A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 184: Chapter 184 — Death Does Not Let Go I

For one breath, James stayed upright.

Alice’s hand was closed around the scythe blade where it sat buried in his chest, and her grip was the only thing holding him on his feet. She watched his face while she did it, the way someone watches water go still.

Then she opened her fingers.

James dropped.

He hit the marble shoulder-first with a flat, heavy knock, then his head followed, a second sound, smaller and worse. His arm landed across his own chest and slid off. The scythe came down beside him, scraped a half-circle through the blood spreading under his back, turned once, and stopped.

The System prompt still hung in the air above him.

[CHALLENGER JAMES GANNER HAS DIED]

Nobody moved.

The throne room had been full of noise for an hour. Steel, bone, Finn roaring, the wolf, Camillia’s sword ringing off Alice’s guard. All of it was gone now. The only sound left was blood finding the grooves between the marble tiles.

Marcus took one step toward James and stopped, because there was nothing at the end of that step. His sword point drifted down until it rested on the floor.

Finn pushed off the ground to rise. His knees buckled before his legs straightened. Redline had already emptied him out, and his body had nothing left to lend. He caught himself on the axe haft and stayed there, half up, staring.

Maeve’s hand was on the circlet at her brow before she knew she’d raised it.

Saoirse gripped her one remaining dagger and looked at James’s chest. She kept looking at it. Waiting for it to move.

It did not move.

[CONTRACT HOLDER DECEASED]

[CONTRACTED UNDEAD DESTROYED]

Camillia froze mid-step, one greave still lifted. The green light behind her visor thinned, flickered, and went out. Her sword left her hand first and rang against the floor. Then the armor came apart, plate by plate, collapsing into a loose pile that no longer had anything inside it to hold its shape.

The wolf was worse.

It dragged itself toward James on its front legs, claws scratching thin white lines across the marble, jaw working like it wanted to make a sound it had no throat for. It got maybe three feet. Then whatever was holding it together let go, and it slumped and broke apart into ribs and vertebrae that rolled and settled and lay still.

Across the hall, the last of the skeleton line dropped where they stood, folding up like puppets when the hand comes off the strings. Loose bone clattered down the throne steps and scattered.

Then the silence got bigger.

Half the raid had just stopped existing. Every wall James had raised, every body he’d put between his team and Alice for twenty floors, all of it was bone on the floor, and the boy who could bring it back was lying in the middle of it with his eyes open at the ceiling.

Maeve pushed mana into the circlet.

The pale glow answered late. It came out of the cracked stone in stutters, bright on one side and dead on the other, like a pulse from something with a torn valve. The warmth that had been holding the whole raid together for the last hour was down to a candle.

[APOSTLE’S RADIANT CIRCLET — OUTPUT REDUCED]

Alice stood over James’s body and did not laugh.

She had laughed all through the second phase. She had laughed with a spear in her wing and Finn’s axe in her ribs. Now she looked at the collapsed undead, at the thin light guttering on Maeve’s brow, at the scythe lying in James’s blood, and she went completely still.

The stillness was worse than the laughing.

Her head tilted, slow, the way a person checks whether a door is really unlocked before walking through it.

[ALICE — HP: 22,100/102,000]

[THIRD PHASE INITIATED]

[AUTHORITY OF LUST: TRUE FORM]

The broken wing went first.

It did not heal. It tore itself wider, the shattered joint splitting along the break Finn and Marcus had paid so much to put there, and out of the split came new growth, red-gold threads of wet muscle winding around the ruined bone like something being stitched from the inside by hands that had never seen a wing, only heard one described. The wing rebuilt itself wrong and did not care.

Black feathers shook loose with every movement and turned to ash before they reached the floor. Wet ash. It stuck where it landed.

Behind her head, a ring assembled itself out of the dark. It was thin and uneven, blacker than the shadows behind it, like a halo dragged out of a fire, still smoking at the seams.

The long elegant blade in her hand ran like tallow and reformed shorter. No sweep to it anymore. No beauty. A straight, narrow thing with one purpose, the kind of blade a surgeon would use if surgeons hated their patients.

And the room started lying.

The black silk hanging along the walls moved. There was no wind, and it moved anyway, swelling and settling, swelling and settling, in a rhythm Saoirse recognized after three repetitions and wished she hadn’t. Breathing.

The statues of kneeling lovers lining the hall seemed lower than before, as if they had bowed another inch while nobody was watching.

The air went sweet. Rose and warm sugar, close and thick. Under the sweetness, arriving a half-second later every time, was the other smell. The one from under floorboards. The one that told the truth.

The marble stopped reflecting what was above it. Maeve looked down and saw herself smiling. She was not smiling.

James’s blood lay in a wide dark sheet across the tiles, and the light moving in it did not match any light in the room.

Marcus spat on the floor and did not look at his own reflection again.

Declan moved first, because someone had to.

James’s undead line was gone. There was no wall anymore between Alice and the back rank. So Declan O’Rourke made himself the wall, the way he had on every floor since twelve, stepping in front of Maeve with the tower shield up and his shoulder braced into it. His boots slid an inch through James’s blood before they found grip. He planted anyway.

”Behind me,” he said, and that was all he said.

[DECLAN — GUARDIAN ART ACTIVATED: MARTYR WALL]

Grey light sheeted down the shield face. Alice walked toward him, unhurried, the short blade loose at her side.

Then the floor lied to him.

In the marble at his feet, Declan saw Maeve. Behind his left shoulder, exactly where she stood, except in the reflection Alice was already there, already past him, her blade already through Maeve’s throat, and Maeve’s mouth was open around a sound the reflection didn’t carry.

It was false. Some part of him even knew it was false.

His body turned the shield toward it anyway. Half an inch. Less than a heartbeat’s worth of correction toward a girl he’d sworn to keep breathing.

Half an inch was the whole door.