A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 240: Chapter 240 — The Second One Stood II

It went off the far side of its mount with the jar still in its fist, and the clay broke in the mud thirty meters short of anything that would burn.

**[CillianStorm]:** LEFT SIDE DELETED

**[ZeroFan]:** HOLD THE GATE

**[FrontierWife]:** the wounded soldiers are BACK ON THE WALL

**[AshesAndBones]:** CILLIAN AGAIN

**[GoblinRights]:** man threw a bomb and immediately died holding it

---

The wolves hit the gate before their riders reached it.

The timber bowed inward under the first two, and on the third the split beside the locking beam opened wide enough for a head and a pair of shoulders, and a war wolf drove its forequarters through the gap with its jaws working.

[WAR WOLF — LEVEL: 27]

[HP: 1,800 / 1,800]

The defenders nearest it broke backward into each other.

[RONAN CLEARY — RALLYING CALL]

”AWAY FROM THE GATE! CLEAR THAT SECTION!”

They went, because that voice did not leave room for anything else, and Ronan came down the last four steps and put his shield against the wolf while it was still forcing itself through.

He did not try to push it back out. There was no leverage in it from a standstill and he knew it, so he held, and waited, and when the animal pulled its shoulders back to ram the timber again he went with it through the gap.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

The shield rim took the wolf across the point of the shoulder and turned all of that momentum sideways, and it went down flat in front of its own gate with its legs tangled.

[WAR WOLF — HP: 1,800 → 1,050]

”FINN.”

[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]

Finn came through the gap two seconds behind him, before the riders coming up behind the wolves could close, and he did not slow down at all on the way in.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

The axe went down through the broken shoulder and into the neck underneath it.

[WAR WOLF — HP: 1,050 → 0]

[WAR WOLF SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 210]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 45,375 → 45,585 / 57,000]

Neither of them stayed out there for a second longer.

Finn turned on his heel and went back through the gap with Ronan’s shield between him and the arriving riders.

The one skeleton James still had on this side of the river had followed them across the town, and it went into the broken section of the gate and wedged itself there, arms braced against both edges of the split.

It was one dead goblin holding a hole that needed a wall. It did not have to hold it for long. It only had to stand in the gap until the settlement’s carpenters got two lengths of timber across the inside and a dozen men put their shoulders behind them.

---

The remaining carriers threw together.

Cillian took one of them out of the air’s way before it released, and the other two jars were already up and coming down toward the section of wall where four men were braced against a gate they were still repairing.

Maeve had sixty mana left in the world, and sixty was not a shield.

She had put four hundred into the barrier that shattered under the bridge charge, and that had been the strong one, and it had folded like sheet metal. What she had now would not have stopped a thrown stone.

So she did not try to stop anything.

She built the thinnest thing she had ever made — a sheet no thicker than a pane of glass, set on a hard slant above the repair party, angled the way she had angled the very first jar of the night so that the clay would break against it and go somewhere else instead of stopping there.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 60 → 0 / 2,240]

The light came up grey and half-transparent and she could see the field straight through it.

The first jar hit the slant and did what it was supposed to do, bursting and running off the incline and down past the outside of the wall in a sheet of fire that never came near anybody.

The second hit two feet lower, where the sheet was thinnest, and went through it.

It broke against the walkway boards at the end of the repair party and the fire went across the timber, and the man nearest it got it up the back of one leg and went down screaming while the other three beat at him with their own coats.

Everything above and behind that point stayed clean, which was three men out of four.

Then the light went out, and Maeve went down onto both hands against the parapet with her head hanging between her arms, and did not get up.

**[ZeroFan]:** ONE GOT THROUGH

**[AshesAndBones]:** that man’s LEG

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT WAS EVERYTHING SHE HAD LEFT

**[FrontierWife]:** she’s been going since the gate. since the GATE

**[CillianStorm]:** DONT LET THEM REACH HER

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** somebody get to her

Cillian did not leave the wall to chase anything after that.

He put himself between Maeve and the open air, and from there he kept killing, but only when a target came clear of the defenders’ silhouettes, which was less often than he wanted and exactly as often as it was safe.

---

Back across the river, the riders had worked out that the middle of James’s line was not weak anymore.

So they stopped charging it and started running the flanks, looking for the end of the crescent, and James did not take a single step after them.

He kept the column walking downriver, and he moved his seven skeletons along with it, sliding the whole line sideways as the civilians went, so that every rider who wanted a person had to come through the dead first — and every rider who did not want to come through the dead had to give up on the civilians entirely.

One of the damaged skeletons came apart on the left arm, pulled to pieces by a goblin that got a rope on it, and for about a second there was a hole in the line.

The fresh skeleton beside it put a hooked spear through the same goblin’s back and dragged it off its saddle into the grass, and James shifted two more across, and the hole closed.

After that it became repetition, and repetition suited him.

The riders that committed died on the spears or under Durendal, and every one of them stood back up inside a minute, and the ones still circling began to understand what that meant. There were more dead things in that line than there had been at the start of the fight, and the number was going the wrong way for them.

[4 GOBLIN RIDERS SLAIN — UNDEAD KILLS]

[EXP GAINED: 640]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 45,585 → 46,225 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +120]

[MANA: 1,690 → 1,810]

---

On the settlement side, the assault broke on its own once its first charge failed.

The archers on the wall stopped shooting at riders and started shooting at mounts, and a goblin on foot in front of that gate was a much smaller problem than a goblin on a war wolf. The wounded soldiers held the repaired section with spears braced low, three deep, because standing in a line with a spear was something a man with a bad arm could still do.

Two water crews worked along the walkway putting out the fires from the jars before they could reach the timber.

Ronan stayed in the gateway and would not be drawn a single pace outside it, no matter what came close enough to tempt him. Finn killed everything that crossed the shield and did not follow one of them out. Cillian took the last two carriers off their saddles from beside Maeve without moving from beside Maeve.

And Maeve, with nothing left to protect anyone with, kept Field Reading running and kept calling targets from her knees.

”Right of the gate, two coming wide — no, they’re turning, they’re turning off—”

[4 WAR WOLVES SLAIN — PARTY KILLS]

[4 GOBLIN RIDERS SLAIN — PARTY KILLS]

[EXP GAINED: 1,480]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 46,225 → 47,705 / 57,000]

The warband pulled back into the dark somewhere around the middle of the night.

James did not take his line one meter out of position to follow them, and Ronan did not open that gate. There were eleven riders and a handful of wolves still alive out there, and going after them meant taking the wall off a settlement and the wall off two thousand people to kill eleven things that were already leaving.

Nobody suggested it. Nobody had to say why.

---

The rest of the night was long and mean and mostly quiet.

Arrows came out of the dark at intervals, badly aimed, more to keep everyone awake than to hit anything, and the defenders rotated along the wall in shifts so that men could sit down for twenty minutes at a time. The healers worked their way back along the rows treating the ones who had torn their stitches open getting back onto the walls.

Finn’s axe strokes got slower and heavier every time something came near the gate. The conductors along Cillian’s arms went from blue-white to a dull grey glow that took longer to build each time he asked anything of them.

James walked the ring of undead around the sleeping refugees for hours, replacing what got broken, and never once let the circle open.

Maeve stayed sitting against the parapet with her back to the stone until her hands stopped shaking, and every time anything moved out past the torchlight she put Field Reading up again and told them where it was, because it was the one thing she could still do for free.

**[FrontierWife]:** is the sky getting lighter or am i imagining it

**[ZeroFan]:** PLEASE JUST REACH DAWN

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** nobody move off those walls

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** the skeletons are STILL standing

**[user48291]:** how long has this stream been going

**[Kieran_77]:** i have work in three hours and i am not leaving

---

The first grey line came up over the hills behind the river, and everything stopped.

The monsters out beyond the torches froze mid-stride. The defenders on the wall froze with their hands on the parapet. The refugees along the bank stopped between one breath and the next, and the only things still moving anywhere in Caerleon were five people who had not slept.

A projection opened above the water.

The central settlement came first. Its gates were split and hanging, and the road beneath the walls was covered end to end with orc dead and Crown dead together, and there were men sitting down on the battlements too tired to stand up.

Above them, Raymond’s banners were still flying, and his soldiers were still on the wall.

[CENTRAL SETTLEMENT: SURVIVED]

Then the east.

The wall was burning along its whole length. Wyverns sat perched across the tower tops like birds on a fence, folding and unfolding their wings, and below them the pass stood wide open with monster columns already moving down through it in a slow unbroken line, going south, going behind everything.

[EASTERN SETTLEMENT: FALLEN]

Nobody on the wall said anything.

[WESTERN SETTLEMENT: SURVIVED]

[CIVILIANS EVACUATED: 100%]

[SETTLEMENTS SURVIVING: 2/3]

[CLEAR CONDITION MET]

[FLOOR 23 CLEARED]

**[FrontierWife]:** TWO THEY GOT TWO

**[ZeroFan]:** FLOOR 23 CLEARED

**[CillianStorm]:** TEAM ZERO

**[AshesAndBones]:** WE MADE IT TO DAWN

**[FloorTheoryPod]:** The eastern pass is open.

**[user48291]:** raymond won the town and lost the road behind him

**[FloorTheoryPod]:** Yes.

---

The transport light took all five of them off both sides of the river at once.

The Waiting Room gave them back their bodies and their mana, and the strain behind James’s eyes let go, and Maeve’s hands were steady before she noticed they had stopped shaking.

[FLOOR 23 CLEAR REWARD]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 50,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 20,000 PER MEMBER]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 47,705 → 97,705 / 57,000]

[LEVEL UP]

[LEVEL: 38 → 39]

[EXP: 40,705 / 60,000]

[ALL STATS +1]

[STRENGTH: 60 | AGILITY: 80 | INTELLIGENCE: 143 | ENDURANCE: 84 | LUCK: 53]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5 → 10]

Cillian opened his mouth to say something about the credits.

The campaign map came up over all of them before he got to it.

It showed the whole northern frontier at once — the central settlement with Raymond’s army sitting in it, holding, and the western settlement standing, and two thousand markers strung along the riverbank where the refugees had walked.

And it showed the east.

Black markers were coming down out of the pass in a column that did not end anywhere on the visible map, and forty miles below the mountains that column turned west.

It was not going toward the settlements. It was going toward the road that ran behind them, the one Raymond’s army had marched up, the one everything he had left in Dunadd would have to come along.

Nobody said anything about the credits after that.

[FLOOR 24 UNLOCKED]

[THE BROKEN CROWN WILL CONTINUE]

[THE NORTHERN PASS HAS FALLEN]

[THE MONSTER HOST IS NOW BEHIND PRINCE RAYMOND’S ARMY]