Chapter 127: Chapter 127: The Questions He Would Not Answer
He walked past the rows the others had taken from.
Something at the back of the vault was waiting for him, and he knew it the way he knew when a corpse was fresh enough to raise. It pulled at the inside of his chest with a slow, cold weight.
He went to it.
It was a scythe.
The blade was cracked along its length, chipped near the curve like it had cut through something it should not have been able to cut. Old black-gold chains wrapped the haft, sealed at the joins. The metal was dark and the cold came off it before he even reached out, numbing his fingers a hand’s width away from the surface.
The name came up on its own.
[AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]
[GRADE: ???]
[STATUS: SEALED]
[COMPATIBILITY: PARTIAL]
[WARNING: AUTHORITY FRAGMENT DETECTED]
James did not understand most of it.
He understood compatibility. The Tower was telling him this thing fit his class, partly, the way a key fits a lock it was almost cut for. He reached through the cold and closed his hand around the chained haft.
It let him.
Behind him, at the door, the angel smiled.
It was not the polite smile from before. It was smaller and more interested, and it landed on James wrong, the way a smile lands wrong when you cannot tell what the person is pleased about.
That smile made James want the scythe less, not more. He took it anyway.
He came out of the vault and went straight at the angel.
"What did she mean," he said, "when she said I had his power?"
The golden door folded shut behind him.
The angel looked at him for a long moment. When he answered, he did not answer the question.
"A shadow can survive even when the one who cast it is gone."
James’s jaw tightened. "That isn’t an answer."
"No," the angel agreed. "It is what I am permitted to say. There is a difference, and you would do well to learn it before you learn anything else."
"Then say more—"
A hand shoved his shoulder.
Maeve. She had crossed to him without his noticing, and tired as she was, the shove still rocked him half a step.
"Don’t," she said. Her voice was thin but it had an edge in it. "He’s only going to answer so many times. You waste them shouting the same thing twice, and we leave here knowing nothing."
James shut his mouth.
She was right and he hated that she was right.
The team pulled in around the question, because none of them was going to let the next one go to nobody.
"Ask him who she is," Finn said. He was watching the dead armor on the ground. "Ask him what walked onto a floor it wasn’t supposed to reach."
"Ask what Father means," Cillian said. He had gone quiet and stayed quiet since the grip closed on James’s throat, and the word came out of him careful. "She said Father like it was a name. He knows the name. Look at him."
"Ask why she could get in at all," Ronan said from the mud, eyes on the angel. "If that’s not supposed to happen, then something let it happen."
Maeve cut across all of them, low and certain.
"Those are small questions," she said. "Why her, why the floor, what one word means. The real one is bigger than any of that." She looked at the angel. "Why is any of this happening to us at all."
The square went still.
James looked at the angel, and the angel looked back, and James made the choice for the team.
"Why did the Tower appear on Earth?"
Something moved across the angel’s face.
It was not fear. It was not grief. It was older than either, and it settled into his eyes and stayed there for a breath before he spoke.
"Because Earth was no longer outside the war."
The answer dropped into the square and sat there.
Nobody was satisfied. James could see it land on each of them and find nowhere to go. Finn’s hand closed on his new axe. Cillian’s mouth opened and shut.
"What war," James said.
"You have used your questions," the angel said gently.
And that was the end of it.
[RETURN TO EARTH IN 60 SECONDS]
The countdown opened in the corner of James’s vision, and the angel’s light began to thin at the edges, the way the village had, like he was getting ready to be somewhere else.
James looked at the Dark Knight’s body.
The thought arrived clean and cold, the way the useful ones always did.
Maeve caught his expression first. Her eyes went from his face to the corpse and back, and she did not say stop. She just watched, close, the way you watch someone about to do a thing you are not sure can be done.
Finn followed her look and exhaled through his nose.
"Only you," he said, "would nearly get killed by a fallen angel and then look at the body she left behind like it’s a tool."
"It is a tool," James said.
He crossed to the remains and crouched.
The body was already going. The story that had powered it was gone, the Cross that had healed it was dead, and Alice’s claim on it had walked out of the cell centuries ago and out of this floor minutes ago. What lay in the mud was just black armor around something that used to be a woman named Camillia, and the System knew it.
James put his hand near the broken chestplate and reached for the skill.
[REANIMATE ACTIVATED]
[TARGET: DARK KNIGHT OF THE SUCCUBUS CROSS]
[WARNING: BOSS ENTITY DEGRADED AFTER DEATH]
[WARNING: STORY AUTHORITY SEVERED]
[REANIMATION SUCCESSFUL]
[DARK KNIGHT — LEVEL 15]
[CONTRACT SLOT OCCUPIED]
The armor moved.
Bones and metal dragged themselves up out of the mud with a low, wrong sound, the plates settling back into place over a body that no longer had a fire in it. The Dark Knight stood. The black was still black. But the red-black burning was gone from the seams, and the cracked helm came up with nothing behind the visor but a flat, patient dark.
No prayer. No Saintess voice. No call for Mother.
Just a dead knight, waiting for an order.
It was useful. It was also the most unsettling thing James had raised, and he had raised a disaster-class python.
The angel looked at the reanimated knight for a long moment and said nothing.
Then, quietly: "Your class is becoming exactly what it was meant to become."
"What does that mean," James said.
The angel only smiled again, and did not answer.
The rest came fast, before the countdown ran out.
[ABYSSAL VENOM PYTHON — LEVEL 20 → 21]
[CONTRACTED UNDEAD RECOVERING]
[DARK KNIGHT CONTRACT ESTABLISHED]
[REANIMATED SLOTS: 2/5 → 3/5]
[REANIMATED DIRE WOLF — LEVEL 9 → 10]
[NECRO BLAST PROFICIENCY INCREASED]
[REANIMATE PROFICIENCY INCREASED]
[DEATH CHAIN PROFICIENCY INCREASED]
James checked the Dark Knight once more.
Level 15.
The boss form had been far above that. The number told him plainly what the warnings had meant. He had not raised the thing that nearly killed his team. He had raised what was left after the story and Alice’s corruption were stripped out of it, and what was left was a fraction of the whole.
That was fine.
A fraction of that was still more than most things he could raise, and it had cost him nothing but a slot.
[RETURN TO EARTH IN 10 SECONDS]
Then the System spoke past the five of them, to the entire world.
This one was not private. James felt it go out wide, the same way the floor’s clear screen had stayed narrow, and he knew without being told that every Challenger on Earth was reading the same words at the same second.
[GLOBAL TOWER ANNOUNCEMENT]
[DUBLIN TOWER — FLOOR 15 SIDE STORY CLEARED]
[CLEARING PARTY: TEAM ZERO]
[FLOOR 15 DIFFICULTY REDUCED FOR FUTURE CHALLENGERS]
[STORY CLEAR RECORDED]
On the stream, the chat broke.
[LondonTowerWatch]: GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT. THEY GOT A GLOBAL ANNOUNCEMENT.
[SeoulRaidBoard]: side story clear?? that’s not a normal floor clear
[TRBWatcher]: Floor 15 difficulty reduced. Two parties died and Team Zero just made it survivable for everyone after them.
[GuildAnalyst_44]: This is recorded history now. Clip everything.
[Anonymous donated €50,000]: TEAM ZERO
The viewer count was a number James stopped reading.
[RETURN TO EARTH IN 3...]
The white light came up around them.
James got one last look at the square before it took him. The dissolving village, frozen and pale. The reanimated knight standing silent at the edge of his vision, his now. And the golden angel in the middle of all of it, light steady, watching James go with that same small, unreadable smile, like he knew something about James that James did not yet know about himself.
[2...]
[1...]
The floor went white.
He came back to Earth on his feet in the Hale Estate entry room, the others landing around him out of the same light.
The stone walls. The gear racks. The dim terminal. All of it exactly where they had left it, like the last few hours had happened to other people.
Ronan sat down on the nearest bench without a word. Finn leaned on a rack and breathed. Cillian looked at the conductor on his arm like he still did not believe it was real. Maeve lowered herself into a chair, took the circlet off with both hands, and held it in her lap.
James stood in the middle of the room.
His throat still hurt. He lifted one hand to it without meaning to, and the cold was still there, five faint points where her fingers had been.
In his inventory, Azrael’s Broken Scythe sat like a stone of ice, cold enough that he could feel it without holding it.
His phone was on the bench where he had left it.
It lit up. Then it lit up again. Then it stopped being separate alerts and became one long unbroken buzz against the stone, the screen flooding faster than the notifications could stack, every name he knew and a thousand he didn’t all arriving at once.
The world had watched Team Zero change the race.
But James had heard the part that was only for him.
Alice knew his power.
