A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 245: Chapter 245 — The Marshal’s Last Order I

Cillian had the strike built and had not let go of it yet.

Vane did not wait to find out what it was.

[MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY]

[COMMAND STACKS: 6 → 4]

[PERSONAL ORDER: HOLD THE LINE]

[VANE — DEFENCE AND STAGGER RESISTANCE INCREASED]

He said it to nobody. There was no army left to hear it, and it did not matter, because the order was not for them anymore.

The lightning went in.

It hit Vane square and it hit the two guards nearest him at the same time, and the three of them took it together — James watched the arc split across all three men and go to ground through six sets of boots, and none of them so much as rocked back.

[VANE — HP: 24,000 → 22,850]

Eleven hundred and fifty, off a strike that had been putting riders through their saddles all week.

”They’re sharing it,” Cillian said.

Then the seven of them came forward as one thing.

Vane held the centre and the poleaxe held everything in front of him, two and a half meters of reach turning in flat arcs that made the ground in front of him a place nobody could stand. The six guards moved with him rather than around him, and every time Finn tried to work a flank they were already there, not chasing him, just occupying the space he wanted.

---

Maeve had been reading it since the first exchange.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

”It’s the spacing,” she said. ”Watch the distances. They’re holding the same gap off him, all six, every step he takes — it’s not a wall, it’s a *shape*, and the shape is what’s feeding him. Break the shape and the sharing stops.”

”Then we break the shape,” James said.

He sent two skeletons at the guard on the left of the arc, the one whose plate was thinnest at the arm.

Vane’s head turned about ten degrees.

”Ignore the dead. Kill the caster.”

Four guards came off the formation and went straight at James, and the shape held anyway, because Vane went with them.

Ronan met them with a shield that had a bent rim and a split running back from it.

He got three of them stopped and the fourth went past him, and Finn caught that one across the back of the legs and brought the axe up.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

The poleaxe came in and caught the axe shaft on the flat of its head before the swing had finished, and Vane drove it — arm, axe and Finn together — six feet backward and dumped him on the broken ground.

The skill died unfinished.

”Rearmost,” Maeve said.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

The mark burned orange on the shield of the guard at the back of the arc, and Cillian put a controlled bolt into it from forty meters, and the guard’s whole shield arm came up as he rocked with the impact.

At the same second, on the opposite side of the formation, James detonated a Northern Legion corpse that had been lying in the mud since before they arrived.

[CORPSE EXPLOSION]

[MANA: 2,690 → 2,540]

It killed nobody. It was never going to kill anybody, because the guards were in plate and the corpse was eight days old.

What it did was move two men eighteen inches out of position.

The spacing broke on both sides at once, and something across the whole formation flickered like a light with a bad connection.

Finn came up off the ground and killed the branded guard before it recovered.

[ELITE GUARD SLAIN]

[EXP GAINED: 545]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,405 → 44,950 / 60,000]

Five left.

---

Vane did not try to reform the shape.

[COMMAND STACKS: 4 → 3]

[PERSONAL ORDER: BREAK THEM]

[VANE — STRENGTH AND ATTACK SPEED INCREASED]

He went at Ronan with three strikes and they arrived faster than a poleaxe that size had any business arriving.

Ronan blocked the first flat on the boss. He turned the second off the outside edge and let it go past him. The third came down on the same split the rim had taken on the platform, and the shield came apart in his hand — the face folding in one direction and the arm straps holding a ruined half-moon of metal in the other.

[RONAN’S SHIELD DESTROYED]

Everything behind Ronan was suddenly standing in the open.

Vane took the backswing across Finn’s ribs on the way through, opening him from the hip to the bottom of the plate, and reversed the poleaxe without a pause and drove the spike end at James’s chest.

Maeve’s light hit James a quarter-second before the spike did.

[RADIANT PULSE ACTIVATED]

[JAMES — HP: 1,682 → 1,117]

[MAEVE — MANA CRITICAL]

It went through the coat and into him and stopped somewhere it should not have stopped, and James stayed on his feet with his ribs full of glass and Maeve down to the last fifth of what she had.

Cillian did not wait to see if he was standing.

He took every safety off the strike and let it go.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The bolt caught Vane across the chest and shoulder and this time there was nobody adjacent to share it with. His reinforced plate opened along a seam and went black at the edges, and he came off James by three full steps.

[VANE — HP: 22,850 → 18,400]

[CILLIAN — MANA STRAIN CRITICAL]

Cillian’s casting arm went numb from the elbow down and hung there.

Vane rolled his shoulder once, looked at the burn on his own armour with mild interest, and turned to his surviving guards.

”The bodies near the necromancer. Take the heads and the arms off them. All of them.”

There was no panel for that one. It was not authority and it did not need to be — it was a man who had spent an hour watching what James did with corpses, giving the only order that mattered.

Two of the guards broke off and did it, and it was a slow, ugly, butcher’s job. They went along the row of Northern Legion dead with the edges of their swords, and what they left behind could not stand up because there was not enough of it left joined together to stand up with.

They got through nine of them before Ronan and Finn made it impossible to keep doing it.

That was the thing Vane could not solve. Every man he put on the corpses was a man not fighting, and every second one of them spent hacking at a dead Legionnaire’s shoulder was a second Finn spent on somebody’s living one.

---

So James stopped hiding what he wanted.

He put both remaining skeletons in the open where Vane could see them, and reached toward corpses he had no intention of using, and made a great deal of obvious effort out of a piece of ground on the eastern side.

Two guards went to it. Vane’s eyes went to it.

And Finn came in from the west, silent, without Berserker Drive, because Vane had learned the shape of that entrance the first time and had been waiting for it ever since. Ronan came in from the north with no shield at all, using Piercing Step as a battering charge and taking hits on his pauldrons that he had nothing left to block with.

Maeve branded guards instead of Vane, two at a time, and let Cillian pick them off with small strikes that cost him almost nothing.

They took the elites apart one at a time over the next four minutes, and Vane made them pay for every one.

He caught Ronan twice — once across the back, once on the unprotected shield arm — and put a cut down the outside of Finn’s leg that made him fight flat-footed afterward. He never once left a guard to die alone if he could reach it.

But he could not reach all of them, and there were five people making sure of it.

[5 ELITE GUARDS SLAIN]

[PARTY EXP GAINED: 2,725]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,950 → 47,675 / 60,000]

[VANE — HP: 18,400 → 12,600]

Then it was one man in a torn surcoat standing alone in the middle of a burnt camp.

**[ZeroFan]:** HALF HEALTH AND HE’S ALONE

**[AshesAndBones]:** he still has THREE

**[Kieran_77]:** three what

**[AshesAndBones]:** stacks. he has three stacks left

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** oh no