A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 222: Chapter 222 — Floor 22 - Before They Could Prepare I

Redfield’s walls were nearly empty.

Two sentries walked the eastern battlement at the pace of men counting down to the end of a shift. Nobody stood at the arrow slits, and no barricade timber lay stacked behind the entrance, because there was no reason to stack any.

The gate was open. The southern road was empty. The beacon platform above the gatehouse held a cold brazier and one bored soldier sitting beside it with his back against the parapet.

Cillian looked at the timer, then at the fort, then at the timer again, and his eyebrows climbed.

”Four thirty-six,” he said. ”We were at three thirty-one when we finished this place last time.”

”So we’re an hour up before we’ve swung anything,” Finn said.

”We’re an hour up, and last time this fort ate fifty-six minutes of us.”

”That lasts until somebody sees Greybridge’s flare or a routine rider comes in,” James said, and pushed up off his elbows. ”Gate first, beacon first, medicine, stockpile, gone. Nobody stops to fight anything that isn’t in the way.”

They rode down at a working trot, side by side, in no formation at all.

Five armed riders coming from the direction of Greybridge on a road that carried Crown traffic all day looked like Crown traffic. The two men at the gate watched them come with their spears grounded, and one of them straightened up and lifted a hand, more curious than alarmed.

”Names and business,” he called, when they were forty meters out. ”Whose company are—”

Cillian was already turning in the saddle.

His first bolt went into the gate mechanism above the arch. The winch housing burst apart in a spray of hot iron and the portcullis locked in its raised position with a shriek of metal, jammed against its own ruined gearing.

The second arc came off the same cast and took the beacon platform.

It caught the parapet under the brazier rather than the brazier itself, and the blast threw the sitting soldier off his feet and across the walkway while the ignition assembly came apart into burning fragments. He landed badly, rolled, and stayed down.

”CHAINS!” someone bellowed from the courtyard. ”MANUAL CHAINS, DROP IT—”

Four soldiers ran for the hand winches on the inner side of the arch, because a jammed portcullis could still be walked down by hand.

They did not get there.

Ronan hit the gateway at a dead run, and the first shieldman inside met the face of his shield rather than the edge of anything. The impact drove the man backward into the two behind him, and all three went down in a tangle across the mouth of the arch, which meant the line they had been forming was not a line anymore.

Finn came through the space Ronan opened. He hooked one axe behind the second shieldman’s rim and tore it aside, and while the man was still reaching after his own guard, the other axe went through his breastplate.

Maeve came in third, and the first volley off the wall arrived as a scatter rather than a sheet, three arrows and then four more a full second later, because nobody up there had been standing ready. Her barrier turned all of it without her having to widen it once.

James came in last with Durendal drawn.

[JAMES GANNER]

[LEVEL: 37]

[EXP: 44,945 / 54,000]

[HP: 1,880 / 1,880]

[MANA: 2,610 / 2,940]

A soldier broke from the courtyard and sprinted for the hand winch with his hands already out for the chain.

James put a Necro Blast through his back at fifteen meters.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[MANA: 2,610 → 2,550]

The soldier folded over the winch housing and slid off it without touching the chain.

[CROWN SOLDIER SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 140]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,945 → 45,085 / 54,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,550 → 2,580]

James raised him where he had fallen.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

[MANA: 2,580 → 2,500]

The skeleton came up still wearing its own gear, and James pointed it at the gatehouse stair rather than at the three soldiers ten meters closer, because the three soldiers could not send a message and the beacon still could.

It went up the steps and planted itself where the stair turned, and the two men climbing toward the broken brazier had to stop and deal with it.

Redfield’s commander arrived in the courtyard at a run and stopped dead, staring at his own open gate.

”Who let them—” He turned a full circle, looking for the thing that should have told him. ”Where is the alarm? Where is the warning—”

He found the beacon platform, and the burning wreckage of its ignition assembly, and stopped asking.

”Gate on the hand chains, now! Storehouse guard, hold the storehouses! You—” he grabbed a rider by the shoulder and shoved him toward the stables, ”—south gate, ride, tell Highwatch we are under attack by—”

He looked back at the arch, and counted, and could not make the number work.

”By five.”

The garrison moved fast, and it moved from where it happened to be standing, which was the whole difference. Men came out of workshops and mess halls and equipment sheds, in ones and twos, toward positions nobody had assigned them in advance.

Ronan planted himself under the arch and stayed there. Every soldier who tried to reach the hand winches had to come through a Guardian in a doorway, and none of them did.

Finn drove into the courtyard’s centre toward the storehouse row, which pulled the commander’s attention and then his soldiers after it, and thinned the men standing between Cillian and the stables.

Cillian took that lane at a run. He put a short burst into the legs of the first horse being led out, dropped the rider before he found the stirrup, and then worked along the stable line with brief flat cracks that emptied saddles and scattered animals into the yard without wasting anything on the walls.

James raised four more from the courtyard dead.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x4 — MANA COST: 320]

[MANA: 2,500 → 2,180]

Two went to the arch and set themselves at Ronan’s shoulders, which turned one man in a doorway into three bodies in a doorway. One went along the storehouse row hunting the soldiers carrying torches.

The last one James sent the length of the courtyard to the medicine store itself, and it did not stop to fight anything on the way, because he did not need it to win. He needed it standing where he intended to be.

The commander watched all four of them go, and then he watched where Finn was heading, and something changed in his face.

He stopped shouting general orders.

”They know the ground,” he said, to nobody, and then louder, to his sergeant. ”Look at them. They’re not sweeping, they’re going to things. That one’s walking the medicine row and he’s never been through that gate in his life.”

”Sir—”

”Burn it. All of it. Fire to the stores, now.”

But nothing had been laid.

There were no ignition lines run along the storehouse walls, no fire crews standing ready beside pre-placed fuel, because none of that had existed at this hour on any ordinary day. His men had to fetch torches from brackets and carry oil in their hands, one building at a time, at a walking pace.

Cillian dropped the first torch crew twenty meters short of the food store with a single bolt that put all three of them on the ground.

A soldier on the storehouse roof threw an alchemical pot at the medicine building, and Maeve’s barrier caught it in the air.

The pot burst against the light and came apart, and burning liquid sheeted down the outside of the shield and pooled across the ground below it in a wide, spreading fire that took the direct route to the medicine door and made it impassable.

”James, the ground’s gone!” she called. ”I can hold the building, I can’t hold the path!”

James was already looking across the courtyard at the skeleton he had parked at the medicine store, on the far side of the fire.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

[MANA: 2,180 → 2,060]

He arrived beside it with the burning ground forty meters behind him and the storehouse door six meters ahead, and the world tilted the way it always did.

He drove Durendal’s point into the packed earth and held on to it while his balance came back.

A spearman standing at the corner of the building saw a man arrive out of nothing and stagger, and did the correct thing with it.

James turned into the thrust half a second late. The head went in under his arm, punched through the coat and skated along the plate beneath, and the shaft slammed into his ribs hard enough to take the air out of him.

[DAMAGE RECEIVED]