A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 208: Chapter 208 — Floor 21; The Broken Crown I

The training target broke left, and James saw the opening behind it.

Two seconds, maybe less. A skeleton stood in the right place, ten meters behind the target’s blind side, exactly where he’d planted it.

He didn’t warn anyone.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

The arena folded.

James ceased to exist at the back of the formation and existed again beside the skeleton — directly in the path of Finn’s axe, which was already halfway through the next swing of a combination Finn had built around where James used to be.

”JAMES—”

Finn wrenched the swing off its line with both arms. The axe missed James by a hand-width and buried itself in the reinforced floor with a bang that echoed off the arena ceiling.

James stumbled.

The world was still arriving. His inner ear insisted he was facing the wrong way. His feet stood on ground his brain hadn’t accepted yet, and for one full second he swayed beside his skeleton, defenseless, exactly where a real enemy would have wanted him.

The drill died around them.

Finn stood over his buried axe, breathing through his nose.

”So,” he said. ”Let’s talk about that.”

It had been one week since Ronan and Cillian cleared Floor 20.

Ireland’s second raid had gone in twenty strong and come out twenty strong. The reconstruction was weaker, the guide held, and the training Team Zero had drilled into the roster held better. Debrief, medical observation, replaced equipment, Floor 21 access. Done.

James, Finn, and Maeve had kept the promise. Two months and more standing outside an open gate, and not one of them had stepped through it.

Now all five names had Floor 20 behind them, and the training arena was the last stop before Floor 21.

The floor had left its marks on the two newest survivors, and the marks showed in small ways.

Ronan checked retreat paths now. Even here, in a sealed TRB arena with padded walls, his eyes did a quiet circuit every few minutes — exits, fallback lines, where the formation would reform if it broke.

Cillian still ran his mouth through every drill. But twice today, when Maeve drifted out of his sightline behind Ronan’s shield, the jokes stopped mid-sentence until he found her again.

Nobody commented on any of it. The three older survivors noticed, recognized it, and let it be. Floor 20 was a language all five of them spoke now, and it didn’t need translating out loud.

The weeks behind them had been busy everywhere else too.

Guild Zero Limited existed — incorporated, funded, founders’ agreement signed. The building had passed its structural inspection; the security assessment and renovation numbers were still coming, so the conditional purchase stayed conditional. No licence yet. No announcement. No recruits.

A guild, still in its shell.

And the money had started arriving in public. The Floor 20 survivor campaign was on billboards now — James, Finn, and Maeve front and centre, and behind them, in the full-team photography Maeve had made contractual, all five of Team Zero under the team’s name. Ronan and Cillian, who had missed the first clear by a roster cap, stood in every frame that used the crest.

James’s personal deal had launched with it.

He was wearing part of it right now — a mana-compatible underlayer that didn’t fight his casting, reinforced boots and gloves, a lightweight combat coat with a small logo on the collar. It layered under and around his real Tower armour instead of replacing it, which had been Dunne’s hardest-fought clause and the only reason James had agreed to wear it into an arena at all.

”Right.” Finn pulled his axe out of the floor. ”The teleport. Again. From the start.”

They gathered at the arena’s edge, and Grave Step went on trial.

”Walk us through what you saw,” Maeve said.

”Opening behind the target. Two seconds of it. I had a skeleton placed, so I took it.” James rolled his shoulder, still shaking off the arrival. ”The opening was real. The problem was everything else.”

”The problem was I nearly cut you in half,” Finn said. ”I was swinging into that lane because you weren’t supposed to be in it. We were all still playing the board from your old position.”

”I know.”

”Say the rules again,” Ronan said. ”All of them. If we’re building formation around this skill, I want its edges in my head.”

James laid it out.

He could jump to a corpse he could see. Or one he could detect inside range, even unseen. Or one of his own summoned skeletons. A contracted undead worked too — but only if it was physically present, standing in the world. Nothing stored in contract space. No living anchor, ally or enemy.

Forty meters, maximum. Twenty seconds of cooldown. A moderate bite of mana each time.

”And the fine print,” he went on. ”It won’t cross a sealed barrier. If the anchor’s destroyed mid-activation, the jump just fails. When I land, I get a second of disorientation — you all saw it. And it doesn’t clear the destination. If something’s already swinging through that space—”

”You arrive inside the swing,” Finn said. ”Noticed.”

”It’s repositioning,” Ronan said slowly, turning it over. ”Not escape, not assault. A door between two points you’ve already prepared. The skeletons aren’t just fighters anymore — they’re doorframes.”

”Which changes where I place them,” James agreed.

The skill had cost more than most people’s houses. There’d been no shelf it came off — A-rank skill books didn’t reach shops. The TRB had brokered it quietly: a retiring Challenger with a book he’d never bound, a Bureau introduction, a price with a lot of zeros, and James’s signature. Six months ago the market itself would have been invisible to him. The money hadn’t just bought the book. It had bought the knowledge that the room existed.

The sword on his hip had come from a similar room.

Durendal. An S-rank longsword out of a specialist high-rank weapon exchange, carrying an old name from an old song, and nothing about it whispered of graves.

Exceptional durability. Heavy physical damage. It drank mana smoothly when he channelled through it, and the edge repaid the mana with cutting power. It lost almost nothing blocking bigger weapons. No element. No holy light. No necromancy.

That was the point. Durendal was the sword the world would watch him swing. The broken scythe stayed where it lived, out of sight, and the less the watching world connected James Ganner to that weapon, the better for everyone who slept in his house.

”Warning system,” Maeve said. ”Simple, or it fails when it matters.”

They built it in five minutes, because it only needed to be small.

One short signal from James before any planned jump. Maeve — who tracked the whole board anyway — calls which skeleton he’s taking. Ronan confirms the destination is covered. Finn and Cillian keep their attacks out of that lane until he lands.

”And if there’s no time to signal?” Cillian asked.

”Then I jump anyway. Emergencies don’t queue.” James looked at Finn. ”But an unsignalled jump means I might land somewhere stupid, and everyone knows it. That risk is mine.”

”It’s not yours if my axe is the friendly fire,” Finn said. ”Signal when you can. That’s all I’m asking.”

”That’s the system,” James said.

They ran it again.

Skeletons went out first this time — not clustered behind James like bodyguards, but seeded across the arena. Doorframes at the corners of the fight.

Finn drove the target backward. Ronan sealed the centre, shield angled, giving it nowhere through the middle. Cillian’s lightning came in from the far side in flat cracks, herding it, and the target turned out of Finn’s pressure and showed its back for half a breath.

”Rear’s open,” Maeve called. ”Now or never.”

James gave the signal — one sharp syllable they’d agreed on.

”East anchor,” Maeve answered instantly.

”Covered,” Ronan said.

Finn’s next swing bent wide, deliberately, leaving the lane empty.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

The world folded, and this time James landed knowing what the first second would cost.

He let the disorientation crash over him without fighting it — feet planted, weight low, one beat of stillness he’d budgeted for in advance.

Then the second beat, which was his.

Mana ran down his arm into Durendal, and the blade took it the way dry ground takes rain. He turned his hips and cut.

The sword went through the reinforced target’s midsection — through layered plating that had turned his old sword’s edge a hundred times in this arena — and came out the other side. The top half of the target slid, toppled, and crashed to the floor.

Silence for a moment.

”Okay,” Cillian said. ”New rule. Nobody annoys the man with the teleport and the giant sword.”

Finn walked over, looked at the cut — clean through, no burring — and then at James.

”That,” he said, ”is what it’s supposed to look like.”

They broke for water, and James sat down against the arena wall and finally did the thing he’d been putting off for two months.

The allocation screen opened. Fifty points, patient as ever.

The ten levels from Floor 20 had already done their silent work — every primary stat up ten before he spent a single free point. He read the board the way Maeve read contracts.

Strength 58. Agility 68. Intelligence 111. Endurance 72. Luck 51.

The necromancer answer was simple: everything into Intelligence. Feed the summons, feed the mana, feed the class.

But Floor 20 had taught the other lesson, at the price of eleven coffins and his own death prompt. Intelligence had been sitting over a hundred when Alice put the scythe through his chest. All the output in the world meant nothing if he couldn’t reposition, couldn’t take the hit he didn’t see, couldn’t stay standing long enough to use what he had.

Grave Step needed a body that could handle arriving. Durendal needed arms that could use the landing.

Thirty into Intelligence, because he was still, first and always, a Necromancer.

Ten into Agility. Ten into Endurance.

He confirmed it before he could re-argue it.

[LEVEL: 37]

[EXP: 28,640/54,000]

[STRENGTH: 58]

[AGILITY: 78]

[INTELLIGENCE: 141]

[ENDURANCE: 82]

[LUCK: 51]

[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 0]

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5 OCCUPIED]

[ANATHEMA — ALICE]

His eyes stopped on the last line, the way they always did.

One slot. One name. She had stayed exactly where he’d put her since the throne room — unsummoned, unmentioned, a sealed door in the corner of his interface that only eight other living people knew existed.

She was not coming to training. She was not coming to Floor 21 either, unless the floor left him no other door at all.

He closed the screen.

Across the arena, Maeve was adjusting her own gear — her own gear, all of it. Warden plate, focus, the shield-charm array she’d climbed nineteen floors with. The Apostle’s Radiant Circlet was back in a TRB vault, its cracked stone under repair and recertification, and she’d handed it over without ceremony.

”It did its job,” was all she’d said. ”I had a class before I had a relic.”