A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 161: Chapter 161: The Outer Court Opens

Finn had opened the right side with enough aggression that the raid had room to breathe there, carving through Consumed Pilgrims and Hollow Knights fast and hard, his axe finding the joints between rotten armor.

Then a Lust-Touched Knight came through the crowd and the level gap showed itself.

Finn caught its first swing on his axe haft and the hit drove him back two full steps, his boots skating on the marble, and he felt the weight of the thing in his arms from the wrists up through both shoulders. He countered and cut it across the side — the right angle, good placement — and the wound opened shallow and the Knight did not slow.

The next blow came straight down at the haft and the impact traveled up through both hands and left his fingers half-numb on the grip.

[LUST-TOUCHED KNIGHT — Level 45] [FINN HALE — HP: 2,340/2,340 → 1,740/2,340]

The Knight pressed. Finn blocked again and gave another step, and the step put him close to the side gate, and the Knight read the wall behind him and changed its angle.

Marcus cut through the exchange from the side and took the Knight across the throat in one pass, and the thing dropped between them.

He did not look at Finn’s face.

”Left side,” he said, and moved on.

Finn looked down at his left ribs. There was a tear in the armor near the bottom edge where the Knight’s gauntlet had dragged through during one of the exchanges — not deep enough to matter, not deep enough to slow him — but there.

He adjusted his stance, lower and tighter. He swung at the next thing in front of him and put more behind it than the one before.

The raid held the second wave.

It was not clean. Two fighters were bleeding, a support was shaking, and the mages had burned more than the distance they’d covered was worth. But nobody had died, and the formation had bent and corrected itself, and for a moment twenty people on a ruined avenue had done exactly what a raid was supposed to do.

Then the marble cracked.

Red lines spread through the stone under James’s boots, thin and even, moving outward from a point in the center of the avenue. He watched them branch. One line cut between him and Finn. Another ran behind Declan’s shield formation. A third ran behind the support line and curved toward the chapel wall to his right.

Not random fractures. Not battle damage.

Cuts. Going exactly where the last ten minutes had pushed everyone.

”Fall back—” he started.

The floor moved faster than the words.

A chapel wall ground straight up out of the street between Declan’s left side and the center of the raid, solid stone rising in a single slow push, and the gap it left in the formation was the exact gap Declan’s side had drifted into during the second wave.

GRRNNK.

Iron gates dropped from the balconies on both sides of the avenue.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

A red iron gate rose through the split in the marble between James and Finn, its bars thick and close, and James ran for it.

”Finn—”

Finn turned. He was three steps away, then two, and the gate came up between them and James hit the bars with his shoulder and bounced back and Finn’s hand hit the iron from the other side at the same moment.

The street pulled in both directions at once.

GRRK.

A staircase unfolded from the marble behind the center line and dragged five fighters down into the dark before they could get off it. A span of avenue lifted ahead of Marcus and became a wall. Another gate sealed the road toward the cathedral. The alleys at the edges of the formation locked shut one after another with a sound like something being fastened from inside.

The city had not been cracking. It had been cutting.

Maeve grabbed the support she had pulled off the stairs by the armor collar and hauled them back onto solid marble.

CRACK.

The stairs folded shut where the support’s leg had been.

James stood at the bars with one hand on the iron and looked through at the section of avenue beyond. Empty. Still. The floor had already finished rearranging it.

He pulled his hand back.

They landed by position, not by role.

Marcus and Finn came out of it in a long hallway with three others.

James came out on a stretch of dark red stone with Maeve beside him, Declan Roe a step behind, an Ironwall officer with a dented shield, and the support Maeve had dragged off the stairs. Confessional booths lined the walls on both sides, their curtains rotted away, their interiors empty and dark.

Saoirse Doyle landed in a broken courtyard garden with four mixed veterans, flowers growing up through the joints of old armor laid in the soil like the garden had been planted on the dead.

A group of guild fighters landed near a set of doors tall enough that the top hinges disappeared into the ceiling, a long table visible through the gap with twenty plates set on it and food that should have been cold a century ago still sitting on them.

Somewhere below all of it, muffled by stone, a trio hit the ground too hard.

James did not know which group was which. He only knew that the gate between him and Finn had sealed, and that he could not hear anything through the stone.

♢♢♢♢

Marcus’s hallway was long and narrow, lit by wall-mounted torches that burned without smoke.

The portraits on both walls were not saints or kings. They were families.

Fathers seated at long tables with sons standing at their shoulders. Men in dress armor passing swords to younger men who had not grown into the grip yet. A commander with one hand on the shoulder of a boy who looked back at him over his shoulder. Generation after generation of the same scene, framed and hung in order down both walls.

Every face in every portrait had been scratched away.

Finn walked past them and kept his eyes forward, and then one portrait caught him.

A father’s hand on a boy’s shoulder. The boy’s face had been scraped down to pale bare wood, every feature gone.

He looked at it for half a second too long.

”On me,” Marcus said from the far end, and Finn pulled his eyes away and moved.

Marcus had placed himself between Finn and the dark at the hall’s far end. He was not looking at the portraits. He was watching the shadows.

Finn noticed where Marcus was standing.

He opened his mouth.

At the far end of the hall, footsteps came out of the dark, unhurried, the sound of someone who had been waiting in the right room.

A woman walked into the torchlight. Dark wings folded close at her back, a long gown trailing the floor behind her, one of Alice’s Brides moving through the hall the way a host moves through her own house. She looked at Marcus first — not at his sword, not at his armor, but at his face — and then her eyes moved to Finn, and then back to Marcus, and she understood the shape of what was in the room in the time it took to take one slow breath.

She smiled, the kind of smile that had nothing warm in it.

”There,” she said softly. ”That is where it hurts.”