A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 169: Chapter 169: The Weight of Want I

The banquet hall was too clean.

Red carpet ran the length of it, unbroken by the wreckage that had chewed up every other room on this floor. A long table stretched down the center, candles burning without smoke, plates set at twenty places though no food sat on any of them and no chair but one had been used.

At the head of the table, a woman sat with her wings folded behind her chair and a maul resting against the wood beside her — black-red, wider than a man’s chest, its head resting on the floor like it weighed more than the table it leaned on.

`[VALERIA — BRIDE OF COVETING]`

`[LEVEL: 96]`

`[HP: 56,000 / 56,000]`

`[WEAPON: WANTBREAKER MAUL]`

”Sit,” Valeria said, and gestured at the empty places along the table like a hostess counting late guests. ”You’ve earned a seat. Everyone who reaches this room has earned one.”

Nobody moved toward the table.

They had heard the death notices from the other rooms. Nobody in this group needed telling twice that a room like this was not one you sat down in.

Tadhg shifted his grip on his sword. Padraig and Aoife spread wide without a word between them. Brendan, the priest, stepped back from the table and planted his staff, already reading the space for angles.

Valeria’s smile did not falter.

”Suit yourselves.”

---

They didn’t wait for her to finish rising from the chair.

Tadhg went straight for her head, fast and direct, and Padraig cut in from the left flank at the same second, Aoife’s bow already drawn and loosing from range. It was a clean opening, three angles at once, the kind of coordinated rush that separated a real guild party from a lucky one.

Valeria came up out of the chair with the maul already swinging into her hands.

She caught Tadhg’s blade on the haft before it reached her, the impact sending plates skittering off the table and a wine glass rolling to shatter on the floor. She turned the block into a shove that sent him staggering back a full stride.

She hadn’t used magic. She hadn’t needed to. The maul moved in her grip like it had always belonged there.

---

Tadhg reset his stance and came in again, angling for her exposed side.

Valeria let the strike come.

For half a second, her eyes went distant — reading him, not his blade — and the black-red core buried in the maul’s head pulsed once, deep and slow, like something waking.

`[WEAPON EFFECT DETECTED: DESIRE WEIGHT]`

`[THE STRONGER THE TARGET’S ACTIVE DESIRE, THE HEAVIER THE IMPACT]`

The maul came down.

It should have been a block, a trade, something Tadhg’s guard could have absorbed. Instead it folded his defense flat and threw him the length of the hall, his body tearing through two chairs and skidding across the carpet until the table’s edge stopped him.

He came up coughing blood onto the polished floor.

”You want your guild master to finally say your name in a room that matters,” Valeria said, almost gently. ”That’s a heavy thing to carry into a fight.”

---

The others froze for one breath, staring at the distance Tadhg had just traveled from a single hit.

Tadhg planted a hand against the floor and pushed himself back up, blood on his chin, sword still in his other fist.

”I can still move,” he said, and nobody argued with him.

They understood the shape of the problem now, even if they didn’t have all of it. Every clean hit from that maul could end someone. What none of them knew yet was how, or how far it could scale.

They tightened their grips instead of backing away, because the door behind them had already sealed shut the moment they’d landed.

---

Brendan planted his staff and finally cast.

Holy light spread out from the base of it and rolled across the floor, climbing up onto Tadhg’s blade first, then Padraig’s, then Aoife’s arrowheads where they sat nocked and waiting. The metal took the glow and held it, steady and bright.

`[PRIEST SKILL ACTIVATED: HOLY ARMAMENT]`

`[FRONTLINE WEAPONS REINFORCED]`

Valeria’s eyes went to him, and something in her expression sharpened for the first time.

Holy light meant real damage. Real damage meant her HP would actually move.

The second rush came in tighter and faster than the first, three weapons glowing gold against the red of the hall, and this time when Tadhg’s blade met her guard, it bit.

---

The group started winning the exchange.

A glowing blade opened a line across Valeria’s shoulder. Aoife’s next arrow clipped the edge of one wing hard enough to make her stagger sideways off the table’s shadow. Padraig drove her back two full steps from her own chair, and even when the maul came around and shattered his shield in one hit, Tadhg was already inside her reach on the follow-through.

`[VALERIA — HP: 56,000 / 56,000 → 41,000 / 56,000]`

`[VALERIA — HP: 41,000 / 56,000 → 28,000 / 56,000]`

She was bleeding now, real wounds opening under the holy-charged strikes, and for a stretch of the fight it looked like a room they could actually walk out of.

---

She kept making them pay for every opening.

Padraig threw himself in front of Brendan when Valeria’s swing angled for the priest’s backline, his shield raised, and the maul’s core pulsed against the desire behind that choice — wanting to keep the one man holding the whole group’s damage alive — and the strike bent toward him with weight that drove him down onto one knee, his shield arm screaming.

Tadhg pressed forward too eagerly a moment later, chasing the same recognition that had cost him the first hit, and the maul found the edge of his guard again and cracked two of his ribs before he could pull clear.

They kept attacking anyway, because her HP kept falling, and falling HP was the only thing in the room that still made sense.

---

`[VALERIA — HP: 28,000 / 56,000 → 10,700 / 56,000]`

Valeria staggered back against the split remains of her own table, one wing hanging lower than the other now, blood running freely down her arm and dripping off her fingers onto the wreckage of a plate.

Brendan’s hands shook around his staff, the holy light thinning at the edges from the strain of holding it this long, but he kept it lit.

Tadhg forced himself forward again despite the ribs, back into the same lane that had put him on the floor first.