A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 125: Chapter 125: This Is Not Your Floor

She didn’t look up.

”You came when she called,” he said. ”Didn’t you.”

She looked up.

Her eyes found James across the square, and she smiled, and the smile was gentle the way the Saintess’s smile had been gentle, which was not gentle at all.

Then she moved.

Ronan stepped into her path first because stepping into things’ paths was what was left of him.

She hit him once, open-handed.

WHAM.

He crossed the square in the air and did not get up where he landed.

Finn swung the axe at her neck with both hands and everything behind it. She caught the haft below the head, one-handed, dead stop — the impact that had split a boss’s armor stopping against her palm like a thrown stick — and threw him aside with a turn of her wrist.

Cillian forced one more spark out of his ruined arm. The bolt crossed the space where she had been standing. She was no longer standing in it.

Maeve’s hands came up. Pale-gold light gathered—

Alice looked at her.

That was all. A look. The light flattened out of the air like a candle pinched between fingers, and Maeve dropped to her knees with her field dead around her.

[TRBWatcher]: That is NOT Floor 15 strength. That is not ANY floor’s strength.

[RaidStatsGuy]: She shut Maeve down without touching her.

[MarrowAndMana]: No level display. No identification. The Tower isn’t naming her. Why isn’t the Tower naming her??

[Anonymous donated €5,000]: RUN. SOMEBODY TELL THEM TO RUN.

Then she was in front of James.

He had not seen her cross the distance. Her hand closed around his throat and his feet left the mud.

He fired Necro Blast on reflex — point blank, no aim, everything — and her grip shifted a half-inch and the bolt went past her shoulder into the empty village.

The python lunged for her back, jaws wide.

She didn’t turn. Pressure came off her like a dropped wall, and the snake slammed flat into the mud mid-strike and stayed there, pinned under nothing James could see, its coils straining against empty air.

[CONTRACTED UNDEAD SUPPRESSED]

James hung from her hand. Black spots crowded in from the edges of his vision. He got one breath through her fingers. Not two.

She pulled him close and studied his face, unhurried, the way someone reads a label.

Then her eyebrows rose, very slightly.

”So,” she said. ”You’re the one carrying his power.”

The words came through the blood roaring in his ears. His power. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t ask.

Something changed in her face. The amusement stayed, but a decision arrived underneath it.

”No,” she said, almost kindly. ”I can’t let that walk around.”

Her fingers began to close.

The sky split gold.

James didn’t see the impact. He heard it —

BOOM —

— and the hand was gone from his throat and he was in the mud, choking, dragging air in through a crushed-feeling windpipe, and the whole square was lit a different color.

He looked up.

A man stood between Team Zero and the woman, where no man had been. Wings of bright gold spread off his back, each one taller than the broken shrine, and the light coming off them didn’t flicker the way fire does. It held, steady and heavy and clean.

James knew that gold.

He had seen it once before, coming down out of the sky over a frozen village, behind a blindfold that hadn’t stopped its owner from looking straight at him.

The woman was picking herself up out of a trench her own body had carved through the square.

The golden angel watched her do it.

”This is not your floor,” he said.

She laughed — soft, genuinely entertained, wiping mud from her cheek with the back of one hand.

The angel glanced over his shoulder at Team Zero. At Ronan, unmoving. At Finn, bleeding into the ground. At Maeve, on her knees. At James, holding his own throat.

”Apologies for the discomfort,” he said, in the tone of a man correcting a clerical error. ”This should not have been able to occur.”

Then he moved, and the air cracked where he had been.

He caught Alice’s face in one hand before her wings finished opening and drove her into the ground.

BOOM.

The square jumped. Mud and broken shrine-stone went up in a sheet. He struck down into the crater once more —

BOOM —

— and the body in his hand came apart, breaking into red-black light that bled away between his fingers like smoke off a snuffed candle.

He did not relax.

He stood in the crater with his wings still spread, looked up at the torn red sky, and said, ”I know that wasn’t you.”

The sky answered.

She was above the village — the same woman, wings open, untouched, not a fleck of mud on her, hovering in the tear in the sky like it was a doorway she was leaning through.

”You’re no fun,” she said. ”None of you were ever any fun.”

Her eyes came down and found James in the mud, and the smile sharpened to a point.

”Be grateful, little necromancer,” she said. ”And don’t be too proud. None of this was mine. It was Father’s game long before it was anyone’s.”

”Leave,” the golden angel said.

She looked at him. ”Boring,” she said. ”You were always boring.”

Then her wings beat once, and she was gone through the tear, and the sky folded shut behind her like it had never opened, and the red haze settled back over the village as if nothing had ever come through it at all.

The square went silent.

Nobody spoke.

Ronan lay where she had put him, conscious by a thread, one hand moving. Finn was on his back in the mud with his chest rising and falling and the axe still in his fist. Cillian sat against a broken stone holding his burned arm against his body. Maeve knelt with the circlet dim above her eyes, staring at the place in the sky where the tear had been.

James stayed on one knee with his hand at his throat. He could still feel the fingers. The exact print of them.

The clear screen hung unfinished in the air, frozen halfway through whatever it had been doing when the sky opened.

[TRBWatcher]: What did we just watch.

[IronRingLive]: I have no idea what we just watched.

[QuietWatcher_Tallaght]: she said ”father.” did anyone else hear her say father

[MarrowAndMana]: 1.4 million people just saw something the Tower refused to name.

The golden angel folded his wings, stepped up out of the crater, and turned to face them.

Up close, his face was calm in a way that did not belong anywhere near the square he was standing in.

”Congratulations, humans,” he said. ”You have cleared an important story.”