Chapter 102: Chapter 102: Floor 13: Bone Against Bone II

He noticed the change once enough skeletons were down.

The piles of shattered bone no longer carried the same weight the standing skeletons did, the same pull of floor authority he had felt when Reanimate bounced off the first one. The broken remains felt inert. Dead in a way the upright ones were not.

He tested it on a shattered pile near his feet.

[CORPSE EXPLOSION] [MANA: 1,310 → 1,282] [COOLDOWN: 40 SECONDS]

The pile went up in a burst of bone shrapnel and black force.

BOOM.

It did not behave exactly the way a flesh corpse did, with less wet force and more flying splinters, but it worked, and that was all that mattered. The blast tore into the skeletons nearest the pile and cracked two skulls, snapped an arm clean off a third, and knocked four more off their feet in a spray of stone dust and bone fragments.

That was the turning point, and James felt it land.

He could not reanimate them. He could not claim a single one of them while they stood. But the moment they came apart, the remains were his to use, and a floor that had taken his control away had just handed him a different weapon in exchange.

The team built around it without needing to be told twice. Finn and the warhammer broke skeletons down in clusters, the caster knocked staggered enemies back toward the growing bone piles, James detonated the piles when enough of them packed in close, and the twin-blade woman ranged across the flanks to finish anything that tried to crawl through the gaps. The fight stopped feeling like five people holding a line and started feeling like a method.

The skeleton warriors changed as their numbers dropped.

They stopped advancing as one block and split through the ruined street, coming at the team from several angles at once, and the pressure spread the group thinner than Finn wanted. A line of spears pushed toward the caster from a collapsed doorway. A knot of sword-skeletons pressed Finn and the warhammer in the open. Several broken ones crawled through the rubble toward James’s flank while he was mid-cast.

His mana started to go in real chunks, because Necro Blast and Corpse Explosion were carrying the strategy now and neither was cheap when he was casting them this often.

[MANA: 1,282 → 1,061]

The warhammer user overextended going for a kill and took a sword cut across the thigh, and he grunted, "Agh—", but stayed on his feet and brought the hammer back down on the skeleton that had cut him. A second skeleton stepped in toward the gap his overextension had opened, blade rising toward his exposed side, and the twin-blade woman crossed the distance and took its weapon hand off at the wrist before it could land.

THK.

"Watch your feet," she snapped at him, and he nodded without arguing.

Finn took a glancing hit of his own across the shoulder and held the center anyway. "Stay tight," he called out. "Every time we spread, they win the angles. Tighten up on me."

The team pulled back inward, and James understood while he reloaded another Necro Blast that the fight would have been a slaughter with weaker randoms. These three were not people he would put a permanent seat behind, not yet, but they listened and they adjusted and they were not dying, and on a floor like this that was the whole difference.

The last of the skeletons ended up packed into the ruined central square, down to perhaps fifteen.

It was not a stand made by any commander, because there was no commander, no captain unit and no boss waiting behind the rank and file. The terrain had funneled them inward and the team’s pressure had done the rest, and the survivors gathered in the open square only because there was nowhere else for the formation to go.

James and Finn read it the same way without needing to talk it through.

"Front line," Finn said, and he and the warhammer hit the leading skeletons together, axe and hammer breaking shields and skulls in a rhythm they had found somewhere in the last ten minutes. The caster threw a wide burst of force into the back row and shoved it stumbling forward into the press. The twin-blade woman slipped through the opening that made and went down the line cutting weapon arms loose so the frontline had nothing to answer with.

James held close range with his sword and Shield Instinct while the Corpse Explosion cooldown ran down, blocking a rusted axe on his guarded forearm and taking the legs out from under its owner. When the square was packed tight and a dozen skeletons had collapsed inward into a single broken heap at the center, he detonated the largest pile.

BOOM.

The blast shredded what was left of the formation, throwing bone and stone dust across the square and dropping the standing skeletons where the shrapnel caught them. The team finished the rest one at a time after that. The last skeleton warrior came at James with a rusted axe raised over its skull, and he caught the swing on Shield Instinct, stepped inside the blow, and put his sword clean through its spine.

It came apart and fell, and the sound of bones settling spread across the ruined town until the square went quiet.

The System chimed.

[FLOOR 13 — SUBJUGATION COMPLETE] [ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED: 50/50] [FLOOR CLEAR REWARD DISTRIBUTING]

[FLOOR 13 CLEAR — BASE REWARD] [TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 2,400 TC PER CHALLENGER] [PARTY EXP POOL: 11,000 EXP] [DIVIDED BY 5 CHALLENGERS: 2,200 EXP EACH]

[EXP: 4,185/13,000 → 6,385/13,000] [TOWER CREDITS: 39,815 → 42,215 TC]

James had not leveled, but the bar had moved a solid distance toward nineteen, and his side had already healed closed with the floor clear. He rolled his shoulder and felt the shallow cut along his ribs knit shut.

The three temporary teammates were quiet in a different way than they had been in the Waiting Room. The warhammer user kept turning his weapon over in his hands and looking at the scattered bone like he was still checking it would not get back up. The twin-blade woman had stopped glancing at James and Finn for approval and was watching the dissolving piles instead. The caster sat down on a broken step, let his breath out slowly, and did not say anything at all.

"You listened," Finn told them while he wiped bone dust off his axe. "You adjusted when your first approach didn’t work. That’s the only reason you walked out. Don’t forget that part."

The three of them nodded instead of grinning, and none of them tried to thank him for it.

James walked over to one of the larger bone piles and crouched beside it. He reached for it with Reanimate the way he had reached for the standing skeletons at the start, half expecting that the clear might have loosened the floor’s hold and left fifty soldiers’ worth of bone free for the taking.

[REANIMATE FAILED] [NO VALID TARGET — REMAINS DISSOLVING TO FLOOR ENERGY]

The bone under his hand was already breaking down, the fragments thinning into grey light and sinking back into the ground the way everything on a cleared floor eventually did. He could not harvest them after death any more than he could claim them in life. The floor had answered his class from the first cast to the last.

He stood up and let it go.

White light returned them from Floor 13, and the basement of Hale Estate resolved around James and Finn while the three random Challengers vanished back to their own entry points.

They were tired in the clean way again, the way that came from a fight won rather than a month wasted, but the tiredness did not loosen the pressure sitting behind it. Floor 13 was done. Floor 14 was the last gate before Floor 15, and Floor 15 was still sitting open with a countdown on it and a wiped party in its history.

"We can’t take another five days on the search," Finn said while he set the axe down. "Floor 14’s the last step before 15. If we crawl, the gap just gets worse."

"I know."

"So we rest, resupply, and hit 14 fast. But we need people, James. Real ones. Random teammates got us through 13 because we carried the adaptation. They won’t get us through whatever wiped that party."

"I know that too," James said.

Neither of them had an answer for where those people were going to come from, because the last five days had already proven the answer was not anywhere easy. James opened his System on the way out, and the unlock was waiting for him.

[FLOOR 14 — UNLOCKED]

James looked at the notification and felt no relief.

Floor 13 had answered his class.

Floor 14 was the last door before the floor that had killed everyone who reached it.

A/N

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