A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 181: Chapter 181: One Death From Victory I

Alice stood at the center of the broken throne steps, and the room had gone quiet in the way a held breath goes quiet.

Her wings had gone fully black. What red-gold light had spread through a whole hall of drained men and transformed monsters was pulled tight now, drawn back into her own body, coiled there like something waiting.

The living men lay still where they’d dropped, breathing but empty. The Incubus Thralls hadn’t moved in a full minute. Maeve’s circlet had a hairline crack running clean across the white stone under her boots, and she stood with one hand pressed flat against her own sternum, feeling the strain of holding the field this long.

Marcus stood with his sword lowered, chest heaving, sweat cutting clean tracks through the blood on his face. Finn had both hands braced on his axe haft, using it the way a man uses a cane, weight sagging into it between breaths. Saoirse was still working her way up off one knee near a cracked pillar, one hand flat against the stone, testing whether her leg would hold before she trusted it with her full weight.

James stayed upright only because the scythe was buried a hand’s width into the marble and his whole body was leaning on the shaft.

[WARNING: HP CRITICAL]

[JAMES GANNER — HP: 188/1,260]

[UNLOCK FULL POTENTIAL — TIME REMAINING: 18:42]

”Eyes on her,” Marcus said, low, not looking away from Alice for a second. ”Nobody rests. Nobody.”

Nobody needed telling twice.

Alice lifted one hand, unhurried, and something began to grow out of her open palm.

Thread first — fine red-gold lines pulling themselves taut out of the air — then black feather-ash spiraling into the threads, twisting tighter and tighter until the whole mess collapsed into a shape. A blade. Narrow, no guard, no hilt ornament, nothing about it that looked forged rather than grown.

James watched the surface of it and couldn’t hold his eyes steady on it. It seemed to shift, subtly, every time he tried to look at it directly, like it hadn’t fully decided what it wanted to be yet and resented being looked at while it made up its mind.

The scythe went colder in his hands. Actually colder, a physical drop he felt travel up through his palms and into his wrists.

The hair on his arms rose under his sleeves.

Across the room, Maeve’s light — that steady, unbroken pale glow she’d been holding for the better part of an hour — flinched. Just a degree. Just enough that James caught it happen out of the corner of his eye, the pale light bending away from the blade the way a candle flame bends away from a draft.

Marcus’s jaw locked so hard James heard his teeth grind.

”That’s not a monster anymore,” Marcus said, quiet, almost to himself. ”That’s a swordsman.”

Nobody argued with him.

Alice moved first.

Not a charge — she didn’t need one. One step, unhurried, and then she was simply inside Marcus’s guard, the blade already falling in a clean diagonal line from her shoulder.

Marcus got his own sword up in time. Barely.

CRANG.

The impact drove his boots backward through the cracked marble in two long grinding furrows, sparks kicking off his heels, and he braced with everything his legs had to keep from going down entirely. His guard held. The blade didn’t punch through.

But James, watching from ten feet away with his hand locked around the scythe shaft, caught something the block itself didn’t explain — Marcus’s sword hand hesitated, half a breath, after the two blades met. A flicker. The kind of hesitation a hand shows after it touches something that was never supposed to feel that cold.

Alice didn’t press the advantage immediately. She circled a half-step, testing him, blade held loose and low.

”Again,” Finn shouted from behind them, hoarse. ”Don’t let her set!”

Marcus didn’t answer. He didn’t have breath to spare for it.

His shoulders locked instead. His breathing turned rough, short, forced through his teeth, and both hands clamped around the grip of his sword like he was bracing to lift something that outweighed his whole body.

[S-RANK SKILL ACTIVATED: TITAN BREAKER]

The air around him seemed to compress, just slightly, just for a heartbeat.

He swung up and across at her sword arm — not a clean strike, a desperate one, everything he had behind it.

Alice tried to slide the blow wide with her own blade, the way she’d turned every other strike aside all fight. This time the parry didn’t hold. His strength simply overpowered the angle, forced her guard open, and the strike caught her forearm and crashed straight through into the base of her left wing.

CRACK.

She didn’t scream.

Her wing jerked at the joint — wrong, bent at an angle no wing should bend at — and a spray of black feathers tore loose and scattered across the throne steps, drifting down slow even as the rest of the fight kept moving at full speed around them.

[ALICE — HP: 68,320/102,000 → 61,900/102,000]

”There!” Saoirse called from the pillar, already pushing herself the rest of the way upright. ”That’s real damage — hit it again!”

Alice didn’t give him the chance.

She let him overextend into the follow-through his own momentum had cost him, and in the half-second his guard sat open, she stepped inside his reach and cut a shallow line across the back of his gauntlet.

It shouldn’t have mattered. It was a scratch. A nothing wound compared to everything else on him.

But Marcus’s whole face changed the instant the blade touched skin. His eyes sharpened for a second — too sharp, too focused, staring at something that wasn’t there — and then they blurred, unfocused, like the cut had reached down past muscle and bone for something older and less physical entirely.

”Marcus.” Finn’s voice again, sharper this time, worried. ”Marcus!”

Marcus broke it himself. He drove his own shoulder into Alice’s chest with everything his body had left, forcing her back a full stride on raw weight rather than skill, and shook his head hard once like a man clearing water out of his ears.

Finn didn’t wait to find out what had happened to him.

He tore his axe free of the marble where he’d been leaning it, spat a mouthful of blood onto the stone at his feet, and pushed himself off the pillar he’d been using as a crutch.

”My turn,” he said, to no one, through his teeth.

[BERSERKER ART ACTIVATED: REDLINE]