A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 193: Chapter 193 — Nine Returned II

By then the street outside the TRB had stopped being a street.

Camera vans stood double-parked down both sides with their dishes up, cables taped across the pavement in bright ribs. The barriers at the entrance had been reinforced twice and pushed back once. Correspondents were going live in four languages within fifty meters of each other, all of them saying versions of the same sentence: the raid is believed to have returned, and the Bureau has confirmed nothing.

Inside, nine survivors were moved deeper into the building, away from anything with a window. No one went out through the public entrance. The world knew Ireland had cleared Floor 20 and knew nothing else at all.

The media hall filled in under ten minutes once the call went out. The TRB seal hung behind the podium, and sometime in the last hour, without an announcement, a black ribbon had been added beside the Irish flag on the stage. The Irish networks had the front rows; BBC, CNN, NHK, and a wall of others packed the rest. The camera flashes started before O’Shea had crossed half the stage.

He came out alone. No survivors behind him, no raid footage on the screens, one page in his hand.

"At 6:58 this evening, Irish time, a twenty-person raid operating from the Dublin Tower completed the Main Story objective of Floor 20," he said. "This is the first successful clear of Floor 20 anywhere in the world."

He let the flashes have exactly two seconds.

"Twenty Challengers entered. Nine have returned alive. Eleven died on the floor."

The hall’s sound changed. He kept going through it, even and unhurried.

"The raid was led by S-rank Challenger Marcus Hale. The eleven dead have been identified, and as of forty minutes ago every family has been personally informed. Their names will be released tomorrow, with the families’ consent, and not before. The mandatory twenty-person entry requirement for Floor 20 remains in force worldwide. The Tower has announced that future raids will face a reconstructed version of the encounter at reduced output. Operational details of the clear will remain confidential until the Bureau completes its debrief of the survivors."

He looked up from the page.

"Ireland did something tonight that no nation has done. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t pretend it came at a price anyone here would call acceptable. Eleven people bought that clear. We’ll take questions."

The room detonated.

It came from everywhere at once — who killed the boss, was it Hale, was it the Ganner boy, what happened in the final phase, in what order did the eleven die, would Ireland share the strategy with foreign bureaus, why was the MVP not being named, was the MVP one of the dead. O’Shea took the questions he could answer with facts he had, which were few, and declined the rest without varying his tone, and the questions kept circling back to the same hole in the middle of the story, and he kept declining to fill it.

Then a correspondent near the front said the words "now that the floor has been recalculated safer," and O’Shea interrupted him for the first time all night.

"Stop there." He waited for full quiet. "Eleven of the twenty best-prepared Challengers this country has ever fielded are dead. The Tower’s word was ’reduced.’ Its word was not ’safe.’ If any team anywhere walks into that floor believing those are the same word, their bureau will be holding this same press conference, and I’d ask you not to help arrange it."

He took two more questions, answered one, and left the podium while the hands were still up.

The first reports went out within minutes.

RTÉ NEWSNINE RETURN FROM WORLD-FIRST FLOOR 20 CLEAR; ELEVEN DEAD

THE IRISH TIMESIRELAND OPENS THE PATH BEYOND FLOOR 20 AT DEVASTATING COST

BBC WORLDIRELAND BECOMES FIRST NATION TO CLEAR FLOOR 20

TOWER TACTICSALICE DEFEATED — FINAL-PHASE DETAILS WITHHELD

Under the articles, the comments came in faster than the moderators could read them.

[DublinFloorWatch]: Nine came back. Everyone was celebrating before we even knew eleven people were dead.

[S-RankLedger]: Marcus Hale led the raid, but the TRB still has not revealed who received MVP. Something happened during that final phase.

[TowerMother_IE]: My daughter cleared Floor 18 last month. I’m glad the path is open, but I don’t want her anywhere near Floor 20.

[WicklowClimber]: First-clear amplification is gone. That does not make Alice weak.

[LondonTowerWatch]: Ireland should release the strategy before another country loses twenty people trying to learn the same thing.

[GalwayHealer]: Release an unverified strategy and people will copy it badly and die. Let the survivors speak when they are ready.

[QuietWatcher_Tallaght]: James Ganner is alive. You can see him for half a second in the return footage.

[EmeraldSpireWatch]: Stop asking the families for comments. They were informed less than an hour ago.

Outside Dublin Tower, the crowd that had been singing since the worldwide announcement heard the casualty figure arrive across a thousand phones at once, and the sound of the crowd changed key over about thirty seconds, and then mostly stopped.

By midnight there were flowers along the TRB barriers. Challenger badges started appearing among them, unclipped from jackets and laid down by climbers coming off shift at the Tower, first a few, then rows.

In the pubs the televisions stayed on but the volume came down for the casualty segment, barmen reaching up without being asked, and went back up after.

Every Irish guild with a web presence had the world-first banner up within the hour, and by morning nearly all of them had a second image beside it, black, with eleven marks on it.

Abroad, the recruiting had already started. Twenty-person rosters, mental-resistance specialists, Purify users, anti-control gear. The path was open, and the world was already queueing for it, grief or no grief.

And underneath all of it, in every comment section in every language, the same speculation kept rising through the noise like a bubble that would not stay down: nine names, five of them already famous — Hale, Hale, Callahan, and the quiet ones people were now looking up — and one of them an eighteen-year-old necromancer that half a million people had watched climb since Floor 1, alive, unexplained, and silent.

They gave the survivors their phones back a little after one in the morning.

James’s screen lit up and kept lighting. The notification count on his messages wasn’t a number anymore, just a symbol. News alerts stacked on top of missed calls from numbers he didn’t know, on top of interview requests forwarded through the Bureau, on top of group chats from people he hadn’t spoken to since school, all of it scrolling up past his thumb.

He ignored every line of it except one.

Mum — 14 missed calls.

The first at 7:02 p.m., four minutes after the worldwide announcement. Then 7:05. Then 7:11. Then on and on across the evening, through the hours when the whole country knew twenty had gone in and no one knew who had come out, the gaps between the calls getting shorter as the night went on, the last one nine minutes ago.

James sat looking at the screen.

Fourteen calls. She’d watched the announcement, and the banner that said SURVIVOR COUNT UNKNOWN, and the press conference that said nine and eleven and no names, and for six hours she had been sitting in the kitchen in Ballymun not knowing which list her son was on, and no one had been able to tell her, because he was a ghost in a sealed building, and the last time she’d seen him he’d hugged her at the door and told her Floor 20 was well planned.

Across the room, Finn glanced over. He saw the name on the screen.

He didn’t say anything. He got up, collected his own phone and his water, and drifted to the far side of the room, and put his back to James, and started very deliberately reading something on his own screen.

James stepped out into the corridor.

It was empty. Fluorescent hum, a noticeboard, a fire door at the far end. He walked until the recovery room was well behind him and stood facing the wall, and looked at her name for one more second, and pressed call.

It didn’t finish the first ring.

"James."

Just his name. Her voice cracked apart in the middle of it.

He opened his mouth. Everything queued up at once — I’m fine, I’m sorry, I couldn’t call, we cleared it, I’m one of the nine — and none of it would go first, and so nothing went at all. He stood in the corridor with the phone against his ear and listened to her breathing, fast and ragged and trying to be quiet about it, and she listened to his, and for several seconds the two of them just held on to the line like it was a hand.

"Mum." His voice came out lower than he meant. "I’m coming home."

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