A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 251: Chapter 251 — What We Know I

Finn noticed first, because he was the one who kept a count of where everybody was.

He got four paces toward the door before he realised only three sets of footsteps were following him, and turned round. Maeve turned when he did. Ronan stopped with his hand on the frame, and Cillian walked into the back of him.

James was standing in the middle of the dusty reception with his phone up and had not moved in some time.

He read the paragraph again before he said anything, because it did not make sense the first time and he wanted to be sure it still did not make sense the second.

”South Korea took Baldwin,” he said. ”The Americans took Raymond.”

”We know,” Cillian said.

”Their kingdoms have nothing in common. Different settlements standing, different armies left, different roads open. Every choice either of them made went a different direction from the other.” He turned the phone round. ”They both filed the same thing in their anomalies annex. Red light. Under the palace at Caerleon.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

Maeve came back three steps. ”Are you certain we saw the same thing?”

”Yes.”

He did not have to work for it. It had been in the last frame of the projection the Tower showed them before any of them chose a side — after both armies had finished destroying each other outside the capital, after the monsters walked in over the top of them, a red light had come up out of the ground under the palace and spread through the foundation stones and the floors until both princes’ fallen banners glowed the colour of an open wound.

Then the Tower had run it backward, and the light had drained down into the earth and gone.

James had watched that happen and filed it under *scenery*.

Finn put his hand out for the phone and read the report himself, taking his time about it.

”Right,” Maeve said. ”Then one thing follows. If a Baldwin team and a Raymond team are both seeing it, us picking Raymond didn’t cause it.”

”That’s not the same as the princes having nothing to do with it,” Finn said, without looking up. ”All it proves is the thing under Caerleon is still there whichever route you walk in on. It survives the choice. That’s different from not caring about the choice.”

Cillian asked the question none of them had.

”Do any of them know what it is?”

James scrolled to the end. There was not much at the end.

”No. Nobody’s identified it. There’s no System description in either release, no analyst conclusion, nothing either bureau will stand behind. Two teams wrote down that they saw a light and neither of them knows what they were looking at.”

Ronan pushed off the doorframe.

”Then it goes where every other unknown goes. We remember it, we watch for it, and we do not build one single part of a plan around a thing we can’t name.” He looked at James. ”You especially.”

”Agreed.”

James put the phone in his pocket.

The only thing that had actually changed was small, and he carried it out of the building with him. The palace in that projection was no longer a building in the background of an image he had seen four floors ago.

Something under it had gone on the list.

---

He opened his own window at the kitchen table that night, after Nyra had gone up and the house was quiet.

[NAME: JAMES GANNER]

[CLASS: NECROMANCER — LEGENDARY]

[LEVEL: 40]

[EXP: 47,675 / 63,000]

[STRENGTH: 61]

[AGILITY: 83]

[INTELLIGENCE: 150]

[ENDURANCE: 87]

[LUCK: 54]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5]

Five points, sitting where they had been sitting since he stood over Vane’s body and closed the panel without touching them.

He had told himself he would spend them once he knew what Floor 25 was going to ask for, and he still did not know, so he thought about what had nearly killed him instead.

It had not been output. He had put a Necro Blast through a marshal’s armour at contact range and it had worked.

It had been the second and a half where he had committed to a jump, and a man who had watched him make three of them had simply stood where the fourth one ended and swung a poleaxe into the middle of it. Two thousand and forty-eight down to one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in a moment where James had not even been fully present to see it coming.

More damage would not have changed that. Being slightly harder to remove from the board might have.

He kept the priority where the priority belonged, because he was a necromancer and everything he did ran off Intelligence, and he did what he had been doing since Floor 20 with the rest.

[FREE STAT POINTS DISTRIBUTED]