A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 198: Chapter 198 — The First Offer I

Two months moved past the memorial the way months do, one unremarkable week at a time.

The TRB finished its verification in the seventh week.

The Floor 20 clearing guide went out under restricted release to every qualified Floor 19 Challenger in the country. Formation requirements. Bride behaviors. Resistance thresholds. The known ways to die.

Within a day of its release, the Bureau opened applications for Ireland’s second twenty-person raid.

James, Finn, and Maeve had not touched Floor 21.

They could have. The gate had been sitting unlocked in their interfaces for two months, the first three names on Earth with access to it.

They trained. They gave the Bureau their testimony hours. They went home.

The gate stayed shut, because Team Zero had settled it in one short conversation at Finn’s kitchen table weeks ago. Five had started this. Five would climb the rest of it. Nobody entered twenty-one until Ronan and Cillian had twenty behind them.

At home that evening, Nyra was doing her sums at the kitchen table under armed supervision.

”Four sevens.”

”Twenty-eight.” A pause. ”This is a trick somebody made up to be annoying.”

”It is,” his mother agreed. ”Next one.”

James moved through the kitchen for a glass of water.

Nyra’s eyes came up and tracked him from the sink to the counter to the doorway. She didn’t grab his sleeve anymore. That had eased off around week three, when enough dinners had ended with him still in the house.

But the tracking remained. Quiet, automatic, a small radar that had learned the hard way what doors could do.

His phone buzzed against the counter a little after ten, when Nyra was already upstairs.

Maeve: Come over.

Two words.

He looked at them for a moment, and something in his chest did the same small drop it had done the first time, two months ago, three days after the memorial, when the message had been longer and he’d read it four times in the hallway before answering.

He put his head into the sitting room.

”I’m going out. Back in the morning.”

His mother looked at him over her glasses for exactly one second longer than the sentence required.

”Mind yourself,” she said, and went back to her programme.

She asked nothing, which was its own kind of comment.

Maeve opened the door before he’d finished knocking.

She was in a jumper and bare feet, hair down. The flat behind her was warm and lamp-lit. She looked at him the way she’d looked at him across the raid camp on Floor 18, back when he’d been too dense to know what the look was.

”You made good time,” she said.

”Traffic was afraid of me. I’m famous now.”

”Get in, famous.”

He knew the flat now. That was the difference two months made.

He knew where the light switch hid behind the bookshelf. He knew the loose floorboard by the kitchen. He knew that the second mug on the shelf was his, without either of them ever saying it had become his.

The first night, he’d stood in this hallway like a man at a checkpoint, terrified of putting his hands anywhere at all.

Tonight she stepped in close, and he met her halfway, and there was no checkpoint anywhere.

She kissed him first. She always did, and he’d stopped keeping score.

Afterward, in the dark, her head found the same place on his shoulder it had found the other nights. They lay in the kind of quiet that neither of them felt any need to repair.

James stared at the ceiling for a while.

Then, because he was still himself, he ruined it slightly.

”Can I ask something.”

”You’re going to anyway.”

”Why tonight?” He kept his voice easy. ”Big meeting tomorrow. The raid’s assembling. I thought maybe—”

He didn’t finish it. I thought maybe you needed— was the wrong shape for the sentence.

Maeve lifted her head off his shoulder just far enough to look at him. There was nothing wounded in her face. Only a flat, faint amusement.

”I invited you because I wanted you here.” She said it plainly, like a correction to a report. ”That’s the whole answer. It’s allowed to be the whole answer.”

”...Right.”

”You’re welcome to keep looking for a sadder reason, but you’ll be doing it in the hall.”

He laughed at the ceiling.

She settled back onto his shoulder, satisfied. Neither of them said anything about what this was or wasn’t, because it worked, and it was theirs, and naming it felt like handling it too much.

”Finn’s at ten,” she murmured, already half gone. ”If you make us late, I’m blaming you accurately.”

They arrived at the Hale gates in the same car, because pretending otherwise had felt stupider than not pretending.

Cillian was in the driveway when they pulled up.

He watched the car park. He watched both doors open. He watched who got out of which side, and his whole face began to climb toward an expression of delight, and his mouth was already opening—

”Don’t,” Maeve said, walking past him.

The mouth closed.

Cillian looked at James instead, eyebrows performing an entire monologue on their own.

”Don’t,” James agreed.

”I said nothing,” Cillian said, to the driveway, with enormous dignity, and followed them in.

Finn’s strategy room sat behind a door with guild-grade screening, and it had been dressed for war since before they arrived.

The official clearing guide was up on the main wall, page by page. Beside it hung the maps: the ruined city under its red sky, the cathedral at its center, the four Outer Courts arranged around the throne room like petals on something poisonous.

Ronan and Cillian’s raid application confirmations sat printed at their places at the table. Two coffees. In front of Cillian, biscuits, because Finn ran a hospitable fortress.

Finn stood, and the room’s temperature changed to work.

”Before anything else,” he said. ”You’ve both read the guide. Good. Here’s what the guide can’t print.”

He put one knuckle down on the table.

”Eleven people died on that floor, and every one of them was better prepared than any second raid is going to be. We didn’t know it couldn’t be known. Your lot will think it can.”

”The Tower rebuilt it weaker,” Ronan said. ”Reduced output.”

”Reduced is a number.” Finn didn’t raise his voice. ”It’s still exactly twenty of you. It’s still her. It’s still the Brides, and it’s still the thing that gets inside your head and drives you like a stolen car. If your roster walks in treating this as a victory lap because Ireland already has the clear, you’ll come home short, and I’ll be at that memorial too.”

He let that sit for a breath.

”Right. James.”

James took the city and the cathedral.

He walked them through it on the map. The streets that rearranged behind the formation. The cathedral’s pull. And above all, the floor’s actual weapon, which was never the enemies themselves.

”Nothing in the city is trying to beat your formation,” he said. ”Everything in the city is trying to make you leave it. That’s the whole design.”

”Meaning what, in practice?” Ronan asked.