A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 217: Chapter 217 — Too Late II

The third fort had turned itself into a lesson about time.

Layered barricades behind sealed gates. Crown formations standing wide — deliberately wide, no clusters to chain damage through. Fire trenches cut before the walls, and consecrated braziers along them, burning every corpse the fighting produced almost before it finished being a corpse. Archers and mages held loose and watchful, and the first skeleton James raised on the approach drew six arrows before its second step — not because they understood Grave Step, but because the dead had helped break two forts already, and Highwatch had decided the dead died first.

The artillery frame loomed above it all, skeletal against the glow.

Maeve studied it from the approach for a long moment, eyes half-closed, reading the fort’s magic the way she’d read the wards at two forts tonight and a throne room before that.

”The frame’s wrong,” she said. ”There’s almost no power in it. Everything in that fort is flowing down — conduits, running under the inner bastion. Something’s buried there behind layered wards, and it’s drinking every drop of magic they have.” She opened her eyes. ”That’s the weapon. The thing on the ridge is just its arm.”

”Then we don’t stop at the frame,” James said. ”We go down.”

The commander here was a battle-mage, and he fought like a chess player. He was visible sometimes on the high wall — robes, staff, unhurried — and he never once came down. He moved his people instead.

The assault went fast and cost the whole way.

Finn and Ronan broke the outer gate while Maeve stripped its wards, layer by layer, spending mana she didn’t have on magic that had been laid hours deep. Cillian picked his six hits like a marksman: an elevated mage here, a murder-hole mechanism there, nothing wasted on the wall at large.

James fought sword-first the entire approach, because the fire trenches kept the entrance corpse-poor, exactly as designed.

Past the braziers, in the inner yard, the bodies finally outran the burning. James raised what he could and spent them on separate barricades, and Highwatch’s defenders shot most of them apart before they reached anywhere useful — every destroyed skeleton one less door for him to step through.

And the commander kept trading ground.

Every time Finn and Ronan cracked a position, its defenders were already falling back to the next one, never trapped, never spent, always closer to the bastion. It was Greybridge’s delay strategy run by a better mind with better preparation, and it worked. The outer gate and its hours-deep wards cost them half an hour. The yard cost twenty-five minutes more.

[TIME REMAINING: 01:05:33]

Then came the barricade lines, and that was where the night truly bled out. Position after position, each one abandoned a breath before it broke, every retreat dragging the fight another twenty meters and another ten minutes uphill toward the bastion. Cillian spent two of his remaining hits just opening lanes. None of it ever felt slow. It only added up.

One skeleton made it over the final barricade.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

James arrived in the bastion passage, and the waiting guards were on him before his balance came back — they’d camped the skeleton on purpose. Durendal turned one blade. A mace glanced off his shoulder. Then Maeve’s shield flared around him against the battle-mage’s hammer-blow of force from above, and Finn and Ronan came through the front of the passage like a wall falling forward.

Cillian found the last defensive ward’s anchor-stone and ripped it apart.

The five of them entered the artillery chamber together.

[TIME REMAINING: 00:08:37]

The core was exactly where Maeve’s reading had placed it.

Beneath the chamber floor, inside a containment structure of banded iron and stone, sat a consecrated sphere of light — cold, patient, wrong-feeling — with conduits running up through the walls toward the empty frame on the ridge above. The floor hummed with it.

Eight minutes.

They hit the same point together, because there was no time for anything clever.

Maeve stripped the outer ward and read the rune-lattice underneath, calling sections. Cillian overloaded them as she called — one rune, the next, the next, each blast smaller than the last as his mana bottomed out. Finn and Ronan broke the containment banding and held the door’s worth of defenders off her back. James put Durendal into the first exposed seam of the core and poured mana down the blade.

The core resisted like bedrock.

Up on the wall, the battle-mage commander watched — and understood the whole battle in one look. He didn’t need to beat five monsters. He needed the sphere alive for eight more minutes.

He emptied the fort into the chamber.

They came without formations, without caution, spearmen and clerks and wounded men, throwing themselves at the containment structure’s attackers because their commander had told them time was a weapon and they were its ammunition.

Ronan took a mace-blow flush on the shoulder shielding James and stayed up. Maeve’s light guttered, came back thinner. Finn swung through his ruined arm, teeth locked, hammering the same cracked band over and over. Cillian killed the last visible rune and shouted that there was more power sealed deeper.

James forced a Necro Blast through the crack Durendal had opened. Finn struck the same point from the far side.

[TIME REMAINING: 00:01:00]

The core cracked. Audibly. A line of dark ran through the cold light — and held.

Soldiers hit Ronan three at once and drove him off the opening.

[TIME REMAINING: 00:00:30]

Maeve rebuilt the gap in front of James — a corridor of light through the press of bodies — and the casting took nearly everything left in her. She went to one knee doing it.

[TIME REMAINING: 00:00:10]

James emptied himself through the crack. Necro Blast, and behind it raw mana, everything, while Finn’s axes rang off the containment frame in a rhythm like a man breaking down a door that owed him.

The chamber shook. The dark line forked through the sphere.

The light inside it flickered — and did not go out.

[TIME LIMIT EXPIRED]

Everything stopped.

Not the way fights stop. The way film stops. Finn’s axe hung mid-swing. The soldiers stood frozen with their mouths open around war cries. The dust in the air held still, every mote in place.

[HIGHWATCH ARTILLERY CORE: INTACT]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 2/3]

[FLOOR 21 FAILED]

The third flare never rose.

Somewhere north, Raymond’s companies were still standing on Dunadd’s southern wall, waiting for a signal that was never coming. And beside three settlement names on a campaign map, chalked estimates had come and gone while Team Zero was fighting through Redfield’s barricades and Highwatch’s traded ground.

Nobody needed a cinematic. They could do the arithmetic in the frozen silence.

The villages had had six hours. So had they.

[THE BROKEN CROWN — ATTEMPT 1 FAILED]

[REMAINING ATTEMPTS: 4]

[FACTION LOCKED: PRINCE RAYMOND]

[NEXT ATTEMPT AVAILABLE: FLOOR 22]

[COMBAT EXP RETAINED]

[STORY-WORLD PROGRESS WILL RESET]

James read the panels twice, standing in a world with the pause button held down.

Attempt one. Remaining: four.

The EXP stayed — every soldier, every monster, all of it banked in him and the others, the one thing the Tower let them carry. Everything else on this floor was about to be taken back.

The chamber began to move again. Backward.

The dark fork in the core thinned, sealed, vanished — the sphere’s cold light smoothing over like water closing on a stone. The shattered containment bands crawled off the floor and rebuilt themselves. Around the chamber, dead Crown soldiers rose the wrong way, wounds closing, falling upward into the postures of living men.

James felt his dimensional storage go suddenly light. The medicine he’d carried out of Redfield was gone — un-taken, back on its shelves in a depot that had never burned.

He watched Caerleon take everything back, and understood the shape of what the Tower had actually built here.

They hadn’t been given another six hours.

They’d been given another floor.