A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 187: Chapter 187 — Death Does Not Let Go IV

He shoved past Azrael. Or tried. The water took his legs like setting concrete and held him exactly where he stood, and no amount of pulling changed it by an inch.

”Let me go. They’re still up there, let me GO—”

Azrael’s head turned slightly. Away from James. Toward some direction the dark hadn’t offered yet, as if he could hear, from very far away, a blade starting its way down toward a boy’s throat.

”With the power of death in your soul,” he said, ”you should not have died like that.”

”I didn’t ASK for it!” It tore out of James louder than he meant. ”The Tower gave me the class. I picked a box on a screen. I didn’t steal anything from you, I don’t even know what this power IS—”

”The Tower opened the door.” Azrael turned back to him. ”It did not create what waited behind it.”

James stood in the grip of the water with that sentence going through him.

Every prompt. Every level. Every time he’d wondered why a System built like a game had handed an eighteen-year-old from Ballymun something the game itself seemed afraid of.

The Tower was the door.

This was the house.

”Then what’s waiting behind—”

”You have touched the handle,” Azrael said over him. ”You have not tasted the blade.”

He raised one empty hand and set it flat against James’s chest, over the heart that wasn’t beating. James flinched back and got nowhere. The heavy calm came down through the palm and pinned him inside his own body.

The star-point eyes came a fraction closer.

”Then taste it.”

Azrael pushed.

The floor was gone. There had never been a floor. James went backward and down into the black water as if it had opened under him on hinges, and his hand shot out and caught at the smoke-dark sleeve and closed on nothing at all.

The water took his feet. His legs. It swallowed upward.

Above him, going small and dark, Azrael said something else. James heard it. Every word of it reached him. And not one word of it would fit inside his head, the sounds sliding off his mind the way water slides off oil.

「 𐌃𐌄𐌀𐌕𐋅 𐌔𐌉𐌍𐌊𐌔 𐌍𐌏𐌕 」

The dark closed over his face.

♢♢♢♢

The blade came down toward Finn’s throat.

Finn didn’t close his eyes. Marcus was hauling himself up the steps one-handed and was not going to make it. Saoirse’s dagger arm was cocked for a throw that would bounce off. Maeve knelt in James’s blood with her hands still on his chest and nothing left in the circlet but broken light.

Declan was dead. Orla was dead. The undead were bone. The room breathed on the walls and belonged, all of it, to Alice.

James’s body left the floor.

Maeve felt it go. It rose out from under her hands, and she scrambled back on her heels with a sound she didn’t recognize as hers.

He was not standing. His boots hung a foot above the marble, toes down. His arms hung loose at his sides. His head tipped forward, chin at his chest, and his eyes stayed closed, and every part of him hung the way a coat hangs, held up by something that was not him.

Then the blood started back.

The wide dark sheet of it on the tiles crawled in reverse, running uphill against nothing, threading up through the air and back into the wound in his chest. The wound drank all of it and did not heal. The edges pulled toward each other and stopped partway, sealing just enough to hold him closed, a rough dark seam where a killing blow had been.

Maeve’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth. Finn stared up past Alice’s frozen blade. Marcus stood on the steps with blood running through the fingers of his last hand, and his breathing had gone completely silent.

[JAMES GANNER — HP: 0/1,260 → 1/1,260]

The scythe ripped itself out of the marble.

It crossed the floor spinning, and his hand came up, unhurried, and the haft slapped into his palm.

Along the snapped edge of the broken blade, black metal began to grow. It did not repair. It stretched, drawn out of the break like night being pulled into a shape by something with strong hands, and through the new black ran hairline cracks of bone-white, and the curve completed itself out of smoke and ash and a cold light that had no source in the room. When it finished, the weapon was whole, and it was not the weapon Alice had broken. It was older than that one. It was worse than that one. The throne room’s air moved away from the edge of it and stayed away.

Then his back broke open.

The first wing bone punched through under his armor with a wet crack that reached every corner of the hall. Black veins climbed his neck, branching under the skin, feeling their way toward his jaw.

The frames came next, unfolding out of his back too fast, bare bone jointed in places no wing has joints. Each socket snapped into place one after another, and his body jerked at every snap while his face stayed slack, eyes shut, head bowed, as if the thing being built out of his back had nothing to do with him.

Ash-black feathers crawled up the bare frames afterward like frost crossing glass. They sprouted at wrong angles, edges sharp as cut slate, and quit growing in patches, leaving stretches of naked bone that nothing came to cover.

No gold light touched any of it. The air around his hanging body did not warm the way it had around every healing Maeve’s circlet had ever cast. It got colder, and the cold spread out across the marble, into the blood, into the bone piles, and kept going until it found the walls.

Maeve stopped breathing.

Finn, flat under the axe with a hole in his side, stared up at his best friend and did not blink.

Marcus looked at the floating body with an expression no one on Team Zero had ever seen him wear, because he could not tell whether the boy had come back, or whether something had come back through him.

And Alice froze.

Her blade hung above Finn’s throat and did not finish. Her eyes were not on James’s face. They went past his face, past the scythe, to the space behind his bowed head, and everything in her expression that had ever pretended to be human went out of it at once.

She recognized what was standing behind him.

Behind James’s head, a ring of black formed in the air. Incomplete. Shaking. A broken eclipse, cracked along its arc, and out of the crack leaked a thin silver-black light that fell on the marble and did not behave like light.

His eyes stayed closed.

The scythe turned once in his hand.

[AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE — AUTHORITY FRAGMENT TEMPORARILY UNSEALED]

[DEATH AUTHORITY MANIFESTATION: PARTIAL]

[JAMES GANNER — HP: 1/1,260]