Chapter 55 — Worth Dying For II
They tightened.
Ewan did not follow me straight in. He moved to my left, unhurried, and stood himself in the one place where the ground was flat and open, which is the one place a planted foot works.
He had watched me use Talaria twice and he had already worked out that it needs a floor.
Declan came from the right.
The gap between them closed by about two metres, and then by another two, and every time I looked for a way through it there was less of it.
My chest was heaving now in a way I could not hide. The bad ankle had started to make me hesitate a fraction before I committed weight to it, and hesitating is visible, and both of them could see it.
My eyes kept going past them.
Into the black between the trunks, back along the line I had run, for a torch or a shape or any movement that was not these two.
Nothing came.
---
I refused to just stand there and get smaller.
Declan was the one I could not fight. Ewan was the one I had already hurt.
So I gave Ewan what he was waiting for.
I broke right around the trunk with my weight going and my shoulder low, exactly the way a frightened eighteen-year-old runs from a swordsman, and I let him see the whole of it.
He came around the expected side.
Then I reversed.
> **[Mana: 214/220 → 206/220.]**
Not Talaria. My ankle would not have survived Talaria and I would have arrived somewhere I could not stop.
Just Aten, a short hard burn through the heel and the ball of the foot, the way I have been using it since the Green Gate, three metres of push and nothing more.
He was mid-step with the blade still coming back across his body.
I got inside the arc and put my gauntlet into his abdomen under the plate line.
He folded.
Properly folded, the way a man does when the air leaves him from the bottom up, head coming down, sword point dropping toward the leaves.
I had him.
For about a third of a second I actually had him.
---
Then Declan arrived.
The first punch came at my head and I slipped it, because Androphagos gave me the shoulder and my neck did the rest, and it went over me close enough that I felt the pull of it in my hair.
The knee came second.
I got both forearms down across my stomach and caught it on the plates.
It still lifted me.
Both boots came off the wet ground, and the whole of my torso went up and back, and I landed badly with my spine across a root and my legs somewhere they should not have been.
> **[Health: 281/330 → 243/330.]**
The bad ankle took part of the landing and something in the joint went sideways and came back, and a white line of pain went up the inside of the leg to the hip.
I made it up onto one knee.
I could not get the next breath in past my own diaphragm and the noise I made trying was not a good noise.
---
Here is what I want written down about that fight.
I hurt Ewan Calder twice. I burned him once and folded him once, and both of those were correct decisions made in the correct half-second by somebody who has been trained by a top-ten Player since he was nine.
And it changed nothing.
Because every time I did something right it cost me Mana or breath or another piece of that ankle, and every time either of them reached me it cost me forty of the three hundred and thirty I have.
They could take turns.
One of them could stand at four metres and breathe while the other one worked, and then they could swap, and neither of them ever had to be tired at the same time.
I did not have anyone to swap with.
> **[Androphagos duration nearing limit.]**
---
That got me off my knee faster than the pain did.
Sixty seconds. Five minutes before I can open it again.
And if that field closed while both of them were still on opposite sides of me, then I stopped being a Player defending a position and became a boy in a wood with two men behind him.
I went for the camp.
Not cleverly. I picked the line and I ran it, over the root, through the gap where the ferns were thin.
Clara Vogel was asleep three hundred metres that way and Gideon Rook was asleep beside her, and if I got within shouting distance of anything at all this was over.
Ewan read it before my second stride.
He did not chase. He put the sword horizontally across the route at chest height, standing, waiting, letting me run into it.
I ducked.
I got under the blade with my chin almost on my own knee and my bad ankle screaming and my hands coming up, and I got about a metre and a half past it.
Declan was already there.
He had not chased either. He had gone where I was going, and he was standing in it, and the punch was already coming at my face from a distance so short that planting a foot would have taken longer than the fist did.
I put both gauntlets up in front of my head.
I knew from my cheekbone that it would not be enough.
---
Something came in from the left.
A forearm.
It arrived between my gauntlets and Declan’s fist and it did not deflect anything, it did not turn the punch aside or absorb it or roll with it, it simply stopped it dead in the air twenty centimetres from my face.
*CRACK.*
The sound went out through the trees like a shot and came back off three of them.
Wet leaves jumped off the ground in a ring. Every branch within ten metres shook and let go of its water at once, and it came down on all four of us like rain.
I was standing behind the block and the pressure of it still hit me across the face and pushed my head back.
Gideon Rook did not move.
Not a step, not a slide, not a shift of the rear foot. His boots were where they had been when he arrived and the leaf litter under them had not been disturbed.
Declan’s arm was shaking.
---
He was there.
That is all I got, and it is all I will ever get, because I did not see the part before it.
Somewhere behind me a man had woken up in an empty patch of leaf litter, found the space where I should have been, and come through three hundred metres of black forest on a shout he heard once.
I did not witness any of that.
I only witnessed his forearm.
My hands had started shaking somewhere between the block and the second breath, and they would not stop, and I stood there with my guard still stupidly up in front of my own face feeling the whole of my body come apart at once.
---
Declan did not throw another punch.
He pushed off backward, hard, both feet, and put five metres between himself and that forearm before Gideon had finished lowering it.
I have thought about that since.
He did not test it. He did not try the other side. One blocked strike told him something, and whatever it told him was enough that his entire posture changed and he stopped trying to reach me at all.
Ewan stopped too.
He was still coming in from the left with his sword out and he simply stopped walking, brought the blade back in close to his own body, and stood.
Neither of them said anything.