A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 257: Chapter 257 — Between Two Monsters II

[PRINCE RAYMOND]

[SKILL ACTIVATED: FRONTIER CHARGE — A-RANK]

[ALLIED MOUNTED UNITS WITHIN FORMATION GAIN MOMENTUM AND IMPACT WHILE ADVANCING]

The first Crown spearman got his weapon around too late. Raymond knocked the head aside with his sword and the horse went through the space shoulder-first and put the man under it.

A second soldier grabbed for the reins and got a boot in the forearm hard enough to break it, and the rider behind Raymond rode him down two seconds later.

Then the whole wedge was inside the formation’s corner, and the corner stopped existing.

It did not destroy Baldwin’s army. It destroyed one compromised section of one formation — horses smashing through men whose shields were facing the wrong way, riders cutting downward at soldiers who could not turn in time, a Crown standard going over and disappearing under hooves.

But it was enough.

Baldwin’s infantry had to turn away from Team Zero’s corridor to deal with forty horsemen inside their own line, and the corridor stayed open.

**[RaymondWasRight]:** RAYMOND IS LEVEL 50???

**[CrownLawIE]:** BRO THE NPC IS STRONGER THAN MOST CHALLENGERS

**[GalwayGoblin]:** THAT CHARGE

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** he waited for the flank to open

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** frontier commander actually commands who knew

Raymond wheeled at the far end of the break rather than riding on into the army, because his objective had never been the formation.

Which put him coming back across the field at the exact moment Kargan raised the Blood Axe over Ronan again.

Ronan was still trying to get his shield arm properly back into position. He was not going to make it.

Raymond did not slow down. He drove the horse in at Kargan’s blind side and cut down across the back of the Orc Chief’s knee as he passed.

[KARGAN — HP: 28,940 → 26,810]

The leg buckled, and the axe that had been coming down on Ronan went into the mud a meter to his left instead.

Kargan turned faster than anything that size had a right to.

He came round backhanded, and Raymond had eight meters of open ground and a horse’s turning circle and none of it was enough. He saw the axe coming, understood he could not get the animal clear, and threw himself out of the saddle.

The axe took the horse across the chest.

Raymond hit the ground shoulder-first and rolled through mud and other people’s blood and came up two meters from his own sword, and got to it half a second before Kargan reached the space where he was.

Ronan stepped in front of both of them and took the follow-up on the shield.

He was driven back a meter and a half. He held.

When it was over Raymond was on his feet inside Team Zero’s formation, on foot, sword in hand, breathing hard, with mud all down one side of him — and he stayed there rather than looking for another horse.

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** HORSE NOOOO

**[GalwayGoblin]:** he jumped before the axe landed

**[RaymondWasRight]:** GET UP GET UP

**[CrownLawIE]:** THIS FLOOR IS INSANE

---

The section Raymond’s cavalry had broken left a hole in the Crown line, and for a few seconds the smoke drifted the right way through it.

James saw the field open all the way to the centre.

Past Morcant. Past Kargan. Past two more formations and the road running back toward the city.

Under the main Crown standard, on a dark warhorse, Baldwin was sitting perfectly still.

James tried to Inspect him and got nothing at all. The skill needed him a great deal closer than six hundred meters, and at this range it did not so much fail as decline to engage — the way it did on a mountain or a wall, on something that was scenery rather than a target.

He was almost relieved. He was not sure he wanted the number yet.

Everything around that horse was chaos. Sections of Baldwin’s own army were collapsing and re-forming. There were monsters inside his eastern lines and his men were dying to them. His brother had personally broken one of his formations six hundred meters away. His Lord Commander was tied up in the mud with an Orc Chief.

Baldwin sat with his back straight and one hand on the reins.

His other hand rested near his weapon without touching it. The horse under him shifted and he settled it without appearing to move at all.

He was watching.

Then a wounded orc came through the soldiers on his left — bleeding from three places, half-blind, running at the royal standard because it was the biggest thing it could see.

Four Crown guards started forward.

Baldwin lifted one hand off the reins.

They stopped.

He waited while the orc closed, and then drew his sword — not all of it, just enough — and made one movement as the thing came into range.

The orc dropped.

Baldwin returned the sword to the scabbard, put his hand back on the reins, and turned his head to look across the field at his brother.

**[RaymondWasRight]:** why is he just sitting there

**[GalwayGoblin]:** THAT ORC DIDNT EVEN GET A SECOND SWING

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** Morcant is 54 and that’s HIS right hand btw

**[user88317]:** stop saying that i don’t like where this is going

Beside James, Raymond had stopped moving.

He was looking straight down the gap at the man on the horse, and his jaw was locked so hard the muscle stood out under the mud on his face, and his sword hand had tightened until the leather creaked.

He did not take a step toward him.

Kargan and Morcant were in the way, and Raymond had spent thirty years on a frontier learning exactly what happened to men who walked at the thing they wanted with two larger things standing between.

The smoke closed.

---

James turned back and found that the ground had changed while he was looking at a prince.

Morcant had followed them out. He was twenty meters from the Crown formation now, and his soldiers were still coming, but they were coming in threes and fives instead of ranks, because Kargan’s swings had scattered one section and Raymond’s charge had bent another and there was simply less of an army in this patch of field than there had been.

And Morcant was, fractionally, easier to read.

”Finn,” James said. ”Keep pulling him. Toward the orc.”

Finn looked once at Kargan, thirty meters away, on one damaged knee and still enormous.

”Right,” he said, and did not ask a single question about it.

They stopped trying to win two fights.

Morcant came at James again and James gave ground on the diagonal rather than straight back, drawing the line of the fight sideways across the churned ground. Finn worked the opposite flank hard enough that Morcant could not simply stop following without opening himself to it.

Thirty meters away, Kargan drove at Raymond and Ronan.

Ronan did not plant this time. He took the charge on an angle and redirected it — turning that enormous momentum a few degrees across the field, across the same stretch of ground James was walking Morcant into.

Maeve saw the two lines converging before either boss did.

She did not shout a plan. She moved, and put herself where Cillian would have to turn to follow her, and Cillian turned to follow her and found himself looking at a firing lane covering the exact patch of mud both fights were heading toward.

He stopped shooting at Kargan entirely and started holding it.

A Crown soldier broke off and came at James’s flank while James was giving ground.

Kargan’s axe killed him on the backswing without Kargan ever knowing he was there.

The body dropped in the mud between James and Morcant.

James took it.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 80]

It came up behind the Lord Commander, and Morcant turned and destroyed it with one economical backhand cut before it had straightened.

That turn was the entire point.

Finn had been killing the Crown soldiers coming in around Morcant for two solid minutes, one after another, out of the same formation, without once letting the count lapse — and every one of them had left something behind in his hands.

He came in on the opening Morcant had just given him and put both axes into the Lord Commander’s side.

[MORCANT — HP: 36,920 → 34,720]

Morcant gave ground.

One step. Only one.

James saw it and felt something shift, because Vane’s master had not moved backward for anybody since he walked down that lane.

Then Morcant answered.