A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 250: Chapter 250 — The World Kept Climbing II

He put it in the team chat because he was not going to be able to think about anything else until somebody else had it too.

**[James]:** US cleared 23. They sent Raymond east.

**[James]:** [link]

It took about ninety seconds.

**[Finn]:** Their Raymond still owns the pass.

**[Ronan]:** Their west paid for it.

**[Cillian]:** so we’re both right and both wrong. cool. love that

**[Maeve]:** Which is the point. Stop looking for the correct route.

James read that one twice and did not answer it.

He put the phone face-down on the table, and Nyra asked him whether four hundred was really wrong, and he said it was, and she said it should not be, and his mother took the tablet away and turned the coverage off.

The thing sitting under Maeve’s message was the part he could not put down.

They had been treating every one of those choices as a puzzle with a solution they were not clever enough to see yet. Two other teams had now run the same kingdom with different hands, and between the three of them they had saved a bridge and lost a pass, saved a pass and lost a bridge, and strangled a prince who in somebody else’s version was strangling back.

Nobody had found the version where everybody lived.

He was starting to think that was not because none of them had been clever enough.

---

They met Kavanagh at the building that afternoon, because the final reports had come back and she had refused to walk anyone through them across a desk.

”You should be standing in it when I tell you what it costs,” she said at the door.

The place had not improved since the walkthrough. The pale ghost of the dead guild’s crest was still burned into the stone above the entrance, the reception was still under its grey blanket of dust, and somebody’s directory board still listed departments for an organisation that no longer existed.

What had changed was the number of people in high-vis jackets.

They walked it in a loose group while the inspectors marked things, and the building told most of the story itself.

In the training hall, a surveyor had run yellow tape across the entire northern half, and inside the tape somebody had chalked a series of numbers on the cratered floor. The barrier emitters along that wall had been unbolted and stacked, and one of them had a tag on it that said, simply, OBSOLETE — DO NOT REINSTALL.

”Full rebuild on that half,” Kavanagh said. ”Floor, sub-floor and Challenger-grade barriers to current spec. The southern half is fine.”

Finn had his hand flat against one of the surviving wall plates.

”What rating does the rebuilt half certify to?”

”High enough for anything the five of you can currently do, with margin.” She looked at him. ”Not high enough for whatever you’ll be doing in two years. That’s a later conversation and a later invoice.”

”Grand,” Finn said, in the voice of a man already planning to have that conversation.

Down in the vault corridor, the panel was still blinking its two-generations-dead status line at nobody.

”The vault itself is sound — the actual door and the box are better than anything you’d buy new. Everything electronic attached to it has to go. Locks, access control, monitoring, all of it, and the server room with it, because you cannot certify a guild vault on hardware that stopped receiving patches four years ago.”

The residential wing was worse in daylight than it had been on the walkthrough video. Two rooms had their ceilings out entirely, and the smell of damp came at them from the far end of the corridor before they reached it.

”Remediation, plumbing, partial reconstruction. That wing is the single biggest line on the renovation side and none of it is legally required to open.”

Ronan had stopped at the medical section door.

”Can this be certified separately? Before the residential work finishes?”

”Yes. It needs refurbishment, not reconstruction, and it can be signed off on its own schedule.” Kavanagh made a note. ”Why?”

”Because if we can have a certified medical room in this building before we have bedrooms, I’d rather have it.” He did not elaborate, and James thought about a Bureau medical wing at two in the morning and did not make him.

Maeve had a copy of the report open on her tablet and was going down it with her thumb.

”Split it for me. What’s legally required before Guild Zero can operate out of this building, and what’s us wanting nice things.”

”That’s the right question and it’s the only reason there are two numbers.” Kavanagh stopped in the corridor where they could all hear her. ”Mandatory works — the security certification package, access control on the perimeter and the private entrance, the vault electronics, fire and safety compliance, and the training hall rebuild, because you cannot licence a guild hall with a training floor in that condition. Four point four million.”

Nobody said anything.

”Everything else — residential wing, servers, the office and briefing refurbishment, medical, equipment fit-out, and a contingency I’m insisting on because this building is sixty years old and will surprise us — brings it to six point two.”

”And time?” James asked.

”Eight to ten weeks on the licensing-critical work, assuming crews start next week and nothing behind a wall makes me change my mind. The rest can run on afterwards while you’re operating.”

Cillian had been quiet for an unusually long stretch.

”Right,” he said. ”I have the important question.”

”Go on.”

”Did any of the showers survive?”

”Three,” Kavanagh said, without checking a page.

”Three.” He looked around at the others. ”That’s the first positive number anybody’s said out loud today.”

---

James walked back to the edge of the training floor while the others spread out.

Six point two million. It was affordable, and that was the strange part — he could write most of it himself and the company could carry the rest, and the number no longer frightened him the way a much smaller one would have two years ago.

”One question,” he said, when Kavanagh came over. ”Anything in those final reports serious enough that you’d tell us to use the withdrawal clause?”

She thought about it properly before answering, which he appreciated.

”No. If there were, you’d have heard it from me in the car park before you got your hopes up.” She closed the folder. ”The building is expensive. It is not bad. Those are different findings and people confuse them constantly.”

James stood there and looked at the taped-off half of the hall.

Hale Estate was Marcus’s. The Spire’s facilities came with a percentage and a seat at somebody else’s table. The Bureau’s arena was booked by the hour and could be un-booked by anyone with more authority than him.

This was a wrecked floor in a dead guild’s building with somebody else’s ghost over the door.

If they bought it, it would be theirs. Not lent, not shared, not contingent on a relationship that could change.

”Founders’ approval,” Kavanagh said. ”All five. That was written in deliberately and I’m not letting you skip it.”

”Yes,” James said.

”Yes,” Finn said, from over by the barrier plates.

”Yes.” Maeve did not look up from the report.

”Yes,” Ronan said.

Everybody turned and looked at Cillian, who let it go on for a good four seconds.

”Question. Does my seven and a half percent entitle me to formally claim one of the three working showers?”

”No,” Maeve said.

”Right.” He shrugged. ”Yes.”

Kavanagh was already writing.

”Then that’s the conditional agreement satisfied and the purchase proceeding. I’ll have the completion documents to you inside the week.”

She said the rest of it plainly, because none of them needed it dressed up.

The headquarters would be theirs. Renovation started immediately. The guild licence remained pending and would stay pending until the mandatory works passed inspection. Recruitment stayed closed. There would be no public launch and no announcement. She could begin hiring where the company and the renovation genuinely required it — a site manager, an administrator, an accountant — and Challenger recruitment was a conversation for a building that could legally hold Challengers.

”Slow,” Kavanagh said, ”is how this ends up standing.”

Contractors were already working when they left. Two men were running a tape along the northern training wall and marking demolition lines in blue. Someone had gone along the vault corridor tagging the old security hardware for removal. Kavanagh had crew dates in her diary for Tuesday.

James stopped for a moment in the room off the main corridor that the plans had marked as a strategy room.

It was empty and it smelled of damp plaster and there was a bird’s nest in the light fitting.

He had spent the morning watching the rest of the planet come up the ladder he had broken open, into a kingdom he had bled in, making different choices with different dead.

And this room, which was currently a rectangle of dust and one bird’s nest, was going to be where the five of them argued about it.

---

His phone went off in the car park.

It was another international bulletin, and he almost swiped it away with the rest, because he had already read everything the morning coverage had on both Floor 23 parties.

Then he saw that this one was not reporting either clear. It was reporting something an analyst had found by putting the two debriefs side by side.

He stopped beside the car door and read it properly.

The clear summaries that went out to the public were the front end of a much longer document. Behind them sat the full bureau debriefs, and at the back of those sat the section every bureau kept for observations its own people could not account for — the anomalies annex, which normally held bad compass readings and equipment that behaved oddly and nothing anybody ever printed.

Somebody at the TRB’s international desk had read Korea’s and America’s on the same afternoon.

The two parties had filed on different days, through different bureaus, with no contact between them and no shared footage. One had run Caerleon under Baldwin from inside the capital. The other had run it under Raymond from the northern frontier.

By the end of their campaigns, almost nothing about their two kingdoms matched. Different armies were intact. Different settlements were standing. Different roads were open, and different people were dead in different places.

Their anomalies annexes contained the same entry.

James’s thumb stopped on the screen.

Both parties, at the close of their Floor 23, had logged a red light beneath the palace at Caerleon.

Not from the palace. Not in it.

Beneath it.

Neither had triggered anything. Neither had been anywhere near the capital when they saw it — the Americans had been ninety miles north on a frontier road, and the Koreans had been inside Caerleon’s own walls and had still described it as coming from underneath their feet. Both had written it up the way you write up a thing you cannot explain and do not want to sound foolish about, in two sentences, at the back of a document nobody reads.

The analyst’s note at the end of the bulletin was one line long. Nothing in either campaign’s chain of decisions accounted for it, and there was no reason two kingdoms that had diverged this completely should be producing the same phenomenon at the same point.

James did not move.

He was seeing the Floor 21 opening again, the one every one of them had watched hanging in the dark before they ever chose a side. Two armies destroying each other outside Caerleon. Monsters coming into the capital over the top of them.

And then, in the last frame, under the palace, a red light spreading up through the foundation stones until both princes’ fallen banners glowed the colour of an open wound.

”James?”

Finn had stopped with his hand on the roof of the car.

James did not answer him. He turned the phone around and held it out.

Baldwin’s route. Raymond’s route. Every choice made differently, every consequence pointing somewhere else.

The same red light.

Underneath it.