A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

They were halfway up the aisle when the announcer stopped them.

"Ladies and gentlemen, remain seated. Our next exhibition bout is an A-rank special match."

Finn turned toward the stairs.

James did not.

The crowd had already changed. People who’d been filing toward the exits reversed. The low hum of conversations that had run through the whole D-rank bracket dropped off almost completely. Guild scouts behind the tinted glass up in the private booths shifted forward, and the two nearest James and Finn in the aisle both went quiet in the middle of whatever they’d been saying. The medics near the side exits stepped closer to the ring perimeter and unzipped their kit bags without being asked.

An A-rank bout in an open bracket was not something any of them got to see often.

Finn looked back at him.

"We have someone to find," he said.

"Two minutes," James said.

Finn checked the tunnel entrance, then looked back at the ring, then stayed.

The announcer’s voice rose again over the crowd noise.

"Introducing first, fighting out of the blue corner — an A-rank Mage Fist practitioner with nineteen professional wins. Cillian Ward!"

The left tunnel opened, and Ward stepped out.

He was not a big man. Average height, lean build, hands wrapped in black combat tape from the wrist to the second knuckle. He walked to his corner without looking at the crowd. Blue-white lightning flickered across his forearms, steady and low, like something he kept running all the time.

The crowd gave him a sharp cheer. He did not react to it.

"And his opponent, from the red corner — an A-rank Sword Fighter with twenty-three professional wins. Seun Adewale!"

Adewale came out of the right tunnel with a thin blade already drawn, the edge catching the arena lights as he walked. He had calm eyes and long reach and he moved like someone who had won twenty-three fights by staying exactly where he wanted to be.

The bell rang.

Adewale moved first.

His opening thrust came before most of the crowd had settled back into their seats. Clean line, straight to the chest, fast enough that the front row flinched before processing what had happened.

Ward stepped inside it.

He didn’t dodge far. He just closed the distance instead of retreating from it, and his reinforced forearm knocked the blade aside as lightning cracked through the impact.

CRACK.

The barrier above the ring flashed once.

The sound was different from anything in the D-rank bracket. Not the heavy thump of Ronan’s hammer or the scrape of steel on shield. This was sharper. Like something fracturing inside the air itself.

The crowd had been loud since the announcement. Now half of them forgot to keep talking.

Adewale pulled the blade back and shifted his weight. James could see him reading Ward’s footwork, looking for the edge of his range. Most fighters had a preferred distance. Find it and you could break almost anyone.

Adewale came back from a different angle, cutting low and then up in a combination that gave nothing away until the last tenth of the movement. It was good. The kind of combination that ended fights.

Ward answered with his elbows and his feet. He slipped the second cut by half a centimeter — just enough — and fired a short burst of lightning directly into Adewale’s guard from close enough that James could see the blue light from the aisle.

Adewale’s arm shook.

He reset immediately and didn’t show anything on his face, but the arm had shaken, and Ward had seen it, and the whole tone of the fight shifted in that one second.

No one in the arena was sitting properly anymore.

The guild scouts had stopped talking entirely. Someone in the front row had one hand pressed to the barrier without realizing they’d moved. A woman two rows back grabbed the arm of the person beside her when Ward took a shallow cut across the ribs and didn’t stop moving.

James and Finn watched.

Ward bled a little from the cut. He touched the spot once with two fingers, checked for depth, and kept fighting.

The fight went on like that. Three minutes, maybe four. Adewale was good — he adjusted twice, tightened his combinations, and pushed Ward into tighter angles near the barrier edge. But Ward was reading the timing rather than reacting to it, and when Adewale committed to the same cross-body cut for the third time, Ward was already inside his arm before the blade finished moving.

The lightning-loaded forearm strike hit Adewale at the elbow.

CRACK.

Adewale’s arm went rigid from the elbow down.

Ward put a body blow into his ribs half a second later and Adewale skidded backward and hit the barrier. The shimmer spread behind him in three rings. His sword was still in his hand but his fingers weren’t responding, and his legs weren’t quite under him.

The referee let it run for three seconds.

Adewale tried to reset his grip. Couldn’t.

The referee stepped in.

The crowd went up.

James watched Ward flex his right hand once, then check that Adewale was upright. When he saw that he was, Ward turned and walked toward the tunnel without looking at the gallery. No hands raised. No acknowledgment of the noise behind him. He was gone before the announcer finished reading out his record.

Finn spoke after a moment.

"The guardian is still worth approaching," he said. "But that—" He nodded toward the empty tunnel where Ward had disappeared. "That changes what Floor 15 needs."

"It does," James said.

Finn was quiet for another second. He’d watched the same fight James had. He’d seen Ward take a cut and not react to it. He’d seen the way Ward moved inside Adewale’s guard — not fast the way most people meant fast, but efficient in a way that made fast look expensive by comparison.

A D-rank guardian who held his position and helped opponents up afterward was one kind of teammate. An A-rank storm fighter who didn’t celebrate wins was a different conversation entirely.

"Two people to find instead of one," Finn said.

"Let’s start with Ronan," James said.

He started moving.

They found Ronan near the fighter exit, away from the crowd.

He had his back against the corridor wall and was checking the strap on his shield with one hand while Lim sat on a bench a few meters down, pressing a cold pack to his jaw. The two of them weren’t talking, but they weren’t ignoring each other either. Ronan had helped him up in the ring. Whatever that had been worth, it was still worth something out here.

Ronan noticed them before they were close enough to speak. His eyes moved to Finn first. Then to James.

He did not say anything right away.

James stopped in front of him. "We watched your match."

"Half the arena watched it," Ronan said.

"We stayed for the A-rank bout after," Finn said. "Before that, we were watching you."

Ronan’s expression didn’t change. He finished tightening the strap and straightened up. "What do you want?"

"How far have you cleared?" James asked.

"Floor 11."

"Why’d you stop?"

A pause. Not long. "My old party kept treating formation like a personal preference." He set the shield down against the wall. "Third floor in, they started making unilateral calls without telling the team. By the fifth floor they were actively arguing mid-fight about contribution scores." He looked at James. "I wasn’t interested in dying because someone wanted to win an argument underground."

He said it flat, with no edge in it, like he’d already processed it and moved on.

"We’re preparing for Floor 15," James said.

Ronan looked between the two of them. "You’re recruiting me or trying to get me killed?"

"Testing candidates," James said.

Ronan turned that over. "I haven’t cleared Floor 14."

"We know," Finn said. "We can give you the strategy to clear 12 through 14. But that comes after the test."

Ronan looked at James specifically. "You already know what I hit like from the match. What are you actually checking for?"

"Whether you can hold position when the fight stops being fair," James said. "Whether you protect the people who need protecting without being told twice. The arena tells me you can handle yourself. It doesn’t tell me how you behave when something you didn’t plan for happens."

Ronan thought about that.

"The D-rank bracket doesn’t have floors that change the rules on you mid-fight," he said.

"No," James said. "It doesn’t."

Ronan was quiet for a few seconds. Then: "One test."