Chapter 162: Chapter 162: Where It Hurts
The hall was long and the portraits were already wrong before any of them had time to look at the door.
They landed in formation out of habit. Marcus first, sword in hand, reading the room from the threshold. Red carpet. Iron torches in wall brackets that burned without smoke. High ceiling with the upper corners lost in dark.
The walls were covered in portraits.
Families, every one of them. Fathers seated at long tables with sons at their right hands. Commanders in dress armor passing weapons to young men who had not grown into the grip yet. A man who looked exactly like his father, then his son, then his son’s son, the same wound painted in oil generation after generation down both walls.
Every face had been scratched away.
Finn read them from left to right before he could make himself stop, and then one caught him — a father’s hand on a boy’s shoulder, the grip easy and certain, familiar in a way that had nothing to do with having seen it. The boy’s face was gone. Scraped down to pale bare wood.
"Finn."
He pulled his eyes to the far end of the hall.
Aisling Byrne was already scanning the walls, spear held low across her body, the Emerald Spire crest — the tiger with the dagger through its skull — pinned at her left shoulder. She was lean and dark-eyed with her hair pulled back tight under the plate of her visor, and she moved like someone who had read too many floors to be frightened by the atmosphere of one. Floor 19 twice. She had been in rooms like this before, or close enough, and her posture said the question was already answered and she was waiting for the floor to catch up.
The independent shield fighter took Marcus’s right, broad-shouldered, his shield already up and angled. The TRB support closed behind the group and his hands were moving, casting speed-reinforcement before anyone had told him to.
The door at the far end of the hall opened.
She walked through it like the hall was hers, which it was.
Silver hair down past her shoulders, loose, unmoved by the air, catching the torchlight the way metal does. Dark wings behind her back — each one taller than Marcus — their tips trailing slow arcs across the carpet. A gown the color of dried blood covered her left side and left her right shoulder bare. Her tail swept the floor behind her, unhurried. Her eyes were pale at the center and dark at the edges, and they moved across the group in one slow sweep before settling into something between interest and amusement.
Beautiful. Wrong in the same way everything on Floor 20 had been beautiful and wrong.
[VESPERA — BRIDE OF POSSESSION] [RANK: BRIDE OF THE SEVENTH DISCIPLE] [LEVEL: 98] [HP: 1,900,000 / 1,900,000]
Finn felt the level before he read the window. The air in the hall changed when she entered it, something heavier sitting just below sound, and his lungs did not fill all the way on the first breath.
Vespera stopped in the center of the hall and looked at them.
"Welcome." Her voice was low, pitched for a smaller room than this one. "We rarely receive proper offerings. Last time they sent children who wept before I touched them." Her eyes moved across Marcus, across Finn, across Aisling, unhurried and assessing. "My Lady is patient. I am less so." She lifted one hand, fingers spread, as if displaying the hall to guests. "She waits for twenty. I will take what you carry and send what is left."
She smiled.
"Thank you for coming."
Marcus was already moving.
He crossed the distance in two strides and drove his sword at her center, and the others went because a Level 98 boss left no other option — the only way to survive the opening of a room like this was to hit it together before it hit back.
Aisling came in from the left a half-beat behind him, spear low, the point driving for Vespera’s ribs. The shield fighter moved wide to the right to close off her retreat. The support cast speed-reinforcement over the whole group, and Finn took the angle Aisling had left on the right and swung the axe in a full-body cut.
Five people, five angles, one second.
Vespera turned Marcus’s sword off center but Aisling’s spear cut across her side before she’d finished turning, and the shield fighter’s shoulder hit her flank and stopped her from giving ground, and Finn’s axe found the same wound Aisling had opened.
[MARCUS HALE — SKILL: SWORD ART — LEVEL BREAK] [DAMAGE: 88,000]
[AISLING BYRNE — SKILL: SPEAR ART — ANGLED THRUST] [DAMAGE: 41,000]
[FINN HALE — SKILL: HEAVY SWING] [DAMAGE: 3,900]
[SHIELD FIGHTER — IMPACT BASH] [DAMAGE: 21,000]
Finn saw the numbers. He saw Marcus’s number. He looked at his own and his hands tightened on the axe haft and he said nothing.
[VESPERA — HP: 1,900,000 / 1,900,000 → 1,746,100 / 1,900,000]
Vespera stopped smiling.
She reversed, and the turn was the attack. Her wing came forward and sliced through the support’s barrier like it was cloth.
CRACK.
The support stumbled and his hands went straight to a rebuild. Her free hand caught the shield fighter’s shield by the rim and pivoted her whole body and threw him into the portrait wall.
CRASH.
Wood, canvas, stone. Frames came apart. He hit the wall and slid and two portraits came down on him, and he shoved them off and pushed back up with blood on his cheek and his shield still on his arm.
Her other hand reached for Finn’s collar.
Marcus stepped between them.
His blade drove her wrist back and he followed the deflection with a cut across her forearm and a second hit driving her three steps back toward the center of the hall.
[MARCUS HALE — CONTINUOUS STRIKE] [DAMAGE: 74,000] [DAMAGE: 84,000]
[VESPERA — HP: 1,746,100 / 1,900,000 → 1,588,100 / 1,900,000]
Vespera glided backward.
Not in panic. Not in fear. She moved to the center of the hall with blood running from the cut on her side and the wound across her arm, and she let it run, and she pressed two fingers to her ribs and drew them back with blood on them and looked at the blood and smiled again like the damage had made the fight more interesting.
"Better than the last group." Her eyes moved across the five of them, easy and unhurried. "They brought more bodies. You brought better ones." She tilted her head. "Fighting together makes you look brave. I want to see what each of you is without the others around you."
She turned and pressed both palms flat against two of the scratched-out portraits.
The portraits split open like doors.
[POSSESSED KNIGHT — LEVEL 52] [HP: 95,000 / 95,000]
[PORTRAIT HUSK — LEVEL 41] [HP: 36,000 / 36,000]
They came out of every frame on both walls, not a charge, just a steady flow of wrong bodies filling the hall in every direction, and the point of them was not to win. The point was to put five people in five separate places.
The hall became small fast.
Marcus cut the first Possessed Knight in one clean pass and turned to close the gap, but two more stepped into the space between him and the rest of the group. Aisling drove her spear through a Husk and pivoted but the angle had already pulled her eight steps further left, past the center of the hall, toward the far wall. The shield fighter had two Possessed Knights pressing him back toward the window side. The support had a Husk behind him and burned another barrier to deal with it, the second barrier he’d used in the first minute.
Finn killed a Portrait Husk with a full-power swing.
SHRRK.
The Possessed Knight behind it caught his axe haft at the top of the swing and pushed down, and Finn felt the force from his hands through his arms to his chest, and his boots dragged backward over the carpet. He wrenched the axe free and got his guard back up, but the Knight was Level 52 and it kept pressing, patient and heavy, walking him toward the wall.
[FINN HALE — HP: 2,340 / 2,340 → 1,890 / 2,340]
[WARNING: LEVEL DIFFERENCE DETECTED] [STAMINA DRAIN INCREASED] [COMBAT EFFICIENCY REDUCED AGAINST HIGHER-LEVEL TARGETS]
He kept fighting because there was nothing else to do.
Aisling saw the opening.
Vespera had her back half-turned, watching Marcus deal with the two Knights still in his path, her wounded arm low, the right side of her body exposed. The distance was crossable. The angle was real. The group had already taken her HP twice, and she was bleeding, and she was not looking.
"I have her," Aisling said, and moved.
Marcus’s head came around. The angle was wrong. The problem arrived in his mind a half-second before he could say it.
"Aisling—"
Her spear drove into Vespera’s shoulder and pinned her against the portrait wall. The tip went through and into the wood and plaster behind her and the portraits on either side of the impact shook.
THUD.
For one second it looked real. An S-rank spear buried in a boss that had already taken serious damage, the group’s pressure working, the floor giving way.
Vespera looked at the spear in her shoulder.
The way a person looks at something mildly interesting.
Her smile had not moved.
She let the spear stay where it was.
Her other hand came forward with the fingers extended, and it went through Aisling’s breastplate, and the sound it made was not the ring of metal and metal. It was the sound of something inside a structure failing.
CRACK.
Aisling’s hands came off the spear. Both arms dropped to her sides, and she stood like that for one full second — upright, held in place — and then Vespera’s hand came back.
The spear fell.
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