Ewan and I went at each other for about ninety seconds and I could not put him down.
He is nine years in and I am four weeks, and Level Ten does not fix that.
What it does fix is that when he came in low and fast across my hip, I got the gauntlet onto his wrist and stopped it rather than being turned by it, and I felt the difference in my own arm.
The polearm fighter kept him honest from the other side.
That is the whole reason it worked. I did not beat Ewan Calder. I stood in front of him and made him fight the way I wanted while somebody else made him bleed.
Every time he set up for the second cut on a line, I put a burning gauntlet through it.
> **[Mana: 112/240 → 106/240.]**
He started shouting at me. I did not listen to any of it.
---
Then the light changed at the other end of the chamber and everybody’s head came round.
Declan had gone to Hati about a minute earlier and I had watched it out of the corner of my eye.
Two Meridian fighters had backed off him and were working him from range, because a man with claws in a stone room is a problem.
Now his spine bowed.
I have watched that four times. Nobody else in that chamber had watched it once.
The shoulders going wide. The bones moving under the skin of the back. The arms lengthening and the hands going wrong and the jaw pushing out through the front of his face, and the dark coming up through his forearms and spreading.
His boots split at the seams and came off in pieces.
Somebody dropped a weapon.
The healer with the shaved head made a noise I have not been able to get out of my head since, and she was forty metres from him.
Then he straightened up a head and a half taller than he had been and put his hand into the ribs of a Meridian fighter and threw him nine metres.
---
He was going for the exit lane.
Not for the wounded. For the lane, because the lane is the only thing in that chamber that finishes them, and Lycaon is the only thing in that chamber that can go through six people at once.
There were four of ours standing in it and none of them could stop that.
I have exactly one thing that can.
And I had spent two days deciding that the moment I used it in front of witnesses, every question I have not answered arrives at once, in a room, with my father in it.
I looked at the four people in that lane.
> **[Ability Activated: Lycaon — SS.]**
---
I had never done it before and it is not pleasant.
My spine went over forward in a curve that spines do not make and I made a noise about it. The bones in my back moved and kept moving. My shoulders came out through my own armour straps and two of them went.
My hands stopped being hands somewhere around the third second.
The jaw was the worst of it. It came out of my face and the teeth came down past my lip and my whole skull rearranged itself around them while I was still upright.
Then my legs bent the other way at the second joint and my boots tore off my feet.
I came up three metres tall in the middle of a stone chamber with nineteen people in it.
> **[Mana: 106/240 → 96/240.]**
>
> **[Lycaon consumes 4 Mana per second while active.]**
Twenty-four seconds. That is what ninety-six Mana buys.
---
Declan stopped.
He was mid-stride at four Meridian fighters with a hand already back and he checked his own advance so hard that he took a piece out of the floor doing it.
His head came round. The ears went flat and then forward. The whole enormous shape of him turned about thirty degrees to face me and just stood there for about a second and a half, and I could hear him breathing from eleven metres.
He knows what he is looking at. He has to know. There is nobody in this region who has that except him.
Behind him, somebody said my name with a question mark on it and did not finish.
I did not explain anything to anybody.
I went at him.
---
Three metres of me hit three metres of him and the stone went.
I do not have a better description.
Both of us came off the floor at each other and the impact went through the chamber and I felt the slab under my feet break in two places, and we went eleven metres across it locked together and hit the wall.
Dust came down.
His claws opened my shoulder before we had stopped moving and I felt every one of the four lines go in, and it hurt in a way that was somehow further away than it should have been.
> **[Health: 251/350 → 168/350.]**
I got a hand into his throat and drove his head back into the stone.
He is stronger than me. I found that out in about two seconds. He has been in this body for years and his Attributes are not mine and every single time we came together straight, he moved me.
But I know exactly what he does.
---
He goes right when he is hurt.
I have seen him take a Giant’s hand on his forearm and go right off it four separate times, and when Alasdair cracked his ribs in a forest he came off that to the right as well.
So when I got my knee into his side and felt something give, I was already moving to my left.
He went right into it.
I put my whole shoulder through the same ribs and put him on the floor, and the noise he made came out of a chest that was not built for language any more.
Nineteen seconds left.
---
He got up because Lycaon gets you up.
I watched a claw wound on his forearm close while he was still rising, and I felt one on my own shoulder do the same thing, and the strangeness of that nearly cost me my throat.
He came in low and I did not get all the way out of it.
The second set of claws went across my chest and took what was left of the plating with them.
> **[Health: 168/350 → 121/350.]**
I got both hands into the sides of his head and turned it, and he tore free and went backward, and neither of us had gained anything.
Which was fine.
He had not moved one metre toward that lane in fifteen seconds, and behind him four wounded Players had gone through the light.
---
The first one crossing changed the room.
I did not see it happen. I heard the noise it makes, which is nothing at all, and then I heard Renard shouting numbers and I understood that somebody was outside.
Rhodri understood it too.
He stopped trying to hold the lane and went at the people in it, and Voss took a strike meant for a man on a stretcher and put his own body in the space instead, and three of ours came onto Rhodri at once.
He went down about forty seconds later and it was not mine and I did not see the end of it.
---
Ewan was still fighting when I came back.
> **[Lycaon deactivated.]**
>
> **[Mana: 96/240 → 24/240.]**
Eighteen seconds. That is what I got out of it.
Coming out was worse than going in.
Everything I had rearranged went back the other way while I was still moving, and I came out of it on one knee with my own blood running out of a shoulder that was now a normal shoulder with four normal holes in it.
My gear was destroyed. Both boots gone. Chest plate hanging off one strap.
Twenty-four Mana.
Four punches.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 24/240 → 18/240.]**
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