Chapter 173: Chapter 173: My Sweet toy James.
"Names," Marcus said. Not a speech. Two words.
Saoirse gave the garden’s dead, flat and short. Declan gave what he knew of the confessional court’s cost. Someone confirmed what the empty passage had already told them — the banquet hall group was gone, every one of them, the room silent when the notice reached it.
"Aisling," Marcus said, when the count reached Emerald Spire’s name.
Nobody answered him, because there was nothing left to answer with.
His hand closed tighter around the sword grip at his side. His jaw locked once, hard, and he looked away from the group toward the passage ahead instead of at any of their faces.
Maeve moved before anyone could stand around the silence too long.
She went to Marcus first — the worst wound in the room — then Finn, then Saoirse, then Declan, in that order, because those four were the ones who had to still be standing when the next door opened.
[MAEVE CALLAHAN — RADIANT PULSE]
[BLEEDING STABILIZED]
[CORRUPTION BUILDUP REDUCED]
The wounds didn’t close. The light didn’t erase what had happened to any of them. It slowed the bleeding, pushed the corruption pressure back a degree, and kept people who could still move on their feet a little longer.
Nobody thanked her for it. There wasn’t time, and she wasn’t doing it to be thanked.
James read his own window with blood still drying under his fingernails.
[OUTER COURT SEAL CLEARED]
[CONTRIBUTION CALCULATION COMPLETE]
[EXP AWARDED: 17,800]
[EXP: 6,840/21,000 → 24,640/21,000]
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL: 26 → 27]
[EXP: 3,640/24,000]
[ALL STATS +1]
[FREE STAT POINTS +5]
He didn’t celebrate it. There was nothing in the room built for celebrating.
He spent the points the same way he’d spent every point since the fight started — fast, practical, because Alice was behind the next door and there wasn’t time to be careful about anything but staying alive long enough to reach her.
[FREE STAT POINTS DISTRIBUTED]
[INTELLIGENCE +2]
[STRENGTH +1]
[AGILITY +1]
[ENDURANCE +1]
[JAMES GANNER] [CLASS: NECROMANCER (LEGENDARY)] [LEVEL: 27] [EXP: 3,640/24,000]
[HP: 1,260/1,260] [MANA: 1,740/1,740]
[PRIMARY STATS] [STRENGTH: 48] [AGILITY: 58] [INTELLIGENCE: 101] [ENDURANCE: 62] [LUCK: 41]
[REANIMATED SLOTS: 3/5 OCCUPIED] [MAX SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETONS: 20] [UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 0]
A second notice followed the first, and this one had nothing to do with stat points.
[SKILL PROFICIENCY THRESHOLD REACHED]
[SWORDSMANSHIP (F) → SWORDSMANSHIP (E)]
[SWORDSMANSHIP (E)] [PASSIVE EFFECT: IMPROVED BLADE CONTROL] [PASSIVE EFFECT: WEAK POINT STRIKES WITH SWORDS DEAL INCREASED DAMAGE] [PASSIVE EFFECT: GUARD RECOVERY IMPROVED WHILE WIELDING A SWORD]
Every clean cut he’d thrown at a joint or a throat across this whole floor had been building toward this, and he hadn’t noticed it happening until it finished.
The Inner Court’s approach wasn’t empty.
A pair of Inner Court Devotees came out of a side archway, low-level and rotten, and behind them a Veiled Hollow Knight in cracked white plate advanced with a joint exposed at the hip where old armor had split.
James went for the joint without thinking about the new skill at all.
His blade found the gap and bit in clean, deeper than it should have for the angle he’d used.
[SWORDSMANSHIP (E) EFFECT ACTIVE]
[WEAK POINT STRIKE]
The Knight’s leg buckled. James’s own guard came back up faster than it used to, no wasted half-second resetting his stance, and he followed the opening with a Necro Blast into the same joint while the Dark Knight held the lane beside him and cut the second Devotee down before it reached the group.
It wasn’t a fight. It was three seconds of cleanup, and it told him everything he needed to know about the upgrade.
The passage beyond the cleared court turned more beautiful the deeper they walked into it, and more wrong with every step.
White marble ran along both walls, veined through with red like something bled into the stone before it set. Broken halos, carved and cracked, sat above statues whose faces had been worn smooth. Roses grew straight out of cracks in the floor, red and full and completely out of place, and under the sweetness of them ran the same rot that had followed the whole floor from the first street.
Nobody talked much. The S-ranks were still hurting. The supports were low on mana and it showed in how carefully they rationed their casts. Eleven people walked where twenty had entered, and the gaps between them stayed wider than they needed to be.
At the end of the passage, the doors were waiting.
They were massive — white gold, twice the height of anyone in the group, carved floor to ceiling with kneeling men and winged women, roses climbing between broken halo after broken halo, and above it all, a crowned succubus seated in judgment over the whole scene. Red jewels sat set into the door handles like eyes, catching the low light.
The polished gold gave back their reflections, bloodied and tired, staring at themselves before they’d even opened it.
"Open it," Marcus said.
James found himself standing near the front of the group without deciding to move there.
Finn noticed him step forward and tightened his grip on the axe.
Maeve was not looking at the door handles at all. She was looking at the carvings, at the kneeling men and the crowned figure above them, like she expected the door itself to be lying to them before anyone had touched it.
Nobody said anything else. There wasn’t a speech left in any of them.
The doors opened without resistance, swinging wide on hinges that made no sound at all.
Inside was not an arena.
It was a throne room, untouched by anything that had happened outside it. Alice sat at the far end on a raised throne, calm, unbothered, as if the entire floor’s worth of dead had happened somewhere else, to someone else.
Around the base of the throne, men knelt and lay and slumped against the steps — not dead. Drained. Their eyes were glassy and empty, their faces slack, their bodies loose in the way of something that had stopped being able to hold itself up. Hands rested near her feet, unmoving, the way a hand rests when the person it belongs to has forgotten it’s theirs.
Alice rose from the throne, slow, unhurried.
Her wings unfolded fully behind her, spreading wide enough to fill the space around the dais, dark and enormous.
Her eyes passed over Marcus. Over Saoirse. Over Declan.
They stopped on James, and stayed there.
"Oh," she said. "My sweet toy James."
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