Chapter 49: Chaoter 48 — Five Returned III (Bonus)
It went back into the water half-lame. The front half was worse.
The head kept retreating into the pool after every strike, which meant the Mages never got more than a second and a half of it and could not sustain anything.
Renard stopped chasing it.
He pulled the entire front rank back onto the stone and made them stand there and do nothing, which took more discipline than the fighting had.
When the head finally committed to a bite because nothing was giving it a target, two Tanks caught the neck between their shields and pinned it.
Everything ranged went into the eyes and the open mouth.
The Amphisbaena started thrashing the whole length of its body through the flooded channel underneath us.
The stone shelf cracked. Black water came up over the path in a sheet, and one of the outsiders went into it knee-deep and started screaming immediately, because it found the gap at the top of his boot.
Two people had him out inside four seconds. It did not matter much. By then it was already into the leg.
The healers had to start working in the middle of a live fight, which is exactly what Renard had spent a week arranging not to have to do.
Cormac was one of the two who pulled him out. He stayed with the man, holding his shoulders down while he thrashed, until a healer physically took him, and then he went straight back into the line.
---
It died because it could not leave.
That was the whole answer. The damaged rear jaw was the weak end, and Gideon and two frontliners forced that head up onto solid stone and held it there.
I opened the cracked hinge the rest of the way.
A Meridian swordsman got inside the gap once the scales came apart and put most of a blade through it.
At the front, Renard’s group had the other head pinned and were working the mouth and the eyes.
The thing tried to withdraw, and its own body would not let it, because you cannot pull two ends of the same animal into the water through the same channel at the same time.
> **[Amphisbaena — Level 29]**
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> **[HP: 0/9,600.]**
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> **[Elite Monster defeated.]**
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> **[Contribution threshold met.]**
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> **[Experience acquired: 290.]**
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> **[EXP: 310/700 → 600/700.]**
---
Nobody celebrated that one either.
The man who went into the water had burns up one leg that were still developing while people looked at them. The ranged fighter who took the bite had at least two ribs gone and could not lift his arm above his chest.
Four others had venom damage on armour or skin. Two filters had to be swapped.
Renard walked the line, looked at all of it, and did not say a word about being pleased.
Eastwick had just taken an enormous amount out of twenty prepared people without killing a single one of them, and I understood something standing there that I had not understood in the yard.
This place does not need to kill you. It only needs to keep spending you.
But that still is not fifteen.
---
The grotto opened out again about four hundred metres on.
The chamber was full of mana crystal. It came out of the walls and up through the floor in seams, pale green-white, and it lit the place well enough that people started turning their lights down.
Meridian knew it was here. It is half the reason the contract was worth taking.
Renard put six people on extraction and everybody else on a perimeter, and he did not let anybody swap.
The healers kept working. Filters got changed. Damaged straps got replaced from the spares. People drank, and the ones whose positions allowed it sat down, and a few small jokes came back because the Amphisbaena was dead.
Nobody believed the Gate was finished. You could tell by the fact that not one person took their gear off.
The outsider who had looked at my armour in the yard looked at me again while I was checking the plating on my left gauntlet.
He looked at the burn marks across the knuckles this time, and the way I was holding my shoulder, and not at the clan mark on my chest.
Another one still tracked Gideon every time I moved. He had made up his mind about me a week ago and one Amphisbaena was not going to shift it.
Both of those can be true. I do not need nineteen people to approve of me. I needed to be in this Gate.
---
I went along the faces again while people rested.
I could not do anything with them.
Every single person in that chamber had done something in the last two hours that a coward would not have done. The man pulling crystal out of a seam had taken a hook across the arm covering somebody he had met yesterday.
And somewhere in the story I half remember, one of them kills teammates.
I did not like what that suspicion was doing to me.
I stood in a crystal chamber looking at exhausted people and rating them, and the honest position is that I was doing it on the strength of a news item I barely watched six years ago.
Then something came out of the fissures behind the crystal seams.
---
They came fast and they came in numbers, low and quadrupedal and about the size of a large dog, out of the cracks behind the formations and out of the tunnels at floor level.
> **[Rictus Hound — Level 20]**
"Extraction stops. Positions." Renard did not need to say it twice.
The problem was that six people had been working a seam, and the perimeter had been built around them rather than around a fight, and the first rush arrived before the shape closed.
It got messy immediately.
A Meridian swordsman put himself between two of them and one of the extraction crew, killed the first, took the second one’s jaws along his side, and killed that one as well.
Then he went down on one knee with his hand pressed over his ribs.
He was alive. I saw him breathing from nine metres away. I saw him get his palm onto the wound.
Cormac reached him before any healer did, got an arm under his shoulder, and took him back behind one of the thick crystal formations, out of the fighting.
That is what you are supposed to do. I have watched a dozen people do exactly that today.
Then one came at me low and I stopped watching.
---
It went for my legs, which is what they do. I took the first snap on the gauntlet, drove a knee into the body to make room, and only lit Aten when the second one came in on my blind side.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
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> **[Mana: 168/210 → 166/210.]**
The first one I killed with the gauntlet and no fire at all.
> **[Experience acquired: 100.]**
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> **[EXP: 600/700 → 700/700.]**
> **[Level increased: 7 → 8.]**
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> **[All attributes increased by 1.]**
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> **[Maximum Health: 320 → 330.]**
> **[Health: 251 → 261.]**
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> **[Maximum Mana: 210 → 220.]**
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> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**
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> **[EXP: 0/800.]**
The second broke off and tried to go around the crystal formation toward the wounded line, and I caught it before it got there and put a burning fist through the back of its skull.
> **[Experience acquired: 100.]**
>
> **[EXP: 100/800.]**
Gideon was forty metres away on the far side of the chamber. Three of them had reached one of Meridian’s healers and he had gone through the middle of the room to get there.
The pressure came off my section.
And I remembered the swordsman.
---
The fighting was still going on across the chamber. I could hear it, and see the light of it coming off the crystal.
Behind that formation it was quiet.
I came around the edge.
Cormac was crouched beside the Meridian swordsman with his back half to me.
The swordsman was dead.
I did not say anything for about two seconds, and in those two seconds I looked at three things in a particular order.
The first was the wound along the ribs, which was ragged and wide and exactly what a Rictus Hound’s jaws do.
The second was the other wound. Narrow. Clean. Straight in under the arm, in the gap where the plating stops, in a place nothing in this dungeon has ever bitten anybody.
The third was Cormac’s left hand, which was inside the dead man’s belt rig, and closing on something.
I stopped moving.
He looked up.
"Bled out," he said. "Faster than I thought. I had my hands on it."
"He was walking."
"He was not walking. I was carrying him." He did not stand up. His hand had come out of the rig and was resting on his own knee now, and I could not see what was in it.
"That happens. You get a bad one under the plate and there is nothing under there to press against."
"I saw him put his hand on it himself."
"Then you saw him do the last thing he did."
He said all of it in a completely reasonable voice. Nothing about the tone was wrong.
He was watching my eyes, though, and I understood while he was doing it that he was not trying to convince me of anything.
He was measuring how much I had seen.
I glanced past the crystal, toward the chamber.
That was the mistake.
---
He came off the ground from a dead crouch.
Not fast for a Player. *Instant*, the way somebody moves when acceleration is the whole of what they are, and he had four metres to cross and he crossed them before I had my weight on the right foot.
The blade came at my throat.
I got my left gauntlet into the line and the impact drove my own fist back into my jaw, and I tasted it immediately, but the steel stopped.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
White-gold went up my right hand and I put it into his ribs at contact range.
He had come at me expecting a boy his employer’s rival had bought a place for.
The punch folded him sideways and took a section of his armour with it, and he made a sound that was mostly surprise.
Then his face changed.
Everything easy went out of it. What was underneath was not rage, which I could have used. It was a man revising a job.
I did not try to fight him.
That was never the objective. There were nineteen people forty metres away and I needed exactly one of them to look at me, and I went for the gap around the crystal rather than at him.
He put himself in it.
I attacked the lead arm to move it, and he pulled most of it back, and Aten still went across his sleeve and his forearm and the smell was immediate.
I got half a metre.
I got enough air in to shout.
---
He came again on the same explosive line, and I knew it was coming this time and put the gauntlet exactly where the last one had been.
He changed the angle in the final third.
The blade went in under my raised arm, through the gap where the side plating stops, between the ribs.
It did not feel like being cut. It felt like being hit very hard by something small.
I got my hand on his wrist before he could put any more of it into me, and I put Aten through the trapped side, into his hand, and held it there until he let go of the grip.
Then I got off the blade and went for the chamber with it still in me.
I made four steps.
My hand went along the crystal wall for the wall’s help and left a long red mark on it.
My breath came in and stopped about a third of the way down, and there was something in my mouth that was not blood from my jaw.
> **[Health: 261/330 → 74/330.]**
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> **[Warning: Penetrating chest trauma.]**
I turned with my good side and threw the best thing I had left.
It did not land properly. My body had already stopped agreeing to things by then, and the punch went past his shoulder with the fire on it and did nothing at all.
He took me down behind the formation.
---
He was careful about it.
That is the thing I want on the record.
He put a hand on the back of my neck and kept my face near the stone, and he used his weight rather than a strike, because a strike makes noise and a body being held down does not.
Forty metres away, an Ability lit the chamber blue and somebody shouted a name.
I could see it. Through the gap at the base of the crystal formation I could see boots moving and light going across the walls, and I could hear Renard giving an order about the tunnel mouths.
Gideon was somewhere in that.
My father had put one of the six people he takes into Red Gates into this raid specifically so that this could not happen, and it had taken this place ninety seconds to open four metres of quiet behind a rock.
I got a hand out and pulled at the floor.
I moved perhaps twenty centimetres.
I have never been so angry in my life, and I could not do one thing with it, and that is the actual answer to what an SSS Ability is worth.
---
He put his knee into my back and finished it.
And in the last part of it, with my face against wet stone and the light going narrow at the edges, the thing I had been reaching for all morning finally arrived.
A row of photographs under a banner.
Twenty went in. Five came out.
And two years after that, a second story, bigger than the first, about one of those five survivors and a set of deaths that everybody had spent two years believing the dungeon caused.
I had the shape of it wrong the entire time.
I had been thinking of it as something that happened *afterwards*. An investigation. A revelation. A scandal that arrived two years late.
It was not two years late.
It was happening now, in this cavern, four metres behind a crystal seam, while nineteen people fought something else.
The face above me was the face in that report.
I could not remember his name from the article and I did not need to any more, because I had shaken his hand in a freight yard six hours ago and he had told me it himself.
> **[Health: 74/330 → 0/330.]**
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> **[You have died.]**