Chương 26: 026

Mark stared across a chasm. A single 2-meter wide bridge led from his landing point to the other side. It was a long, long bridge. White stone. Aqueduct-type architecture with a trough in the middle and lips on the side. It was maybe a hundred meters long? It had no railings. It had battle damage or wear-and-tear damage here and there. A whole section of the middle of the bridge was little more than a line of broken concrete, maybe a foot across. It wasn't a hole in the bridge, but it was close.

Holes opened up in other places, though. The sky was blue and full of clouds and mist, with some of that mist flowing down below the aqueduct like an airy river. A knight in shining armor stood at the other end of the aqueduct. Luckily, the knight wasn't a person. Mark could already tell that. He was an animated armor, so maybe calling him 'him' wasn't exactly correct. The armor pieces floated here and there, and it didn't have a helmet.

It did have an absolutely huge shield, though, big and rectangular and metal, and a large sword, both of which floated in front of it. The whole thing was kinda discombobulated, floating there. Mark knew of most of the common monsters out there, but not many specifics, so he knew what he was seeing, sort of. It was a living armor. Was a living armor without a helmet better, or worse? Or was it not a living armor at all? Why was it floating like that, all its pieces barely connected to each other?

Mark had thought that living armor held itself together with tendrils, or something. It was clearly waiting for a combatant to try and cross what remained of the aqueduct. The door to the next room lay beyond the living armor." Well fuck," Mark said." If it's any consolation," Addashield said, "This is probably your last room and you can take its body parts as loot. Unless those parts fall over the edges, of course. Or if you fall over the edge. That's death." That'd be death alright.

Mark looked over the edge, down into the canyon. Wind blew at his face, ruffling his clothes. Everything down there was misty and unknowable. At least it was a comfortable sort of mist. Mark was all sweaty and hot after that walk across the mountain— A sudden gust blew up from the canyon and Mark retreated down, to get closer to the bridge, behind the lip of stone at the edge, because that wind was a lot. The wind blew hard across the bridge, whistling danger.

The living armor's floating body spread apart a little, and then the armor shielded itself with its shield, coming back together behind the large rectangle of embossed silver. Addashield's floating blinding spell did a little tumble in the wind, but it came back together rapidly and never really left him at all. Mark breathed deep, focusing. He hefted his steel mace and his wooden shield, waiting for the wind to die down. Soon enough the rush of air slowed, and Mark stood up.

The living armor came back together, floating gently out from behind its large shield. Mark stepped forward— The living armor suddenly solidified into a person-shape, feet hitting on the ground and weaponry in its gauntlets. It stepped forward, but just once. Mark had only taken a single step, and maybe the armor mirrored him? Mark took another step and the armor did the same thing.

"… Huh." Mark surveyed the bridge, wondering where would be the best place to fight since some of the bridge was broken. A 2-meter wide section for both of them? To maybe get some of the armor's pieces when he killed it? No. That was probably crazy thinking. Sure, living armor was supposed to be fantastic armor, but Mark would be wearing webweave for any serious monster fights, or once he could afford it. Armor was heavy… Armor was practical, though? … No. Not even the sword or the shield.

Mark didn't need either of them… That sword though. Mark wanted the sword. He'd take the sword if he could get it. To do that, he'd need to fight the monster where he would have the most advantage, and that probably meant… just on this side of a broken part of the bridge? Make the armor have a hard time closing the distance? Oh wait. Mark felt like an idiot. The monster floated when it was at rest, and walked when it felt like walking.

Maybe Mark was the only one constrained to the bridge at all, in which case he didn't want to be anywhere near the broken part of it, because the monster could just circle around through the air and trap Mark against the broken section of the bridge. … Play it by ear? So far the thing was walking on the ground. Might be a trap— The living armor rushed forward. Mark stayed right where he was… Hmm. He moved forward a little, to get more in the middle of a good section of the bridge.

The armor rushed across the bridge. There was a gap in the bridge right in front of it, and it did not stop at all. It ran forward and tumbled straight down into the gap in the bridge, like a silver, jangling rock. … uh. Mark heard metal banging on metal— Oh shit. Mark started running for it, even before he truly understood what he already knew to be true. Legs pumping, arms holding his weapons with as much balance as he could, Mark ran, sprinting down the aqueduct.

The jangling of metal stopped, either because of the wind, or because what Mark suspected to be true, was coming true. The armor had been floating in the air when Mark first saw it. The wind pushed it around. When Mark had advanced a step, it came together and started walking, adopting a normal-ish person-like walk. That had been a misdirection. A trap, trying to get Mark to underestimate it. Mark reached the first small gap in the bridge; it was a gap he had not noticed before, but he noticed it now.

It was a meter of open air, a full split in the bridge. Mark jumped and sailed over the gap, glancing downward just in time to see the scattered pieces of armor flying below, swirling like metal parts caught on a wind, flowing to where Mark had been standing. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Mark landed on the other side of the small gap and turned to see the monster come together where he had been.

The sword flashed through the space first, spinning like a windmill, slicing across the stone and the air. Sparks flew. Stone chipped. The shield came up next like a battering ram, held level on the bridge's surface and flowing from the start of the bridge to where the sword had cut. The sword stilled at hand height, right next to the shield that did the same, and then the armor flowed up from the edges of the bridge, to reform the living armor, to grip its weapons again.

No fucking way was Mark tangling with that thing. Who knew how much strength was behind those blows? This was clearly not a fight room. This was an escape room. Mark sprinted forward. The archway loomed a good 400 meters ahead. Breaks in the bridge were the first problem, though. The living armor made it dangerous to waste time with fear, so Mark prepared to dance across the— The wind picked up, hard.

A hurricane of fog and wind blew through the canyon and Mark lost his shield, letting go of it before it took him off the edge, as he hunkered down against the bridge. Mark glanced back and saw the armor's silver sheen flickering in the wind. Glints in the fog rapidly revealed themselves as the armor's shield, flung a good 25 meters off of the bridge, in the air, and half of its armored body similarly scattered. Its sword lodged into the bridge and the breastplate and some greaves held on that way.

Mark wasn't sure if its desperate cling to the bridge was an affectation, or a necessity. He didn't care to figure it out, either. The wind died, so Mark raced forward, to the first big gap in the bridge. A single line of mostly-broken bridge held to the left side of the main path. It was just the left lip of the aqueduct. The floor of the aqueduct was gone, as well as the right lip. The 'safe path' was 10 centimeters wide. The width of a parking bumper.

Mark had always walked on those parking bumpers in empty lots when he was walking through, just to have fun. And look! This small path even had a gap in it, too, so Mark would have to jump from one parking bumper to the next. Simple, really. The wind died as fast as it had come, so it was probably safe to risk his life rushing across— Nope. Mark glanced to the right, to the direction the wind was coming from, and saw as the fog in the canyon got whipped into yet another frenzy. The wind was coming any second now…

Could Mark kill the armor and take its sword in the seconds of wind? The armor had already reformed itself, too. But it was light enough to get pushed around, wasn't it? Even though it was running at him now, it didn't seem to be bracing itself for the next round of wind. Could it tell that the canyon was going to blow again— No. It couldn't tell anything at all, because here came another rush of wind and there went the armor's shield and half of its body.

It failed to slam its sword into the bridge this time, and so the whole thing went flying— Oh. When the wind died, it was going to come back together right on top of Mark, wasn't it. In that moment of realization, Mark recognized that the living armor also couldn't actually see him… probably. Maybe it had some other sort of senses, like tremorsense or metalsense. Metalkinetics were supposed to get that, Mark knew.

Dad always had a sense for fish, though it was a pretty low level sense— The wind died, and Mark made a choice to dash across the thinnest part of the bridge, as fast as he could go. Feet on the rock, don't look down too much, Mark raced forward, balanced on a beam for his very life. And then the beam ended. A gap. A jump. Mark jumped, and he did not stumble on the other side, which was yet another balance beam.

He raced forward and edged over to the solid ground of the 2-meter wide bridge, not looking back or down at all, though he did make sure he wasn't running into any problems. Looking back would slow him down. He didn't have to look to know what was going on back there. The wind whistled. That would be the sword, slicing through all of the space behind Mark— The shield rose out of the mists to the left, right ahead of Mark, rushing over the edge of the bridge and then angling like a door slamming shut on Mark's legs.

He leapt as much as he could. It clipped his feet anyway. It was like getting clipped by a car; impossible to not be moved. Mark tumbled forward, the mace going wide, clattering ahead and then not making any sounds at all. It fell through a gap, maybe. Mark didn't see what happened up there. He was too busy being tumbled onto the ground. Crashing. Mark lay on his back for a bare moment and the pain of getting clipped passed into obscurity. Into the flow. There was absolutely no way to grab that sword.

There was no way to grab the shield. Even touching them would be too much for Mark. No fight. Only run. Mark rose on sharp feelings in his legs; broken, no, fractures maybe. The shield spun into the living armor's left gauntlet, as the sword slapped its hilt into the armor's right gauntlet. The whole monster came back together on greaves, filled with air, headless with light glittering inside the neck hole of the breastplate. It raced after Mark, and Mark was already running down the length of the bridge.

Mark heard the jangle-jangle-jangle of armor chasing him, and then he heard nothing, for the living armor had fallen down the hole in the middle of the bridge. It was already falling, the jangle-jangle-jangle of it spreading out, disappearing into the wind down below. It was going to come back up on top of Mark as soon as it could. Air flowed. Something whistled. Mark sprinted. He eyed the right side, the mists in the canyon. Here came another howling wind.

The shield tried to clip him again, lifting off of the right side of the bridge's edge this time, becoming a rectangle of solid metal that spanned the two meters of the bridge, and a meter and a half into the air. Ducking under it was impossible. Mark leapt over it this time, landing in a roll— The canyon howled with an ocean of wind, ripping from the right to the left. Mark crawled, scrambled, avoiding the torrent of mist and wind, and then, when the wind died down enough, he sprinted again. A trick was coming.

Mark knew that. He spared one look behind him when he was within two paces of the archway— The armor stood 20 meters behind him, unable to run that fast, but its sword was a spear, thrown hard and straight and right down the center of the path. Mark dodged left. The sword tore through his shirt and nothing else before it soared through the archway, to turn into rainbow light on the other side. For a moment, Mark knew he was going to die. He had dodged too far left, and now he was in the open air.

His stomach and lungs seemed to enter his throat as he scrambled without purchase— He grabbed the edge of the bridge. Safe! He slammed into the side of the bridge, his feet reaching nothing, his fingers holding on for everything— He slipped. He grabbed onto a lower ledge, just below the aqueduct lip. The sides of the bridge were heavily carved in floral designs and Mark dangled, but he also slammed a foot into a depression in the stone. Mark saved himself, doing the most stressful pullup of his life.

The living armor slammed its shield onto the rock above him, above his grip. If he had been holding onto the first edge he would have lost fingers— The wind started to howl again, but Mark was below the edge of the bridge, effectively behind a wall of stone. The armor was above, in the open air, and it could not hold onto anything at all, not with its sword already disintegrated, or whatever had happened to it when it went through the portal to the next room. It wasn't hunkered behind its shield, either.

Silver metal jangled and crashed as it scattered on the harsh winds. Mark started pulling himself up, even before the wind calmed. He grabbed for the higher lip of stone and pulled up, making it onto the surface of the bridge just as the wind began to die. Mark rushed for the archway. Addashield was on the other side already. The living armor came together on the bridge— The door closed.