Chapter 320 - 311 — The Same Man II

Chapter 320: Chapter 311 — The Same Man II

Finn put the alternative up immediately, and it was a good one.

"They didn’t do the same Broken Crown."

Both of them looked at him.

"We saw four Caerleons on a screen yesterday afternoon and every one of them was different because of what people picked on floors twenty-one to twenty-five." He spread his hands. "They took Baldwin. They sent the reserve north. Their whole five floors were different from ours. If the Tower can hand out four different endings for the same kingdom, why can’t it hand out two versions of thirty?"

"That’s fair," said Maeve.

"I’m not saying it’s the answer—"

"No, it’s fair. It’s the first thing we should rule out."

She did not rule it out from the chair. She went and got the evidence.

---

It took until nearly six.

Maeve pulled every foreign archive the analysis team had spent six weeks collecting and went through them looking for one specific thing — not for red-coloured effects, of which there were plenty in a tower full of magic, but for the phenomenon: reinforcement holding a damaged body up, power coming off a corpse and moving under its own direction, anything the System had refused to classify.

South Korea’s Floor 29. Their layout had been nothing like Team Zero’s — no terraces, a river crossing and two bridges — and the phenomenon was not in it.

South Korea’s Floor 28. Nothing.

The United States, Floor 29. Nothing. Floor 28, an entirely different environment and a completely different objective, and nothing.

China’s Floor 28. Nothing.

Ronan came in around five and Cillian about twenty minutes after him, both of them called in by Finn, and by then it was not a curiosity anymore and both of them understood that within about a minute of standing in the room.

They put six foreign clears on six windows.

Six teams. Different countries, different floors, different environments, different classes, different routes.

Not one single instance of it anywhere.

"So it’s not the Tower," said Cillian.

"It’s not everyone’s Tower," Maeve corrected. "That’s not the same sentence."

---

Alice was standing at the end of the table.

James did not know how long she had been there. She had come in with Cillian or shortly after him and had not said anything, and she was watching the two frozen frames of the same man with her arms at her sides.

Her wings did not move once.

Not a shift, not a fold, not the small constant adjustment they made when she was standing anywhere for any length of time. She stood there and looked at a man without red on him and was completely still.

James watched her for three seconds.

Then he looked, without meaning to, at the interface line where a broken scythe sat sealed and dark and inert on his own back.

Then back at the screen.

He had a shape in his head. It had about four possible things in it and he was not going to say any of them out loud in a room at six in the morning on no evidence, because the last six weeks had taught all of them exactly what naming a thing too early did.

He did not ask Alice anything.

---

Maeve changed the sentence, which was the only real work anybody did that night.

"We’ve been saying the wrong thing since twenty-nine," she said. "All of us. Me included. We’ve been saying it was moving up through the Tower."

"It was," said Finn. "We watched it—"

"We watched it move up through *our* floors." She pointed at six windows of foreign footage. "It didn’t move up through theirs. It was never in theirs. The sentence we’ve been using is too big and it’s been making us think about it the wrong way for six weeks."

"Then what’s the sentence."

"It appeared across Team Zero’s sequence of floors, and nobody else’s that we can find."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That’s not the same as it following us," Maeve said, immediately, into the silence. "I want that said out loud before anybody’s brain finishes the sentence for them. Different choices could do it. A hidden condition could do it. Something about the specific route we took through twenty-one to twenty-five could do it, and we know for a fact that route was unique to us."

"Could it be the first clear?" James said.

Everybody looked at him.

"Serious question. We were first into twenty-eight, first into twenty-nine, first into thirty. If the Tower scales a floor for the party that gets there first, that’s not a conspiracy, that’s a difficulty setting."

"I can’t rule it out," said Maeve.

"No, hang on." Finn was shaking his head slowly. "First-clear scaling. Grand. That gets you more of them, tougher ones, better numbers, a nastier boss. I’ll believe all of that." He tapped the screen. "It doesn’t get you a thing the Tower’s own System refuses to put a name on. Twice. *Unclassified.* It named a Fallen Divinity. It named him." He pointed at the Last Defender. "It’s never named that."

Nobody had an answer to it.

Maeve did not resolve it and did not pretend to.

---

The news got there before dawn.

**WHY IS SOUTH KOREA’S FLOOR 30 DIFFERENT?**

**TEAM ZERO ARCHIVE SHOWS UNEXPLAINED RED PHENOMENON ABSENT FROM KOREAN RUN**

Somebody had already cut the two courtyards together. Somebody else had the two boss frames side by side with an arrow on one of them, which was the exact comparison sitting on the wall of a private room in Guild Zero, arrived at independently by a stranger with a laptop about ninety minutes after Maeve.

Nobody had said Wrath as a fact. That was something. The only thing the public had was a dying man saying a word and a Fallen Angel calling it one of the Seven, and most of the coverage was being careful with it.

James turned the news panels off.

They were not going to solve it, and watching them try was going to do nothing for anybody in that room.

---

The Korean fight was still going on one screen, muted, in the corner.

Nobody was watching it anymore.

James looked at it once and realised, with the sort of delay that comes at six in the morning, that he had been waiting for something for about forty minutes without knowing he was waiting.

The man had not spoken.

Their Last Defender had said one word in the entire encounter, at the very end, looking at a black blade and then at a pair of black wings.

This one had come out of a doorway and fought five people for the better part of an hour and had not said anything at all.

James did not put that anywhere. He did not have anywhere to put it.

---

Maeve left the two frames up when she finally stood away from the console.

They stayed side by side on the wall of the strategy room with the sky going grey outside the window and a fight from five thousand kilometres away running silently beside them.

Same weathered face.

Same lines in the same armour, the same worn place where a strap had sat.

Same heavy straight sword held low in the same hand.

Same eight steps, same ruined doorway, same courtyard with a colonnade down the eastern side.

On the left, a second body of red lying against him from wrist to shoulder to throat, perfectly still, held.

On the right, a man.

James looked from one to the other for a long time.

He did not know who Wrath was. He did not know what the red was, or what it wanted, or why the Tower would not put a word to it, or what had happened to the part of it that came off a corpse in that courtyard and thinned out of existence in front of him.

He knew one thing now that he had not known at twenty past eleven last night.

Floor 30 had never needed it.

That man had been standing at the top of those steps for ten thousand years without it, and the Korean party were fighting the floor as it actually was, and everything Team Zero had walked into on the way up to him — the seams under the road, the soldiers already lit before anybody touched them, the thing that came up through the cracks of a dead world — had been put there on top of it.

They had spent Floors 28 and 29 believing they were following it toward Floor 30.

It had not been going to Floor 30.

It had been going through theirs.