A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 140: Chapter 140: The Field Bent

He came at Langford with the sword.

He was not the better swordsman. Langford was trained, older, stronger, and his footwork never opened. But James was faster than the man expected, and James did not fight clean.

Langford cut down at his head. James caught it, let the force fold him low instead of fighting it, and fired Necro Blast point-blank into the back of Langford’s knee.

[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED]

The gold plate blackened where it hit. The rot held for one second before the light burned it clean — but the leg buckled, the step broke, and the guard dropped for an instant.

James cut across the gap.

His blade scraped the white breastplate.

It was not deep. It was a line, a scratch across the holy plate.

But the stream saw it. And Langford saw it.

The control in his face changed.

Now he stopped playing.

A guard lay wounded near Langford’s feet, trying to drag himself clear. James put a Necro Blast through him and killed him.

The death triggered the chain.

[DEATH CHAIN TRIGGERED]

Black chains burst out of the fresh corpse and lashed around Langford.

The holy armor fought them. The chains wrapped, smoked, and cracked against the white plate, and they did not pull him down the way they pulled normal men. But they forced him to one knee for a single second, his sword arm dragged down.

James paid for it at once.

His skull split with it. His vision doubled, the car park sliding into two of itself, and blood ran from his nose down over his mouth. The strain hit the back of his head like a hand pressing his brain into bone.

He had nearly blacked out from this before. He almost did now.

Langford used it.

He burned the chains off in a flare of gold and came up swinging.

[PALADIN ART: JUDGMENT BLOW]

The strike caught James full across the chest and threw him into a support column.

The column broke.

Now the level started to go for real. The floor above tilted. Cars slid toward the new low side. More concrete dropped. Sprinklers burst and rained down, and the fire alarms began to scream through the whole structure.

Across the city, O’Shea stood in front of the screen with the fight live on it.

The room behind him was loud. Someone had a hand over their mouth. Someone else was already talking fast into a phone.

”Director.” One of his people turned from a second screen. ”Civilians are dying on that feed right now. Do we move Enforcement in?”

”No.”

”Sir—”

”You put a team into that building right now, you give me more bodies and another funeral.” O’Shea did not look away from the screen. ”Whatever is happening in there, it ends when one of those two stops standing, and our people are not fast enough to be anything but the next ones under the floor.”

He turned to Niamh.

”Lock it down. Every TRB account tied to the delegation. Every board member with procurement authority — flag them, freeze their access, now. And the travel order goes wider. Airports, private hangars, diplomatic routes, every Tower-linked movement permit in the country. Nobody connected to this leaves Ireland tonight.”

Niamh was already on it.

O’Shea looked back at the screen, at the white-gold figure standing over the boy in the wreckage.

”If Langford walks out of that building,” he said, ”we lose the country before sunrise.”

In B2, Langford raised both hands.

[PALADIN ART: CATHEDRAL FIELD]

White-gold light poured out of him and flooded the broken level. It climbed the pillars and ran across the collapsed floor and turned the whole space into his ground.

The Dark Knight dropped to one knee and could not rise.

The wolf collapsed and clawed at the concrete, dragging itself by its front legs.

The last skeletons burned to ash where they stood.

Inside James, his mana recoiled, pulling back from his hands like it was trying to get away from his own skin. His sword arm shook. He could not make the next cast form.

Langford walked toward him through his own light, slow now.

”Your class should never have existed,” he said. ”We didn’t want to recruit you. We wanted to contain you, because leaving a thing like you loose was always going to end like this.” He gestured at the bodies under the marble, at the rising smoke, at the lens. ”And now the whole world has watched you raise their dead and bring a building down. Tell me which of us they’ll call the monster.”

James understood it then, through the pain and the doubled vision.

If he lost here, Langford did not just kill him. Langford got to keep the story. Every clip would be James, the necromancer who fought in a hotel full of people and walked the corpses on camera.

Surviving was not enough.

He had to win.

He tried the kit one more time.

He pushed off the column, swung his sword, reached for a blast, and threw the command out.

[GRAVE COMMAND: PROTECT]

The Dark Knight forced herself up against the holy weight and put herself between James and the Paladin.

Langford slammed her aside with one arm. She went into a car and did not get back up fast.

The wolf dragged itself into a leap at his back. He turned and kicked it through another car.

James’s sword met the white blade and the holy strength drove straight through his guard. He hit the floor. His fingers had gone numb around the grip.

Langford raised his sword over him for the last strike.

The blade caught the gold light and held there, high.

James opened his inventory.

The cold came before the weapon did.

He closed his numb hand around the haft and pulled Azrael’s Broken Scythe out into the light.

It was still broken. The blade was a stub, the chains still sealed around the shaft.

Langford stopped with his sword raised.

It was not fear. It was recognition. He looked at the broken thing in the boy’s hand like he had seen its shape somewhere before and did not like remembering where.

James reached for the seal.

[AUTHORITY RELEASE ACTIVATED]

[TARGET: AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]

[DURATION: 30 MINUTES]

The scythe answered.

The missing blade grew back in black light, curving out from the stub until it finished, long and clean and cold. Frost spread out across James’s hand and up his wrist where the haft touched him.

The Cathedral Field bent.

It did not break. The holy light pushed back from the boy on the floor like something had leaned into it, curving away from him in a slow arc.

The car park lights went out one by one, down the rows, until the only light left was the white of the field and the black running off the blade.

James got one foot under himself.

Then the other.

He lifted the scythe with both hands.

[AUTHORITY RELEASE: 29:59]

Langford stopped smiling.