A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 308: Chapter 299 — The Man Who Endured III (Bonus)

He worked it out on a ridge above a valley that was on fire from one end to the other, and none of the fire was his and none of it was the enemy’s either, because there was no longer a clean way to say who had started any particular part of it.

The war had stopped being about the war.

Nobody down there was fighting for the valley. Nobody was fighting for grain, or a road, or a border, or a king. Every single thing happening below him was happening because of what the other side had done last, and the thing the other side had done last had happened because of what his side had done before that, and it went back and back and he could not find the beginning of it anymore.

And the red was thicker than he had ever seen it.

Not on him. In the ground. In the stone of the ridge under his boots, in the cracks in the road below, in the burnt terraces on both sides of the valley — a dull sullen glow down under everything, everywhere the cycle had been running longest.

It was not a weapon he had been given.

It was a thing that grew where people did this to each other, and he had been very, very good at making it grow.

He sat down on the ridge and understood, in one piece, why he had been chosen.

Not because he was cruel. He was not cruel; he had never been cruel, and he could have named forty men in his own army who would have made worse use of it.

Because a man who could carry enormous anger for a year without doing one stupid thing was a man who could *hold* an enormous amount of this and keep functioning.

A man who lost control burned out in a season and took a village with him.

Sevrin had lasted eleven years.

The exact quality that had made him worth following had made him the best possible thing to pour it into. Every night he had gone up on the wall and refused to burn a camp had been an audition.

---

By the twelfth year most of the world was ash.

He walked through it. Cities where the roads had gone to glass. Weapons run together at the tips in piles at abandoned barricades. Whole quarters where the stone had softened before it cooled. He passed positions his own people had dug and positions the other side had dug, and after a while he could not tell them apart, because everyone had ended up falling back the same direction.

Toward the Last Stronghold.

It was the only thing left standing, and it was next, and they were coming up the road for it with everything they had left.

---

He took the first three hours of that assault standing in the gateway.

He took a lance through the thigh and a sword across the back of the neck and something he never identified through the plate below his ribs, and he did not answer any of it, because he was waiting — because he had learned that if he let it build long enough, the thing he gave back would end the war in one piece.

By the fourth hour he was carrying more than he had ever carried.

He could feel it standing off his shoulders. The air was moving wrong around him. Men on both sides had stopped coming near him, and the stone under his boots had gone from warm to hot, and he raised his hand to finish it.

And he saw Ivet.

She was thirty-one by then and she had a scar from her ear to her collarbone and she had been on his signal posts for twelve years. She was standing at the inner gate, twenty feet away, exactly where she should have been, doing exactly her job.

She was looking at him.

And when he raised his hand, she put the gatepost between herself and him.

Sevrin saw the rest of them then. The whole inner court. Six thousand people who had cheered him off a wall in the first winter, standing very still and watching the red come off their own protector — and not one of them was looking at the enemy in the road.

They were watching the thing in the gateway to see which way it was going to go.

*They think I’m the next one.*

He looked at the road, and at what he was holding, and understood that it would work. It would kill everything on that road. It would probably take the outer wall and part of the city with it, and it would end this assault, and then the people who had sent that army would answer it, because they always answered it, and there would be another one after that.

There was no last blow. There had never been a last blow. That was the entire mechanism and he had been feeding it for twelve years.

So Sevrin lowered his hand.

---

They hit him for another two hours and he did not give any of it back.

He took a spear through the shoulder and he held it. He took a hammer across the hip that broke something he could feel grinding and he held that too. The red came off every wound and gathered and had nowhere to go, and it built, and built, and by dusk there was so much of it around him that the men attacking him had stopped attacking and simply stood in the road looking at him.

Holding it was worse than anything the enemy had ever done to him.

It wanted out. That was the closest word. It was not alive and it did not speak and it did not tempt him, and it wanted out the way water wants down, and every second of not letting it out was a second of deliberate, sustained refusal, and he had to do that second again immediately afterward, and again after that.

He did it until the assault broke off on its own.

He did it through the night.

He did it the next day, and the next, and by the end of the week the red was no longer standing off his shoulders in a cloud. It had come in against him. It lay flat along his arms and his back and his throat, close and even, thick as a second skin and going nowhere at all.

His wounds never closed. Not one of them, not ever again.

But nothing else in that world burned after that day.

The Last Stronghold survived, because the man in the gateway finally stopped handing back what he had been given — and eleven thousand people lived out their lives behind those walls, in a dead world, protected by the reason the world was dead.

He never once thought of it as forgiveness.

There were four hundred and eleven names on a paper he had read twice on a wet morning, and after them there were tens of thousands more, and a great many of those were on him, and no amount of standing still afterward was going to move them onto somebody else’s account.

---

The stranger came one last time.

He came at evening, and stood on the parapet edge on six inches of wet stone the way he had the first night, and he looked at Sevrin for a long while.

He was exactly as beautiful as he had been twelve years earlier. Nothing had touched him. The crimson still moved deep in the black feathers and the ring still burned red-gold behind his head, and his face still had that pleasant, patient, faintly entertained interest in it, as though he had come out to look at the weather.

He did not threaten him.

He did not congratulate him.

He looked at a man standing perfectly still with more of that power packed against his body than had ever existed in one place, holding all of it, refusing all of it, and going nowhere for as long as it took.

"Yes," he said. "I thought so."

Then he opened his wings and left, and Sevrin never saw him again.

♢♢♢♢

---

James had not moved.

The courtyard was full of people who had been dead for longer than anyone could count, and none of them could see him, and a woman with something under her arm walked straight through the space where his skeleton had been broken ninety seconds ago.

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — HP: 64,700 / 95,000]`

The panel was still there. The wound under his arm was still open. The bare stripe across his ribs where the scythe had gone through had not filled in.

"Nobody move," Maeve said, from the column. "Nobody move until we know if it’s real."

Finn had his axes up. Ronan was back on his feet with the shield deformed across the boss. Cillian was holding his hand against his chest and staring at a child on a parapet.

And the Last Defender was not looking at any of them.

He was looking at the scythe.

He had been looking at it since James released it and he had not stopped, not through the courtyard rebuilding itself, not through the ash going up instead of down — his eyes were on the black blade and they had the look of a man reading something he already knew how to read.

Then they moved.

Past James’s shoulder. To Alice.

To the four metres of black wing standing open behind her, and to the broken ring of dark light hanging behind her head with nothing holding it up.

Something went through his face.

James had spent three floors watching this man be unreadable and he read that one instantly, because he had seen it on a hundred faces in a hundred debriefs and it never looked like anything else.

*He knows what she is.*

Alice went completely still.

James saw her see it — saw her register that she had been recognised, saw her not react in any of the four or five ways a person reacts to being recognised, and that absence was louder than anything she could have said.

"Alice."

"Not now."

"He knows you."

"*Not now.*"

The Last Defender lowered the sword.

He looked at Alice’s wings, and at the ruin of the halo behind her head. Then he looked back at the black blade in James’s hands, and at the cold coming off it, and at the man holding it.

And he spoke for the first time since he had come out of that doorway.

"Wrath."