A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 182: Chapter 182: One Death From Victory II

He didn’t come in high. He dropped low instead, and when Alice’s returning blade swept for his head, he let it open a line clean across his own shoulder rather than dodge it — a trade, on purpose, blood for distance.

The pain didn’t slow him down. If anything it seemed to focus him.

He got the axe under the wing joint Marcus had already broken and hauled up with everything both arms had.

The wing didn’t tear off — it wasn’t built to come apart that easily — but it folded. Wrong. All the way to a point it shouldn’t have been able to bend to, and for the first time in the entire fight, Alice’s whole balance shifted under her, one bare foot sliding a half-inch across bloodied marble to catch herself.

[ALICE — HP: 61,900/102,000 → 55,400/102,000]

She didn’t answer with a tail-strike this time. She changed method entirely — the blade in her hand threaded itself around the axe haft like living rope and yanked, dragging Finn forward off his own feet, and she drove a knee into his exposed ribs at the same instant the blade pressure at his throat forced his whole body to bend.

His knees started to give.

”Finn—” Maeve’s voice, high and tight, from somewhere behind the front line.

He was one more inch from kneeling in front of her when he stopped it the only way his body had left — he slammed the axe handle into his own already-wounded shoulder, hard, using the fresh white-hot pain to shock his legs back under him by pure reflex.

Marcus’s hand closed on the back of his armor and hauled him backward, out of range, a half-second before the blade at his throat would have finished the motion it had started.

Both of them were still standing.

Both of them were bleeding worse than they had been thirty seconds ago, breathing worse, moving worse, and every single person in that throne room understood it without anyone saying it out loud.

Saoirse hadn’t rushed in blind while the others fought. She’d been reading Alice’s blade the entire time — the way it kept returning, again and again, to the same handful of guard points. Wrist. Throat. Ribs. The wing, already failing twice.

She waited until Alice turned her attention fully onto Finn, weight committed, guard narrowed to a single direction.

Then she crossed the cracked steps low and fast, blades already reversed in both hands.

[S-RANK TECHNIQUE ACTIVATED: SEAMCUTTER]

Her first strike failed. Alice caught it on the flat of the authority blade without even fully turning to look, and sparks spat white-hot between the two edges where they met.

Saoirse used the failure. She let the momentum of the block carry her sideways instead of fighting it, rotated in under Alice’s raised guard while the blade was still occupied, and opened a shallow cut beneath her ribs with the second knife already coming around from her other hand.

The cut wasn’t deep. It didn’t need to be.

Alice’s whole body answered it in a way pain alone wouldn’t explain — James, watching from behind the line, saw the red-gold light running just under her skin flicker unsteadily around the wound, sputtering like a flame caught in a draft before it settled back to steady.

[ALICE — HP: 55,400/102,000 → 51,800/102,000]

Alice didn’t reach for the blade this time. She drove the bare hilt into Saoirse’s throat instead, hard enough to snap her head back, and followed it with a kick that sent her sliding the length of the throne steps.

Saoirse hit the marble on her back, coughing, one hand pressed to her own throat.

Her eyes never left the spot on Alice’s ribs where her blade had gone in, even while she fought to get air back into her lungs.

Maeve saw the window and didn’t waste it.

She pushed the circlet’s light past anything she’d risked all fight — past anything she’d risked in her whole career, if she was honest with herself later, which she didn’t have time to be now.

The crack in the white stone under her feet widened with a sound like ice breaking. Her hands shook visibly around the light gathered between them. The pale glow sharpened, thinned, and for a handful of seconds the red-gold lines running beneath Alice’s skin became fully visible from across the room — thin glowing threads sitting just under the surface like veins traced in fire, running from her wrist to her collarbone to somewhere low behind her ribs.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — RADIANT FIELD: ABSOLUTION PULSE]

”There!” Maeve shouted, voice cracking with the effort of holding the light steady. ”The chest line — James, the chest line, now—”

Alice’s head turned toward her before James could take a single step.

She threw the sword.

Not at Marcus. Not at Finn. Straight at the light itself — straight at Maeve’s forehead, the red-gold blade spinning end over end across the throne room fast enough that James barely registered it leaving her hand before it was already halfway there.

Declan didn’t think. He moved.

[DECLAN — GUARDIAN ART ACTIVATED: MARTYR WALL]

He got his shield up with both hands, planted his full weight behind it, and the blade hit dead center.

The sword punched halfway through the shield’s face, the metal screaming as it deformed around the blade, and Declan’s boots slid backward across the marble in a long grinding line. His arms shook holding the angle steady. The metal groaned, straining, the blade’s tip visibly pushing another half-inch through with every second that passed.

”Hold,” Declan snarled through his teeth, to no one, to himself. ”Hold.”

It held. Just long enough. Long enough that Maeve’s light stayed lit behind him and the threads stayed visible for the extra second the raid needed.

James moved during that window because it was the only window he was going to get.

He couldn’t sprint. His body wouldn’t let him — every muscle he tried to call on answered a half-second late, sluggish, running on fumes. He used the scythe like a crutch to drag his first step forward, and before his legs could fold under him on the second, Camillia’s shoulder was already there, shoving him bodily ahead.

[GRAVE COMMAND ACTIVATED]

She surged past him and met Alice’s returning sword head-on. Alice didn’t waste a fraction of a second trying her authority on the Dark Knight again — she’d already learned, twice now, that door didn’t open for her. She simply cut her instead, the blade carving a bright line across the black breastplate, throwing sparks and broken fragments of ancient armor across the steps.

Camillia didn’t fall. She held the lane, planting herself squarely between James and everything else in the room, silent as she’d always been.

The Python threw what was left of its ruined body around Alice’s ankle and lower leg in the same instant, coiling once, holding on with everything its cracked and failing scales had left.

Alice looked down at it. Almost bored. She cut into it with the authority blade, deep, straight through muscle and old bone.

The Python didn’t let go. It tightened instead, jaws snapping uselessly at nothing, holding on with a stubbornness that had nothing left to gain from it.

[CONTRACTED UNDEAD DESTROYED]

It came apart into drifting grey ash all at once, the coils around Alice’s leg dissolving mid-grip, and for one strange, silent second the ash hung in the air where the Python had been before it settled to the floor and was gone.

James felt something in his chest tighten that had nothing to do with his ribs.

There wasn’t time to feel it properly. The wolf hit Maeve’s side a heartbeat later, low and fast, dragging her bodily out of the path of the pressure wave that followed the Python’s death, taking the edge of the blast across its own spine instead of letting it reach her.

It skidded across the marble on its side, claws scraping long white lines into the stone, and when it tried to push itself back up, one hind leg wouldn’t answer anymore. It got up anyway, three legs under it, and dragged itself back toward the line.

James reached Alice while the last of Maeve’s light still lit the threads under her skin.

One of them — low, near her chest, thinner than the others — twitched visibly the instant the pulse crossed it.

He didn’t stop to confirm what that meant. He didn’t have thirty seconds left on the clock to spend confirming things.

He reached for the nearest dead Incubus Thrall and pulled.

[DEATH CHAIN ACTIVATED]

Blood came from his nose immediately, hot and sudden, running over his lip before he could react to it. His vision doubled — the whole throne room split into two overlapping images, Alice standing in both of them at once, and he swung the scythe at the version that felt more solid.

The blade caught the thin line under her chest and dragged through it the way a knife drags through wire buried just under skin — resistance, then a give, then nothing at all.

Alice staggered backward.

Two full steps.

She had not given ground like that once, the entire fight.

[ALICE — HP: 51,800/102,000 → 39,600/102,000]

”That’s it!” Finn shouted, dragging himself back into the line despite the shoulder still bleeding down his arm. ”That’s the one — do it again!”