SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 115: 115. He Took His Arm From Around My Shoulder, and I Thought He’d Stumbled

For a moment, nobody moved.

I stood over him with my chest heaving and my sword hand throbbing and the cord still wrapped around my wrist.

I looked at the man who had nearly killed me twice. And I waited for him to say something.

A curse, a threat, or maybe a last bitter word.

Instead, he smiled.

It wasn’t a pleasant smile. It was thin and cracked and strangely patient, the smile of a man who’d just heard the answer to a joke he hadn’t known he was telling.

And at the same instant, I heard a small clink behind me, and something rolled across the stone and burst.

A cloud of thick gray smoke boiled up out of the floor.

”BACK AWAY!” Sharon roared.

I couldn’t see. And I couldn’t breathe.

I stumbled back with my sleeve over my mouth, and I heard Alicia coughing and Laura shouting, and over it all, calm and dry and perfectly clear, a woman’s voice.

”Phase Two was never in this room, Sir Ravenshield.”

A sharp metallic clang rang out from the far wall.

I whipped around and saw it through the smoke: a narrow steel door standing open in the rock, hidden behind a rack of tools, and beyond it a small freight lift, a plain iron cage with a lever on the side.

Director Varn was standing in it. She’d lost her glasses somewhere, and her hair had come loose from its knot, but she still held herself like a woman at a lecture.

She had one hand on the lever. With the other, she was dragging Corvane in beside her by the collar of his breastplate.

A small black strongbox sat at her feet.

”Next time,” Corvane rasped, with blood on his teeth, ”bring a bigger team...”

”Wait!” I shouted.

I lunged for the cage. ”Stop, you fucking cowards!!!”

Varn pulled the lever.

The door slid shut with a bang, and the lift dropped, with a long screeching rattle, down a shaft that I couldn’t see the bottom of.

I reached the door and slammed my fist on it. And I put my eye to the crack.

But fuck...! All I saw was darkness and a long, falling spark.

”Roland!” Alicia grabbed my arm. ”Roland! Look at the floor!”

I felt it then. It was a deep, grinding shudder under my boots, like the sound of an old animal turning over in its sleep.

Then the first slab of ceiling came down, ten yards away, and smashed into the stone with a noise like the end of the world.

The Hollow didn’t collapse all at once. That would have been merciful.

It came apart in stages, groaning, a piece at a time, with long pauses in between when you could almost convince yourself that it was over.

A crack would open across the floor and swallow a catwalk.

A chunk of ceiling would drop.

Then the dust would settle, and for about ten seconds, nothing would happen, and then another noise would start somewhere far above us, a slow, deep creak like a ship’s timber.

”Move!” Alicia was shouting. ”Everybody out! Now!”

She’d taken charge again without anyone asking.

She was standing on the lowest rung of a rack ladder with her sword in her fist, calling orders over the din in a voice that cut through the noise like a blade.

Holt and Wynn, who had come back through the passage at a run as soon as they heard the first crash, were already carrying the nine knights down off the racks, two at a time.

Dessa had somehow gotten a limp man across her shoulders and was making for the stair at a dead run, swearing in a steady stream.

”Laura! Take the first group through the culvert! Count heads at the gully, and don’t wait for us!”

”I’m not leaving you!”

”I’m not asking you to! I’m asking you to move!”

Laura went anyway.

She cast one furious look back at us, and then she was gone, with a line of stumbling knights behind her.

I saw Sharon carry two of them past me at once, one under each arm, with a sword stuck through her belt and a scowl on her face that could have curdled milk.

”What the hell are you all standing around for?” she was bellowing. ”It’s a mountain! It’s falling!”

”Run, you useless bastards, or I’ll carry you myself and you won’t like it!”

”I thought you were,” muttered Holt, under a limp man’s weight.

”I’m carrying him, you idiot! You’re just standing there!”

I turned and ran.

Garrick was on the catwalk where he’d fallen.

He’d managed to drag himself up onto one knee with the shield still strapped to his arm and one hand clamped over his shoulder, and when I came skidding up to him, he looked at me with a face the color of old paper.

”Go on,” he said. ”I’ll catch up.”

”Like hell you will.” I ducked, got my shoulder under his good arm, and hauled him to his feet.

He weighed about as much as a sack of wet sand. ”Come on, you stubborn old goat!”

”We’re leaving together.”

”Roland...”

”Don’t talk! Walk!”

We then moved as fast as we can.

We went through a door I didn’t see and down a corridor I’ll never remember, with the floor tilting under us and the lamps going out one by one overhead.

Rocks fell. One of them clipped my shoulder, and I felt something warm run down my arm.

A long crack ran along the wall to my left, from floor to ceiling, and a trickle of dust poured out of it like sand from a glass.

Behind us, with a roar like a landslide, the corridor we’d just crossed went down in a single piece.

I saw the end of it ahead of us.

A square of gray daylight, no more than forty yards off, with a stretch of scree beyond it and a patch of sky.

I saw the culvert gully and a figure standing in it, and I heard Alicia’s voice shouting my name.

”Almost there!” I yelled. ”Garrick! Almost there! Twenty more steps!”

”Roland.”

”Don’t talk!”

”Roland... Look up.”

I looked up.

The ceiling of that last stretch of corridor wasn’t a ceiling.

It was a slab, a solid, ten-foot sheet of rock, and a crack was opening across the middle of it, slowly, like a smile.

Dust poured down. I felt the whole weight of the mountain hang, for one second, directly over our heads.

Garrick took his arm out from around my shoulders.

I didn’t understand... I thought he’d stumbled.

Then he put both hands on my chest, with the whole of his remaining strength behind them, and shoved.

”NO--”

I flew. I’d like to say I flew gracefully, but it was more of a stagger, a long, backward tumble with my arms windmilling, that ended with me flat on my back in the gray daylight at the mouth of the culvert.

I heard a sound behind me like a thunderclap.

BAAMMM!

I rolled over. And I saw the whole length of the corridor, the corridor I’d been standing in a moment earlier, vanish behind a wall of falling stone.

”Garrick!” I was on my feet before I knew it.

I ran back toward the cloud of dust with both hands out. ”Garrick! Garrick, answer me!”

There was no answer.

I reached for him, desperately, with the link, and found nothing, because he wasn’t bonded, because I’d never given him a thread to follow.

I felt for the place in my head where he should have been, and all I found was a hole. A cold, bottomless hole the shape of a man who’d just told me he’d haunt me nicely.

I threw myself at the rubble.

I wedged my hands under a block of stone twice my own size and heaved, and my arms shook, and it didn’t move.

I heaved again. Somebody was screaming, over and over, a raw, broken sound that I slowly realized was mine.

”Roland, stop! Roland, you can’t!”

That was Alicia.

She had her arms around my waist. She was trying to haul me backward, and I was fighting her, and I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t stop.

”He pushed me!” I screamed. ”He pushed me, he’s under there, he’s...”

A small gold streak flashed past my shoulder.

I didn’t see her come. None of us did.

One moment there was a slope of rubble in front of me, and the next there was a girl on top of it, running straight up the face of the slide with her ears pinned flat and her sword in her teeth.

She hit the first boulder with both feet and used it as a step.

She hit the second and launched herself off it in a long, flat dive, and she disappeared headfirst into a gap in the stones no wider than my forearm.

”Eveline!” I roared.

But... there was nothing.