A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 249: Chapter 249 — The World Kept Climbing I

James had slept nine hours and eaten two proper meals and was wearing a jumper with a hole in the cuff that had nothing to do with any Tower.

The tablet was propped against the milk jug because Nyra had put it there, and the international Tower coverage was running with the sound low while his mother made a second pot of tea and told Nyra, for the third time, that four hundred was not a reasonable answer to that particular sum.

James was only half watching it. Most of the coverage was still about him, which he had stopped finding interesting somewhere around the fourth replay of Vane’s poleaxe catching him mid-jump.

Then the segment changed, and it was not about Ireland at all.

It was a frontier tracker — not a System thing, just the Challenger industry’s own board, compiled from confirmed national clears and updated whenever a bureau published one.

**IRELAND — FLOOR 24 CLEARED — TEAM ZERO**

**SOUTH KOREA — FLOOR 23 CLEARED**

**UNITED STATES — FLOOR 23 CLEARED**

**CHINA — FLOOR 22 CLEARED**

**ENGLAND — FLOOR 22 CLEARED**

**JAPAN — FLOOR 21 CLEARED**

**FRANCE — FLOOR 20 CLEARED**

**GERMANY — FLOOR 20 CLEARED**

**BRAZIL — FLOOR 20 CLEARED**

James’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth.

He read the top four lines again, and then he read the second and third ones a third time, because Floor 23 was not Floor 24 and that was not the part that had stopped him.

Floor 23 meant they were *in* it. Two other parties on this planet were living inside Caerleon.

”Did somebody catch you?” Nyra said.

She had noticed the fork before she noticed the screen, which was very like her.

”No.” James put it down. ”Nobody’s caught us. We’re still a floor ahead.”

”Then what?”

”They’re in the same story I’m in. That’s all. I thought we were the only ones.”

His mother glanced at the screen on her way past with the pot and did not say anything about floors or numbers, and refilled his cup instead.

Then the tracker changed to its second panel, and James reached over and turned the volume up.

**BROKEN CROWN — FACTION ALIGNMENTS**

**IRELAND — PRINCE RAYMOND / NORTHERN LEGION**

**SOUTH KOREA — PRINCE BALDWIN / CROWN ARMY**

**UNITED STATES — PRINCE RAYMOND / NORTHERN LEGION**

**CHINA — PRINCE BALDWIN / CROWN ARMY**

**ENGLAND — PRINCE RAYMOND / NORTHERN LEGION**

**JAPAN — PRINCE BALDWIN / CROWN ARMY**

He had known, in a theoretical way, that the other door had been a real door. He had stood in front of it with sixty seconds on a timer and picked the one on the right.

Three teams had picked the one on the left.

---

The presenter went back through what the Korean coalition had published, starting with their Floor 22 release, because that was the one that showed what the other door actually opened onto.

It came up on screen as a plain block of mission text, reproduced from the summary.

> **[FLOOR 22 — THE BROKEN CROWN]**

> **[FACTION: PRINCE BALDWIN]**

> **[FACTION MISSION: SECURE THE SOUTHERN CORRIDOR]**

> **[GREYBRIDGE — KEEP THE CROSSING OPERATIONAL]**

> **[REDFIELD — PROTECT THE CROWN SUPPLY STOCKPILE]**

> **[HIGHWATCH — PROTECT THE MAGICAL ARTILLERY]**

> **[CLEAR CONDITION: ALL THREE STRATEGIC POSITIONS REMAIN OPERATIONAL]**

James read the three names and felt something go cold along the back of his neck.

Greybridge. He had stood in that gatehouse with the winch under his hands and watched the drawspan hit the river and twist away downstream.

Redfield. He had detonated a corpse in the middle of the stockpile row and walked out with the smoke standing a hundred meters into the sky behind him.

Highwatch. He had put Durendal into a consecrated core under a bastion and felt the whole chamber start coming down.

He had done all three of those things twice, because the first time had not worked.

”Why are they minding those places?” Nyra asked. She had abandoned the sum entirely and was reading over the top of her mug. ”You broke all of them. I watched you break the bridge one.”

”Because they picked the other prince.”

She thought about that for a second.

”So they get the opposite homework.”

”That’s exactly what they get.”

It was a better summary than the presenter managed over the following two minutes.

The Korean coalition had held all three. That was what their clear meant. Greybridge’s crossing was still standing in their Caerleon, carrying Crown cavalry and heavy wagons north whenever Baldwin wanted them moved. Redfield was still full and still feeding his advance. Highwatch’s artillery had been finished and consecrated on schedule and was sitting live on its ridge.

In their version of this war, Raymond was not a prince with a supply problem. He was a prince being slowly strangled.

James thought about the healer at the western settlement opening a crate with the military seal on it and doing something with her mouth that was not quite crying, and about the fact that in Korea’s Caerleon that crate had never left Redfield at all.

Then the presenter moved on to Korea’s Floor 23, and James found out that Baldwin had a crisis of his own.

> **[FLOOR 23 — THE BROKEN CROWN]**

> **[FACTION: PRINCE BALDWIN]**

> **[THE CROWN RESERVE CAN BE COMMITTED TO ONE FRONT]**

> **[NORTH — MONSTER ADVANCE. CROWN BORDER POSITIONS COLLAPSING.]**

> **[CENTRE — CAERLEON REFUGEE GATES. CIVILIAN PRESSURE AND SUPPLY FAILURE.]**

> **[WEST — NORTHERN LEGION SUPPLY CORRIDOR. OPPORTUNITY TO CRIPPLE PRINCE RAYMOND.]**

> **[SELECTION IS FINAL]**

It was the same shape of question in a different man’s hands. Not which settlement gets an army — which front gets the reserve, when one of the three options is simply *finish your brother*.

The Korean coalition had sent it north.

James put his cup down.

Baldwin had spent part of his reserve on the monsters. Not on the refugee gates of his own capital, and not on the corridor that would have strangled Raymond while Raymond was already stretched — on a collapsing border that gained him nothing against the man he was at war with.

Which meant the prince Team Zero had spent four floors treating as the one who abandoned the frontier had, in somebody else’s Caerleon, been pushed into defending it.

Not by the Tower. By five foreign Challengers standing in his war room with ninety seconds on a timer.

Their party had taken one of the two remaining crises themselves while Baldwin’s reserve went north, and they had cleared it — and the cost of the choice was that Raymond’s Legion came out of their Floor 23 stronger than it had any right to be, because the soldiers who could have broken it had been sent to fight goblins instead.

---

The tracker moved on, and the thing it kept showing him was that the branch had branches.

South Korea and China had both chosen Baldwin, and Korea was through 23 while China had only finished 22 and was somewhere inside 23 right now with nothing published. Same prince, one floor apart, and whatever choice China was making at that reserve table, they were making it without knowing what Korea had done.

Japan had chosen Baldwin as well and had only cleared 21, which meant their Caerleon was still standing at the crossroads with three roads and everything to play for.

England had chosen Raymond and had cleared 22, which meant they had already broken Greybridge and Redfield and Highwatch the way Team Zero had, in their own order, at their own cost — and were now sitting in front of the same three settlements James had been frozen over, with no result out yet.

And the United States had chosen Raymond and had cleared 23.

That was the one he leaned forward for.

Because Floor 23 was where the Tower had frozen five people over a command tent and made them decide, in ninety seconds, which of three settlements got an army.

The American summary was on screen inside a minute.

> **[PRINCE RAYMOND’S MAIN ARMY WILL REINFORCE THE EASTERN SETTLEMENT]**

James sat back.

They had picked the pass.

He could see the reasoning from here, and it was not stupid reasoning — it was the reasoning Cillian had put on the table and that Maeve had refused to dismiss. The east was a road, not a town. Losing it did not cost you a settlement, it cost you the ground behind your entire army.

America had sent Raymond’s soldiers into that pass, and Raymond’s soldiers had held it, and in the American Caerleon the monster host was still north of the mountains where it belonged.

Their Raymond still owned his own back.

And their west had paid for it. The summary was careful about how it phrased the civilian figures, in the way official documents are careful when the number is bad, and James did not need the exact figure to know what a river settlement looked like when nobody with a Radiant Warden’s shield came to stand on its bridge.

There was no gloating in it and no shame either. Just a different set of dead people.

James sat at his mother’s kitchen table with cold tea and worked it through.

Team Zero’s Raymond had a monster host behind him and a centre and a west that were still standing.

America’s Raymond had a pass, an army that could still turn around, and a hole in his country where a bridge and a town used to be.

Same prince. Same campaign. Same five attempts.

Completely different war.