A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 183: Chapter 183: One Death From Victory III

Nobody had time to celebrate it. Alice didn’t give them the chance.

She stopped swinging wide and started taking the raid apart one piece at a time, and every cut she used was different from the last, deliberate, surgical.

A shallow line opened across Marcus’s thigh, and his next step buckled under him before he could catch it. The flat of her blade caught Finn square in the chest hard enough to break the rhythm Redline needed to keep his body moving past its own limits, and he staggered, gasping. A low kick swept Saoirse’s already-hurt leg out from under her entirely — not even the sword this time, just the bare economy of violence.

Maeve tried to heal through it anyway. The circlet’s light came out uneven now, guttering, reaching Finn just long enough to let him drag one full breath back into his lungs before it died out again. She wiped a streak of blood from under her nose with the back of one shaking hand and didn’t stop standing.

Marcus saw the clock. Everyone could feel it now, the weight of how little time was actually left, and he reached for Titan Breaker a second time even though his hands were visibly shaking before the skill had finished settling into his body.

Finn saw the shake.

He said nothing about it. He was already moving to Marcus’s flank before the skill fully activated.

[S-RANK SKILL ACTIVATED: TITAN BREAKER]

Marcus came from the right. Alice caught his blade on the authority sword, and this time he didn’t try to overpower the parry — he let his own sword slide along the length of hers and locked the two weapons together at the hilt.

”Now!” he shouted, arms straining to hold the lock. ”Finn — the wing! Saoirse—”

Finn came from the left and drove the spiked back of his axe head into the wing joint that had already failed twice, all his weight behind it.

Saoirse, still low from the floor, cut behind Alice’s exposed shoulder in the same half-second.

Three angles. One breath.

Alice’s wing dropped and failed to lift, dragging a long black smear of feathers across the marble as it fell useless at her side.

James saw the shoulder cut connect straight through to the chest line Maeve had already exposed, the two wounds lining up like something had planned it that way.

His hands were shaking too badly by then to raise Necro Blast cleanly — he tried, felt the mana refuse to settle into shape between his fingers, and abandoned it. He dragged the scythe upward instead, catching the fresh line Saoirse had just opened and tearing straight through it with everything his arms had left to give.

[ALICE — HP: 39,600/102,000 → 26,700/102,000]

For one full breath, it felt like they were going to win.

The red-gold haze thinning through the room actually thinned, visibly, the pressure behind everyone’s eyes easing off for a single second. The pressure on Maeve’s circlet dropped enough that she straightened up out of her crouch. Marcus straightened too, despite the blood running steadily down his leg. Finn bared his teeth at the sight of Alice’s ruined wing hanging dead at her side. Saoirse’s grip tightened around the handle of her remaining dagger.

”She’s done,” Finn said, low, disbelieving. ”She’s actually—”

Alice let her sword dip.

Just slightly. Just enough to look like the damage had finally reached all the way down to her guard.

Marcus read it as the opening it looked like and locked her blade a second time. Finn hooked the ruined wing down and held it there. Saoirse widened the rib line with a fast, precise cut. Camillia threw herself bodily into Alice’s tail to keep it from finding James. The wolf tried to drag its ruined leg back under it near Maeve and couldn’t quite manage the weight, snarling in frustration at its own body.

Maeve gave the circlet everything it had left to give.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — RADIANT FIELD: ABSOLUTION PULSE]

James reached killing range with the scythe already rising above his shoulder, close enough now that a loose black feather brushed his cheek on its way past.

This was it. Everyone in the room understood, in the same silent half-second, that this was the moment the whole fight had been building toward.

Alice let her sword go.

She didn’t fight Marcus’s lock. She released it entirely, and the blade dissolved back into loose red-gold thread wrapped uselessly around his own weapon, slipping free of her grip like it had never been solid to begin with.

Her bare hand shot out instead and closed around the scythe blade in mid-swing.

The edge bit into her palm on contact. Black-red blood welled instantly and ran down the flat of the blade in a thin steady line.

She held it there anyway. She didn’t even flinch.

[ALICE — HP: 26,700/102,000 → 22,100/102,000]

James pulled. The scythe didn’t move an inch.

”James—!” Maeve’s voice, and it was the first time all fight it had sounded truly afraid.

Marcus wrenched at his own sword and found it still held for one breath longer than it should have been, the dissolved threads clinging to the blade with a stubbornness that made no physical sense. Finn swung with everything Redline had left and Redline chose that exact moment to give out completely, his knees buckling mid-motion, the axe going wide. Saoirse threw her last dagger and Alice turned her head a bare inch — enough that it opened her cheek instead of the eye it had been aimed at. Maeve reached for one more pulse and the circlet only flickered, spent down to nothing.

Every single one of them tried. Every single one of them failed by the same margin: half a second, no more.

Alice reformed the sword as a short blade in her free hand, the metal — if it was metal — condensing out of the red-gold light in a fraction of a second.

She didn’t say anything.

There was no speech in her, no pause to savor it, nothing that gave the raid even the half-second such a pause would have bought them. She simply held James in place by the grip she still had on the scythe blade, and drove the short sword up under his ribs and through his chest in one motion.

James’s breath stopped before the pain even had time to reach his face.

For one long, suspended second, nothing in him moved at all.

Then his hand tightened — once, reflexive, final — around the scythe’s shaft.

The scythe went cold under his palm. Colder than it had been at any point in the entire fight, a cold that had nothing left of warning in it anymore. And then it simply went still, the way a held breath finally lets go.

Marcus was already moving, sword abandoned, both hands reaching.

He was one full step too late.

Finn screamed something that didn’t come out as words and forced his ruined legs to try anyway, dragging himself forward on pure refusal. Maeve’s knees gave out where she stood, and she didn’t try to catch herself. Camillia’s helm turned toward James in the exact same instant the bond between them went utterly, completely silent — no strain, no static, nothing at all where something had always been.

James was still upright.

Only Alice’s grip on the scythe held him there, his own body no longer doing any of the work of standing on its own.

Blood ran down the shaft in a single thin line, dripping steadily off the curve of the blade onto the cracked marble below.

His eyes were open.

They weren’t looking at anything.

Maeve’s circlet gave one last weak flicker of pale light, guttering like a candle at the end of its wick, and went dark completely. The throne room’s own light dimmed with it, the gold draining out of the air, leaving only the low red-gold glow of whatever Alice still carried inside her.

[JAMES GANNER — HP: 188/1,260 → 0/1,260]

[CHALLENGER JAMES GANNER HAS DIED]