For a few seconds, nobody in the entry room said anything.

Their bodies were fine. The Tower had closed every wound on the way out, and there was not a mark left on any of them to show what Floor 15 had cost. That was the part that did not feel like winning.

James’s throat was whole. He could breathe without trouble. He still remembered her hand closing around it.

Finn stood near the gear racks with his jaw set, looking at nothing. Ronan opened and closed his fingers slowly, like his body kept bracing for a pain that was not coming back. Cillian turned his restored arm over once, looked at the unmarked skin, then looked away from it. Maeve sat in the chair with the Apostle’s Radiant Circlet in her lap, and she touched it once with two fingers and said nothing.

Then every phone in the room started buzzing at the same time.

It was not one alert after another. It was all of them at once, a wall of vibration off the bench and out of pockets, and it did not stop.

The clear they had survived was already being taken apart by the world.

Finn pulled his phone out first.

He scrolled for two seconds and went still.

James took his own off the bench. The screen was a flood. He stopped trying to read individual notifications and opened the first link that loaded, and it was a clip.

It was him.

The angle came from a stream drone somewhere above the square, and it caught the moment Alice’s hand closed on his throat and lifted him clear off the mud. In the footage his feet kicked once. His own hands clawed at her wrist and did nothing. He hung there for two full seconds before the golden light hit her from the side and tore her grip away.

Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

The clip looped. It played it again. James watched himself dangle a second time.

He did not move his face. But the second viewing was worse, because from the outside he could see exactly how little he had been able to do.

"Stop watching it," Finn said.

James didn’t look up.

"James." Finn’s voice was flat. "I mean it. Nothing good comes from running that back. You already know what happened. Watching the angle doesn’t change it."

James closed the clip.

Ronan had not opened a single video. He was reading instead, thumb moving slow down a page of comments, and his face had the look of a man already counting what this was going to cost down the line.

"They’re not treating it like a floor clear," Ronan said quietly. "Look at the language. ’Incident.’ ’Event.’ Nobody clears Floor 9 and gets called an event."

Cillian was frowning at his own screen. "It’s the part where the System wouldn’t name her," he said. "Watch. The clear screen flashes on the public feed for a second, and there’s a blank where a boss name should go. People are filling it in themselves. Half of them are calling her an angel. The other half think she’s a second boss." He looked up. "The Tower had a word for her. It just didn’t say it out loud."

Special interference resolved, James thought.

He kept that to himself, the same as he had on the floor. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Maeve had her phone angled low in her lap, and she was scrolling without any of the urgency the others had. When she finally spoke, it was about none of the things they were looking at.

"They’re not clipping the fight," she said. "Not most of them. They’re clipping the circlet."

Cillian glanced over. "What?"

"The white light. The Purify field. Me." She turned the phone so James could see the thumbnail grid, and a good third of them were her, the circlet’s white stone bright above her eyes. "After today, nobody is going to talk about me without talking about this." She set the phone face-down on her knee. "That’s a problem. Just not the one any of you are looking at yet."

The room sat with that.

This was not their first public floor. It was the first time they had cracked open a hidden story, put an unnamed winged woman and a golden angel on a live feed, and triggered a global difficulty drop, all in one stream. The world did not have a box to put that in, so it was building one in real time, and Team Zero was not in the room where it was being built.

The door from the main house opened.

Marcus Hale came in without knocking, which was a thing a man only did in his own house, and he had clearly been watching the same feeds they had. He did not look at them the way people looked at the wounded. Their wounds were gone. He looked at them the way you look at five young Challengers standing on a ledge they cannot see.

"Put the phones down," Marcus said.

Nobody moved.

"I’m serious. Every one of you has spent the last five minutes letting a stranger’s clip pull a reaction out of you." He crossed to the center of the room. "That’s backwards. The stream already happened. The announcement already went out with your name on it. You don’t get to decide whether the world talks about Floor 15. You only get to decide whether you’re in the conversation or whether you let everyone else have it without you."

Finn put his phone away, but only because he wanted his hands free to fold his arms.

"And let me guess," Finn said. "You’ve already decided what we do about it."

"I’ve got a suggestion." Marcus did not rise to the tone. "A press appearance. Controlled. Not a TRB debrief, where they ask what they want and you answer under their rules. Not a guild meeting. A room you set up, where Team Zero answers exactly what it chooses to answer and refuses everything else, on the record, once."

"We don’t owe anyone an explanation," Finn said.

"No. You don’t." Marcus looked at him steadily. "But silence isn’t neutral. Silence is a blank space, and right now there are three different groups racing to fill it. TRB will have their version by tomorrow morning. The press already has theirs. And every Tower authority outside this country is watching the footage and writing their own." He let that sit. "You can hand them a blank page, or you can put one line on it that they all have to work around. That’s the whole choice."

The room had tightened by the time he finished. James noticed it. Foreign Tower authorities was not a phrase that left a room comfortable.

Then Marcus said the thing that turned James’s head.

"And the Ganners are watching too," Marcus said. "Whatever you decide, decide it knowing that. A boy from a Dublin flat clearing a story floor on a global feed is one thing. The Ganner family’s blood debt walking around as the most-clipped Challenger on Earth is another. They have to respond to that now. It changes how they handle you, and not in your favor."

James’s attention sharpened to a point.

Floor 15 had not erased the duel. He had half-let himself believe it might fade under everything else. It would not. If anything, the brighter the light got, the more the Ganners had to be seen winning under it.

"I’ll think about the press," James said. It was not agreement, but it was not no.

Marcus took it as enough for now. "Think fast. The window where you control the framing is about a day wide." He moved back toward the door. "I’ll have a room ready in case you say yes."

He left them with it.

James stepped away from the others, toward the far wall, and opened his status window where he could read it without an audience.

He kept it short. There would be time later to sit with the numbers. Right now he only wanted the shape of what Floor 15 had given him.

[JAMES GANNER — NECROMANCER (LEGENDARY)]

[LEVEL: 19 → 24]

[ALL STATS +5]

[STRENGTH: 39 → 44]

[AGILITY: 44 → 49]

[INTELLIGENCE: 71 → 76]

[ENDURANCE: 45 → 50]

[LUCK: 31 → 36]

[HP: 920/920 → 1,020/1,020]

[MANA: 1,420/1,420 → 1,470/1,470]

[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 25]

Five levels off one floor.

His first instinct was the one it always was. Pour the points into Intelligence, push the mana pool higher, get more casts before he ran dry. That was the right build for floors. More undead, more blasts, more of everything that made him dangerous against a room full of monsters.

He stopped before he touched a single point.

The duel was not a floor. Cormac Ganner was one man, an ice user, in an open arena with no waves of enemies to grind down and no corpses lying around for him to use. A floor build and a duel build were not the same thing, and if he spent these points the way habit wanted him to, he would be spending them for the wrong fight.

He closed the allocation screen with all twenty-five untouched.

Think first.