Chapter 31 - 30 — The Former Number One II
*POV : Haldrain Nolan*
I put a plane flat under my own feet and drove it upward.
It threw me four storeys and I caught the parapet with the forearm layer still on, and I came over the top of it into a rooftop with two men on it.
The ranged one was at the far edge, already turning.
The other one was closer, and he was built like a door, with mana standing visibly off his shoulders in a haze.
He got to me first.
He hit me in the chest with something that had a truck behind it.
I went backward through the roof structure and the stairwell housing behind it, and came down through a ceiling into somebody’s kitchen with about half a tonne of joist and plaster arriving on top of me.
Ribs went. I found that out later.
The first second went on lying underneath it, unable to see anything, working out by feel which direction was up.
The second went on getting a plane in flat above me and driving it upward to take the weight off my chest, which cleared the debris and most of the ceiling with it.
Then I put another plane under my boots and rode it back up through the hole I had made on the way down.
Four seconds. Maybe five.
He put two more shots into the column while I was under that ceiling. I heard both of them land, and I have never been able to make myself believe that neither of them hit anybody.
I did not make a wall for him. Walls are for protecting things behind you, and there was nothing behind me on that roof worth protecting.
I put Aegis in tight, a thin skin around both forearms and across the backs of both hands, no thicker than the sleeve of a coat.
He threw a straight right at my head.
I did not block it. I put a palm-sized plane against the inside of his wrist at an angle and let his own force carry the punch past my ear.
While his arm was extended and the elbow was locked, I put one plane above the joint and one below it.
And closed them.
The arm went at the elbow with a sound I still hear.
He was still screaming when the roof lit up behind me.
His friend had fired anyway. Straight down the line at me, with his own man in the way, because a shot through a wounded ally was still a shot at me.
I dropped flat.
It went over my back and into the bruiser’s chest and put him off the roof entirely.
Then I crossed the roof.
The ranged one got two more off. The first took the layer off my left forearm and most of the skin under it.
The second went wide because he was backing up while he fired, which is the last mistake a lot of people make.
I got a plane behind his knees and one against his sternum, and I put him down onto the roof, and then I finished it with my hands.
I did not enjoy it. I want that written down somewhere.
He had been putting shots into a packed street for six minutes, and he had killed more people in that time than the man on the road below.
When I got to him he was still trying to sight past my shoulder at the column.
Two on the roof. One in the street.
Three, and it was not yet three in the afternoon.
---
I went back down and the road had gone bad while I was up there.
That is the thing nobody tells you about being the strongest man on a battlefield. Every minute you spend killing a Player is a minute you are not standing anywhere else, and the war does not politely wait at the other end of the street.
Enemy infantry had reached the column at the third junction, and behind them were the lesser Players, the ones who could not have touched me and did not need to.
A soldier was down across a doorway with his weapon still in his hands, and he had put himself there deliberately, between the doorway and the street, and there was a family in the room behind him.
He did not get up while I was watching.
A man in a grocer’s apron came out of that doorway, took the soldier’s rifle off him with both hands like it was something dangerous he had found in a cupboard, and knelt in the same place.
He knew it would not work. Everybody in that city had watched rounds bounce off Players for three days.
He knelt there anyway.
Forty metres up the line, one of their Players opened an evacuation vehicle the way you open a tin.
I did not get there in time for that one either.
After that it stopped being a battle and became work.
I put a wall across the mouth of the third junction and left it standing so the column could keep moving behind it.
I put a plane into an enemy Player’s back at speed and folded him into a shopfront.
I coated a fist and went through a defensive Ability that a younger man had clearly been very proud of, because he looked genuinely surprised about it.
One of them threw something at the crowd, and I put a plane in front of it at an angle and sent it into the man standing next to him instead.
Twice I stopped fighting entirely and carried somebody. A girl of about nine with her leg opened up, and then an old man who had been trampled at the barricade and could not get his breath.
Both times I put them behind cover and went straight back in.
I killed three more men in that street. I am not going to describe all of them. Two of them were not much older than my eldest son was that year, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about most things.
---
Then the last transport.
It was at the western end, loading, with maybe seventy people around the doors and a soldier on the step counting them aboard with his hand.
I was two hundred metres away with a wall up and an enemy Player in front of me.
I saw the attack come in over the rooftops.
I have gone over this many times, and I could not have covered that distance. Not with Aegis, not on foot, not with anything I have ever been able to do.
I threw a plane anyway.
It formed about a second after the fuel went up.
So what I actually did was stand two hundred metres away and put a translucent wall between myself and a fire that was already burning, and look through my own Ability at a vehicle coming apart with seventy people around it.
I did not shout. I did not say anything at all.
The soldier who had been counting them aboard was not there any more either.
I let the plane go and turned around, and the man who had thrown it was standing on a warehouse roof watching his own work.
He saw my face.
I know he did, because he stopped watching the transport and started backing up.
---
He was not one of the young ones.
He had been fighting as long as I had, and he knew immediately that running was worse than standing, so he came to meet me instead, and the next ninety seconds took most of the street with it.
He cracked four planes. Nobody had cracked four of my planes since the war started.
He put something through my guard that opened my side from the bottom rib to the hip, and I felt the whole of it go in, and I kept moving because stopping was how the last hour ended for a lot of better men.
He was good. He was better than the three on the roof and in the road put together.
He was also fighting a man who had just watched a transport go up.
I gave him a wall to break, because he wanted one, and while he was breaking it I put two planes in from the sides at ninety degrees to each other, and they met behind him and took away every direction he had left.
He knew. Right at the end, he knew.
I did not use Aegis for the last part of it.
I did it with my hands, close enough to see him, because it seemed to me then that a man who does that to seventy people at two hundred metres ought to have somebody’s face in front of him at the end.
I have never decided whether that was justice or whether it was just me.
---
We got perhaps eleven thousand people out of that city.
Somewhere between four and six hundred did not make it out of that road. Nobody ever gave me an exact number and I stopped asking for one after the second week.
They took one of them alive at the end, a young man with his hip broken, and taking him alive was not a decision anybody made calmly.
By the time I got there a corporal already had a rifle against the side of his head and was being held off it by two other men, and one of those two was crying while he did it.
The corporal had been on the third junction. He had watched the flatbed come apart. He was not making an argument, he was just saying the same short sentence over and over while they pulled his arm down.
An officer got between them and said the word intelligence, which is a word that means very little to men who have spent six hours carrying pieces of a crowd off a road.
He said it anyway, and eventually the rifle came down, and I want to be clear that it came down because there were three of them and one of him and not because anybody in that street had been persuaded of anything.
They put him against a wall with his hands bound in a way that would not have held him for a second if he had still been able to concentrate.
He was not frightened. That was the thing.
"You held one road," he said, when he worked out who I was. "One. And it cost you the whole city."
Nobody answered him.
"You understand this is already finished? He has four countries. He will have this one by winter, and then it will not matter how many roads men like you stand in."
I looked down the street.
The frontage that had come down was still burning, and there were people working at it with their hands.
Further along, past the third junction, there were shapes in the road that nobody was going to reach before dark, and most of them had not been carrying anything.
"Is this it?" I said. "Is this the ruling?"
He looked at where I was looking. He looked at all of it, the road and the frontage and the transport still going up in black smoke at the western end.
"They were told," he said. "They were given the terms and they refused them. People who will not accept their betters choose what happens to them."
He said it the way a man reads a price off a board.
I did not argue with him. There is no argument to have with that, and there never has been.