A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 172: Chapter 172: The Inner Court Opens

The oldest flowerbed had split wide open, and the root-heart pulsed under the black soil like something breathing.

Saoirse’s face was scratched down one side, blood drying along her jaw. Her sleeve hung in shreds from the shoulder. One arm bled freely where a thorn had gone in deep enough to matter, and her breath came sharp through her nose, controlled but no longer easy.

Behind her, the last two veterans reset their weapons slow, the way people move when their bodies have already spent more than they had.

One limped. The other could barely lift his blade above his waist.

Neither of them looked at the root-heart like it was a way to survive.

They looked at it like it was the only thing left worth reaching.

Saoirse didn’t waste a word on it.

”Root-heart,” she said. ”Go.”

She moved first, straight at Lysandra, and the two veterans broke the other way toward the flowerbed.

One cut through the nearest root-filled shell blocking the path, old metal splitting under his blade, and kept moving before the pieces hit the ground. The other fell in beside Saoirse’s blind flank, covering the angle she couldn’t watch while she carved the one she could.

Lysandra thrust the spear into the gap, roots surging up through the cracked marble to grab at ankles from below.

Lysandra kept every ounce of pressure on Saoirse, because Saoirse was the only one fast enough to reach the heart and still turn around and kill her after.

Saoirse cut a vine before it finished wrapping her wrist, ducked under the next spear thrust, and clipped the shaft near the thorn growth hard enough to crack the black wood.

Lysandra answered with a real hit — the spearhead caught Saoirse across the shoulder, opening a line that ran hot down her arm.

SHK.

Saoirse didn’t slow. Her stance shifted around the wound instead of stopping for it, weight settling onto her other side, blade coming back up a half-beat later than it would have an hour ago.

The roots came up under her ankle just as Lysandra drove the spear for her chest.

The veteran at her side saw it half a step before Saoirse could react to it herself.

He cut the root wrapped around her leg free with one stroke, and stepped into the spear’s path instead of pulling back.

The thorn spear went through him where it had been meant for her.

[RAID NOTICE]

[CHALLENGER HAS RETURNED TO GOD]

He didn’t fall right away. He kept his hand on his blade and cut once more at the roots crawling toward the flowerbed, buying the last veteran the half-second he needed to reach the exposed heart, before his legs finally gave out under him.

Saoirse didn’t stop to look at him.

She saw the body fall. She saw the path open because of it. She turned that into speed instead of grief.

The last veteran reached the root-heart and swung down into it with everything left in his arms, but the roots ran too thick for one blade alone. The cut bit deep without finishing the job.

The garden staggered anyway.

Every root-shell in the courtyard jerked at once. The flowers along the paths closed halfway, petals folding back over themselves. Lysandra’s spear thorns stopped regrowing mid-crack, the white spines frozen half-formed.

For one full second, the garden forgot how to breathe.

Saoirse used the second.

She went for Lysandra’s spear hand first, forcing the grip wide, then the wing, then a line straight for the throat.

Lysandra blocked the last one — she had to, or die — and the block pulled her one full step away from the flowerbed she needed to stand near.

That step was everything.

Saoirse turned from her mid-motion and drove the blade down into the root-heart with both hands, all her weight behind it, precise instead of savage.

[ROOT-HEART DESTROYED]

[GARDEN CONTROL WEAKENED]

The garden started dying before Lysandra even understood what had happened.

Flowers blackened from their centers outward, the color draining down each petal like ink running backward. The root-filled shells scattered across the courtyard collapsed at once into empty, rusted metal, the vines holding them together turning to ash mid-air. Thorn vines fell loose from the broken statues and hit the marble in dead coils.

Lysandra’s spear, when she swung it in panic, showed thorns that no longer regrew where Saoirse’s blade had already broken them.

The room had lost its breath, and it was not getting it back.

Lysandra turned for the last veteran, desperate, aiming to kill whatever she still could before the end took her too.

Saoirse cut her off before the spear reached him.

Lysandra thrust with the damaged shaft. Saoirse stepped inside the arc of it, close enough to feel the wood pass her ribs, and cut clean through the weakened thorn guard.

The blade opened Lysandra from shoulder to chest.

The last veteran, shaking, wounded, kept one dying vine off Saoirse’s back with the last swing he had in him, just long enough for the cut to land clean.

[LYSANDRA — BRIDE OF THORNS SLAIN]

[OUTER COURT SEAL: FOUR OF FOUR BROKEN]

[ALL BRIDES DEFEATED]

The garden folded open behind her, and the walls that had sealed each court apart began sliding back into the marble.

Saoirse stood in the wreckage with one veteran left standing and three bodies laid out behind her, and she did not call it a victory.

From the confessional side, James’s group came through first — Maeve, Declan, the Ironwall officer, the support, James’s summons trailing behind him, the Dark Knight silent, the Python low, the wolf limping but on its feet.

From the portrait side, Marcus and Finn came through with what remained of their own group.

Nobody spoke for a moment. They looked at each other first, and the looking said everything the room needed to say.

Marcus’s armor was torn across the chest, blood dried dark over the wound Vespera had opened. Finn stood beside him, pale, the faint red line of the healed curse mark still visible under his jaw. Saoirse had thorn cuts across her face and arm. Declan was battered but upright, holding himself the way a man holds himself when standing is a decision, not a given.

James looked exhausted down to the bone, blood dried on his armor that wasn’t all his own.

Someone looked toward the last open passage — the one that should have brought the banquet group back to them.

Nobody came through it.

[OUTER COURT CLEARED]

[ACTIVE CHALLENGERS: 20 → 11]

[INNER COURT ACCESS: OPEN]