A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 225: Chapter 225 — Thirty-Five Missed Calls I

The map hung over Finn’s basement table with the western settlement still burning red.

James walked around to the side where the red marker sat and put two fingers against it.

[SELECTION UNAVAILABLE]

[DECISION REQUIRED UPON FLOOR 23 ENTRY]

He tried the eastern marker instead, and got the same two lines. He tried the central one, and the map did not even bother repeating itself.

"It’s a preview," he said. "We can look at it, and that’s all we can do with it. Whatever’s happening to that village is going to keep happening until we walk in there and pick."

Then the whole thing folded inward, three settlements and forty miles of road collapsing into a single thin line of light, and the line went out.

Cillian kept staring at the empty air above the table.

"Right," he said. "So the Tower does trailers now."

"A trailer tells you what you’re watching." Maeve had not moved. "That gave us three places in trouble and asked us to choose between them. No names. No populations. No idea how many people live in any of them, what walls they have, what’s coming at them, or how far apart they are."

"So what did it actually tell us?" Ronan asked.

"One thing," James said. "Raymond’s army can’t cover the whole northern front, and somebody is going to be told no."

Finn reached over and flicked the empty space where the map had been, the way you would flick a dead lightbulb.

"Then it stays in there," he said. "We’re not standing in my basement at midnight deciding which village burns off a map we saw for ninety seconds. We pick when we’re inside and we can see the ground."

Nobody argued with that, and the room let go of it.

The relief came back in once the light was gone.

Cillian dropped into a chair with his legs out in front of him. "Two attempts," he said. "Two. Not five. We got out of that place without doing the same war five times over, and I’d like that written down somewhere."

"We were allowed five," Finn said, taking a seat on the table edge. "We needed one that worked. The other three didn’t turn into anything — no bonus, no reward, they just stopped existing when the second one cleared."

"I know that. I’m celebrating that."

James was not listening properly, because he had his storage open.

[DIMENSIONAL STORAGE]

[REDFIELD MEDICAL CRATES: 22]

Twenty-two, still sealed, still stamped with a healer’s mark from a kingdom that had not been rolled backward this time. He had checked them in the Waiting Room and he checked them again now, because Floor 21 had reached into this same storage and taken everything back.

"They kept," he said.

Maeve looked up from her papers. "Don’t open them."

"I wasn’t going to open them."

"Don’t sell them, don’t donate them, and don’t let anybody at the Bureau talk you into handing them over for testing until we’ve had them appraised properly." She went back to squaring her notes. "That’s medicine from a world that doesn’t exist. We have no idea whether it’s safe for people here, whether it’s worth ten euro or ten million, or whether we’ll want it on Floor 24. Those crates sit in your storage until somebody who knows what they’re looking at tells us what they are."

"Agreed," James said, and left it there, because the answer was not going to be found tonight.

He opened the progression window instead.

[FLOOR 22 CLEAR REWARD]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 45,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 18,000]

[COMBAT EXP GAINED — HIGHWATCH: 3,410]

[LEVEL: 37 → 38]

[EXP: 41,535 / 57,000]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5]

James read the experience line twice.

Floor 21 had killed him on the clock and given him nothing but the bodies, and the bodies alone had been worth thousands. Floor 22 had paid the bodies again and then put forty-five thousand on top for finishing. Two runs at the same six hours, and the connected scenario had moved him a full level in a way no single floor ever had.

"How much did it give you?" Ronan asked.

"Enough that I’d rather not say it out loud in a room with a window."

"There’s no window in here."

"Then a level," James said, and Ronan whistled.

He opened his status.

[JAMES GANNER]

[CLASS: NECROMANCER — LEGENDARY]

[LEVEL: 38]

[EXP: 41,535 / 57,000]

[HP: 1,922 / 1,922]

[MANA: 2,960 / 2,960]

[STRENGTH: 59]

[AGILITY: 79]

[INTELLIGENCE: 142]

[ENDURANCE: 83]

[LUCK: 52]

[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 5]

He scrolled to the skills and went down them one at a time, looking for a rank marker that had moved.

Necro Blast had been cast more times in the last twelve hours than in the previous month. Grave Step had carried him past four separate defensive lines. Corpse Explosion had brought down two stockpiles and a corridor. Summon Undead Skeleton had emptied his mana twice.

Every one of them sat exactly where it had sat before Floor 21.

He held on the list a second longer, then closed it without deciding what that meant, because he had no idea what the Tower counted and no reason to guess in front of four tired people.

The Reanimated section came last.

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5 OCCUPIED]

[ANATHEMA — ALICE]

No level. No experience bar. No notice of any kind, and nothing under her name that had not been under it the day he walked out of that throne room.

She had been stored through two full attempts and thirteen hours of fighting, and the interface had precisely nothing to say about it.

So she gains nothing sitting in there.

He caught the thought before it finished and put it down. He did not know that. He knew that no change was displayed, and those were not the same sentence, and he had watched a floor punish five people for exactly that kind of assumption.

He closed the window.

Durendal came off his back next, and he turned it under the basement lights.

The edge had come through two forts without a chip in it, which was most of what he had paid for. The grip had worn dark where his hand went, and there was a scoring line along the flat where a Highwatch guard’s blade had skated off it.

Around him the others were doing the same inventory in their own ways.

Ronan had his shield face-up across two chairs and was running his thumb along the gouge in it, and the gouge went deep enough that his thumb disappeared.

"That’s a re-facing," he said. "Not a repair. A re-facing, plus the rim, plus whatever they charge for the straps." He looked up. "A painful amount of eighteen thousand credits is going straight back out to the people who fix our gear."

"That’s the part that gets me." Cillian pulled his gloves off finger by finger and dropped them on the table. "They paid us for winning. After making us fight the same three forts twice. We did that whole night twice, lads."

"They kept the experience from the run we lost," Maeve said, without looking up.

Cillian considered that.

"Fine," he said. "Then it’s professionally compensated abuse, and I withdraw my complaint."

James had the allocation screen open with five points blinking, and he closed it.

Five points would not change a fight tomorrow, and he had thresholds to redo — how much mana he could hold back for a Corpse Explosion, how many skeletons he could carry into a passage, whether Endurance or Intelligence bought him more of a floor like the one they had just survived. That was a job for a desk, in daylight, with his notebook.

The room was coming down off it now. Finn had his boots up and was arguing with Ronan about which place would still be open at this hour. Maeve had gathered every page of her notes into one stack and squared it twice. Cillian had gone quiet in the way that meant he was about to fall asleep in a chair.

James reached for his phone on the shelf by the stairs, where it had sat since before they entered.

The screen woke as he lifted it.

He did not put it in his pocket.

His thumb stopped halfway to the display, and the loose set of his shoulders went out of him all at once, and the room noticed him before it knew why.

35 missed calls.

Every one of them from his mother.

She called twice when she was worried. She had called four times the night of the Floor 20 press conference, when the whole country knew twenty had gone in and nobody knew who had come out.

Thirty-five was not worry.

Maeve stopped squaring her papers.

James pressed her name.

It did not finish the first ring.

"James—"

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