A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 241: Chapter 241 — Seven Days Outside I

The riverbank came apart around them, and the panels stayed.

[FLOOR 23 CLEARED]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 50,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 20,000 PER MEMBER]

[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 38 → 39]

[EXP: 40,705 / 60,000]

[ALL STATS +1]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5 → 10]

[FLOOR 24 UNLOCKED]

[MISSION PARAMETERS WILL BE REVEALED UPON ENTRY]

That last line was the whole of it. No preview, no map, no three roads with a red marker on one of them. Just a door and no information about what was behind it.

The transport light set them down in the secure chamber under Dublin Tower with their bodies made whole and their gear exactly as they had left it — Ronan’s shield gouged to the boss, Maeve’s focus cracked along one edge, Finn’s left-hand axe wrapped in wire where the binding had gone, and the whole of James’s coat stiff down one side.

The chamber was silent, and after twelve hours of a live feed the silence had a shape to it.

There was no chat scrolling in the corner of anyone’s vision. The broadcast had ended where broadcasts always ended, at the floor’s edge, the instant the light took them — which meant the last thing forty million people had seen was a burning eastern wall and a paid question nobody had answered.

Maeve sat down on the floor of the chamber with her back against the wall.

It was the first time she had stopped moving since the western gate, and she did it without any ceremony at all, sliding down the tiles in full plate and letting her head go back against them. Cillian looked at her, looked at the door, and sat down beside her.

"That man’s leg," she said, to the ceiling.

"He’s alive," Ronan said. "The healers had him inside a minute. You put three of them behind that thing on nothing."

"I know what I put them behind." She closed her eyes. "I’m saying I saw it go through."

Nobody argued with her about it, because none of them had been standing where she had, and the fourth man’s leg was hers to carry if she wanted to carry it.

After a while she got up.

---

The reporters were already outside.

Bureau security had a corridor made between the doors and the vehicles, and it was long enough that the questions had time to land.

"Did you sacrifice the eastern settlement?"

"Would you make the same choice again?"

"Is Prince Raymond losing the war?"

James kept walking and did not turn his head for any of them. Ronan walked on the outside of him the whole way with one shoulder square to the crowd, and every time a microphone came past the line Ronan’s arm was already there, unhurried, not touching anybody.

Maeve stopped for four seconds at the car door.

"Team Zero will put out a statement," she said. "Not tonight."

Then she got in and shut the door, and the cameras went on flashing at the glass.

---

James got home a little after two.

He meant to eat and stay up long enough to be a person for an hour. He got about two thirds of the way through a plate of food on the sofa and lost the rest of it somewhere between one sentence and the next, and when he woke it was four the following afternoon, the plate was on the table, and there was a blanket over him that he had not put there.

Every channel was still on Floor 23.

The bridge was what they wanted. They had it from six angles and they slowed all of them down. There was a whole segment on Maeve building barriers one board at a time under three men’s feet, with a Radiant Warden from some Cork guild explaining what that would have cost her and then stopping halfway through the explanation and saying, quietly, that he had never seen anyone do it that long.

They had Ronan opening the lane through eight hundred panicking people, and they had Finn splitting the wagon axle and frame in one blow with the rear half going into the water. They had James standing at the far mouth of the bridge for two hours and not crossing back.

The tone changed every time the eastern settlement came up.

One panel argued the arithmetic — the clear condition required two, Team Zero could realistically influence one, Raymond’s army could realistically influence one, and the eastern settlement was never inside anyone’s reach on that timetable. Another put the burning eastern wall on the left of the screen and the western refugee column on the right, side by side, and asked the presenter how a group of five had come to be deciding which civilians counted.

Both segments used the same footage. Nobody on either of them had been on that floor.

Nyra came in during the eastern one and stood beside the sofa watching the wall burn.

"Did everybody live?"

James reached for the remote.

"No."

She waited. She was good at waiting, and she gave him a long time to say something else, and when he did not she watched the screen go black and then went and got her book without asking him anything more.

---

The week went slowly, and mostly it went well.

He ate at the table three times a day. He sat through lessons and refereed a running argument about whether nine sevens was a real number. He finally got up on a ladder and cleared the gutter over the back door that had been overflowing since before Floor 20, and replaced the handle on the kitchen door that had been coming off in his mother’s hand for a month, and spent an entire morning on the phone about a bill that turned out to have been paid twice.

Nyra worked on her wings in the back garden every afternoon.

The horn was reliable now. One wing was reliable. Both wings together still came apart about four seconds in, and on Thursday she got seven seconds and shouted about it, and the shouting undid it instantly, which she found personally insulting.

None of it made the outside go away.

His phone kept lighting with news alerts he had not asked for. People recognised him at the shop, and mostly that was fine, and twice it was not.

A man in his sixties stopped him by the bread and shook his hand for a long time and said thank you for not leaving them out there on that road, and got embarrassed, and left.

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