A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 199: Chapter 199 — The First Offer II

"Meaning what, in practice?" Ronan asked.

"Meaning you’ll hear a child crying two streets over. You’ll see one enemy, alone, wounded, an easy kill. You’ll see somebody from your own raid cut off down a lane, screaming for help." James paused. "And some of the time it’ll even really be them."

Cillian stopped reaching for a biscuit.

"So the rules are short and you follow all of them," James said. "Nobody moves on anything unconfirmed. Shield line stays whole. The Purify users and mental-resistance supports stay in the centre, and you defend them like they’re the objective, because they are."

"Chasing?" Ronan asked, writing.

"Never without the raid leader’s word. Not once." James tapped the map. "Thralls — they’re living people, remember, right up until the System says otherwise. If one grabs you, you restrain. You don’t kill until the prompt confirms full transformation."

"And openings?"

"Any opening that looks convenient is a trap until a second Challenger has eyes on it. Any. Every."

Then James turned to Ronan directly, and his voice changed slightly.

"Now the hard one."

Ronan looked up from his notes.

"That floor will find out what you are inside an hour," James said. "And what you are is a man who covers people. So it will manufacture somebody to save."

Ronan’s pen stopped.

"It’ll break one Challenger out of your line. Put them twenty meters out. In trouble, screaming. Every muscle you have will fire toward them." James held his eyes. "And the moment you go, everyone standing behind your shield is open. That was the entire point of the exercise."

The room was quiet. Ronan looked at the map, at the narrow streets, and his jaw worked once.

"So I let them die," he said. "Whoever’s out there. I hold the line and let them."

"You hold the line and you call it," Finn said. "Leader decides who goes. Sometimes someone goes. It just cannot be the wall that goes."

"That’s what almost buried us, Ronan," Maeve said quietly. "It’s not a hypothetical. We watched it work on better Guardians than either of us."

Ronan sat with that.

He didn’t argue, and he didn’t nod quickly the way people nod past things. He wrote something short on the printout in front of him and underlined it.

James caught the shape of it upside down: not without the call.

Maeve took the mental mechanics, and she took them straight at Cillian.

"Floor 15," she said. "The vault corridor."

Cillian’s grin faltered. "That was—"

"You were four steps from walking into it, and the only reason you’re at this table is that Finn had your collar."

Her voice wasn’t cruel. It was clinical, which was worse.

"I’m not raising it to embarrass you. I’m raising it because Floor 20 does what that corridor did, except it does it custom-fitted, and it does it all day."

"Custom-fitted how?" Cillian asked.

"The floor reads what you want. What you’re afraid of. What you think you can save." Maeve counted them off. "Then it builds you a situation shaped exactly like it. Not roughly like it. Exactly."

Cillian looked at the biscuits and didn’t take one, which in Cillian was the sign of a man genuinely listening.

"So the rule for you is ugly and it works," Maeve said. "If something on that floor looks perfectly suited to you — a fight you’d love, an opening only your lightning fits through, a person only you can reach — you treat it as hostile until a teammate who isn’t you confirms it’s real."

"That’s—" Cillian shifted in his chair. "You’re describing half my good decisions."

"I know. Perfect fit is the tell. Nothing on that floor is accidentally perfect for you." She paused. "There’ll be a discipline cost. Pay it."

She turned to the room.

"Which is also why the roster can’t just be twenty hitters. They need a strong Purify specialist, protected at all costs. And at least one person who can read authority connections — someone who sees the threads, not just the monsters."

"The guide lists that as ’recommended,’" Ronan said.

"The guide is being polite. Damage doesn’t solve the Brides and it doesn’t solve her control effects. Sight does, and cleansing does." Maeve’s voice went flat. "If the final roster is short either of those, they don’t have a raid. They have a queue."

Finn came back in for the Outer Courts, and he didn’t retell the four battles, because nobody in that room wanted them retold.

"One rule underneath all four Brides," he said, tapping each court in turn. "None of them is a monster standing in a room. Every one is a monster plugged into the room."

"Plugged into what?" Cillian asked.

"Depends on the court. One draws off a structure. One draws off the people she’s holding. One works off what you’re feeling and feeds it back. One runs threads to something else in her court entirely."

Finn straightened up.

"The raid that fights the Bride is fighting her supply line too, and losing. The raid that finds the anchor and cuts it first fights something half her size." He looked at Ronan and Cillian. "Your groups find the plug. Then you spend the big skills. Not before."

"Which brings up the groups," James said. "The floor will split the twenty. Assume it. Plan for it. It’s not an if."

"Four fives," Ronan said.

"Four balanced fives, built before anyone steps through. Tank, support, healer, damage — spread even. If the raid stacks its best people in one group because they’re friends, the floor will thank them for it." James looked between them. "Every five has to be able to survive alone. Because every five will."

The room worked through it, page against map, for another hour.

Then Ronan sat back and asked the question he’d plainly been carrying since the door.

"And her." He nodded at the last map, the throne room. "The guide’s thinnest exactly where it matters. How does a raid kill Alice without—" he tipped his head at James "—without whatever that was."

The three survivors did not look at each other.

Which took practice. And they’d practiced.

"It can’t be reproduced," James said. "What I did isn’t a strategy. It isn’t teachable, it isn’t repeatable, and it isn’t coming to Floor 20 with them. So it doesn’t go in the plan. Forget it exists."

"James—"

"Forget it exists, Ronan." He said it without heat. "Here’s what does go in the plan."

He pulled the throne room map closer.

"Purify field stays up from the first second to the last. The moment it drops, she owns somebody."

"Priority target?" Ronan asked.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!