A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

He looked down at his hands. Ordinary hands. Then at the small dark shape that had been Alice, and at the empty floor where her wings had crumbled. He remembered all of it. Every step, every cut, the slow walk, the kitchen. The authority had moved through him, but every decision in the last five minutes had been his, and he stood there holding that.

”...James?”

Finn’s voice, from behind him. Careful. The voice of a man who has watched his best friend die, float, grow wings, and take a floor boss apart, and now needs to know what answers when he calls the name.

James turned around. Just turned, like anyone turning at their name.

”I’m fine.”

Finn looked at him for a long moment. Then he let his head drop back against the marble and let out a breath he had been holding, one way or another, since the scythe went through James’s chest.

Marcus flexed his new hand once more and said nothing at all.

Maeve stayed where she was, beside Declan, her hand resting on the back of his armor.

Saoirse slid her last dagger into its sheath on the third try.

Nobody had asked anything yet. Nobody had crossed the floor to him. Every question in the room was still forming, all of them aimed at James, at the scythe, at the space behind his head where a black ring had been—

A chime sounded.

It rang through the throne room, and it rang in the ears of every Challenger in every Tower, in Dublin, in London, in Seoul and Lagos and São Paulo, on training floors and safe floors and gate queues, an interface tone that none of them had ever heard before, arriving everywhere on Earth at the same instant.

[WORLDWIDE ANNOUNCEMENT]

[WORLD-FIRST FLOOR 20 CLEAR ACHIEVED]