A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 223: Chapter 223 — Floor 22 - Before They Could Prepare II

[DAMAGE RECEIVED]

[HP: 1,880 → 1,679]

He cut the shaft in half on the backswing and killed the man on the follow-through, and stood there for a second with his side burning while the fight went on across the yard.

[CROWN SOLDIER SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 140]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,060 → 2,090]

Inside the storehouse, the shelves were still full, still labelled, still stacked in the order a quartermaster had left them.

James did not look at the food, or the bandage bales, or the rows of ordinary field kit. He went straight along the wall to the compact crates stamped with the military healer’s seal and started feeding them into his storage until it would take nothing more.

[DIMENSIONAL STORAGE UPDATED]

[MEDICAL SUPPLY CRATES STORED: 22 — CAPACITY REACHED]

Outside, the commander shouted an order that had James’s name in it, in the shape of a description rather than a name, and eight men in heavier armour peeled off the storehouse line and came for the medicine building.

James backed out of the doorway into the lane and looked at the corpse lying six meters away, and did the arithmetic.

Finn was twelve meters up the lane. Ronan was in the arch behind him. The medicine store was directly at his back with Maeve’s barrier still over it.

Everything was inside the radius. Everything he cared about was in the wrong place.

So he moved the bomb instead of the people.

Two skeletons hooked their arms under the corpse’s shoulders and dragged it backward down the lane, away from the medicine store and into the mouth of the military stockpile row where the alchemical crates and the weapon racks stood.

The elite soldiers understood what was happening about three seconds too slowly, and went for the skeletons instead of for James.

A sword took the left skeleton’s arm off at the shoulder. It shifted its grip and kept dragging with the other one. The right-hand skeleton let go of the corpse entirely, stepped between the soldiers and its partner, and took four blows standing before it came apart, which bought the eleven meters that mattered.

The corpse came to rest between two racks of alchemical containers.

James checked his people one more time — Finn moving away up the lane, Ronan in the arch, Maeve’s barrier bellied out over the medicine roof, Cillian at the stables well clear.

[CORPSE EXPLOSION — MANA COST: 150]

[MANA: 2,090 → 1,940]

The first blast was flat and hard and threw two of the elite soldiers off their feet, and then the alchemical containers went, and after that Redfield’s stockpile row began destroying itself in a rolling series of detonations that walked down the lane building by building.

Heat came off it in a wall. Debris rattled off Maeve’s barrier and off Ronan’s shield in the arch, and a burning weapon rack cartwheeled across the courtyard and buried itself in a wall.

Maeve stretched her shield over the medicine building and the lane behind it and held it there while the fire went past.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 2,240 → 1,880]

She was still standing at the end of it, and still had most of herself, which was not how this fort had gone the first time.

The commander came through the smoke at James with his sword up.

Finn hit him from the side before he had covered half the distance. The commander got his reinforced blade across in time and took the first axe on it, but the impact turned him bodily, and Finn’s second axe came in low and went through the outside of his knee armour.

He went down onto that leg and stayed down, and Finn did not stop to finish it, because Finn had never wanted the duel.

”Stockpile’s gone!” Cillian shouted from the yard.

”Then so are we.” James was already moving. ”Out, all of you, now.”

[REDFIELD SUPPLY STOCKPILE DESTROYED]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 2/3]

The second flare went up off the wall while they were still mounting, and the smoke behind them stood a hundred meters into the evening sky.

Cillian’s face did something complicated as he checked the timer, and Finn saw it.

”What.”

”Three fifty-eight,” Cillian said. ”We finished this place at three thirty-one last time, and we walked out of it half dead.”

[TIME REMAINING: 03:58:47]

James read his own board as they turned onto the southern road, and it was not comfortable reading, because Call of Souls had been generous and he had still spent more than he had recovered.

[JAMES GANNER]

[COMBAT EXP GAINED — REDFIELD: 2,180]

[EXP: 44,945 → 47,125 / 54,000]

[HP: 1,679 / 1,880]

[MANA: 1,940 / 2,940]

[ACTIVE SUMMONS: 3]

The Highwatch road took eighty-eight minutes, and the ride told its own story.

Finn rode with both hands on the reins and both arms working, and when he shifted his grip he did it because he wanted to.

Ronan’s shield had a new gouge across the face and a bent rim, and he swung down off his horse at the water stop without favouring either leg.

Maeve put a slow recovery light over all five of them for most of an hour and did not once check her reserve.

”How much have you got?” James asked Cillian.

”Enough for the wards and a bit over. Last time I was counting bolts before we even got there.”

Nobody said anything about the mission being won.

”Don’t get comfortable,” Ronan said, somewhere in the last stretch. ”That fort has eyes. Somebody up there will see the smoke behind us, or a patrol will come in from a road we don’t know about, or a supply rider will arrive from Redfield and never leave. We bought time. We didn’t buy silence.”

Highwatch came into view on its ridge with the last of the light behind it, and the fort answered Ronan’s warning by not answering it at all.

The beacon stood cold.

Down in the outer yard, men were carrying timber. A crane crew was working on the artillery frame, which still stood half-assembled and open to the sky, and the engineers had scaffolding up its northern face with lamps hung along the boards.

”Wards,” Maeve said, staring. ”Look at the wards.”

James could not see what she saw, so he waited.

”They’re not linked. There are nodes lit all along that wall and half of them are running on their own — nobody’s tied them into a lattice yet.” She let out a breath. ”Last time I spent four minutes on the outer layer alone, and there were three layers under it.”

”Then we don’t touch the frame,” James said. ”The frame was never it. We go in on the side nearest the bastion and we go down.”

Cillian killed the beacon from three hundred meters, which was a longer shot than he liked, and it still landed, because nobody had thought to post a guard on a signal fire in a fort that had received no warnings.

Then Ronan and Finn hit the outer gate while the garrison was still forming up in the yard behind it.

Ronan took the first three defenders in the opening on his shield and held the gap with his shoulder into the timber. Finn put an axe into the lower hinge where the metal had been repaired badly enough to show, worked it twice, then set both hands on the second axe and wrenched the whole leaf inward until the gap was a doorway.

Maeve went at the ward nodes in the order she had learned in a chamber that no longer existed, and the unfinished lattice paid her for it. The first node broke in under thirty seconds, and the two beside it guttered and dimmed on their own, because nothing was holding them up.

”Route’s open,” she said. ”Left of the yard, down the bastion stair.”

James raised two more from the men Finn had put down in the gateway, and sent all five of his skeletons through the breach ahead of the team.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x2 — MANA COST: 160]

[MANA: 1,940 → 1,780]

Highwatch’s soldiers cut into them with the ordinary irritation of men killing something inconvenient, and not one of them looked past the undead to work out why an enemy commander would spend summons pushing them forward.

One skeleton got through the press and reached the mouth of the inner passage.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

[MANA: 1,780 → 1,660]

James arrived past the first barricade beside a man whose hand was already on the inner gate release, and killed him before the disorientation had finished, because this time he had come out facing the right way.

The gate did not fall. The rest of Team Zero came through the passage behind him.

Above them, on the wall, the Highwatch commander stopped watching the artillery frame and started watching the stair.

”They’re not going for the gun,” he called down. ”They’re going under it. Everyone — everyone — to the core chamber.”