A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 191: Chapter 191 — Returning Home

Behind him, nobody spoke for a moment.

The survivors had all seen Reanimate before. They’d fought beside Camillia for floors, stepped over James’s skeletons, slept in camps his wolf guarded. An undead was furniture to Team Zero.

Nobody was treating this one like furniture. Camillia had never talked. The wolf had never knelt there planning anything. What was on one knee in front of James was every ounce of the thing that had just killed eleven people, with all its power and all its mind and all its memory of being killed, held still by nothing anyone could see.

"Well," Finn said finally, to no one in particular. "That’s going to take some getting used to."

Marcus said nothing. He watched Alice the way a man watches a chained dog work out the length of its chain.

Then Maeve was on her feet.

She had risen from Declan’s side without a sound, and she crossed half the floor with his blood still drying on her hands. She stopped where she had a clear view of the kneeling angel — the restored wings, the sealed throat, the face that had smiled through eleven deaths, every piece of it whole again — and she looked at it for a long moment before she looked at James.

"James."

Her voice was level. That was the worst part of it.

"Keep it away from him. Wherever you put it, however that works. It doesn’t go near Declan."

"It won’t touch him. Ever." James held her eyes. "That’s not a promise, Maeve. It’s contract."

Alice’s head turned toward Maeve from one knee, and something unhurried and interested moved through her expression, the look of a collector finding a piece worth remembering.

Saoirse stepped between them with her hand on her dagger before the look could finish.

Maeve didn’t flinch from either of them. She turned and walked back to Declan and knelt again with her back to the whole arrangement, and that was her answer.

James looked down at Alice. "When we go back, you don’t come with us. Not visible. Not through that gate into a room full of Bureau security." He didn’t explain further. "Dismissed."

Alice held his eyes the whole way as the contract took her, her body loosening into grey mist from the wings inward, and the last things left of her were the black halo and the stare, and then the slot in the corner of James’s vision went from hollow to full, and she was a name in his interface.

One slot filled. Four empty. An army to rebuild from a fallen angel down.

♢♢♢♢

RTÉ One cut away from a cookery programme mid-sentence.

The studio wasn’t ready. The presenter’s earpiece was still in her hand when the feed went live, and the banner along the bottom of the screen had clearly been built in under a minute:

IRELAND ACHIEVES WORLD-FIRST FLOOR 20 CLEAR

She read the confirmed facts, which took eleven seconds, because there were almost none. The System announcement had gone to every interface on Earth. The clearing raid had entered from the Dublin Tower. Twenty Irish-registered Challengers had gone in.

Then the second banner went up, and it was the one every screen in the country stayed on:

TWENTY-PERSON RAID HAS NOT RETURNED — SURVIVOR COUNT UNKNOWN

At the TRB perimeter, the crowd of reporters had tripled inside twenty minutes, and they pressed against the barriers shouting at every staff member who crossed the forecourt.

"How many are alive? Can you confirm survivor numbers?"

"Is Marcus Hale alive? Is Team Zero intact?"

"Who took the kill? Was it Hale? Was it the necromancer kid?"

A junior Bureau officer crossing to the gate with a box of medical supplies made the mistake of slowing down, got forty microphones angled at him at once, and said the only true thing anyone in the building could say.

"Nobody knows yet."

It ran as a headline within four minutes.

The rest of the world didn’t wait for the answers.

In Seoul, the guild master of Baekho read the announcement twice, set down his tea, and made a call he had sworn on his career never to make.

"Yoon. Don’t hang up." He listened to the silence deciding. "You have eleven raiders past eighteen. I have nine. The floor still wants twenty, and neither of us gets there alone."

A long pause on the line. Then: "My office. Seven a.m."

In London, a raid-planning director walked out of her own birthday dinner reading her interface, and by the time her car reached the office she’d flagged every support file the guild owned with the same three lines. Mental resistance. Purify. Anti-control gear.

"Pull anyone who’s ever shrugged off a charm effect," she told the night analyst, dropping her coat over a chair. "I don’t care if they’re Floor 12. If their head doesn’t open easy, I want them on a list by morning."

"The announcement said the reconstruction’s weaker—"

"The announcement also said the real one killed eleven of the twenty best the Irish had." She pulled up the raid roster projections. "Weaker than that can still be plenty."

On the Challenger markets, anti-charm accessories doubled before sunrise, and holy-resistance gear chased them up. In Berlin, a trinket dealer who had spent two years failing to offload a crate of mind-ward amulets woke to ninety-one purchase requests, read the news to find out why, and quietly tripled his prices before answering any of them.

And in a pub off Camden Street in Dublin, a man who had been buying rounds for strangers all night stopped with a fresh pint halfway to his mouth.

"Here," he said, to nobody in particular. "If we cleared it. If we actually cleared it. Why’s there no one on the telly shaking hands?"

Nobody at the bar had an answer for him. The pints kept coming, but the singing had died out an hour ago, and every phone on every table was open to the same banner, and the banner hadn’t changed.

In the sealed departure chamber under the Dublin Tower, the clear announcement had arrived the way it arrived everywhere, as a chime and a panel that no one in the room could close.

The cheer was instant and it was loud. Medics, techs, recovery staff, people who had been staring at a dormant gate for hours with nothing to do but check equipment that was already checked. Somebody’s clipboard hit the floor. Niamh Doyle had both fists in the air before she knew she’d raised them.

O’Shea let it run for exactly four seconds.

"They’re not back," he said.

He didn’t say it loudly. The room settled anyway, fast, the cheer swallowed mid-breath. Twenty Challengers had gone through that gate. A clear announcement said the floor was beaten. It did not say by how many.

"Positions," O’Shea said. "Nothing gets stood down until I count twenty."

Along the wall, all twenty stretchers stayed where they were. Niamh looked down the row of them, then at the dormant gate, and put her fists back in her pockets.

♢♢♢♢

[RETURN TO EARTH IN 60 SECONDS]

The countdown hung in the ruined throne room, and the survivors spent it the only way left to spend it.

They brought the dead to the center of the floor.

Maeve had already arranged Declan on his back with his shield laid on top of him, his hands set on the rim the way he’d held it in life. She closed his eyes with two fingers, and left her hand against his face a moment longer than the task needed.

Saoirse carried Orla’s spear back from where it had fallen and set it along the spearwoman’s side, then wound the cloak over her, working with quick, tight movements, jaw set, getting it done before the counting finished.

Marcus went down the line of the other nine. He straightened what could be straightened. He crossed arms over chests. At each body he stopped and looked at the face long enough to have it, because he was the ranking Challenger of this raid and every one of these would be a phone call, a doorstep, a family standing in a hallway, and he would be the one standing on the mat.

James stood at the edge of it with his empty interface open.

Four hollow slots. Camillia’s name gone from the first. The Python gone. The wolf gone. Contracts didn’t survive their holder’s death, and his had all died with him on this floor, in this room, in the same hour as eleven people. What he had now was one name where three loyal ones used to be, and the name belonged to the thing that had made the eleven.

He closed the interface.

Rebuild it. All of it. Higher this time.

[RETURN TO EARTH IN 10 SECONDS]

The nine gathered at the center of the room, standing among the eleven.

Finn found his feet beside James, steady again, and didn’t say anything, and stood so their shoulders touched anyway. Maeve rose from Declan’s side and smoothed the front of her armor with red-stained hands. Marcus took the position at the head of the group by simple habit, and Saoirse took the rear the same way, and the four surviving outer-line Challengers folded in around the dead like an honor guard nobody had assigned.

[5]

[4]

[3]

Maeve looked back once, at the throne, at the black stains where the silk had been, at the broken floor.

[2]

[1]

The light took them.

♢♢♢♢

The gate in the sealed TRB chamber went white.

"Return light!" a tech shouted, and every person in the room came forward off the walls at once, medics grabbing stretcher rails, staff already smiling, because the light meant it was over, the light meant they were home—

The light faded.

Nine people stood on the platform.

Eleven lay at their feet.

The room’s momentum carried it another half-step and then died. The smiles went first. Then the noise. A medic at the front had her hands on a stretcher aimed at Finn, at the blood dried down his side, and stopped, because Finn was standing without a wobble and the man laid out behind him with a shield on his chest was not.

She looked down the platform, survivor to survivor, whole, healed, upright, then at the shapes arranged so carefully between them, and turned the stretcher, and pushed it toward the dead instead. Around her the others did the same, one by one, the whole room quietly reorganizing itself around the count.

Somebody at the back was still counting out loud, under their breath, and stopped at nine.

O’Shea came through the medics without hurrying.

His eyes went across the living. Marcus, upright, both hands whole. Finn beside him. Maeve, Saoirse. The boy, Ganner, on his feet with the broken scythe on his back. Five faces he knew and four more behind them, and then his eyes made the same journey everyone’s made, down, to the eleven, and along the row of them, and back up.

He stepped forward.

"Welcome back."

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