Chapter 63 — The Giant V
Thirty.
Thirty EXP from Level Nine and it stopped there, and I looked at that number with mud in my teeth and something ridiculous went through me that I was not going to pretend was dignified.
---
The aftermath was entirely physical.
Erik sat down where he was standing, which is the first thing he had done all night that was not deliberate, and then got straight back up and started going over himself with both hands looking for holes.
Clara was wiping her face with the back of her wrist and getting more dirt onto it than off, and she did not put either blade away.
Gideon was standing.
Cuts across both forearms, a long one over the ribs, his shirt gone at the shoulder and the skin under it black with bruise already. Filthy to the waist. Upright.
Declan was still transformed, and there were wounds all over him, and I could see them closing.
The air had gone thick with churned soil and blood and burnt hide, and under all of it the animal stink of the thing lying in the middle of the clearing.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Nobody celebrated. There was nothing in any of us to celebrate with.
---
Then Erik moved.
Not far. He walked about six metres and stopped, and when he stopped he was standing on the same side of the clearing as Gideon and me.
Clara came across a moment later and did the same thing.
Neither of them announced it.
Declan noticed immediately.
---
"You saw that wrong."
His voice came out of that jaw distorted and low and still perfectly understandable.
"I saw where your hand was going," Erik said.
"The thing had just put him on a knee. I was going for the arm above him."
"You were four metres past the leg."
"I was—" He stopped. Started again, and it came out steadier. "Rook killed Calder. That is what I walked into.
A man from a Red Gate outfit standing over a Meridian Player with a body at his feet, and every one of you is now telling me that I am the problem for reacting to it."
"You said Ewan was your friend twenty minutes ago," Clara said. "You have not looked at his body once."
That landed on him.
I watched it land, and I watched him have nothing at all to put after it.
---
Gideon did not join in.
He had been quiet through all of that, and when he spoke it was not to Declan and it was not loud.
"You are not going out of my sight," he said. "Not to walk. Not to sit down. Not for anything.
When we reach the rest of the raid you can say all of this to Renard, and I will stand there and let you, and he can decide."
Declan looked at him.
Then at me. Then at Erik. Then at Clara.
Four people, and none of them standing where he needed them to stand, and the only person in the clearing who might have taken his side was face down in the leaves seventy metres north.
He ran.
---
Lycaon went into the trees.
He did not run along the ground. He went up and out and the branches came apart where he went through them, and the sound of it was moving away north-east inside two seconds.
Gideon was after him before I had finished turning my head.
I went three steps.
"NOLAN."
He did not even look back to say it.
"Stay. With them."
---
I stopped.
I want that recorded, because I have not got a good history with that instruction, and because two nights ago I heard a version of it and did the opposite and it cost a man his win and cost me my life.
I stopped, and I stood there in the mud beside a dead Giant with two people I had spent all night arguing with, and I let him go.
That is the whole of it. It is not very impressive.
It is more than I have managed before.
---
We waited.
Erik and Clara did not sit down. They stood at the edge of the wrecked clearing facing north-east with their weapons out, and every time a branch moved somewhere in the dark, both of them turned toward it.
Erik’s grip kept changing on the axe handle. Clara had gone completely silent.
Neither of them said the thing they were both thinking, which is that they had no idea which of the two men was going to come back through those trees.
I did.
I stood with my hands loose at my sides and watched the direction he had gone, and I did not reach for my gauntlets once.
---
The sounds came in pieces.
A heavy impact, a long way off, that came through the ground rather than the air.
Branches breaking, in a run, going further away.
Then a roar. Declan, and it did not sound like a threat, and I have decided not to find a better word for what it did sound like.
Then a second crash, closer than the first.
Then nothing.
The nothing went on a long time.
The insects had not come back yet and the forest was completely quiet, and Erik Lind stood five metres from me for something like four minutes without moving.
---
Gideon came back alone.
He came out of the trees walking, with a new set of scratches down one side of his face and blood on his hands that was not all his, and he was still upright.
Clara’s shoulders came down about three centimetres.
"He is dead," Gideon said.
Nobody asked him for anything else. He did not offer anything else.
---
Two.
Ewan Calder and Declan O’Rourke, both in the ground, in a single timeline, and the version of this raid where fifteen people do not come home has been dismantled twice over.
And Cormac Keane is somewhere in this dungeon right now with a filter on his face, being pleasant to somebody.
I did not relax. There was nothing to relax about.
---
The forest changed about ten minutes later.
The mist had been standing between the trunks in flat sheets since we arrived, and it started pulling away from one direction, all at once, sliding back between the roots like water going out.
Behind it there was a path.
Not a cleared trail. A gap where there had been overlapping trunks and undergrowth an hour ago, running north, two metres wide.
> **[Group Trial cleared.]**
>
> **[Route to convergence point opened.]**
Erik looked at that path for a long moment.
"Trial," he said.
Nobody had anything to add.
---
We walked it in about forty minutes and it got easier the whole way.
The trees thinned. The trunks stopped being enormous and started being ordinary, and then started being sparse, and the light between them went from black to grey.
The ground changed under our boots by degrees.
Wet leaf litter, then leaf over gravel, then gravel, then bare stone with a thin scatter of pine needles on it that thinned out and stopped.
The smell went with it. Soil and rot and resin faded out and were replaced by something cold and mineral, the smell of a cave, of dust and old water on rock.
Then the trees ended.
---
The chamber was enormous.
Dark stone floor, cracked in long old lines, going out a hundred and fifty metres before it reached anything. Walls that went up past where our lights could follow them.
The ceiling was somewhere. We could not find it.
Around the perimeter there were openings. Several of them, spaced out, dark, and the one we had come through was one of them.
And there were people.