A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 190: Chapter 190 — Anathema

The announcement chime faded out of the throne room, and nobody cheered.

Nine Challengers stood among eleven bodies. Maeve had not moved from Declan’s side. Saoirse knelt over what was left of Orla with the spearwoman’s cloak in her hands, working out how to use it. Marcus walked the outer lines alone, stopping at each fallen Challenger from the rear ranks, checking every one of them even though the golden light had already given its answer.

The System spoke again into the silence.

[WORLD-FIRST AMPLIFICATION REMOVED]

[FLOOR 20 BOSS ENCOUNTER WILL BE RECONSTRUCTED FROM RECORD FOR SUBSEQUENT RAIDS]

[RECONSTRUCTED FRAGMENT OUTPUT: REDUCED]

[RAID ENTRY REQUIREMENT UNCHANGED: 20 CHALLENGERS]

Finn read it from where he sat against a shattered pillar, flexing legs that finally worked again.

”So the next lot still fight her.” His voice was flat. ”Her, the Brides, the head games, all of it. Just a cheaper copy.”

”Weaker copy,” Saoirse said, without looking up from Orla’s cloak. ”Eleven dead against the real one. That discount’s paid for.”

James was only half listening.

He was watching Alice.

Her body had stopped being a body. The edges of her had gone soft, the way the wolf’s bones had gone soft when the contract broke, and thin streams of grey were lifting off her severed shoulders and drifting upward and thinning into nothing. The Tower was taking her back.

His five Reanimated Slots sat empty in the corner of his vision. Camillia, the Python, the wolf — every contract he’d built across twenty floors had died with him on this floor, and the interface showed five hollow squares where his army used to be.

And the strongest corpse he would ever stand next to was evaporating twenty feet away.

He started walking before the reward calculation finished.

[FLOOR 20 MAIN STORY CLEAR REWARD]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 60,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 20,000]

[WORLD-FIRST BONUS: 10,000 TOWER CREDITS]

[TOTAL: 30,000 TOWER CREDITS PER SURVIVOR]

The panels hung in front of all nine of them at once.

Nobody complained about the number. Nobody toasted it either. Maeve’s eyes passed over the glowing text and returned to Declan’s face. Marcus flicked his panel closed with one finger, mid-stride, and kept walking the line of the dead. Thirty thousand credits was more than most Challengers saw in a year, and it sat in the air of that room like a receipt nobody wanted to sign.

Then the System found James.

[FIRST DISCIPLE KILL CONFIRMED]

[KILLING CHALLENGER: JAMES GANNER]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 250,000]

He kept walking. The next panel arrived before the first had faded.

[CALCULATING RAID CONTRIBUTION]

[FINAL KILL: JAMES GANNER]

[HIGHEST DECISIVE DAMAGE: JAMES GANNER]

[BOSS SUPPRESSION VIA DEATH AUTHORITY: JAMES GANNER]

[MAIN STORY OBJECTIVE COMPLETED FOLLOWING CHALLENGER DEATH AND RETURN]

[MVP: JAMES GANNER]

[MVP BONUS EXPERIENCE: 90,000]

[MVP BONUS: 70,000 TOWER CREDITS]

Somewhere behind him Finn made a short sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. ”Died and still took MVP. Course you did.”

The experience hit all at once.

[LEVEL UP x10]

[LEVEL: 27 → 37]

[EXP: 3,640/24,000 → 28,640/54,000]

[ALL STATS +10]

[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 50]

Ten levels went through James in the space of three steps.

It came as heat up the spine, one wave stacking onto the next before the last had finished, his muscles tightening and releasing, his vision sharpening in stages like someone cleaning a window pane by pane. He stopped walking until it passed. After the borrowed authority, after feeling every heartbeat in a room, it was strange how small ten levels felt, and stranger how good.

The interface offered him the allocation screen, fifty points blinking over his stat block.

He closed it.

Not here. Not standing in blood with the count still running. Fifty points was a build decision, the kind you made at a desk with tea and a calculator, not in a boss room with his hands still remembering the scythe. The points would keep.

”How many?” Finn asked from the pillar.

”How many what?”

”Levels. You lit up like a road flare.”

”A few,” James said.

Finn looked at him a second longer, then let it go, because eight years of friendship had taught him exactly how far that door opened.

The System wasn’t done.

[UNIQUE GROWTH TITLE ACQUIRED]

[MEMENTO MORI]

[NECROMANTIC DAMAGE: +2%]

[RESISTANCE TO DEATH-BASED EFFECTS: +2%]

[TITLE GROWTH CONDITION: HIDDEN]

Two percent.

James read it twice. A unique growth title, earned by dying inside a Tower that did not give deaths back, and its opening offer was two percent. He looked at the last line, the hidden condition sitting there like a folded note, and decided the Tower had never once given him anything whose first page was also its last.

Then the MVP item appeared.

It materialized in the air in front of his chest without ceremony, small and dull, and dropped into his palm.

A coin.

Old bronze, worn nearly smooth, heavier than it looked. One face carried the stamped outline of a boat. The other face was blank. It was cold in a way metal shouldn’t be after appearing out of thin air, cold like it had spent a long time under water.

[MYTHIC CONSUMABLE ACQUIRED]

[CHARON’S OBOL]

[USES: 1/1]

[CONSUME DURING REANIMATE TO BYPASS TARGET-RANK RESTRICTION]

[NULLIFIES POST-DEATH STAT REDUCTION]

[RESTORES THE TARGET’S STRONGEST COMPLETE FORM]

[PRESERVES MEMORIES, PERSONALITY, ABILITIES AND AUTHORITY]

James read the description once and looked up from the coin to the dissolving shape across the floor.

Bypass target-rank restriction.

The Tower did not deal in coincidence. It had watched him kill a First Disciple with five empty slots, and it had paid him in the exact key that fit the exact lock, and it was letting her body evaporate while he decided. He closed his hand around the coin and crossed the last of the distance to Alice at a walk that was nearly a run.

”James.”

Marcus’s voice. James stopped at the edge of the dark stain that was spreading and shrinking at the same time.

Marcus came toward him with his eyes on the remains. His new hand flexed once at his side, the way it had been flexing every minute or so since the light built it. ”Eleven of ours are lying on this floor because of her. She was one bad half-second from making it all twenty.”

”I know. I watched most of it.”

”And you want her standing up again.”

”I want her standing on our side of the line.” James turned the coin over in his fingers. ”I’ve got five empty slots, Marcus. Everything I contracted for twenty floors died with me an hour ago. This is a First Disciple, and in about a minute she’s gone for good.” He nodded at the shrinking remains. ”I have Reanimate and the Tower just handed me that item. Letting her dissolve isn’t caution. It’s waste.”

Marcus looked at him for a long moment. Whatever he was weighing, he did it behind his eyes, where he did everything.

”Then keep her leash short,” he said, and stepped back.

James knelt at the edge of what was left of her and put out his hand.

”Reanimate.”

The skill reached out of him the way it always did, cold threading down through his arm into the corpse, searching for the shape of what had lived there.

And it stopped.

The cold hit something and came back up his arm like a hand slapped off a rail. The interface flashed red at the edges.

[REANIMATE FAILED]

[TARGET RANK EXCEEDS CHALLENGER AUTHORITY]

[TARGET: FALLEN DIVINITY]

Then, beneath the red, new text arrived.

[MYTHIC CONSUMABLE DETECTED IN INVENTORY]

[CONSUME CHARON’S OBOL? Y/N]

James looked at the coin in his palm one last time. One use. He could hold it for years, save it for something worse, something later.

There’s nothing later that’s worth more than this.

”Yes.”

The coin went black in his hand, then went nothing. The cold came off it and poured down his arm and into the remains, and this time nothing pushed back.

[CHARON’S OBOL CONSUMED]

[TARGET-RANK RESTRICTION BYPASSED]

[POST-DEATH DEGRADATION NULLIFIED]

[PERFECT REANIMATION SUCCESSFUL]

The dissolution reversed.

The grey streams that had been lifting off Alice’s body came back down out of the air and rejoined her. Her head drew back to her shoulders and the cut line sealed without a scar. Both hands rebuilt at the ends of her arms, whole, pale, unhurried. The stumps on her back split open and the wings came out of them, both of them, enormous and black and complete, no red-gold patchwork, no cracked joint, every feather in its place, and they unfolded across half the throne room before folding down against her back. Her tail uncoiled along the marble. Behind her head, the broken halo reassembled, dark and cracked and hers.

She looked, lying there, exactly as she had looked when twenty Challengers first walked into this room and understood they were going to die.

[ALICE — FIRST DISCIPLE OF LUST]

[HP: 102,000/102,000]

[AUTHORITY: DESIRE / LUST / FALLEN DIVINITY]

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5 OCCUPIED]

[UNIQUE UNDEAD DESIGNATION: ANATHEMA]

Her eyes opened.

They fixed on the ceiling for one heartbeat. James watched the memory arrive behind them, all of it in order, the wrist, the hands, the boot on her wing, the slow draw of the blade, the last thing his face had said to her before the scythe came across.

She moved.

She came off the floor in a single motion, wings snapping wide, one rebuilt hand already a blade of red-gold light, and she crossed half the distance to James’s throat—

—and stopped.

Everything stopped. The blade of light hung a foot from him, shaking. Her whole body strained against nothing at all, tendons standing out in her neck, wings beating once, twice, driving her nowhere. The contract sat between her and James like a wall of glass a mile thick, and she poured herself against it and it did not notice.

James hadn’t moved. Behind him he heard Saoirse’s dagger clear its sheath anyway.

Alice’s eyes went from her own frozen hand to his face. There was no fear anywhere in them, only a pure, distilled hatred with a lifetime of aim behind it.

”You,” she said softly, ”put your fingers in my soul—”

”Kneel,” James said.

Her body began to obey and she fought it. She fought it with everything her true form owned, wings flared to their full black span, and the marble under her feet cracked outward in spiderwebs from the force of her refusing, her jaw locked, the light-blade at the end of her arm guttering as the contract pulled it apart thread by thread.

It bought her three seconds.

Then her right knee went down onto the broken tile, and her wings folded whether she wanted them folded or not, and Alice, First Disciple of Lust, knelt in the ruin of her own throne room in front of an eighteen-year-old from Ballymun, shaking with rage the entire way down.

”I will wear your skin,” she said, from one knee, in the same soft, pleasant voice she’d used all raid. ”Some day the leash will fray. They always fray. And I will be there the hour it does.”

”Noted,” James said.