A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 171: Chapter 171: The Garden That Ate The Dead

Saoirse cut the vine an inch from her own throat.

SHNK.

It fell in two pieces, curling where it landed among the flowers already growing up through a cracked helmet nearby. She dropped to one knee, breathing hard through her nose, and looked up as Lysandra crossed the broken marble toward her, thorn spear dragging a thin line across the stone.

The garden had been beautiful once. It was still beautiful, in the way a wound looks clean before it starts to smell.

Flowers pushed up through the joints of old armor half-buried in the soil. Roots split the marble tiles in long cracks. Thorn vines climbed the broken saint statues on either side of the courtyard, and where blood had soaked into the ground, the flowers grew brighter than anywhere else.

[LYSANDRA — BRIDE OF THORNS] [LEVEL: 97] [HP: 57,000 / 57,000] [WEAPON: THORN SPEAR]

Saoirse’s sleeve was torn to the shoulder. Thorn needles had opened three thin scratches down one side of her face. She was still standing. She was not untouched.

Behind her, one of the four veterans limped, a root wound around his ankle black at the edges. Another had thorn poison crawling up the veins of his forearm, visible under the skin like ink spreading through water.

The System spoke over the fight, and none of them had time to stop for it.

[BRIDE OF POSSESSION SLAIN]

[BRIDE OF CONFESSION SLAIN]

[BRIDE OF COVETING SLAIN]

[BANQUET HALL GROUP — ANNIHILATED]

[REMAINING BRIDES: 1]

One of the veterans faltered mid-swing at a reaching vine, his eyes flicking up to the words hanging in the air.

Saoirse’s blade came down between him and the vine before it could close on his neck.

”Later,” she said, and shoved him back into his stance with the flat of her free hand. ”You’re not dead yet. Fight like it.”

They were the last room. Everyone else was already finished, one way or another, and there was no time in this garden to sit with what that meant.

Lysandra fought like a warrior who had grown up with the spear in her hand and the garden as an extension of it.

She thrust low at the limping veteran’s guard, and a root broke the marble behind his heel a half-second before the spear arrived, catching his ankle just enough to shift his weight wrong. He blocked, but the angle was off, and the spearhead opened a line across his shoulder instead of skating past it.

[VETERAN — HP: 2,100 / 3,400 → 1,650 / 3,400]

Pale skin. A bridal dress in dark green-black, split high for movement. A crown of black thorns sitting low over her brow. Her wings were black, feathers tangled through with living vine, and where the thorn spear moved, flowers along the ground opened and closed like something breathing with her.

She was not casting spells at them. She was simply very good with a spear, in a garden that fought alongside her.

Saoirse became the only answer any of them had.

A thorn flower split open near the poisoned veteran’s face, needles already forming inside the bud, and Saoirse crossed the distance in two strides and cut the stem before it could fire.

SHK.

The flower dropped, dead, and behind her, in the half-second that had cost, a vine finished wrapping around a third veteran’s knee and yanked him off balance.

She turned, cut that too, and something else opened somewhere else.

She was fast enough to reach any one thing in this garden before it killed someone.

She was not fast enough to reach all of them.

The first death came from the ground, not the spear.

The limping veteran’s ankle wound had gone from black-edged to fully numb, the poison finally taking his leg out from under him, and he went down hard onto one knee in the middle of a flowerbed.

Saoirse saw it and moved.

Lysandra’s spear met her mid-stride, not aimed to kill, only to block — one clean parry that cost Saoirse half a second she didn’t have.

The roots came up through the soil and wrapped around the fallen veteran’s legs before he could push himself upright.

[RAID NOTICE]

[CHALLENGER HAS RETURNED TO GOD]

He was dragged down into the flowerbed inch by inch, the flowers blooming through the gaps in his armor as they pulled him under, until only one gauntleted hand remained above the soil, fingers curled, unmoving.

Saoirse did not look away from it. She looked at it exactly long enough to understand the rule, and then she turned back to the fight.

Wounded bodies fed the garden. She had seen enough now to be sure of it.

”Cut the flowers around anything down,” she said, sharp, already moving toward the next threat. ”Fire it if you’ve got fire. Don’t let them bloom on a body.”

One of the two remaining veterans carried a blade skill that ran hot, orange light bleeding off the edge of it, and he stopped chasing Lysandra directly and turned it on the nearest flowerbed instead.

FWOOSH.

The flames caught the petals and the roots beneath them curled back from the heat, blackening, and the ground around the dead veteran’s body went still.

The other stayed close on Saoirse’s flank, covering the angle she couldn’t watch while she covered his.

Lysandra’s spear found less air to work with after that. The garden had one less place to reach into.

It was a smaller group now. It moved smarter.

Lysandra felt her control thinning as the flowerbeds burned back, and she used what was left of the first death to answer it.

The soil around the dragged-down body split open all at once.

[LYSANDRA — SECOND PHASE TRIGGERED]

[GARDEN OF THE DEAD BLOOMING]

Roots pushed up under buried armor scattered across the garden — old, rusted, long empty — and lifted the shells upright, dragging them out of the soil with vines threaded through the joints where arms and legs had once been. Empty helmets turned, slow and mechanical, toward the four still standing.

These were not risen souls. James’s way of doing it, that was not this. These were dead metal shapes moved by root and vine, hollow all the way through.

They did not need to be strong.

They only needed to be in the way.

The shells clogged the garden fast, forcing eyes off Lysandra and onto bodies that shouldn’t have been walking.

Saoirse cut through them without slowing, one after another, but the two remaining veterans couldn’t match her pace. Three shells stepped into the gap between Saoirse and the wounded, poisoned veteran, and by the time she cleared them, Lysandra’s spear had already found the opening.

The spear went through his side.

[VETERAN — HP: 1,200 / 2,800 → 400 / 2,800]

A thorn needle burst caught him a heartbeat later, the poison already deep enough in his blood that the second dose barely mattered.

The garden was turning every wound into the next trap, and there weren’t enough hands left to stop both problems at once.

Lysandra set the next trap for Saoirse herself.

A flower opened directly under the spot where Saoirse’s next landing would put her, the bud already swelling with thorn needles, timed for the half-second her guard would be down.

The last veteran saw it before she did.

He crashed into her shoulder with everything he had left and knocked her sideways, out of the flower’s reach, and the burst caught him through the chest instead.

[RAID NOTICE]

[CHALLENGER HAS RETURNED TO GOD]

Lysandra’s spear finished it before he hit the ground.

Saoirse did not have time to grieve it, and she didn’t try to.

She stopped cutting only what reached for her. She went straight through the space Lysandra occupied instead.

The first shell came apart under one clean stroke, old metal splitting at the neck. The second she didn’t slow for either, the same arc of her blade carrying through, and it dropped in two pieces behind her before she’d finished the step.

Lysandra’s spear came around to meet her, fast, and Saoirse ducked under it close enough to feel the wind of the thrust across her scalp. Her blade found the shaft first, notching deep into the black wood, and came up in the same motion to open Lysandra’s wing from base to tip.

SHRRK.

[LYSANDRA — HP: 57,000 / 57,000 → 39,000 / 57,000]

Lysandra staggered back into the oldest flowerbed in the garden’s center, wing torn and leaking black sap where feathers should have been, the first ground she had given all fight instead of taken.

Saoirse’s eyes went to the spear’s broken thorns.

They were already regrowing, thin white spines pushing back out through the black wood — but only after Lysandra’s heel had touched down in that same central bed, the oldest soil in the garden, the one the vines all seemed to run back toward whenever they were cut.

Every root in the courtyard traced back there. Every recovery Lysandra made happened a half-second after her foot found that patch of ground.

Saoirse’s gaze dropped to the soil, then back to the spear, then to the soil again.

The weakness wasn’t in Lysandra’s body.

It was under it.

Two veterans were dead. The last two standing were barely that, one bleeding from a wound the poison hadn’t finished with yet, the other breathing in short pulls with a blade too heavy for his arms anymore.

Lysandra still had 39,000 HP standing between them and a room that had already killed two of five.

”Root-heart,” Saoirse said, not loud, not gentle. ”Center bed. Everything runs back to it. We cut that, or we die here.”

Lysandra straightened out of her stagger.

She looked at the four of them. Her folded calm from the start of the fight was gone; what was left in its place was flat and hungry.

Then the entire garden bloomed at once.

Every flower along every path burst open together. Vines tore loose from the statues and climbed the broken walls. Every root-filled shell still standing turned in the same direction, toward the four people left in the courtyard.

[LYSANDRA — HP: 39,000 / 57,000]

[ROOT-HEART DETECTED]

[FINAL ANCHOR ACTIVE]

Saoirse set her stance between the last two veterans and the flowerbed at the garden’s heart.

The whole garden was coming for them at once.