Chapter 276 - 267 — After the Crown II

Chapter 276: Chapter 267 — After the Crown II

The Waiting Room did its work.

Ronan’s arm came back first, or he noticed it first. He raised it slowly out to the side, then higher, then all the way over his head, opening and closing the hand, and let it drop.

"Right," he said.

Finn straightened up out of the shape he had been holding for twenty minutes and put a hand where the shoulder wound had been and found skin.

Maeve stopped shaking. James watched her notice it — she held both hands out in front of her, turned them over, and put them down.

James’s own ribs stopped hurting. The strain that had been sitting behind his eyes since Death Chain drained out. His mana came back up in one long cool pull.

Cillian flexed his arm.

The wounds had gone. The mana was back; James could see it in the way he stood. He rolled the shoulder, opened the hand, and reached for the conductors.

Nothing happened for about half a second.

Then the light came up along his forearm wrong — patchy, breaking between the second and third contact, dimming out entirely near the wrist before it came back.

He tried it again.

Same.

Nobody said anything. Nobody told him it was fine, because none of them knew whether it was fine, and Cillian would have known immediately if they were guessing.

He looked at his arm for a while.

"Right," he said. "That’s new."

Finn opened his mouth.

The System got there first.

---

[FLOOR 25 — THE BROKEN CROWN COMPLETE]

[FLOOR 25 CLEAR REWARD]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 60,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 24,000 PER MEMBER]

[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL UP]

[LEVEL: 40 → 41]

[EXP: 53,315 / 66,000]

[ALL STATS +1]

[STRENGTH: 62 | AGILITY: 85 | INTELLIGENCE: 154 | ENDURANCE: 89 | LUCK: 55]

[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]

James left the five points where they were. He had learned that much.

[SKILL PROFICIENCY THRESHOLD REACHED]

[SWORDSMANSHIP (E) → SWORDSMANSHIP (D)]

That one he read twice. He had swung Durendal more in the last five floors than in his entire climb before it, and somewhere in the middle of Greybridge and a bridge and a Crown formation the Tower had apparently been counting.

[GRAVE STEP PROFICIENCY INCREASED]

[TRANSITION STABILITY IMPROVED]

He checked the description underneath and the disorientation was still in it. Shorter. Still there.

Good. He had built four floors of habits around that second existing, and he did not particularly want to relearn how to jump.

[NECRO BLAST PROFICIENCY INCREASED]

[NECROTIC DECAY POTENCY IMPROVED]

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON PROFICIENCY INCREASED]

[CONTROL RESPONSE IMPROVED]

Then the last one.

[BROKEN CROWN — STORY COMPLETION BONUS]

[HIGH-GRADE ITEM REWARD GRANTED TO EACH SURVIVING CHALLENGER]

Five items came out of the air in front of five people, and the Tower’s sense of who needed what turned out to be roughly nonexistent.

James got a spear.

[S-RANK TWO-HANDED SPEAR]

[WEAPON DAMAGE: HIGH]

[PASSIVE: INCREASED ARMOUR PENETRATION]

[ACTIVE: BREAKING THRUST — MANA COST: 100 — COOLDOWN: 25 SECONDS]

It was, objectively, superb. He turned it over once and understood two things in the same breath: that it was probably worth more than his mother’s house, and that he was never once going to carry it, because he had Durendal on one hip and a dead god’s scythe in his inventory and no third hand.

Finn’s materialised across his palms, and he looked down at it for a long moment.

It was a staff. A very fine one, pale wood banded in silver, with a focusing crystal at the head and a listed bonus to spell channelling.

Finn looked at the staff.

Then at the two axes on his back.

"Selling it," he said.

Cillian made a sound that was almost a laugh, which under the circumstances was the best thing that had happened to any of them in an hour.

Maeve got a bracer with a substantial offensive enchantment and nothing on it whatsoever for shielding or restoration, and said, "Of course," and put it away.

Ronan got the only sensible drop on the floor — a set of A-rank reinforced arm plating with a passive that reduced impact transfer through the guard — and stood there holding it and looking mildly persecuted about his own good fortune.

"Say nothing," he said.

"I said nothing," Finn said.

Cillian’s was a heavy S-rank amulet with two strong passives, neither of which had anything to do with lightning or conductors or arms that had stopped working properly. He looked at it for slightly too long, then closed his hand around it and put it away without comment.

[CALCULATING FLOOR CONTRIBUTION...]

[MVP: JAMES GANNER]

[REASON: FINAL BLOW ON PRINCE BALDWIN / REPEATED SUPPRESSION OF TARGET REINFORCEMENT VIA AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE / SUSTAINED BATTLEFIELD CONTRIBUTION / CONTRIBUTION OF CONTRACTED ANATHEMA]

[MVP BONUS: 30,000 TOWER CREDITS]

[MVP REWARD: S-RANK ITEM CACHE]

The cache appeared in front of him, sealed, glowing gently.

James put it straight into storage without opening it. He had looked at enough bright windows for one day, and whatever was in there would still be in there tomorrow, on Earth, at a table, with a cup of tea.

[RETURN TO EARTH IN: 10 SECONDS]

---

Alice stood beside him through all of it.

Nobody asked whether she was coming. Nobody said her name, or looked pointedly at James, or made any of the eleven remarks that were available. Maeve glanced over once and went back to checking Finn’s shoulder for a wound that had stopped existing four minutes ago.

James did not reach for the interface.

He had said it out loud in front of forty million people. That was the entire mechanism, and there was nothing further to arrange.

[3...]

At three seconds he turned and looked back the way they had come, at the last of the Broken Crown going white.

Not at Baldwin.

Raymond was still standing beside his brother, alone in the middle of a disappearing field, with his sword in the ground and his head down.

[2...]

[1...]

The light took them.

---

The secure chamber under Dublin Tower was exactly as they had left it. Fluorescent strips, steel benches, dark cameras, the low hum of an air system.

Five Challengers came out of the light with their bodies whole and their equipment destroyed — Ronan carrying the ruin of a shield with no straps, Finn’s armour opened in three places, Maeve’s focus cracked, James’s coat in strips down one side, Cillian holding an arm that would not answer properly.

The TRB staff were already coming forward, and the medics behind them, and somebody was saying something about the debrief.

All of it stopped at once.

Every person in that chamber looked past James, over his shoulder, to the woman standing at his back.

Two enormous black wings folded neatly behind her. A broken halo hanging dark above her head. Hands loosely clasped in front of her, entirely undamaged, entirely calm.

Alice looked around the room with mild curiosity — at the lights, at the benches, at the fifteen people who had gone completely still — and then she looked at James and waited to see what he was going to do about it.

James did not do anything about it.

That was the whole point.