Chapter 54 - 53 — Worth Dying For I
**POV: Jace**
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The name went out of me and the forest took it.
That is what the trees do here. Sound goes between the trunks and comes back thinner, and by the second bounce it has stopped being a word, and there is nothing left in the air where it was.
Nothing answered.
My throat had torn somewhere in the middle of it and the next breath came in over the tear and burned.
I stood in that with my chest heaving and listened for one full second for a voice, a footfall, anything moving in the direction of the camp.
Wet leaves. Insects. My own blood in my ears.
He might have been forty metres away with his arm over his eyes.
That was the whole of my situation, and I had exactly no time to feel anything about it.
The tendons across my shoulder had started to seize where Declan’s strike caught me. The left side of me was plastered in cold leaf mulch from the roll.
And my right ankle sent up a slow pulse of heat every time I put weight through it.
I put weight through it anyway.
Behind me, boots came out of the mulch fast.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
The field opened around me and both of them arrived inside it at once.
Ewan, close, four metres, coming up off my right heel where he had watched my head turn toward Declan and decided that was enough.
Declan, six and a half metres out, front-right, still walking.
Androphagos does not move me. It has never moved me. It puts a living body somewhere in the dark behind my head and tells me it is there, and everything after that is mine.
Ewan’s shoulder rolled.
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The cut came diagonally, up from his hip toward my back and my neck, and it was fast enough that turning away from it would have put the edge across the base of my skull.
So I turned into it.
I got my left gauntlet up and out and caught the sword on the flat rather than the edge, and I did not try to stop it.
I pushed the line of it, sideways and out, so that the whole cut went past my shoulder instead of through it.
Steel screamed along the plate and something like a hot wire went across the top of my arm where the tip found a gap.
Then Declan.
Androphagos put him in motion before I saw it, and I saw it anyway, because his shoulder turned and there is only one thing a shoulder that size turns for.
Six metres. Closing.
Ewan resetting behind me.
If I stayed where I was I was going to be a thing between two men, and I have been told what happens to that thing by a man who does it for a living.
I planted my rear foot.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
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I did not travel.
Ewan’s follow-up cut was starting and Declan’s fist was coming and there was maybe eighty centimetres of live air between the two of them, and then I was four metres past it with wet leaves ploughing up in front of my boot.
The stop was ugly.
My heel skidded through mulch, my ankle rolled outward about ten degrees more than an ankle should, and I got a forearm onto a trunk and let the bark take the rest of my weight before I could turn around.
Bark came away under my glove. My whole leg had gone hot from the joint up.
Cormac made that look like walking.
That is not the Ability. I understood it again standing there with my chest going and my ankle screaming, and I filed it, because there was nothing else to do with it.
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They did not collide.
That is what I noticed first, and I noticed it before I had finished turning around.
Ewan’s cut had been about to go through the space Declan was running into, and neither of them adjusted, because neither of them needed to.
Ewan simply did not complete the swing at full extension, and Declan simply came through the gap Ewan left, and it happened without a word.
Then it kept happening.
Ewan did not come at my body. He came at the ground to my left, at the open run between two trunks, and put his blade across it.
Declan came from the right and did not take the shortest path to me.
He took the path that made the left the only place left to go.
They have done this before. Not once. Not for this raid. You do not get that from a briefing, and you do not get it from a man who told you his rotation four hours ago beside a fire.
I put my back against the trunk and got my breathing under control, and my hands had gone tight enough inside the gauntlets that the padding creaked.
Stay alive.
That was the whole plan. Not win. Not catch one. Stay alive in this wood until Gideon Rook arrives, if Gideon Rook is coming at all, which I did not know and had no way to find out.
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So I used the trees.
My father spent six years making me do exactly this in a hall with two of his people and a stopwatch, and I hated every hour of it, and I have never in my life been more grateful for anything.
Keep something solid between the two of them.
Never let the pair of them have a clean line at the same moment.
Make one of them walk around furniture.
I went left around the trunk, which put the wood between me and Declan for about a second and a half, and Ewan came in on the open side because he had to.
He cut from the left, hip height, wide.
I did not go back.
I went *in*, close enough that his forearm hit my chest plate, close enough that the middle of his blade was somewhere past my hip and useless, and a sword that long has nothing at that distance.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 220/220 → 214/220.]**
I knocked his sword wrist out with my left gauntlet, and I did not wind up, because winding up in front of a man like that is how you hand him your ribs.
I turned my hip and drove a short elbow into his side.
The fire went on at the last twenty centimetres.
*Fwoom.*
It caught on the seam under his arm where the plating stops and the padding starts, and the padding took light, and he went sideways with his mouth open and his sword arm still coming back down out of the way.
He did not fall.
He staggered three steps, slapped the burning material against his own ribs with the flat of his hand, and came back around with his guard already rebuilt.
I had put my whole hip into that and the man had absorbed it and walked.
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Half a second. That is all I gave Ewan after the elbow landed, and Declan took it.
Androphagos had him already, tearing across the leaf litter behind my right shoulder, and I got my chin down and pivoted and the fist went past my jaw with about four centimetres to spare.
It should have been a miss.
It was not.
Something came with it. A wall of moving air, or moving force, or whatever it is that Ability puts in front of his knuckles.
It hit me across the cheekbone and the point of the shoulder and turned me a quarter circle in the air.
> **[Health: 330/330 → 281/330.]**
I came down on the bad ankle and something in it slipped and caught.
My face had gone numb along one side and my eye on that side started watering so hard I had to blink through it.
I got my guard up on instinct and backed toward the next trunk, and my breath was coming through my mouth now in ugly wet lumps.
I did not know what his Ability is.
But I knew that the fist did not have to reach me.