A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 185: Chapter 185 — Death Does Not Let Go II

His body turned the shield toward it anyway. Half an inch. Less than a heartbeat’s worth of correction toward a girl he’d sworn to keep breathing.

Half an inch was the whole door.

Alice stepped inside the shield rim like she’d been invited and drove the short blade into his chest.

Declan looked down at it. Then he did the last thing his art was built for. He dropped the shield, took Alice’s wrist in both hands, and held her there, teeth locked, blood climbing his throat, keeping her pinned in one place for Marcus, for Finn, for anyone.

”Now—” he got out.

Alice turned the blade upward inside him, and the strength went out of his hands like water out of a cut skin. His grip slid off her wrist. His knees went. The Martyr Wall’s grey light died on the floor beside him.

[DECLAN O’ROURKE — HP: 7,840/9,200 → 0/9,200]

[CHALLENGER DECLAN O’ROURKE HAS DIED]

”Declan—” Maeve was already moving toward him, hands out.

Saoirse caught the back plate of her armor and hauled her backward off her feet. Maeve fought the grip for half a second, dragging them both toward the body, her fingers open toward a man who was not going to take her hand. Then Alice turned her head toward the two of them, and Maeve stopped fighting.

Saoirse didn’t let go anyway.

Orla Keane had held the rear-left line all raid without a word of complaint, an Emerald Spire spear fighter who measured openings the way bankers measure interest, and she saw the opening now: Alice’s blade still buried in Declan, her flank open, her weight committed.

It was the correct read. Any instructor in any guild hall would have called it the correct read.

Orla crossed the distance in three strides and put her spear under Alice’s ribs with both hands and her full weight behind it.

The head went in. All of it.

Alice’s body folded around the shaft. Her heels slid back through the blood. For one full breath the whole raid saw it, the boss bent over a spear, hurt, held, and something that had been dying in every chest since James hit the floor came back to life.

[ALICE — HP: 22,100/102,000 → 19,600/102,000]

Then Alice took hold of the spear shaft with her free hand.

She did not push it out. She pulled herself down it.

The blade went deeper through her, and she moved along it toward Orla like a woman climbing a rail, and her face never changed. Orla tried to let go. Her hands received the order and refused it. The desire to finish the strike, to drive it home, to win, was still burning in her, and Alice’s authority had found that desire and closed a hand around it, and for half a second Orla’s fingers stayed locked on the shaft of her own spear like they belonged to Alice already.

Half a second was the whole door.

Alice reached her at the end of the shaft and cut upward once, short and close. Orla came apart at the middle and dropped without a scream, because the cut was faster than one.

[ORLA KEANE — HP: 6,200/6,200 → 0/6,200]

[CHALLENGER ORLA KEANE HAS DIED]

The spear stayed standing in Alice for a moment longer. She drew it out of herself and let it ring on the marble.

Marcus was moving before Orla finished falling.

No shout. No warning to the others. He came up the throne steps with his blade low and his eyes flat, and the only thing in his line was Alice’s neck.

Alice did not dodge.

The black halo behind her head guttered once, like a candle in a draft.

Marcus’s next step came down on hospital linoleum.

Finn was twelve, sitting in the hard chair beside the bed, small in a way Marcus had trained out of him years ago, holding his mother’s hand after the hand had stopped holding back. The boy wasn’t crying. That was the part that—

The throne room came back.

One step. Less than a second of somewhere else. His blade line had dipped four inches.

Alice’s short sword crossed the gap and took his sword hand off at the wrist.

The hand hit the marble still gripping the hilt. The blade rang once against the tiles. Blood crossed the throne steps in a hard flat spray, dark on the white stone.

Marcus stood looking down at his own hand on the floor. One second. His body knew. His mind was still arriving.

Then he clamped his remaining hand over the stump, pressed it against his ribs, and stayed on his feet. He backed down two steps without turning his back on her. He did not make a sound the entire time.

[MARCUS HALE — HP: 9,420/16,800 → 5,870/16,800]

”DAD—”

Finn’s body betrayed him on the first stride.

There was nothing wrong with his nerve. There had never been anything wrong with Finn Hale’s nerve. But Redline was gone, and the debt it left behind had come due in every fiber below his waist. His knees shook under him like a newborn animal’s. The axe, the same axe he’d swung one-handed an hour ago, dragged behind him and threw sparks off the marble because he could not lift it clear.

He got it up anyway. Halfway up. His breath caught wrong, twice, the air going down like broken glass.

Alice stepped inside the swing before it had built any force at all and put the short sword through his side.

Finn made a sound through his teeth and did the same thing Declan had done, because he’d learned the raid from the same men. Both hands on her wrist. Locking her blade inside himself. Holding her in one spot.

”NOW!” he screamed, ”SOMEBODY—”

Marcus lunged one-handed. Saoirse threw herself forward off the floor, dagger out, dragging a leg that wouldn’t answer. Maeve forced mana into the circlet and got one stuttering pulse of pale light that reached halfway across the hall and thinned into nothing.

None of them got there.

Alice tore the blade free, sidestepped Marcus’s swing without appearing to hurry, and kicked Finn flat onto his back. Her heel came down on the axe haft and pinned it to the floor.

[FINN HALE — HP: 4,920/8,700 → 1,130/8,700]

Maeve crawled to James.

Not to Finn. Her whole body wanted to go to Finn, and she overruled it, because Finn was still alive and there was exactly one thing left in this room that could change what happened next, and it was lying dead in the middle of a bone field.

Resurrection.

She had never cast it. It sat at the bottom of the circlet’s granted arts like a debt she’d hoped never to call in. She pressed both hands flat against James’s chest, over the wound, into the cold coming off him, and pushed everything she had left through the cracked stone at her brow.

Her hands were shaking. His blood came up between her fingers, already thickening.

”Come on,” she whispered. ”Come on, come on—”

The light gathered. Weak, uneven, flickering at the edges, but it gathered, pooling over the wound, sinking into him, spreading through his chest the way it was supposed to, searching for the thing it was built to call home.

Then it stopped spreading.

The light held still inside him for one long moment, like a hand feeling around an empty room.

And it withdrew. It pulled back out of the wound and lifted away from his body, and it felt to Maeve, through the casting, exactly like fingers closing on nothing.

[RESURRECTION ATTEMPT FAILED]

[TARGET SOUL NOT FOUND]

Maeve stopped moving.

She knew what that prompt meant. Anyone who had ever studied support magic knew what that prompt meant, and none of them ever wanted to see it. Resurrection did not fail on the freshly dead. Ten minutes gone, the soul stays by the body. The art reaches out and there is always, always something to take hold of.

There was nothing to take hold of.

James was not just dead on the floor of the throne room.

James was not here at all.