A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 273: Chapter 264 — No Other Door II

He caught Baldwin’s sword on the scythe haft at close range and turned the blade off Finn’s line. He Grave Stepped to a corpse eleven meters out and came back into the flank. He cut the red light away from the wound twice more and made it fail to settle both times.

And every collision between the black blade and the red reinforcement did something to him.

The cold around him stopped being weather and started being *his*. It came up his arms out of the haft instead of down into it, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth exchange James stopped noticing the weight of the weapon entirely.

Then the pressure arrived behind his eyes, and it was not Death Chain’s strain, and something began forming in the air behind his head.

[DEATH AUTHORITY MANIFESTATION: PARTIAL]

The broken eclipse came back — the black ring, cracked along its arc, leaking thin silver-black light into the space above his shoulders, exactly as it had in a throne room three months ago.

The wing frames started out of his back under the coat and stopped a third of the way, unfinished, the way they had before.

And then something new.

It came up out of James’s hairline above the left temple with a sound he felt in his skull rather than heard — a spiral of black, growing outward and up, dark and hard-edged and unmistakably *not* part of the eclipse or the wings.

He could not see it. He had no idea it was there.

Maeve did. She was thirty feet away holding three people upright, and she looked at him and her hands stopped moving for one entire heartbeat.

Finn saw it a half-second later and missed a step.

Baldwin’s sword came down where Finn’s step should have been.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THE RING

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** FLOOR 20. THAT’S FLOOR 20

**[user88317]:** WHAT IS ON HIS HEAD

**[ZeroFan]:** JAMES??????

**[GalwayGoblin]:** BRO WHAT

**[CorkClimber]:** LOOK AT BALDWIN NOT JAMES

**[user88317]:** HORN???

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

After that the feed stopped being readable at all.

---

He took a collision that would have put him on his back ten minutes ago and gave two paces instead of six. He cut deeper. He stayed inside close range for four exchanges rather than two.

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 22,100 → 19,400]

Then he came out of an exchange and had to put the scythe’s butt into the mud to stop his own knee folding, and stood there for a second and a half with his lungs going, and the ring behind his head guttered and came back.

Ten meters away, Ronan was on his back trying to sit up and getting halfway.

Finn made an exchange, stopped, breathed twice with his hands on his knees, and made another one.

Maeve’s light was on Raymond, and then it was not, and then it was on Finn, and Raymond took a strike across the arm inside the gap.

Cillian said, to nobody, "One. I’ve got one," and nobody answered him, because they all already knew.

They built one more anyway.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

"He goes right after the bind — right, and low, he’s favouring the hip—"

Raymond baited it and Baldwin took the bait.

Ronan got in front with a shield he was holding at waist height and simply refused to be moved out of the way. Finn forced the sword to one side. Cillian spent his discharge on the recovery. James came through the middle with the scythe already swinging at the ruined light over the wound.

For about a second and a half, Baldwin was in genuine trouble.

James got the blade close enough that one more clean movement would have opened him from hip to ribs.

Then Baldwin broke the whole thing apart.

He came out of the trap with a strike that had nothing tactical in it at all, just violence, and it caught James’s scythe on the haft and drove him three meters back through the mud.

Ronan got between them and was thrown clear and did not get up quickly.

Finn took the next counter trying to cover him and went down onto one hand.

Raymond tried to stop the pursuit and made it two steps before his leg went and put him on a knee for the third time.

Cillian’s hand came up. Nothing happened. He stood there with his arm raised and nothing in it and looked at it.

Maeve got Finn back onto his feet, and to do it she had to let go of Raymond, and Raymond stayed down.

James backed off with the scythe up and made himself look at all of them.

Ronan, on his back, arm out at an angle arms did not go. Finn on one hand in the mud. Raymond down on the knee again with his sword being used as a prop. Cillian standing with an arm raised and nothing coming out of it. Maeve holding Finn up and looking straight back at James, and she did not say anything, and she did not have to.

Across the wreckage, the red light finished knitting itself shut over Baldwin’s shoulder and he started walking.

James opened a window nobody could see but him.

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5 OCCUPIED]

[ANATHEMA — ALICE]

*Alice does not exist.*

Eight meters.

James opened it.

---

She arrived the way weather arrives.

The air went thick and sweet and wrong, and Alice was simply standing four meters to James’s left with both enormous black wings spread and settling, the broken halo dark behind her head, her hands empty and open at her sides.

[ALICE — FIRST DISCIPLE OF LUST]

[HP: 102,000 / 102,000]

[AUTHORITY: DESIRE / LUST / FALLEN DIVINITY]

[UNIQUE UNDEAD DESIGNATION: ANATHEMA]

Finn said something that was not a word.

Maeve’s whole body turned toward her, and the light she had been holding on Finn wavered, and she pulled it back by force.

Ronan, flat on his back in the mud, got his head up. Cillian said, quietly, "Oh, that’s her. That’s actually her."

And Raymond — who had never seen a Floor 20 broadcast, who had no idea what a First Disciple was, who knew nothing at all except what was in front of him — looked at the winged woman who had appeared out of nothing beside the necromancer and understood exactly one thing, which was that whatever had just arrived on this field was worse than his brother.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** ALICE

**[ZeroFan]:** NO

**[ZeroFan]:** NO FUCKING WAY

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT IS THE ORIGINAL

**[user88317]:** FLOOR 20?????????

**[FrontierWife]:** SHES WITH JAMES???

**[CorkClimber]:** WHAT DID HE DO

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

Alice looked around the battlefield without any hurry whatsoever.

At the two armies. At the bodies. At Baldwin, closing, wrapped in red. At Team Zero in pieces on the ground.

Then at James, and at the black ring behind his head, and at the horn.

Something moved through her face that James could not read at all.

"Help us," he said.

"No," Alice said.

---

He had expected a great many things and had not expected how *bored* she sounded.

"You put me in a box," she said. "Three months. Not once. Not a word, not a summons, not a question — and now there is finally something on a field you cannot kill, and here I am." Her head tilted. "Ask me again. I want to hear it again."

"Alice—"

"You need me." She smiled, and there was nothing warm anywhere in it. "Say that part."

Baldwin arrived while she was speaking, because Baldwin was not going to wait.

Ronan got up off the ground with an arm that could not hold a shield and put the shield in the way anyway. Finn came in on Baldwin’s flank and did not try to hurt him, just kept him turning. Raymond got off the knee and threw himself into his brother’s path with a wound in his side that was not going to let him do that many more times.

Maeve held all three of them together and watched Alice with her jaw locked, because she had been on the wall at the western settlement and she remembered exactly what those wings could do.

Cillian stood ready with nothing in his hands.

James could have ended the argument in one word.

The contract was right there. He had used it once, in a ruined throne room, and it had folded a First Disciple of Lust onto one knee in front of him while she fought it with everything she had. He could say *fight* and she would fight, whatever she wanted.

Alice was watching him not do it.

He saw the moment she noticed — a small shift, her eyes going from his face to his hands and back, waiting for a command that was not arriving.

"A deal," James said.

"You *have* a deal. You have a leash."

"A different one." He kept the scythe up between her and the fighting, because Baldwin was fifteen meters away and everything he said had to be short. "You help us here — because you choose to, not because I make you — and storage stops being where you live."

Alice went very still.

"Explain that."

"You stay out. Manifested, whenever it’s possible, which is most of the time. Not brought out for a fight and put back in a box when it’s over." James’s arms were shaking from the scythe and he did not lower it. "You get to exist. Talk to people, walk around, be seen. I stop pretending you’re not there."

"And when I embarrass you in front of that." She flicked two fingers at the empty air where the broadcast interface hung. "When the cameras go and you want the problem back in a box—"

"Then it stays a deal I broke, in front of them, out loud."

"Words."

"Then here’s the shape of it," James said. "I don’t put you away because you annoyed me. I don’t put you away because you argued. The only thing that gets you stored is you actively trying to kill somebody or about to." He met her eyes. "That’s the whole condition. I’m not promising to take the contract off, because I don’t know how, and I’d be lying. I’m not promising you can do whatever you want. I’m promising you stop being furniture."

Alice looked at him for a long moment while a prince wrapped in red light beat Ronan two meters sideways behind her.

"You could simply order me," she said.

"Yes."

"Why haven’t you?"

"Because I want you actually fighting," James said. "Not a body doing what it’s told. I’ve seen what you are when you mean it. I’d like that on my side, and I can’t order that part."

Something changed in the way she was looking at him.

Not warmth. Nothing anywhere near it. She studied his face the way a person studies an instrument they had been certain they understood, recalibrating.

"Say the last part loud enough for your friends," Alice said.

James turned his head so Maeve and Finn and the invisible thing recording all of this could not possibly miss it, and said, "After this floor, she stays out. That’s a promise, and you all heard it."

Alice’s wings came off her back and opened to their full span.

"Then I accept," she said, "and I still hate you."

She turned around, and walked away.

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