Chapter 67 — The Dullahan III (Bonus)
The body kept fighting.
I do not know what I expected. It had never used the head to swing anything.
But the horse was slowing down.
Not from any one attack. From eleven minutes of them. There were four separate weapons in that ribcage and the front left leg had stopped bending properly, and every charge it made now came in a straight line because the turn cost it too much.
Renard read that and started calling the lines.
"It comes down the left. Kessler’s side. Wall on the crack, ranged into the legs on the pass, GO."
It came down the left.
It went down about forty seconds later, and I was not close enough to see which attack did it.
What I saw was the whole thing coming apart at the shoulder mid-stride, and the Dullahan going over the front of it, and the black plate hitting the stone flat and sliding four metres.
And getting up.
Two metres of armour, on foot, with a long weapon and no head at all, and it came at the shield line before the horse had stopped moving.
---
We were finished by then. All of us.
I could hear it in the room.
Everybody’s breathing had gone loud, and weapons were coming back into guard slower than they had an hour ago, and the sweat that had been running off us in the fight had started to cool and I was shaking with it.
The healer with the shaved head was sitting on her heels between two wounded men and had stopped moving between them.
Ide swallowed twice before he activated whatever he activates, and I watched him do it.
Gideon had cuts on both forearms and one across the jaw, and Adamant was still holding, and he had stopped commenting on anything at all.
And it killed one more of us.
The man with the wrapped forearm, from the second group, the one who had been favouring a leg since he walked out of that treeline. He got out of the weapon’s line about a third of a second too slowly.
Renard had the body destroyed inside eight seconds.
Two people did it and neither of them looked at each other while it was happening, and it never got up, and I do not want to write any more about that than that.
---
The end of it was ugly and organised at the same time.
Renard called openings and rotations like a man reading them off a page, and everybody hit the same places.
There was a section of black plate over the left hip that had gone in during the horse’s fall and everything went into that.
Melee, ranged, again and again, and the ringing of it came back off the chamber walls until the sound stopped arriving as separate impacts.
"Nolan, on the hip, when Rook turns it."
I went in eleven times.
> **[Mana: 190/230 → 118/230.]**
My arms had stopped being reliable somewhere around the seventh.
I was bracing my left wrist under my right forearm to keep the fist closed, and the smell coming off that hip was scorched metal and something underneath the metal that I did not want identified.
Gideon turned it for the last time.
He got inside the weapon, took the haft of it against his shoulder, and rotated the whole two metres of armour about forty degrees, and the damaged hip came round into all of us at once.
Eight people hit it.
> **[Mana: 118/230 → 74/230.]**
I was one of the eight. That is all I was.
The armour folded at the hip and the whole thing went down onto the stone in pieces of its own plate, and the weapon came out of its hand and rang across the floor, and the gauntlets scraped once against nothing.
Then it stopped.
> **[Dullahan — Level 35.]**
>
> **[HP: 0.]**
>
> **[Boss Monster defeated.]**
>
> **[Boss experience: 700.]**
>
> **[Contribution threshold met.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 700.]**
>
> **[EXP: 120/900 → 820/900.]**
Eighty from Level Ten.
I saw the number and I registered it and there were two dead men on the floor of that chamber and I put it away without letting it become anything.
> **[Eastwick Orange Gate cleared.]**
>
> **[Exit forming.]**
>
> **[Gate collapse begins in 30:00.]**
---
Nobody cheered.
The light came up at the far end where the exit opened, pale and steady, and it put everybody’s shadow out long across the stone, and the raid simply stopped standing.
That is the only way I can describe it. Sixteen people who had been upright for nine hours all found out at the same moment that they did not have to be any more.
A man about four metres from me sat straight down where he was.
Two others got their backs against the broken stone at the wall and slid down it. One of them tried to unbuckle a chest strap and could not manage the catch, and gave up, and left his hand resting on it.
Ide sat with his weapon across his knees and both hands around the haft, and the shaking started once he no longer needed them to work.
Somebody was kneeling beside what was left of Kessler with a hand on the man’s chest plate and had not said anything for a while.
The healers moved. They were the only ones moving.
Blood had dried on my gauntlets in a way that made the fingers stiff. I could taste stone dust and old copper and the back of my throat was raw from breathing that air for eleven minutes.
I was cold. I noticed that for the first time since the treeline.
Gideon came and stood beside me. Not close. Four metres, where he could reach me in one movement.
He did not say anything and neither did I.
---
Cormac was checking the wounded.
I want to be exact about this, because I have gone over it more times than is good for me.
His jacket was open down the whole left seam and there was a field dressing taped across his forearm and dried blood down the outside of his leg.
His face was filthy. He was walking the way everybody in that chamber was walking, which is to say badly.
He stopped by the man with the shoulder wound and said something and got a nod.
He looked at the healer with the shaved head and pointed at somebody, and she pointed back at somebody else, and he changed direction.
He picked a broken helmet up off the floor and put it down again.
Nothing.
There was nothing in any of it. He was one of the tired ones, doing what the tired ones do, and I was eleven metres away with my eyes actually on him and I did not see one single thing.
---
The swordsman with the grey at his temples was sitting against a slab of broken stone near the wall.
He had taken something through the side during the last four minutes and his armour was open around the ribs where they had cut it away to get at it, and there was packing in there under his hand.
One leg was straight out in front of him because he could not fold it.
He was awake. He had his head back against the stone and his eyes half open, and he had got his sword across his lap because he had not been able to reach the sheath.
The healer was six metres away with both hands inside somebody worse.
That man is alive because of me.
Not in a way anybody in that chamber will ever know about.
Two nights ago I pulled a perimeter closed early and put myself in front of a fissure and none of it looked like anything, and a knife that should have gone in under his arm never got the chance.
I have looked at him about nine times since we came out of that forest.
---
Cormac walked over to him.
That is what it was. He walked, at the speed everybody was walking, from about twelve metres, on a line that took him past two other people, and he stopped once on the way to step over somebody’s leg.
Nobody watched him do it.
I did, and I watched it the way you watch a man crossing a room, which is to say I was not watching it at all.
He got to about three metres.
Then
> **[Talaria activated.]**
the three metres were not there.
I know exactly what that looks like from the inside and I still could not follow it from the outside. His foot went down and then he was against the man and his arm was already finishing something.
There was a sound like a hand pushing into wet cloth.
The swordsman’s head came forward off the stone about ten centimetres and his eyes opened all the way and he looked down.
His hand came off the packing in his side and got about halfway to Cormac’s wrist.
Then it stopped, and stayed there in the air for a second, and went down.
---
The chamber did not react for one whole second.
I have counted it since. One second, in a room with sixteen people in it, where nothing happened at all.
Because everybody had just been told the fight was over. The System said so. The exit was standing open forty metres away throwing pale light across all of us, and every person in that chamber had already put it down.
Then it went through the room in one breath.
The healer’s hands came out of the man in front of her.
A Player halfway to his feet stopped halfway to his feet.
Somebody’s weapon came off the stone and up into both hands with a scrape that was the loudest thing in the chamber.
Renard turned so fast that the man beside him flinched.
Gideon’s shoulders came down and forward and he moved about half a metre in front of me without appearing to have taken a step.
Erik Lind said one word under his breath, and Clara Vogel had her blades out before he finished it, and both of them were looking at Cormac and neither of them was surprised.
They have seen this before. Two nights ago, in a forest, from a different man.
And I was standing eleven metres away with my hands opening and closing and nothing in my chest at all, watching the whole exhausted chamber come back up off the floor.
Cormac Keane put a boot against the dead man’s hip.
And pulled his weapon free.