Chapter 147 - Twenty-Four

Etzel did not care about twenty-five.

Not yet.

He cared about twenty-four.

THE LAST NECROMANCER FAILED AT TWENTY-FOUR.

The words remained on the waystation wall as if they had always been there.

Etzel stood in front of them with his arms folded.

"Failed how?"

Nothing.

"Died?"

Nothing.

"Lost the marked soul?"

Nothing.

"Destroyed a world?"

Orsik looked at him.

"Do not give it options."

"I'm establishing scale."

"By suggesting catastrophes?"

"The Keeper has poor conversational habits. I'm compensating."

Still nothing.

That silence mattered.

The Keeper had not written died.

It had written failed.

Etzel refused to turn vocabulary into evidence, but he also refused to ignore vocabulary when something this old seemed painfully precise.

He stepped back from the wall.

"Could still be alive."

Orsik's expression sharpened.

"Possible."

"Not probable."

"Correct."

"Good. We remain professionally miserable."

Back at Authority headquarters, Etzel requested every accessible progression record involving Hunters between Levels Twenty and Twenty-Five.

Renn stared at him.

"You're looking for efficient targets."

"No."

"Experience-density zones?"

"No."

"Level acceleration records?"

"No."

Renn's suspicion increased.

Etzel looked offended.

"I can make responsible decisions."

"Occasionally."

"I want to know what changes at Twenty-Four."

The answer was disappointing.

The moment gave Etzel something he had learned to value almost as much as an answer: time to check whether his first interpretation was wrong. One detail kept returning to him: "Do not give it options." "I'm establishing scale." "By suggesting catastrophes?" "The Keeper has poor conversational habits. It had felt simple while he was reacting to it. In retrospect it carried more than one possible explanation, and Etzel had paid enough for certainty to stop buying it cheaply. He forced himself to label facts, assumptions and hopes as three different things. What he had seen remained useful. What he thought it meant remained provisional.

Orsik watched the process without interrupting until Etzel finally looked up. “You can say it.”

“I was waiting to see whether you would notice it yourself.”

“That is an extremely inefficient form of support.”

“It worked.”

Etzel disliked that answer because it did. The correction went into the plan instead of his pride.

Etzel replayed the dangerous exchange at reduced speed. He removed the spectacular parts first: no Predator’s Interval, no heavy soul output, no attempt to reproduce the strongest strike. What remained was foot placement, reach, timing and the moment around "You believe the previous Necromancer broke under the weight." Etzel looked at him. That stripped-down version exposed the errors adrenaline had hidden. One step had been too long. One guard had depended on an ally covering an angle. One successful commitment had worked because the opponent chose the expected response, not because Etzel’s decision had been flawless.

Orsik corrected the motion once. Etzel repeated it until the correction survived fatigue. That was the kind of progress he trusted most. It produced no chest, no glow and no dramatic System line. It simply made the same mistake less likely to kill him twice.

One more detail bothered him: For once, the next Level did not look like a reward. Etzel tested the memory against the rest of the sequence and found that its importance depended entirely on context. That was exactly why he kept it. Minor details became decisive surprisingly often once a new piece of evidence arrived. He recorded it without elevating it into a theory.

The discipline felt unsatisfying. No revelation. No instant weakness. No clean answer. But the accumulated record was becoming a weapon of its own. Each correctly labeled uncertainty narrowed the number of ways a future enemy could surprise him with something he had already seen and misunderstood.

Nothing.

No universal threshold.

No known physiological transition.

No standard Rank event.

No consistent soul phenomenon.

Hunters reached Twenty-Four, fought, trained, lived, died and complained exactly as they did at Twenty-Three.

Etzel read six reports.

No approval covered the copy shown here; the chapter came from the author's official page, where readers support the writer.

Then twelve.

Then stopped.

"The problem isn't Level Twenty-Four."

Orsik stood across the table.

"Necromancer."

"Probably."

Etzel opened his own progression history.

Level One.

Orsik.

Level Five.

Witness of the First Flaw.

Every later milestone had added something.

Not merely strength.

Weight.

Orsik was a soul connected to him.

Saeva was another.

Rook had become an anchor inside the Foundation.

Abilities accumulated.

Soul Links deepened.

His body had begun carrying soul-pressure into physical combat.

Soul Architecture had formed because simple capacity was no longer enough.

Etzel stared at the pattern.

"Every time I become stronger, my soul has to hold more."

Orsik nodded slowly.

"You believe the previous Necromancer broke under the weight."

Etzel looked at him.

"I believe I don't know."

"Good."

"I hate when you sound like me."

Once the immediate pressure eased, the cost did not vanish with it. The memory of "Destroyed a world?" Orsik looked at him. made that especially clear. Etzel checked his breathing, grip, shoulders and the places where soul pressure had crossed into ordinary muscle. He no longer accepted functional as a synonym for unharmed. A hand that still closed could be injured. A Foundation that still stood could be strained. A bond that still answered could have paid more than he intended.

With For once, the next Level did not look like a reward. still fresh in mind, Saeva stayed close enough to notice the inspection. Etzel tried to dismiss the concern with humor, then changed his mind and gave an accurate answer instead. The shift was small, but it mattered. Hiding damage from enemies was useful. Hiding it from allies only made the next decision worse. He adjusted the next movement around the body and soul he actually had rather than the version of himself his impatience preferred.

The mystery in front of him invited a dramatic question. Etzel deliberately asked smaller ones. What changed immediately before "So grinding to Twenty-Five would reproduce the mistake." One word appeared.? What stayed unchanged afterward? Which response could be reproduced, and which had happened only once? He worked from constraints rather than desired explanations.

The method was slower. It also kept him from turning every unknown into the same conspiracy. Roads, Keeper behavior, foreign soul patterns, memory distortion and Necromancer mechanisms could be related without being identical. Etzel wrote links only where evidence supported them. Everything else remained a possibility.

“I preferred mysteries when stabbing produced useful data,” he muttered.

Orsik glanced over. “Did it?”

“Emotionally.”

That earned exactly as much sympathy as expected.

Before moving on, Etzel asked one deliberately uncomfortable question: if comparable pressure returned under the same constraints, what would he do differently? The answer was not “hit harder.” Sometimes it was wait half a second longer. Sometimes it was give Orsik freedom to choose a line without an order. Sometimes it was stop before a soul technique crossed from strain into damage. Sometimes the right change was simply refusing to let urgency turn incomplete information into certainty. The surrounding evidence kept this review distinct: That earned exactly as much sympathy as expected.. In this review he emphasized available exits rather than team positioning, keeping the conclusion tied to the evidence that had actually produced it.

He wrote the answer down. Tomorrow’s version of him was allowed to disagree. What mattered was that tomorrow would inherit a decision examined honestly rather than a victory polished into myth.

A quiet laugh came from the doorway.

Saeva.

Etzel pointed at her.

"No encouragement."

She sat beside him.

"Etzel heavy."

"Spiritually."

"Also food."

Orsik looked away.

Etzel narrowed his eyes.

"This workplace has collapsed."

He returned to Kestrel before evening.

Not to demand answers.

To test a hypothesis.

The wall still carried the warning.

Etzel spoke.

"The last Necromancer reached for power faster than his soul could carry it."

Nothing.

"Wrong?"

Nothing.

"Right?"

The wall changed.

HE CHOSE POWER BEFORE CAPACITY.

Etzel stopped.

Orsik stepped closer.

Saeva went quiet.

There it was.

Not weakness.

Not bad luck.

Choice.

Etzel read the sentence again.

They reconstructed the event without allowing Etzel’s viewpoint to become the default truth. His memory emphasized "The problem isn't Level Twenty-Four." Orsik stood across the table. Another person remembered the timing differently. A third had noticed a position Etzel had missed completely. None of those disagreements were dramatic, which made them exactly the kind that could become dangerous once retold enough times.

Especially after "So grinding to Twenty-Five would reproduce the mistake." One word appeared., Etzel kept the contradictions until physical evidence, System records or repeatable behavior settled them. Where nothing could settle them, the report said unknown. That word had once felt like failure. Now it felt like a barrier against inventing an answer simply because the blank space was uncomfortable. The next Hunter who read the record did not need Etzel to look clever. They needed him to be accurate.

After "The problem isn't Level Twenty-Four." Orsik stood across the table., the pause changed how Etzel looked at the people around him. Orsik carried concern differently from Saeva; fatigue showed differently too. Nobody needed a speech. They needed injuries checked, assumptions shared and a withdrawal condition decided before pride made the decision for them. Etzel answered the questions he could, admitted the ones he could not, and resisted the temptation to manufacture certainty for morale.

At this point, Twenty-Four was still a historical warning rather than Etzel’s current Level. When the situation moved again, the group was not following because Etzel had declared the problem solved. They were choosing the same next step with the same information. That distinction had become central to the kind of Necromancer and leader Etzel was trying to become. Command could force motion. Trust made people keep choosing the line beside him when force was unnecessary.

The previous Necromancer had not failed because Level Twenty-Four was cursed.

He had failed because his progression had outrun his structure.

Etzel looked toward the unseen Keeper.

"So grinding to Twenty-Five would reproduce the mistake."

One word appeared.

YES.

Etzel exhaled through his nose.

"That's annoyingly reasonable."

He thought of the available operations.

The easy temptation was obvious.

Find higher-Level targets.

Take risk.

Force XP.

Reach Twenty-Five.

Save Ilyen.

Except perhaps that path had already killed—or broken—the person before him.

Etzel touched his chest.

The Foundation answered.

Stable.

Not complete.

His hand still remembered soul-burn.

His ribs still hurt from the identity imitation.

Combat Integration worked.

Barely.

While Twenty-Four remained a warning about someone else’s failure, the interface remained useful, but Etzel refused to let it flatten several kinds of growth into one convenient number. The recent events touched systems that did not mean the same thing. Level represented accumulated progression and capacity. Rank progression came from proving real capability against meaningful threats, while formal Hunter classification still depended on recognized evaluation. Necromancer Authority followed a different logic again, tied to claims, bonds, limitations and demonstrated understanding.

With "You believe the previous Necromancer broke under the weight." Etzel looked at him. as the immediate reference point, Etzel compared every notification with what his body and Soul Architecture actually did. If the System said progress but the structure felt unstable, he treated both facts as true. If a new classification appeared without new mastery, he did not pretend the label itself had supplied the skill. That separation kept progression from becoming a story he told himself rather than a change he could survive.

Because he was investigating Twenty-Four rather than standing at that threshold himself, before the next escalation, Etzel returned to logistics. He checked distance, fallback routes, communication assumptions and the point at which gathering more information would become greed. The practical details felt almost insulting beside the scale of the questions surrounding the situation. They were also the details most likely to keep those questions from becoming somebody’s last thoughts.

The plan left room to retreat, particularly because "Do not give it options." "I'm establishing scale." "By suggesting catastrophes?" "The Keeper has poor conversational habits. had shown how quickly assumptions could narrow options. Etzel no longer treated that as pessimism. A route out was a tool, like a spear or a barrier, and refusing a useful tool because it offended his image of courage was merely pride wearing armor. He marked the limit in advance so that fear, anger or curiosity would have less opportunity to move it later.

There were too many unfinished things inside him to call another Level the solution.

The wall changed again.

YOUR NEXT CHOICE WILL WEIGH MORE THAN THE OTHERS.

Etzel's expression hardened.

Every five Levels.

Chest.

Three choices.

Sixty seconds.

One selection.

The others gone.

Level Twenty-Five would bring another milestone.

Apparently not an ordinary one.

Orsik read the message.

"Then we prepare before it arrives."

Etzel nodded.

For once, the next Level did not look like a reward.

It looked like an exam he could fail before taking it.

"Twenty-Five can wait."

Saeva smiled.

"Etzel patient."

"Don't spread that rumor."

The Keeper erased everything except one line.

GROW CORRECTLY.

Etzel looked at it for a long moment.

Then turned away.

He had five Levels to gain.

More importantly, he had a soul that needed to be capable of surviving them.