A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 196: Chapter 196 — Eleven Names I

James came downstairs the next morning in ordinary clothes with a Bureau lanyard in his pocket, and Nyra took one look at him from the kitchen doorway and had his sleeve in both hands before he reached the bottom step.

”It’s an office,” James said. ”The debrief. I told you last night.”

Her grip didn’t move.

”No Tower. No floor. A room with a long table and bad coffee, and I’ll be home before dinner.” He crouched, so she could check his face and see that it was true, the way she checked everything now. ”Before dinner, Nyra. You can start being annoyed at me at six.”

She studied him for a long moment. Then she released the sleeve, one finger at a time, and stood in the doorway with her wings pulled in tight while he put his boots on.

His mother watched from the kitchen with her tea. She didn’t say anything about floors, or reasons, or his father. She’d said it. It stood between them, already built, and neither of them needed to add a brick this morning.

”Before dinner,” she said instead.

”Before dinner.”

The door closed. Nyra stayed in the hall until the car was gone from the end of the road.

The conference room was three levels down, sealed, and swept twice before they were let in.

The nine survivors sat along one side of the long table like the world’s worst-rested jury. O’Shea sat opposite with Niamh at his right hand and three report officers spaced beside her, each with a terminal, a recorder light glowing between them. Water. A carafe of the predicted bad coffee. Eleven folders in a stack at the table’s end that nobody looked at directly.

”This is the official record of the Floor 20 clear,” O’Shea said. ”It’ll be taken once, in full, and you’ll never be asked to do it again. Commander Hale.”

Marcus took them through it chronologically, and he did it the way he did everything, in order, without decoration.

The ruined city under a red sky. The cathedral at its center and the pull it exerted, the way the raid’s own members began drifting toward it off formation before anyone understood the influence was already inside their heads. The separation — twenty split into isolated groups across the district, and the four Brides waiting, one for each fragment. He named the failed first formation and why it failed, and then the corrected one and what it cost to learn the correction. He gave the casualty locations one at a time, each with a map reference, and each time he placed a death on the table the survivors’ side of the room adjusted itself in small ways — Saoirse’s thumbnail working at the seam of her cup, one of the outer-line survivors, Brady, closing his eyes for the length of a sentence and opening them again.

The report officers typed. Niamh checked recovered-equipment logs against his account and flagged nothing for a long time.

Saoirse spoke up once.

”That’s wrong.” She leaned forward to see the map projection. ”Tomás didn’t die at the west stair. That’s where we recovered him. He died at the nave mouth holding the third Bride off the withdrawal — we carried him back to the stair when we fell back. If the report says west stair, it reads like he was running.”

The correction went in. Nave mouth, holding position. Saoirse sat back and returned to her cup.

Marcus continued into the throne room. Alice’s abilities, phase by phase, delivered in the flat vocabulary of the record: charm-class mental interference, environmental reflection manipulation, desire-response exploitation, regeneration exceeding sustained raid damage. The second phase. The Redline commitment. The wing.

Then the casualty list reached Declan.

”O’Rourke broke formation at third phase initiation,” Marcus said, ”moving forward of the shield line—”

”He didn’t break formation.”

Maeve’s voice was quiet and it stopped the room. Her hands were folded on the table in front of her, and they stayed folded, pressed flat and white at the knuckles.

”There was no shield line after James fell. The undead wall was gone. There was nothing between her and the support rank.” She looked at the map projection, at the small marker on the throne steps, and not at anyone’s face. ”He didn’t break formation. He moved in front of me.”

Nobody spoke. The senior report officer looked at O’Shea, and O’Shea nodded once.

The line on the screen changed.

DECLAN O’ROURKE — KILLED WHILE PROTECTING ANOTHER CHALLENGER.

Maeve read it, and nodded, and put her folded hands in her lap under the table, and that was all she said for the rest of the session.

Marcus went on. Orla — a correct counterattack exploited by the boss’s authority, entered into the record in exactly those words, a correct counterattack, and Marcus said that phrase with slow deliberateness, looking at the officers until they’d typed it. His own hand. Finn’s wound. The failed resurrection.

Then he reached the part of the account that the whole room had been waiting for, and slowed down.

”Challenger Ganner was killed by the boss at the end of the second phase,” Marcus said. ”Confirmed by System prompt. Resurrection was attempted and failed.” He paused. ”Approximately four minutes later, he returned.”

The senior officer looked up. ”Returned how?”

”Through a power none of us can identify.” Marcus’s eyes didn’t move toward James, and the not-moving was its own kind of care. ”He manifested an ability that suppressed the boss’s authority on contact, engaged her alone, and delivered the killing blow. That’s what I saw. All nine of us will tell you the same, because it’s what happened.”

”Can you characterize the ability? Class resonance, artifact activation, hidden skill—”

”I don’t know.”

The officer turned to James. So did the recorder light, it felt like. ”Challenger Ganner. Can you identify what it was?”

James had spent the drive in deciding the exact size of his answer, and he gave it whole.

”Not well enough to put it in your report.”

The room held still for a moment. Down the table, Finn examined the ceiling with great interest. Maeve looked at her hands. Saoirse turned her cup ninety degrees. Nobody amended, nobody elaborated, and the silence had the smooth, load-bearing quality of something nine people had built without ever discussing the plans.

O’Shea studied James across the table for a long second.

”A Challenger’s System information is his own,” he said at last, to the officers. ”That’s statute, not courtesy. Record it as manifested: unidentified ability. Returned to combat. Killed the boss. Move on.”

The typing resumed. Nobody in that room said Azrael, or spoke of black water, or a coin, or what currently occupied the first Reanimated slot of the youngest person at the table. The eleven folders stayed at the end of the table, and the meeting stayed about them, which was the only mercy the day had scheduled.

When the account was complete, O’Shea laid out what would happen to it.

”Two documents come out of this room. The first is the confidential raid report — full casualty timeline, full testimony, sealed at national-security classification. The second, months from now, is a public clearing guide for whoever attempts the floor next: the twenty-person formation that worked, mental-resistance requirements, purification coverage, the Brides’ behaviors, the boss’s attack patterns, the known ways to die there. Reproducible information only.” He looked at James. ”What you did in the final phase goes in the first document and never the second. No raid can train for it, so printing it would only get people killed chasing it.”

”And the timeline?” Niamh asked.

”The guide releases after we’ve verified testimony against the recorded floor and tested the reconstruction. Months. It’ll feel slow and it’ll be right.” He closed his folder. ”Last item. The memorial is Friday, at the Tower plaza, pending final consent from the families on the public release of the names. All eleven have been asked. Attendance is your choice, but the country will be watching for you.”

He stood, and the room stood with him.

”Thank you,” O’Shea said, and for once it didn’t sound like procedure.

Ronan and Cillian were waiting in the upstairs atrium, conspicuously casual against a pillar, and they peeled off it the moment the three of them appeared.

Ronan looked the question at Finn. Finn looked it back, flat, in a way that said not in this building, and Ronan’s jaw shifted, and Cillian read the entire exchange in half a second and clapped his hands together once.

”Food?”

They ate in the back corner of a place Cillian knew, small and dim and run by a woman who either didn’t recognize them or had decided, heroically, to act like it. Cillian ordered too much of everything and made it everyone’s problem. Ronan complained about a Floor 12 escort job he’d suffered through while they were gone, a client who’d tried to pet a fire hound. Maeve ate an actual meal, slowly, and Finn stole chips off James’s plate with his old shamelessness, and James let him, and for an hour, by unspoken agreement, Floor 20 did not exist.

It was waiting outside the door when they left. But for an hour.