A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 248: Chapter 248 — Six Thousand More II

Maeve went round all four of them anyway, checking, which was pointless and which she did every single time, because the System restoring somebody was not the same thing as her seeing it. Finn had both axes off his back and was going down the edges with his thumb. James drew Durendal a hand’s width and looked at the steel, and it looked the way it always looked, which after the day it had was faintly insulting.

Then the notice came.

[THE BROKEN CROWN WILL CONTINUE]

[FLOOR 25 — FINAL FLOOR AVAILABLE]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]

[RETURN TO EARTH IN 60 SECONDS]

”Right,” Cillian said. ”So the field’s about four kilometres across, Baldwin’s somewhere in the middle of—”

”No,” Maeve said.

”I’m only—”

”We’re not planning the last floor of this campaign in under a minute, in a room we can’t take notes in.” She was not sharp about it, which made it land better. ”We saw a picture. We know roughly where two armies are standing. We don’t know a single level on that field, we don’t know Baldwin’s class, we don’t know one skill he has, we don’t know what Raymond has left after the north, we don’t know what’s in that monster host, and we don’t know where the Tower is going to put the five of us when we walk in.”

”We also don’t know what else it’ll ask for,” Finn said. ”Every previous one had a second objective it didn’t show us until we were inside. The picture is information. It isn’t a plan.”

Nobody argued with that, because all five of them had watched exactly that lesson cost them a settlement.

”Then we take it home,” James said. ”Everything gets repaired, everything gets replaced, and then we sit down and actually work the problem.”

The countdown ran out.

---

The secure chamber under Dublin Tower was very quiet.

There was no chat in the corner of anyone’s vision, no army noise, no wind, nothing. Just the hum of the strip lights, four equipment benches, and a bank of cameras standing dark because they had stopped transmitting the instant the floor let go of them.

Five people stood in it looking considerably better than their equipment did.

Ronan crossed to the nearest bench and set the remains of his shield down on it.

He had been carrying that shield for so long that his arms had a memory of what it weighed, and what he put down weighed almost nothing, so it hit the steel bench far harder than he meant it to. The sound went round the whole chamber.

Nobody said anything about it.

Cillian rolled his restored shoulder twice.

”I’d genuinely forgotten what having two arms was like.”

”It was thirty seconds,” Finn said.

”It was a difficult thirty seconds.”

Then the phones started.

They came back onto the Earth network in the order they had been left on the benches — James’s first, buzzing itself sideways across the steel, then Maeve’s, then Finn’s, then the other two, all of them going and going and not stopping.

The whole fight had been streamed. That was the thing they kept relearning.

The first headline on James’s lock screen was the flattering one.

**TEAM ZERO CLEARS FLOOR 24 — LEVEL 46 CROWN MARSHAL DEFEATED**

The second one was underneath it.

**63% GOT THROUGH: TEAM ZERO’S FLOOR 24 CLEAR MAKES FINAL BATTLE HARDER**

And under that, a Tower Tactics piece already three thousand words long, breaking down Marshal’s Authority frame by frame, with a diagram of the command stack economy and a section at the end estimating what six thousand additional Crown soldiers did to the force ratio on the final floor.

Cillian read the second headline over James’s shoulder.

”Five minutes,” he said. ”We didn’t get five minutes before somebody found the worst possible way to say it.”

”That’s not the worst possible way to say it,” Maeve said. She did not look up from her own screen. ”That’s what happened.”

The joke died there, which was correct.

James looked at the headline for a while longer than he needed to.

He was not angry at it. That was the problem with it. He kept coming back to the frozen road after Vane went down, and the six thousand men caught mid-stride on it, still walking north with their marshal dead behind them — because that was the entire point, and killing the man had never been going to turn one of them around.

Sixty-three percent was not a slant. It was a number, and it was theirs.

He scrolled past it, and past four more like it, and stopped on something that had nothing to do with him at all.

It was a TRB international bulletin, the dry weekly kind that went out to registered Challengers, and it was mostly a table.

James read the table twice.

”Who?” Finn said, watching his face.

”Nobody. That’s the thing.” James turned the phone round so Finn could see it. ”It’s the international summary. Look at the nineteen column.”

Finn looked at the nineteen column.

Two months ago that column had been thin. It was not thin anymore. There were teams on it from four continents, and the number of registered parties sitting at Floor 19 with clearance to attempt the next one had roughly tripled since the guide went out.

”They’ve been busy,” Finn said slowly.

”They’ve been busy studying us.” James took the phone back. ”Every floor we’ve streamed since twenty is on somebody’s wall in six languages. We’ve been in Caerleon for weeks arguing about one kingdom, and the rest of the planet has been climbing the whole time.”

Maeve had come over to read it as well.

”That was always going to happen,” she said. ”It’s the trade. We stream to control the record, and the record teaches everybody behind us.”

”I’m not complaining about it.” James put the phone face-down on the bench. ”I just hadn’t looked up in a while.”

He glanced around the chamber — at the wreck of Ronan’s shield on the steel, at Finn still holding an axe he had not put away, at Cillian flexing a hand he had got back thirty seconds ago, at Maeve reading a table of other people’s progress.

”Several days,” he said. ”Not just to sleep. I want to know what’s changed out here before we walk into that field, because we’ve had our heads down since Floor 21.”

”Tomorrow’s for the floor,” Maeve said. ”Tonight everybody goes home.”

Ronan was already reaching for his gear bag.

---

Then all five interfaces chimed at once.

It was not the tone their own progression made, and it was not the Bureau, and it came up in front of every one of them at the same instant with the same words on it.

[GLOBAL TOWER ANNOUNCEMENT]

[FLOOR 20 CLEARED]

[CLEARING PARTY: ———]

[REGION: ———]

James stopped scrolling.

Finn’s head came up before anyone spoke, because Finn had stood in a sealed room under this building three months ago and watched a notification exactly like this one go out to every Challenger on Earth with Ireland’s name in it.

”That’s not us,” Cillian said. ”We already did twenty.”

”It’s not us,” Maeve said quietly. ”It’s somebody else.”

For three months, Floor 20 had been a wall with one hole in it, and Ireland had made the hole, and every other nation on the planet had been standing on the other side working out how to get through. Team Zero’s guide had gone out under restricted release. Twenty people had died proving what was in there.

Somebody had finally used all of it.

James looked at the two blanked-out lines for a few seconds. The Tower would fill them in within the hour; it always did.

”Took them long enough,” Cillian said.

Finn did not laugh.

He was looking at the same notification and thinking about the part that came after it, which was that whoever those people were, they had just spent the last of their dead to open a door — and on the other side of that door was a burnt kingdom with a dead king in it, two princes, five attempts, and a red light under a palace that nobody outside this room had ever seen.

They had access to Floor 21 now.

They were about to meet Caerleon.