Chapter 297 - 288 — It Chose him III (Bonus)

Chapter 297: Chapter 288 — It Chose him III (Bonus)

James took the scythe off his back at the bottom of the last ramp.

He was not being dramatic about it. He had confirmed twice now that this was the only thing any of them owned that the red reacted to, and the last eight enemies on this floor were standing between them and the exit, and he was not going to spend the first thirty seconds of it reaching over his shoulder.

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE ACTIVATED]`

`[TARGET: AZRAEL’S BROKEN SCYTHE]`

`[DURATION: 30 MINUTES]`

The black ran out along the broken edge and the cold came into his hands and the sound of the floor stepped back a pace.

They went up.

---

Eight on the third terrace. Seven Floor Soldiers in a wide arc.

And in the middle of them, standing directly in front of the exit arch with his back to the light coming out of it:

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN]`

`[LEVEL: 47]`

`[HP: 12,500 / 12,500]`

He was already wrapped in it.

That was the thing that stopped James on the top step. Not a light coming up through the cracks. Not a thing arriving. The red was on him to the throat and had been for some time, banked and settled and still, and the captain had been standing there in it waiting for them to climb.

It had gone from a wounded man, to a healthy man, to a man further up the hill, to the strongest man on the floor.

And the strongest man on the floor was standing in front of the door.

"Right," said James.

---

The captain came at Ronan the instant they cleared the top of the ramp, already moving wrong, already at the speed it took the others thirty seconds to find.

Ronan did not try to hold it. He had learned that at the bottom of the hill. He gave two metres of ground and turned the strike off the shield’s face instead of standing under it.

Finn came into the recovery.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 12,500 → 10,920]`

The captain corrected out of a completed swing faster than a man should be able to and caught Finn’s second axe before it had any weight in it, and Finn had to abandon the strike entirely and get out.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

The bolt hit the weapon arm at the elbow and the whole pauldron went white.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 10,920 → 8,740]`

"Now," said Maeve. "Right side’s open — *now*—"

James sent one skeleton straight at the captain’s face.

He sent the second one round behind him, thirty feet past, and left it standing there doing nothing at all.

The captain destroyed the first one. Took it apart at the ribs in a single stroke and did not break stride.

Which was exactly what James had sent it to do.

`[GRAVE STEP — 120 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,800 / 3,100]`

The world went black and cold and came back thirty feet up the terrace, behind the captain, and for one full second James could not tell which way he was facing.

He did not swing. He never could, in that second.

Ronan and Finn and Alice had the captain’s entire attention for exactly that long, because they had all known it was coming.

Then James’s vision caught up, and he stepped in, and put the black blade across the red on the captain’s back.

The red came apart.

It peeled off the edge of the scythe and recoiled, two feet of it stripping away and folding back on itself, and the cut it left behind tried to close and could not. It reached across. It failed. It reached again.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 8,740 → 6,380]`

---

And then it did something new.

It did not try a third time.

Part of the red on the captain’s back simply detached — a third of it, maybe more — and dropped off him onto the flagstones and started moving toward the exit arch.

The captain was alive. Six thousand three hundred and eighty of him.

It was leaving anyway.

"James," Maeve shouted. "It’s *going*—"

James went after it instead of the man.

He swung the scythe down across the stone into the middle of the moving light, and one of the streams came apart under the blade — snapped in the middle, both ends going dull, the whole length of it dying on the flagstone like something spilled.

The other one went past his boot and kept going.

He could not get both. He was one man with one blade and there was a Floor Captain behind him.

The second stream reached the arch and went into it and was gone.

---

Alice stepped into the captain’s path.

He hit her with everything the red had left him — a full two-handed downstroke from a Level 47 with abnormal speed on it.

She caught it on her forearm.

Then she took the haft, turned the whole weapon and the man attached to it in a half circle, and put him down onto one knee on the stone hard enough to crack the flagstone under it, and held him there.

"Now would be sensible," she said.

Finn came in on the exposed side.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 6,380 → 4,710]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

Cillian had nothing big left and did not pretend otherwise. He put a tight controlled discharge into the brand and no more.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 4,710 → 4,020]`

James came through with the scythe and stripped another handspan of red off the shoulder.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 4,020 → 2,250]`

More of it came loose and ran for the arch, and James could not follow it, because Ronan had just put the shield into the captain’s chest and Alice had torn his guard sideways and there was a hole in the middle of him the size of a dinner plate.

James put the scythe through the hole and everything still burning inside it.

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN — HP: 2,250 → 0]`

`[FLOOR CAPTAIN SLAIN]`

`[LEVEL 47 ENEMY DEFEATED]`

`[PARTY EXP GAINED: 850]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,830 / 3,100]`

---

The seven soldiers had been fighting skeletons and Ronan for ninety seconds and had nothing left in them.

Finn broke the flank. Ronan stopped two from getting near Maeve. Cillian took one at fifteen metres.

A skeleton put a dead man’s sword through the throat of one that had been bleeding since the ramp.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 610 → 0]`

`[FLOOR SOLDIER SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 260]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,860 / 3,100]`

The last one broke off the line and went at James’s back.

Alice removed its head before it covered four metres.

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,890 / 3,100]`

`[HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED: 21 / 21]`

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED]`

---

The red left the captain’s body.

James was already turning to watch where it sank, because that was what it did — Caerleon, Floor 28, three separate times — the threads came off the corpse and found a crack and went down into the ground.

It did not find a crack.

Every stream that had survived his blade came off the body at once and did not spread out. They pulled together on the flagstones into one bright line about as thick as a man’s arm.

Then it went straight up the terrace.

Not into the stone. Not down. Along the surface, dead straight, in a line that did not deviate around anything, sixty metres of open ground toward the arch at the end of the third terrace — where the exit had come fully live the second the last soldier fell.

It reached the light.

It went through.

And the terrace was empty and quiet and there was no red anywhere on Floor 29.

`[FLOOR 29 CLEARED]`

---

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** IT WENT THROUGH

**[ZeroFan]:** FLOOR 30???

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT WAS THE EXIT. THAT WAS THE ACTUAL EXIT

**[user88317]:** IT WAS MOVING THERE THE WHOLE FLOOR

**[CorkClimber]:** THE RED WENT UP

**[FrontierWife]:** it left three living people to get there

**[GalwayGoblin]:** JAMES DO NOT CLICK 30 😭

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

---

`[FLOOR CLEAR REWARDS]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 6,500]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 32,000 PER MEMBER]`

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 42]`

`[EXP: 26,145 / 69,000]`

Nobody read any of it.

Cillian had sat down on a dead man again, which was becoming a habit. Finn was standing at the top of the terrace with an axe hanging off each hand, staring at the arch. Ronan had not put the shield down.

Alice was looking at the exit with an expression James had never seen on her.

Maeve came and stood beside him, and she did not offer a theory, because Maeve did not do that.

She gave him the three things they could prove.

"On Floor 28 it came up out of the ground, it took whoever was hurt, and when they died it went back underground." She held up a second finger. "On this floor it walked out of two living bodies and a dying one, and every single time it moved further up the hill. Not toward us. Not toward the strongest thing on the floor — toward the *front* of the floor."

"And the third."

"When the door opened," Maeve said, "it went through the door."

`[FLOOR 30 AVAILABLE]`

Everyone else was looking at the arch.

James was looking at the prompt.

Twenty-nine floors, and he had opened every single one of them the moment it appeared, because that was the job and there had never been a reason not to.

He stood there on the top terrace with a broken scythe going cold in his hands, and he did not press it.

Whatever it was had spent two floors getting to the other side of that door.

It was already up there, waiting, and it had gone on ahead of them on purpose.