Chapter 317 - 308 — The World Kept Climbing I

Chapter 317: Chapter 308 — The World Kept Climbing I

`[SKILL PROFICIENCY UPDATED]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[NECRO BLAST — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

`[GRAVE STEP — PROFICIENCY INCREASED]`

Three lines for an hour.

James read them standing in the middle of a fort he had spent that hour turning into a factory, with six skeletons still upright around him because he had not told them to be anything else yet.

Nothing ranked up. He had raised fifteen bodies out of a corpse pile at a gate and the Tower had given him a sentence.

He went over to Fossor instead.

It had come the whole way out and was sitting in its own wide ring of turned earth, and there was still soil coming off it in slow falls where it had been packed into the seams. Fifty-eight minutes underground. Four Heavies put off their feet, one gate floor collapsed under a charge, and every single wave called before it cleared the ditch.

James walked around it once.

There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing different about it either — no new line under its name, no rank, no second form waiting to be unlocked because it had finally done a day’s work. It was exactly what it had been when he had summoned it that morning, which was a thing that went through the ground and came up where he told it to.

He stood there a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he put a hand out and dismissed it, and the dirt closed over the place where it had been.

---

`[FLOOR EXIT SEQUENCE INITIATED]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST ENDING]`

**[GalwayGoblin]:** SIXTY MINUTES AND NOTHING WENT WEIRD

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** normal floor. actual normal floor. i forgot what those looked like

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN NEVER LEFT THE GATE

**[CorkClimber]:** SHOW THE MOLE AGAIN

**[user88317]:** IT CAME UP UNDER THE BIG ONE TWICE. TWICE. ℯℯ𝘭.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** he’s had that since book one basically. he’s just never had a floor where standing still for an hour was the whole job.

**[ZeroFan]:** whats it CALLED james

`[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]`

The chat went out and the fort went with it.

---

`[HP RESTORED]`

`[MANA RESTORED]`

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

Ronan lifted the shield arm before anything else. He had been absorbing impacts through it for sixty minutes and it had stopped being an arm somewhere around the forty-minute mark, and now he raised it, and rotated it, and did it a second time to be sure.

Cillian turned both hands over and looked at them.

Finn rolled his shoulders and did not say anything.

James felt the mana come back into him all at once, three thousand one hundred against fourteen hundred and forty, and it was the difference between being tired and having been tired.

The shield still had a split in the rim you could get two fingers into. It always did.

`[FLOOR 32 AVAILABLE]`

James left it closed.

Not out of caution. They had spent an hour standing in a gate and there was no version of the world where the right thing to do next was open another door immediately, and nobody in the Waiting Room even suggested it.

---

The headquarters was busy at half four in the afternoon.

James came in through the rear and there were people everywhere. A member of the ops staff went past him with a stack of medical clearance forms and said afternoon without stopping. Somebody had put a whiteboard on the second-floor landing with equipment allocations on it, twelve rows, ten names and two blanks.

Through the glass on the way to the stairs, the smaller training hall had eight of the new intake in it doing basic formation work under one of Ronan’s assessors, walking a shape, stopping, walking it again.

James slowed for a second and watched them.

They were good. That was not the issue. Two of them had more registered floors than Finn and one had been in a guild for eleven years.

They moved independently. That was the whole of it — a caller said a thing, and then there was a beat, and then five people did it. Somebody checked left before covering left. Two of them reached for the same gap and one pulled back.

Every one of those beats was a half-second, and every half-second was a thing Team Zero did not spend anymore, and had not spent since somewhere around Floor 11.

It was fine. It was exactly what the assessment had been for. They had picked people worth six months, not five finished copies of themselves.

James kept walking.

---

Ronan and Cillian went straight to the orientation plan, because the thing they had built in six weeks had started producing actual people and neither of them entirely believed it yet.

Maeve confirmed with ops that the day was already handled and then stopped asking.

Finn stood at a training screen for considerably longer than anyone else, reading a recruit’s floor record with his head tilted, and James could see him building a party out of it in his head.

James did not interfere with any of it. He had spent six weeks learning not to, and it was still not comfortable, and he did it anyway.

---

He was almost off the operations level when one of the big screens changed.

`INTERNATIONAL FRONTIER — CURRENT STANDINGS`

James stopped.

He had watched this exact segment on a hotel screen after Floor 24, when the whole board had felt like a thing happening somewhere else. He had not properly looked at it since.

`IRELAND — FLOOR 31 CLEARED — TEAM ZERO`

`SOUTH KOREA — FLOOR 29 CLEARED`

`UNITED STATES — FLOOR 29 CLEARED`

`CHINA — FLOOR 28 CLEARED`

`ENGLAND — FLOOR 28 CLEARED`

`JAPAN — FLOOR 27 CLEARED`

His eyes went to the top line, then down to the second, then back up.

Thirty-one. Twenty-nine.

The last time he had studied this board seriously, South Korea had been on twenty-two and the Americans had just posted twenty-three, and Team Zero had been on twenty-four and pulling away.

Then Team Zero had gone up the Broken Crown, and taken Floor 30, and spent forty-three days on Earth running a recruitment process.

The rest of the world had not stopped for any of that.

"Two floors," said Finn, from behind his shoulder.

"Two floors."

"That’s not overtaking us."

"No."

"But it was six, after twenty-five."

"I know," said James.

Nobody was doing anything wrong. Two other parties had spent a hard year doing exactly what Team Zero had spent a hard year doing, and the gap had closed because a gap closes when you stop moving.

---

The segment moved off standings and into a retrospective, and James stayed where he was.

`THE BROKEN CROWN — COMPLETED ROUTES`

The screen split into four.

Four maps of the same kingdom. Same coastline, same river, same capital sitting in the same bend of it. Caerleon, four times, at the end of four different wars.

James had been inside one of them for five floors and he had never once seen it from above.

They ran Ireland’s first, which meant his.

Raymond’s colours across the north and the centre. The western settlement marked as surviving, with a population figure beside it. Greybridge with a broken line through it where the span had been. Highwatch shaded as taken but with a red note against the artillery, and James remembered exactly what that note was — a consecrated core that had never come out of the bastion, because they had not been able to get it out, because there had not been time.

Then America’s, beside it.

Also Raymond. Almost the same colours.

Their army had gone east on Floor 23 instead of west. The mountain pass was marked intact, held, a whole road running up out of the kingdom that in James’s version had come down.

And the western settlement had a casualty marker on it.

James looked at that for a while.

He had stood on that wall. Maeve had stood on that wall. Alice had come over the top of it. There were about eight hundred people behind it who had walked out afterward, and in the American Caerleon they were a number in a box on a map.

And a mountain pass was open that had been closed for them all the way to Floor 25.

Then England’s.

Also Raymond, and the presenter took a while over this one because it had gone strangest. They had never killed Alwyn Vane on their Floor 24. He had pulled out with most of his cavalry intact, and he was still on their board at the final war — an extra formation, in a colour James did not recognise, sitting east of the capital and complicating everything around it.

And they had left Greybridge standing.

The whole span, intact, and the presenter said the thing James had already worked out from the map: the enemy had crossed there on the second night, and Redfield was a casualty marker too.

Then South Korea’s.

Baldwin.