A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 166: Chapter 166: Mother Spoke of You

The floor here was dark red stone, and it ran the length of a narrow room lined with confession booths on both sides.

James turned in place once, taking in the ceiling that vanished up into shadow, the rotten curtains hanging half off their rails inside the booths, the smell of old wax and damp wood and blood that had dried into the cracks between the stones more times than once.

Finn had been two steps away when the gate came down.

”Finn!”

His voice hit the booths and the narrow walls and came back thinner than it went out. Nothing answered.

Maeve tipped her head back, scanning the dark of the ceiling like there might be another group somewhere above them.

Declan put a flat hand against the nearest wall and held it there.

”Nothing,” he said. ”No vibration. Whatever’s on the other side of this, it’s not close.”

James called once more, and the silence swallowed that too. He forced his hand off the wall and made himself turn back to the room instead of the wall he couldn’t get through.

They counted themselves instead. Five.

The support Maeve had pulled off the folding stairs stood with both hands pressed flat against her thighs, breathing too fast through her nose, her eyes moving from booth to booth like she expected each one to open at once.

The Ironwall officer kept angling his dented shield toward the row of booths on the left, a half-step at a time, like something in there was pulling at his attention whether he wanted it to or not.

Maeve’s eyes never stopped moving. Not panic — reading.

Declan took the center of the corridor without asking anyone’s permission to.

”Marcus,” he called down the length of it. Two seconds. Nothing. ”Saoirse.”

Nothing answered that either.

Then, from inside one of the booths, low and soft, something knocked twice against the wood from the inside.

The curtain of the nearest booth lifted with no wind behind it.

A figure stepped out barefoot, chains dragging over the red stone behind it — torn worship robes, an iron collar fused into the skin of its throat, a cracked red veil hanging over a face that didn’t move under the cloth.

[CHAINED PENITENT — Level 44]

Behind it, from the booth next to that one, something pale unfolded out of the dark and pressed both hands flat against the wooden frame.

[CONFESSOR WRAITH — Level 47]

Its mouth was sewn shut with black thread, thick loops of it pulling the lips together, and its hands were wrapped in a rosary of what looked, at first glance, like beads, and were not beads.

More Penitents stepped out down the row, unhurried, the way people answer a summons rather than the way monsters attack. The Wraiths came after them, thin and pale in the booth doorways, watching.

The room had not spawned enemies.

It had opened confessions.

They hit without a warning.

A Chained Penitent’s arm whipped out and the chain wrapped around the Ironwall officer’s shield and yanked it sideways, hard enough to spin him a half-step off balance.

James dropped the Python low across the floor before the shield fully turned.

[GRAVE COMMAND]

The Python coiled around the Penitent’s legs at the ankle and cinched, and the thing went down before the chain could finish dragging the shield any further.

[ABYSSAL VENOM PYTHON — HOLD]

The officer got his shield back square and set his feet.

”Watch the chains,” Declan called, already meeting the first wave of Penitents head-on, his own shield taking two chain-wraps across the face and shrugging them off. ”They’re not trying to kill you. They’re trying to drag you into the booths.”

Behind them, a Confessor Wraith’s sewn mouth did not open, but something came through anyway — a pressure behind the eyes, and the support’s hands started to shake mid-cast.

”With me,” Maeve said, sharp, catching her wrist before the spell fell apart. ”Breathe. It’s noise. It’s not real.”

The side lane between two booths went from clear to crowded in a breath, and James called the Dark Knight forward.

[GRAVE COMMAND]

She crossed the gap between one blink and the next, black armor cracked across the breastplate from older floors, the burning sword low at her side. A Penitent lunged out of the dark between the booths and she cut it across the chest without slowing, the body folding back into the booth frame it had come out of.

She took position beside the Python, and the two of them turned the narrow lane into a killing chute nothing crossed clean.

Declan’s eyes went to her once, tight, the look of a man who did not enjoy relying on someone else’s undead. But the chains stopped reaching that side of the room, and he did not waste breath on it.

She never looked at Declan. She never looked at anyone but James.

James put a Necro Blast through a Penitent’s chest, and the corpse had not finished falling when the notice opened in the air above it.

[RAID NOTICE]

[AISLING BYRNE OF EMERALD SPIRE HAS RETURNED TO GOD]

Declan’s shield dipped.

Half a second, no more — but a chain was already swinging for the gap it left, and Maeve’s hand shot out and caught his shoulder and shoved him back a step before the chain found his throat.

”Later,” she said. ”Not now.”

Declan’s jaw worked once. He got his shield back up.

James didn’t know how Aisling had died. He didn’t know which room, which Bride, which second it had happened in. He only knew what the notice meant — that somewhere close enough for the System to hear it, an S-rank had already stopped being an S-rank, and none of them had been there to stop it.

He put the thought away, because the room gave him nowhere to put it but away.

The wave used the gap.

Chains came up out of the cracks in the floor itself now, more booths swinging wide, and the support’s heel crossed the threshold of an open confession booth before she understood she’d stepped backward into it.

Maeve’s hand closed around her armor collar and hauled her out bodily.

”Not that way. Never that way.”

James saw the corpse of a Penitent lying half inside the same booth doorway. He kicked it the rest of the way in with his boot.

[JAMES GANNER — CORPSE EXPLOSION]

BOOM.

The blast tore the booth apart from the inside and threw splinters and chain links across the corridor, and the pressure in that stretch of the room broke all at once.

It didn’t clear the corridor. It only bought them air.

That air was exactly enough time for the room to stop.

Every chain went still at once.

The Penitents froze mid-motion. The Wraiths lowered their heads, sewn mouths pointed at the floor, and the confession booths along both walls swung shut, one after another, in a long unbroken ripple down the corridor.

From the far end, a second set of doors opened.

She came through them slow, unhurried, a white bridal veil trailing over red-and-gold robes that had the shape of a nun’s habit and none of the modesty. Black wings sat folded tight behind her shoulder blades. Thin chains hung from both wrists, worn like jewelry rather than restraints. Her lips were stained red. Her hands were folded in front of her like prayer.

[BRIDE OF CONFESSION — SERAPHINE] [LEVEL: 95] [HP: 54,000 / 54,000]

She stepped into the red light of the corridor, and the last of the confession booths closed behind her in the same breath.

Her eyes went over the group once, unhurried.

Declan. The Ironwall officer. The support, still shaking. Maeve.

None of them held her attention.

Then her eyes found James, and stopped.

Something in her face changed — not fear, not quite recognition either, more like a name being matched to a face she’d only heard described. Her folded hands loosened. The chains at her wrists shifted against her skin, a slow slither of iron.

She did not attack.

She studied him the way a person studies a problem someone else has already warned them about.

James held still and said nothing, because he did not know enough yet to say anything that mattered.

Her gaze moved past him.

To the Python first, coiled low near the boot line, hood spread. Her eyes narrowed there, wary.

Then to the Dark Knight, standing silent beside it, burning sword low, black cracked armor, helm turned toward James and no one else.

Seraphine went still.

”Camillia.”

The name came out soft, almost gentle, the way a person says a name they have said a thousand times before.

The Dark Knight did not answer.

James did not command her to. He didn’t need to. The silence answered for her, and it answered louder than anything the Dark Knight could have said.

”Camillia,” Seraphine said again, sharper this time, an edge cutting through the softness.

Nothing. No turn of the helm. No shift in the stance.

The chains at Seraphine’s wrists began to move on their own, dragging slow trails across the red stone floor, scraping loud enough to be heard under everything else in the room.

Seraphine understood what the silence meant. Not that Camillia was bound and could not answer.

That she was no longer anyone’s to call.

Not free — James’s undead didn’t work that way, and Seraphine’s eyes said she knew it — but gone. Out of Alice’s reach. Standing in a room with a necromancer’s hand on her instead.

Seraphine’s folded hands came apart.

The chains at her wrists rose off the floor entirely and hung in the air, trembling.

She moved.

There was no warning in her stance, no wind-up James could read. One second she was thirty feet down the corridor. The next, the pressure of her arrived before his eyes did, a wall of weight against his chest half a breath before he understood she had crossed the distance.

His hand started to lift for Necro Blast.

It never finished rising.

She was already there — inches from him, her hand already coming up toward his throat, faster than his body could answer for.

James saw it and knew, with total clarity and no time to do anything about it, that he was not going to be fast enough.

Declan was.

He crossed the gap between one heartbeat and the next, shield leading, shoulder and fist coming in behind it in one committed line, and he put his whole body into the space between Seraphine’s hand and James’s throat.

BOOM.

The impact took her sideways, off her feet entirely, and she went through the nearest confession booth wall-first. Wood cracked and folded and came apart around her, chain links scattering across the stone, splinters raining down over the wreckage.

Declan did not say anything.

He reset his stance in front of James and did not look back to see if he needed thanks.

James stood where he was, breathing hard, and understood in the half-second of silence that followed exactly how close that had been. A half-step slower, and Declan would have been reaching for a body instead of a save.

Seraphine pulled herself up out of the broken booth.

Her veil hung torn across one side of her face. Blood ran from a split lip down her chin. The cold, composed calm from a minute ago was gone entirely, burned off in the wreckage of the booth behind her.

Behind her, every confession booth in the corridor swung open at once.

And every chain in the room, on the floor, in the walls, wrapped around the dead Penitents’ wrists, lifted off the stone together, rising slow and even like something invisible had taken hold of every one of them at the same moment.

Seraphine wiped the blood from her chin with the back of one hand and looked at Declan, then at James, then at the Dark Knight standing silent behind them both.

The real fight hadn’t started yet.

It was starting now.