'[MAIN STORY BOSS DETECTED]`
`[THE LAST DEFENDER]`
`[LEVEL: 67]`
`[HP: 95,000 / 95,000]`
That was all of it.
No class. No skill list. No affiliation, no origin, nothing about the light he was standing in. Twenty-five floors of Tower panels had trained James to expect a paragraph and he got four lines and a number.
He did not look at the man's face first.
He looked at the red.
It lay against the body in one even layer, wrist to shoulder to throat, and it was not doing anything. It was not climbing. It was not knitting. It was not reaching for the cracks in the flagstones it had come out of, and it was not straining anywhere, and when the figure shifted his weight at the top of the steps it moved with him exactly the way a coat moves with a man.
On Baldwin it had been a fight. Something wrapping a body and being worn badly.
This was not that.
"James," said Maeve.
"I see it."
"No — he's—"
He came down the steps.
---
