A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 332: Chapter 323 — Still Standing II

They had James in a treatment room under the Cusack Stand for about fifty minutes.

He got the wound packed and closed and something for the leg and a great deal of instruction about what he was not to do for the next week, delivered by a TRB doctor who did not appear to be even slightly impressed by him.

Then they let the others in.

Cillian was first through the door and he did not say hello.

”You *ran* at him.”

”I did.”

”You ran at him. Like a fella running for a bus.” He put both hands on his head. ”Fifteen minutes of high-level combat and it ends with you doing a sprint.”

”It worked.”

”It worked!” said Finn, coming in behind him. ”That’s the worst part! Do you know how badly that could have gone? He recalls that ice half a second earlier and you’re a kebab—”

”He didn’t, though.”

”*He nearly did.*”

Maeve came in last, ignored all of them, and went straight to the doctor.

”Is he done?”

”He’s done. He’s not to—”

”I’ll take the list.”

”Maeve—”

”You’re getting the list, James, and I’m getting a copy, because I know exactly what you’re like.”

Ronan had been standing against the wall with his arms folded for about a minute and had clearly been waiting for a gap.

”The gap was three seconds earlier.”

Everybody looked at him.

”What?”

”The gap. It opened when Alice committed, not when you raised the scythe. You stood there for three seconds telling him it was coming.” Ronan shrugged. ”Three seconds is a lot.”

”He needed the third signal or he wouldn’t have split it—”

”He’d split it. He always split it. You’d watched him do it four times.”

”Oh, here we go,” said Cillian.

”I’m only saying he could have gone earlier.”

”He got *stabbed*, Ronan.”

”He got stabbed because he went late.”

James was laughing, which hurt, which made him stop, which made Finn point at him and start laughing as well.

---

Alice came in during that and leaned against the frame of the door.

She looked at the five of them — a man with a hole in his side sitting on a treatment bench, two others arguing about the timing of it, a fourth reading a medical list out loud in a hostile voice, and Cillian doing an impression of James running.

”He was almost killed this afternoon,” she said.

”He was,” Finn agreed.

”And you are reviewing it.”

”Well, yeah.”

”He is *sitting here*.”

”Best time to do it,” said Cillian. ”It’s fresh.”

Alice considered all of them for a moment.

”You are a very strange group of people,” she said, and came in and sat down.

---

Across the city, in a house in Foxrock, Adrian Ganner stood in front of a television with a glass in his hand that he had not drunk anything out of.

The official confirmation had been up for four minutes. His brother’s name was on it under the word DECEASED, and they had stopped showing the body some time ago but they had not stopped showing the moment, and they were showing it again now, slowed down, from a camera on the north corner.

He watched the black blade come through the front of his brother’s chest.

He did not flinch and he did not sit down.

His jaw was locked and there was a muscle going at the side of it and the hand around the glass had gone white along the knuckles, and after about ten seconds he put the glass down on the sideboard hard enough that the base of it cracked and he did not look at that either.

He was not frightened of James Ganner.

He had never been frightened of James Ganner. He had stood eighteen inches from that boy in a lobby with a room full of people watching and he had seen him at his absolute worst, and nothing that had happened on a screen this afternoon changed one single thing he knew about him.

Adrian stood there and watched it loop, and hated him more than he had that morning, which he would not have said was available.

He did not pick up a phone.

He did not make a plan.

He turned the television off and stood in a dark sitting room for a long time.

---

They got back to Guild Zero at half nine.

Somebody — Maeve, obviously, at some point in the last three hours while her friend was being stitched back together — had arranged food, and by the time James came up the stairs the strategy room had been turned into somewhere people ate.

The big table had been cleared of everything and covered in the opposite: two trays from the Thai place on Dorset Street, a mountain of chips from somewhere else entirely, plates, a stack of napkins nobody was using, four different kinds of drink and one bottle that had come out of Maeve’s office and had a ribbon on it from something in June.

It smelled of ginger and hot oil and beer.

Four hours ago James had been standing on a frozen platform breathing blood and ozone in front of eighty-two thousand people.

He sat down in a chair with arms on it, slowly, and got his leg up on a second chair, and let out a breath that went on for a while.

Nobody was trying to kill him.

That was the whole of it, and it was enough.

---

Finn put the fight on the wall screen inside eleven minutes.

”Don’t,” said Maeve.

”I’m only—”

”Finn.”

”It’s *research*.”

It was not research. He went straight to the part where the ice came up through the floor in the first twelve seconds and James’s boot slid, and paused it there, on a still frame of James Ganner mid-wobble with his arms out.

”There he is.”

”That’s the *ice*—”

”That’s a man on a frozen pond.”

”You try standing on—”

”Here’s my favourite, though.” Finn scrubbed forward. ”Here’s my absolute favourite.”

It was the elbow. Cormac’s forearm plate going into James’s shoulder from behind, and James’s entire face doing something unfortunate.

Cillian was bent double.

”Play it again.”

”I’m going to play it again.”

”*Play it again.*”

”You were forty metres away eating nothing,” said James.

”I was *providing morale*.”

Ronan was still on the timing and had got a napkin and a pen out.

”If you go here—” he drew a line on it, ”—instead of here, you don’t get hit at all.”

”He couldn’t see that from where he was standing.”

”He could have.”

”With what, Ronan? Divine intervention?”

”With his *eyes*—”

Maeve took the napkin off him.

Alice watched the whole thing from the end of the table with a plate she had barely touched and an expression James could not entirely identify.

”Every single time,” she said, eventually, to nobody in particular.

”Every time what?”

”Something nearly kills one of you, and within six hours there are drawings.”

”It’s how we cope,” said Cillian.

”It is not coping. Coping would be silence and a drink. This is a *seminar*.”

”Would you rather we cried?”

Alice thought about that for slightly longer than the question deserved.

”No,” she admitted.

---

Cillian stood up somewhere around eleven with a glass and did not make a speech, because Maeve had told him in advance that he was not to make a speech.

”Right. Two years that thing’s been sitting on a register with your name on it.”

”It has.”

”And now it isn’t.”

”It isn’t.”

”So.” He raised the glass about as high as James had raised his hand in Croke Park. ”You’re not dead, and he is.”

”That’s genuinely the worst toast I’ve ever heard,” said Maeve.

”It’s accurate!”

”To James,” said Finn, ”not being dead.”

”To James not being dead,” said Ronan.

Alice raised a glass she had been holding for an hour and had not once put anywhere near her mouth.

”To that,” she said.

James drank with them.

It went on for a long time after that.

The food went. Finn found four more clips he wanted to show everybody and Maeve confiscated the remote twice. Ronan and Cillian moved from the timing of the gap to whether James should have released the scythe earlier, which was a completely different argument, and both of them enjoyed it far more than the first one. Alice was asked her opinion on the finish and said, flatly, that it had been ”structurally unsound but effective,” which Finn wrote on a napkin.

Every time James laughed properly the wound in his side pulled and he had to stop, and then somebody said something else and it happened again.

He did not think about Cormac once after about half eleven.

He did not think about Wrath, or the red under a dead world, or four Caerleons on a screen, or a board with Ireland on the top line and two countries two floors underneath it.

There was a room, and there were five people in it arguing about him in front of him, and there was nothing at all he needed to do tonight.