Chapter 311 - 302 — The Name Everyone Heard I

Chapter 311: Chapter 302 — The Name Everyone Heard I

James looked at the body.

It lay on its side on the flagstones with the wound above the hip still open and the bare stripe still across the ribs, and it was a body, and it was going to stay a body.

Then he looked four feet to the left, at the patch of stone where the red had gathered itself up and thinned out of existence, and there was nothing there at all. No crack. No seam. No dull glow underneath. Just flagstone, in a courtyard full of people who had been dead ten thousand years.

He looked back at the corpse.

Then at the empty stone.

The man was here. The power was not. That was the only thing in the last four minutes he could actually prove, and he turned it over twice and could not get anything else out of it.

Alice had not moved either. Her wings hung open and almost completely still behind her, and she was watching the same patch of floor, and she had been watching it since before he asked her the question.

He did not ask her anything else.

She had given him what she had. *One of the Seven*, and *no*, and the space between those two things was the whole problem, and pushing at her in the middle of a dissolving floor was not going to close it.

---

Behind him, Team Zero came down off it.

Ronan lowered the shield only after he had checked the whole courtyard twice — the steps, the colonnade, the gate they had walked in through — and then let the ruined thing hang off his forearm and rotated the shoulder that had taken three discharges. He did it slowly. He did it twice more.

Finn let one axe drop to his side and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and left a red smear along it, and did not notice.

Cillian bent forward with both hands on his thighs and stayed there for six or seven breaths before he straightened up.

Maeve went round all of them. She put two fingers against Ronan’s shoulder and made him lift it. She turned Finn by the elbow and looked at his side. She said something to Cillian that James did not catch, and Cillian shook his head, and she looked at him for another second before she accepted it.

She checked her own arm last, and only because she ran out of other people.

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE — 00:02:47 REMAINING]`

James let it run.

---

`[MAIN STORY BOSS SLAIN]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[MAIN STORYLINE COMPLETE]`

`[FLOOR 30 CLEARED]`

Nobody said anything.

They stood there and waited, because they had all been on Floor 26 and they had all watched a Warden stand back up out of its own pieces, and every single one of them was waiting for the second half of it.

Ten seconds went by. Then twenty.

Nothing came. No new panel, no second phase, no hidden objective, no thing coming out of the keep.

Floor 30 was over.

Ronan let out a breath through his nose that James heard from ten metres away.

---

The chat went off like a firework.

James had forgotten about it entirely, which was, he supposed, the point of paying somebody to handle it. He had a broadcast running to something over two million people and every one of them had just watched a man die, watched a red light come out of him and vanish, and heard a necromancer ask a Fallen Angel a question and get one word back.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** SO THAT WASN’T WRATH

**[ZeroFan]:** SHE SAID WRATH IS ONE OF THE SEVEN. ONE OF THE SEVEN WHAT

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THEN WHO DID THEY JUST KILL??

**[GalwayGoblin]:** THE RED LEFT THE BODY AGAIN. AGAIN.

**[CorkClimber]:** somebody clip the whole conversation before it goes

**[user88317]:** SEVEN. SEVEN OF WHAT.

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

James read about six lines of it and understood precisely which forty seconds of the last hour the entire world had decided to keep.

He closed it.

Maeve had already been looking at him, and when he glanced up she moved her eyes to the broadcast indicator floating at the edge of his vision and back, and that was the whole of the conversation.

Nobody said the word again while it was live.

---

`[CALCULATING FLOOR CONTRIBUTION...]`

`[FLOOR 30 CLEAR REWARDS CALCULATING...]`

`[THE LAST DEFENDER — MAIN STORY BOSS]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 23,500]`

`[FLOOR 30 CLEAR REWARD]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 45,000]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 50,000 PER MEMBER]`

Cillian made a noise from the flagstones that was not a word.

`[LEVEL UP]`

`[LEVEL: 42 → 43]`

`[ALL STATS +1]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]`

`[EXP: 27,645 / 72,000]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS — TOTAL UNSPENT: 15]`

`[ALLOCATE NOW?]`

James flicked it away without reading the rest of it.

Fifteen points sitting in a box. He had been carrying ten of them since Floor 27 and he was not going to spend them standing over a dead Story boss with a broken scythe in his hand.

`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`

`[GRAVE STEP — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[NECRO BLAST — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

Nothing ranked up. Nothing evolved. He had thrown himself across that courtyard twice with a second of blindness on the far end of each one and the Tower had given him a line of text saying he had got slightly better at it.

Then the last one.

`[FLOOR MVP — JAMES GANNER]`

`[REASON: FINAL BOSS KILL / SUPPRESSION OF UNCLASSIFIED HOSTILE POWER]`

James stopped.

*Unclassified.*

The same word. The exact same word it had used on Floor 28, in a dry valley, over a Heavy Floor Soldier with its arm on the ground.

The Tower had a name for everything. It had named a Fallen Divinity, and a broken scythe belonging to something that had come to collect him personally, and a labyrinth that moved on a fifteen-minute clock. It had a name for a man he had killed eleven minutes ago and it had put it up in four lines before the fight started.

He had a name now. He had heard it twice in one hour, out of a dead man’s mouth and out of Alice’s.

The Tower still would not use it.

James looked at the word for a second longer than he needed to.

Then he closed the panel.

Nothing appeared under Alice’s name. It never did.

---

For about a minute nobody did anything useful.

Finn put his axes away, which he did not do until he genuinely believed a fight was over. Ronan turned the shield face-up across his knees and started going over the damage with his thumb — the caved boss, the split in the rim — even though the Waiting Room was going to give him his shoulder back and would not do a thing for the shield. Maeve sat down against the base of a column instead of standing up out of habit. Cillian lowered himself beside her and put one leg out straight and closed his eyes.

Alice was still on her feet.

She had not looked away from that patch of flagstone once.

James went and stood beside her.

He did not ask who Wrath was. He had already got the ceiling of that answer twice and asking a third time would only make her lie or make her refuse, and he did not want either of those in the last thirty seconds of a story floor.

He asked the one thing he had actually watched happen.

"That power. Do you think it was his?"

Alice took long enough that he thought she might not answer.

"No," she said. "I do not believe it was."

That was all of it, and James did not push, and then, the floor began to come apart around them.