Chapter 69: Chaptee 69 — Five Shares II
Erik got the first wounded man moving.
He got his shoulder under a Meridian fighter with a ruined leg and walked him at the door with his axe still in his free hand.
When Rhodri came at the two of them, Erik put the man down on his own feet, took the strike on the haft, and shoved.
Clara went the other way.
She joined the four healthier survivors trying to push Rhodri off that lane, and she was the fastest thing on our side of the room, and she did not once try to kill him. She kept getting behind him and making him turn.
I went to the lane too.
Because Gideon was thirty metres away being made expensive, and that left the whole left side of the evacuation with nothing in it.
---
Søren reached the man with the crutch about the same time I did.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 128/230 → 122/230.]**
He had something out and low and he was going for the back of the man’s good knee.
I got my left gauntlet across it.
The impact went up my arm to the elbow and my whole forearm rang, and I felt the difference between this and every fight I have had in the last week, because two nights ago that block would have moved me.
It did not move me.
I put a short burn through my heel, changed the angle so I was between him and the crutch, and hit him in the chest with everything my hips had.
He went back four metres.
He did not fall. He arrived on his feet, turned his shoulder into it, and came off the stop already resetting, and I want to be honest about what that told me.
I hit that man as hard as I can currently hit anything and he walked out of it.
But he had stopped moving toward the wounded.
"GO," I said, without turning round. "Door. Now."
---
Something changed in the room about a minute after that.
Not in us. In them.
Because the first man reached the exit.
I saw it happen out of the corner of my eye while I was still stepping around Søren, and it was not dramatic at all.
Ide walked a wounded Meridian fighter up to that pale surface and the light folded around him, and then there was nobody standing there.
Gone. Out. Into a containment zone full of PSB officers and six ambulances and four heavy anti-monster units and about ninety people with radios.
I looked back at Søren and his face had changed.
Behind me, thirty metres away, Cormac stopped conserving.
---
He went at Gideon.
For the first time in four minutes he actually went at him rather than around him, and he took a strike across the shoulder to do it, and I heard the noise it made from where I was standing.
He was trying to get past.
That is all of it. He had stopped trying to win and started trying to reach the door, because every second that passed put another mouth on the other side of it.
Gideon did not let him past.
But holding a man who no longer cares what he loses costs more than holding one who does, and I watched Gideon give ground twice inside ten seconds.
> **[Gate collapse in progress: 24:12.]**
---
Søren came back at me and I had him for about ninety seconds.
I want that written down properly, because of what happened afterward.
He fought the way he had fought the Dullahan, which is the whole reason I lasted.
I had watched him for eleven minutes in that boss fight from the second rank. I had watched him pull a corpse off Ide’s back at seven metres with a line of force out of his palm.
I knew what the wind-up looked like.
> **[Halter — A activated.]**
He put it on my right arm and hauled.
I let the arm go where it wanted and turned my whole body with it instead of resisting, which is a thing my father made me do in a hall four hundred times against a man with a rope.
I came out of the pull inside his reach.
He got his elbow up. I got my forearm into his sternum.
He tried the same pull on my ankle and I was already moving the foot.
The third time, he changed to a genuinely dangerous angle, low and across, and there was no version of my legs that got out of that.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I got out of the line.
The stop was awful.
I came down two and a half metres away with all of my weight going through the outside of my right ankle, and it went from a joint into a white bar of pain from the arch to the hip.
I had to put a hand on the floor and reset the stance before I could do anything at all.
Two days of this and I still arrive with my hand on the floor.
But I got up, and I came back, and I put Aten through his guard.
> **[Mana: 122/230 → 116/230.]**
The fire caught him across the upper arm and the side of the neck and he made a sound and went sideways off it, and there was a patch on his shoulder that was still smoking when he turned round.
And then he looked at me.
Properly. Two full seconds of it, in the middle of a fight, with his stance coming lower and both hands changing position.
He had come into this expecting to move me out of the way and get on with it.
---
I was not trying to kill him.
There is a man with a crutch and a healer and two more who cannot stand, and every one of them has to cross forty metres of open floor, and I was the only thing standing on that side of it.
So I kept him there.
I hit and moved and made him follow, and twice I got between him and somebody on the ground, and once I put my back to a slab of broken stone so he had to come at me from the front.
Behind me, somebody else reached the door.
Then a third.
I did not turn round to watch either of them. I counted the light changing on the wall in front of me.
---
Then he stopped fighting the way he had been fighting.
I saw it in his feet. He set them differently and he brought his back hand down and open, and for about a third of a second I thought he was going to try the pull again on my leg.
> **[Snare — S activated.]**
Nothing came at me.
Something went into the floor.
I did not understand any of it in the moment. What I felt was my left boot, which was planted, stop being something I owned.
Not held. Not gripped. Fixed, like it had been welded through the sole into the stone, and my body was already turning and my foot was not coming with it.
Everything above the ankle kept going.
Something in my knee went past where a knee goes and I heard the noise it made through my own leg rather than my ears, and then he hit me while I was folded over a joint that had stopped working.
> **[Health: 218/340 → 84/340.]**
The chamber turned over.
I came off my own trapped foot and the release let go at the same time and I went across the stone on my shoulder and my face, and something in my mouth broke and I swallowed part of it.
Two abilities. Same hands, same shape, one pulls a body and one pins a floor.
Of course they were the same resonance. Of course they were.
And I had spent this entire raid watching everybody in it, and eleven minutes of Søren Juel in a boss fight told me exactly one third of what that man is.