Alice had exactly two options and neither of them was good, so she took the only one that kept Maeve alive.
She hit him.
The red-gold blade went in above the hip and she drove him nine metres sideways across the courtyard and put him through a table that had not existed twenty minutes ago and was not really there now.
`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 55,500 → 40,700]`
Fourteen thousand eight hundred.
And the red came up around him like something boiling.
More of it than they had let him have since the fight started — an enormous banked mass of it standing off his shoulders, red enough to light the whole eastern half of the courtyard, and James was sixty metres away on the far side of it.
"He wanted that," James said. "He *wanted* that—"
---
The Last Defender did not throw all of it.
He used part of it — a fraction, precisely measured — and put it into Ronan, who was the only body left in the route between himself and James.
