Chapter 283 - 274 — Back to the Tower I

Chapter 283: Chapter 274 — Back to the Tower I

Two days later James pulled his coat out of the hot press and laid it over the back of a kitchen chair, and Nyra stopped talking mid-sentence.

She had been halfway through something about a rabbit. Her eyes went to the coat, then to the boots by the door with the laces already loosened off, then to the flat leather case on the table that he only ever took one place.

Her feet came down off the rung of her chair.

"You’re going up."

"Tonight, yeah."

"Which one?"

"Twenty-six."

She did not say anything about that. She just watched him check the case, and go through it, and close it, and her spoon stayed where it was in the bowl.

Alice was at the other end of the table with her wings folded down the back of the chair and a broken halo hanging dark behind her head, working her way through a second slice of toast with the concentration of a woman conducting an experiment.

She had not put anything away since the outing. Not once, not for anybody.

James pulled the interface up and formed the party from where he stood.

`[PARTY FORMATION — TEAM ZERO]`

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL 41 — HOST]`

`[FINN KAVANAGH — LEVEL 40]`

`[MAEVE DONNELLY — LEVEL 39]`

`[RONAN BYRNE — LEVEL 39]`

`[CILLIAN Ó BAOILL — LEVEL 38]`

`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`

Two lists. One roster, and one line underneath it that had nothing to do with the roster at all.

"Do you want to come?" James said.

Alice put the toast down.

"What is it like? A floor that is not a war."

"Monsters, mostly. A boss at the end. It’s a job."

"Then yes." She wiped her fingers. "I have seen exactly one floor of this tower and I was the thing standing at the bottom of it. I would like to see an ordinary one."

"Grand."

"That is not agreement to be used," Alice added, without heat, still looking at the plate. "If your team requires a wall, build one. I am coming to look."

James thought about the corner of his vision, where the other thing lived.

He did not go anywhere near it.

"Fair enough," he said. "Nobody’s putting you in front of anything."

"Good."

"That’s not fair," said Nyra.

Both of them looked at her.

She had her arms folded and she had clearly been building this for the last ninety seconds.

"She’s not a Challenger. It says five. If it says five and she’s going, then it’s not about the five, it’s about who’s *allowed*, and if it’s about who’s allowed then—"

"Nyra."

"—then I want to see the actual rule, because there isn’t one, there’s just *you*—"

"She’s dead," James said. "That’s the rule. She goes in because she’s part of my skill list. You go in when you’re not eleven."

"That’s a *loophole*, that’s not a rule, that’s a *loophole* and you’re using it—"

"Nyra Ganner."

James’s mother did not raise her voice from the sink and did not turn around, and the entire argument stopped where it stood.

"Get your bowl over here."

"But—"

"Bowl."

Nyra got up with the face of a woman whose barrister has abandoned her on the courthouse steps, put the bowl in the sink, and said, quietly and with total conviction, "It’s still a loophole."

"It is," Alice agreed.

"Don’t help her," said James.

---

They went in from where they stood.

That was the part that still felt wrong three months after they had earned it — no chamber, no queue, no Bureau staging area with a man reading a clipboard. James put his hand up, the interface opened, and the kitchen went white at the edges with his mother’s radio still going behind him.

`[ENTERING FLOOR 26]`

`[TEAM ZERO — 5 CHALLENGERS SYNCHRONISED]`

`[REANIMATED UNIT TRANSFERRING WITH HOST]`

Cold hit him first. Then the smell — old stone, standing water, dust that had not been disturbed in a very long time.

They came in on a flagstone plaza under a ceiling of packed earth and root, and the others arrived around him in the space of three seconds, one after another, out of nothing.

Ronan first, shield already off his back. Maeve second, staff planted. Finn third, both axes going into his hands the instant his feet touched stone. Cillian last, blinking, adjusting the strap of the focus on his forearm.

Then Alice, beside James, wings folded, tail resting on the flags.

Cillian looked left. Cillian looked right. Cillian counted.

"There’s six of us."

"There’s five of us," said James.

"There is *manifestly* six of us. I can see six. I’m looking at six."

"Roster says five."

"Then the roster is lying to my face."

Finn walked past him without stopping.

"Doesn’t matter," he said. "We clear this the way we clear everything. Five. She’s not in the plan, she’s not in the rotation, nobody looks at her when something goes wrong." He set his shoulders. "Ronan, front."

"Front," said Ronan.

---

James started the stream when they were already moving.

`[BROADCAST LIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`

`[VIEWERS: 1,204,663 ▲]`

The number climbed while he was still looking at it.

**[ZeroFan]:** SHE’S THERE

**[GalwayGoblin]:** SHE’S ACTUALLY THERE

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** floor 26 boss can go home lads

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** WHY DOES IT STILL SAY 5/5

**[CorkClimber]:** it says 5 but i count 6??

**[user88317]:** 5/5 SHE’S RIGHT THERE

**[FrontierWife]:** boss already finished he just doesnt know yet 😭

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** she’s not on the roster because she’s not a Challenger. she’s on his skill list.

"She’s not a Challenger," Maeve said, without turning her head. "Ronan, that arch on the left is load-bearing and it’s cracked. Don’t put your shoulder near it."

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** SHE’S ON HIS SKILL LIST

**[GalwayGoblin]:** ON HIS SKILL LIST 💀💀

**[user88317]:** LIKE A SPELL

**[AshesAndBones]:** she is going to be so annoyed when she hears that

---

`[FLOOR 26]`

`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`

`[MISSION TYPE: HUNT]`

`[OBJECTIVE: LOCATE AND DEFEAT THE WARDEN]`

`[WARNING: LABYRINTH CONFIGURATION IS NOT PERMANENT]`

Standard.

James read it twice, because after five weeks of Broken Crown — beacon riders, siege lines, a prince, a civil war, eleven thousand men on a road — the word looked almost rude.

No campaign objective. No population counter. Nobody to save.

Find the thing. Kill the thing. Go home.

"Standard," Cillian said. "Standard. Lads. It’s a *standard floor*. I’d nearly cry."

"Don’t get comfortable," said Ronan.

They moved out of the plaza into the city.

It was a city, and it was buried. The passages ran between the fronts of actual buildings — doorways, window frames, the stumps of columns — all of it packed under stone and earth so that the streets had become corridors and the squares had become rooms. Water ran somewhere below the flags and never came up. The light came from nothing James could identify, a low grey glow off the stone itself, and it threw no shadows worth having.

Ronan took point with the shield up and his good arm loose.

Maeve stood at every intersection for two seconds before anyone crossed it.

Cillian walked with his eyes down the long lines of sight, the way he had done since Floor 24, checking the far end of everything before Ronan committed to it.

Finn stayed a step behind Ronan’s shoulder, axes low.

And James went along the edges looking for corpses, because that was his job and there were none, and a floor with no corpses on it was a floor where he was carrying a sword.

Alice walked in the middle of them with her hands behind her back like a woman inspecting a building site.

---

The first pack came out of a collapsed doorway forty minutes in.

They were dog-shaped and not dogs — long-limbed, grey, hairless, with too much shoulder and heads that were mostly jaw. Nine of them, moving low and fast and completely silent, which was the worst part.

Ronan met the first two on the shield and did not move an inch.

Finn came round the outside of him and took the third through the neck on the backswing of the same motion that opened the fourth from hip to sternum, and he was already stepping through the gap before either of them landed.

Maeve put a wall of stone up across the doorway and cut the pack in half.

Cillian dropped one at the back of the room with a lance of light so thin it looked like a scratch on the air, and then leaned on his knees for a second, which he had not used to do.

James took the seventh himself. Necro Blast, close, straight through the ribs.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[GREYHOUND STALKER — SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,070 / 3,100]`

The eighth got past all of it.

It came off the top of a fallen column, over Ronan’s shield, past Finn’s guard, and went straight for the one target in the room that had not moved, hit anything, or looked at it once.

Alice took her right hand out from behind her back.

She did not turn to face it. She did not brace. She caught it in the air by the jaw, mid-leap, with the casual upward reach of a woman taking a coat off a hook, and closed her hand.

The sound was short.

She dropped what was left and wiped her palm on her thigh and kept walking, and she had never actually stopped walking, that was the thing James noticed — she had crossed about a metre and a half of ground while it happened.

`[GREYHOUND STALKER — DESTROYED]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,100 / 3,100]`

**[GalwayGoblin]:** DIDNT EVEN LOOK

**[CorkClimber]:** SHE DIDNT LOOK AT IT

**[user88317]:** LIKE TAKING A COAT OFF A HOOK

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** i take back everything that thing was rapid and she just. hand.

**[ZeroFan]:** SHE KEPT WALKING 😭😭😭

**[FrontierWife]:** dog: attacks / alice: no

Ronan finished the ninth and looked at the mess on the flagstones.

"That one was quick," he said.

"That one was very quick," Finn agreed.

Nobody said the other thing out loud, and the fight had still taken four minutes and cost Cillian more than it should have, and the floor did not feel harmless at all.

It felt like a floor where being quick was not enough.

---

James took a body.

He picked the cleanest of them, the one Maeve’s wall had crushed against the doorframe, and knelt with his hand flat on its sternum.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,020 / 3,100]`

It came up out of itself in about six seconds, flesh going off it in a grey drift, and stood there on four long legs with its head cocked at nothing, waiting.

"Scout," James said. "Left passage. Two hundred metres and turn round."