A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 294: Chapter 285 — The Same Red III(Bonus )

The bolt hit the loaded leg and the whole harness rang.

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 7,150 → 5,020]`

James came through with a hand out while the side plate was gaping.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,720 / 3,100]`

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 5,020 → 2,760]`

And the captain kept fighting.

He took a skeleton apart with one stroke. He caught Finn across the chest plate hard enough to send him back four metres with his boots off the ground, and Finn had to disengage entirely to get his wind back. He broke out of the ring toward Maeve and Ronan had to sprint eight metres to get a body in between.

He was still dangerous at two thousand and he did not need anything to make him dangerous.

Then Ronan turned him one way and Finn hit him from the other, and James put Durendal through the gap in the flank plate to the crossguard.

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 2,760 → 1,480]`

---

The stone lit up.

”*RED*,” Maeve shouted, before it was past his ankles.

And this time nobody had to work anything out.

Finn was already backing off — not turning, not running, just getting outside the range of a man who was about to become considerably faster than he had been a second ago. Ronan had his shield up and set before the light reached the captain’s knees. Cillian stopped mid-cast and held it.

James already had the scythe in both hands.

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 1,480 / 8,800]`

The light climbed him. The hole in his side stayed a hole.

He straightened.

Then he came off the mark like something fired.

Ronan met him ready, braced, expecting it — and still went back two metres with his boots carving lines in the dust.

Finn hit the recovery and did not commit an inch more than his arms, because he had watched a prince eat three men’s full weight and correct out of it, and the captain corrected faster than he should have, and Finn was already gone.

”Maeve—”

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

The violet ring settled into the wound James had opened.

Ronan drove into him and made him turn toward the shield. Finn came in on the brand from the left. Cillian hit it from the right with a short controlled discharge and nothing more, because he had one big one left and this was not it.

The red over the wound flickered.

It held.

James came through last.

He put the black blade into the brand and the red came apart around it, peeling back off the edge, and the cold went straight up the haft and into his teeth.

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 1,480 → 620]`

The red tried to crawl back across the cut.

It reached. It failed.

It reached again, and in the half-second it spent failing, Finn buried an axe in the gap.

`[WAR CAPTAIN — HP: 620 → 0]`

[WAR CAPTAIN SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 560]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,750 / 3,100]

---

The rest went quickly, because the rest had been bleeding for four minutes.

A skeleton put a dead man’s sword through a wounded warrior’s throat.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 440 → 0]`

`[ARMORED WARRIOR SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 220]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,750 / 3,100]`

Alice took two off their feet and through the chest in a single fluid movement, stepping over a third that Cillian had already dropped with a clean lance

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,780 / 3,100]`

And Finn killed the last one with ordinary axe work, no skill, no light, nothing with a name on it — two strikes and a body on the stone.

`[HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED: 18 / 18]`

Nothing appeared.

---

James was expecting the panel and it did not come, and for one bad second he thought about the Warden.

Then he saw why.

The red came off the War Captain first — unwinding off the shoulders, pouring down onto the causeway, gathering into threads.

Then, two hundred metres back down the ruin, another set of threads lifted off the body of the Heavy Warrior.

And further still, at the top of the terrace where the first fight had happened, off a warrior that had been dead for eleven minutes.

Three separate streams of it, on three separate parts of the floor, all moving at once.

They did not come toward Team Zero.

They did not go toward Alice, and they did not go anywhere near the exit.

They ran low and fast across the pale stone, and every one of them found a crack, and every one of them went down.

James stood on a dead man’s causeway and watched the last thread of it slide into the ground.

`[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE COMPLETE]`

`[ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED]`

`[FLOOR 28 CLEARED]`

---

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THREE OF THEM

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** IT WENT UNDERGROUND AGAIN

**[user88317]:** DIFFERENT FLOOR. SAME THING.

**[ZeroFan]:** WHAT IS THAT

**[CorkClimber]:** james better start asking questions

**[FrontierWife]:** that was beneath caerleon too. that was UNDER CAERLEON

**[GalwayGoblin]:** FLOOR 29 IS GONNA BE BAD ISNT IT

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

Maeve read four lines of it and put it away, because she had nothing to tell them that would not be a guess with two million people listening to it.

---

`[FLOOR 28 CLEAR REWARD]`

`[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 6,000]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 30,000 PER MEMBER]`

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 42]`

`[EXP: 13,115 / 69,000]`

`[FLOOR MVP — JAMES GANNER]`

`[REASON: SUPPRESSION OF UNCLASSIFIED HOSTILE REINFORCEMENT]`

James looked at the word *unclassified* for slightly too long.

The Tower had a name for everything. Every monster, every skill, every floor, every rank — it had named a Fallen Divinity and a broken scythe and a labyrinth that moved.

It did not have a name for the red.

Or it had one and was not using it.

---

The transport started to build around them, the white going up from the ground the way it always did.

James looked at Alice.

She was still watching the causeway.

”You’re sure you don’t know.”

”I am sure I do not know enough to name it,” Alice said. ”If I gave you a name now it would be a guess wearing a costume, and you would build a plan on it, and the plan would be wrong.”

”That’s not a no.”

”It is not a yes either.” She turned to look at him properly. ”What I will tell you is this. It did not come to us. Three times, with a Fallen Divinity standing in the open, it went the other way.”

`[FLOOR 29 AVAILABLE]`

James did not open it.

He was looking at the flagstones twelve feet away, at a hairline crack in pale stone with nothing in it now, in a dry valley on a floor that had nothing to do with a burnt kingdom or a dead king or a prince who said yes in a corridor under his own house.

Caerleon was four floors behind them.

Baldwin was in the ground.

And it had just gone under again.