It came across Raymond's side above the hip and opened both the plate and what was underneath it, and the cloth beneath went dark immediately and kept going dark. Raymond's back foot slid and he caught himself on it.
He attacked again inside two seconds, because backing off meant handing Baldwin the tempo, and handing Baldwin the tempo was how this ended early.
---
The Royal Guard worked out what was happening to them.
They stopped treating Finn as one of five problems and started treating him as the problem. Two of them broke off Ronan entirely and went at him together.
The first caught Finn's right axe against his shield and simply held it there, pinning the weapon, and the second came in low at his exposed ribs.
Ronan got there.
Late, and one-armed, and unable to do more than swing the carried shield into the line of it — so the strike came off-line rather than stopping, and it went into Finn's side under the last one instead of through it.
