A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 216: Chapter 216 — Too Late I

[TIME REMAINING: 04:28:11]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 1/3]

Redfield was awake and armed.

Shut gates. Archers and battlemages spaced along the walls. Torchlit crews finishing barricades behind the entrance. The warning beacon burning overhead, Highwatch’s answering fire on the far ridge — and beside that distant flame, the cold glow around the unfinished artillery, brighter than it had been an hour ago.

The gun wasn’t live. But its engineers had stopped taking their time.

Below, the last visible medicine wagons rolled south into the dark, under escort, already beyond reach.

James watched them go and let them go.

"We don’t chase. Wagons that are out are out." He was already moving for his horse. "We breach, we take what medicine is still inside, we burn the rest, and we ride. Every minute here is a minute Highwatch spends digging in."

Nobody argued. The enemy was moving; standing still was the only wrong answer.

Finn and Ronan took the main gate, loudly, because someone had to be the obvious problem.

Finn’s axes went into the gate’s central lock while Ronan’s shield covered them both — arrows off the boss, a thrown stone glancing wide, a mage-bolt bursting against the rim in green sparks. The timber cracked under Finn’s third swing.

The gate held anyway. Through the split, Finn could see why: wagons chained across the inside, stacked timber, a second wall built out of the fort’s own furniture.

"Barricaded!" he shouted. "This is going to take actual work!"

Maeve came up behind them and split her attention two ways — a barrier over the breach, and counter-work against the wards someone inside was feeding into the entrance. The battlemages on the wall found her fast. They’d worked out whose shields were keeping the two big men alive under their arrows.

Cillian peeled off south, after the wagons still inside and whatever rider might try to carry a fuller story to Highwatch.

James took the far side of the fort — a service entrance, small and mean, with a handful of defenders on it.

He came in with Durendal and nothing else, because he had nothing else. The Greybridge skeletons hadn’t kept pace with the horses, and there was no putting bone in contract space. Every fight past 20 started at zero corpses.

Redfield knew what he was, in outline. The patrol had seen Greybridge: a necromancer who raised the dead and made corpses explode. So the defenders fought spread out. Soldiers dragged their own dead back from the entrances. Near the inner storehouses, fire mages burned bodies where they fell.

They didn’t know his ranges, his costs, his cooldowns. They just knew not to give him raw material, and that was worth half a countermeasure all on its own.

A spearman came at him from the service gate. James took the thrust on Durendal, turned it, stepped inside the shaft, and killed him. The second guard got a Necro Blast at four meters.

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED]

More defenders were bunching at the entrance now. Enough for a Death Chain.

James didn’t cast it.

The cooldown had cleared on the ride. The strain hadn’t. When he pulled hard on his mana, his vision still tightened at the edges — and a second activation on top of the first might leave him half-blind at Highwatch, where the real problem lived.

Not here. Not for a service gate.

He fought with the sword instead, and when there were bodies enough beyond the fire crews’ reach, he raised them — four skeletons, orders kept stupid-simple. Two on the service entrance beside him. One south, toward Cillian. One at the nearest fire crew, before they could burn the yard’s corpses down to nothing.

An archer on the wall shot the southbound skeleton apart before it made the corner. A fire mage torched a corpse James had been saving. The defenders couldn’t stop him summoning. They could keep him poor, and they knew it.

One skeleton slipped through the press at the service entrance and got inside, behind the first barricade.

Door.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

James arrived behind the barricade — and Redfield had been told about this too, in whatever words the patrol had found for it: the necromancer appears beside his dead. Two soldiers were already watching the skeleton when he materialized next to it.

The disorientation second cost him. The first soldier’s blade banged off his armour, the second drove him back against the barricade timber, and James blocked on instinct, took a glancing cut across the ribs, and burned them both off him with a close-range Necro Blast.

Not untouchable. Just inside.

At the main gate, Finn tore the outer lock apart — and met the wagon wall.

Ronan jammed his shield into the gap and held it wide by raw legs and spite while Finn went at the chained wagons, axes throwing splinters, defenders stabbing through the gaps at both of them. Maeve suppressed the battlemages feeding wards into the entrance, and the exchange cost her — mana she’d budgeted for healing, going out as counterspells instead.

At the southern gate, another medicine wagon was rolling for the exit.

Cillian didn’t touch the horses or the driver. He hit the gate mechanism above them — one precise bolt — and half the reinforced entrance came down in front of the wagon, sealing it inside Redfield with its cargo.

Then he went up the wall and blew the beacon’s access apart, same trick as Greybridge. The first warning was long gone. There’d be no updates.

Finn’s axe finally burst the last chained wagon aside, and Team Zero was in the depot grounds from three directions at once.

And the depot was preparing to burn itself.

Redfield’s commander had made his decision before they breached: nothing for Raymond. Fire crews were laying ignition points through the storehouse lanes — food, weapons, armour, alchemical stock, and the medical stores mixed in among all of it.

A clock inside the clock. Burn it all was the enemy’s win condition, and Team Zero needed the medicine out first.

"Markings!" Ronan bellowed, reading crate stencils on the run. "Green cross-brand — medical! This row!"

James hit the medical storehouse with him. His dimensional storage swallowed the most valuable crates first — concentrated tinctures, the compact high-value stock — until the space was full, and it was nowhere near enough for the whole store.

The skeletons dragged what the storage couldn’t hold, and they were terrible at it — slow, clumsy, crockery-armed — so Ronan held the lane open and Maeve walled a collection point in the outer yard, shielding the growing stack of crates from arrows and fire magic both.

Cillian hunted the fire crews. Every ignition point near the medical rows died with its torch unlit.

Finn found the commander.

The man was at the central ignition line, and he did not stand and duel. He gave ground through the narrow storehouse lanes, put soldiers into Finn’s path, pulled a rigged shelf down between them, always working back toward the master fuse — a commander spending everything to finish one job. Finn had to fight through all of it, bleeding time.

By the time the last recoverable medicine crossed into Maeve’s shielded yard, they had been inside Redfield far too long.

James picked his corpse — a dead soldier lying between the weapons store and the food rows — and did the arithmetic out loud in his head one more time. Finn clear. Ronan clear. Maeve and the medicine behind her wall, out of radius.

[CORPSE EXPLOSION ACTIVATED]

The blast touched off the enemy’s own prepared alchemical stock, and the depot began eating itself — food stores, weapon racks, armour, ammunition, one controlled chain of fire rolling through the military rows while Maeve’s shield stood between the flames and the recovered medicine.

Finn put the commander down twenty meters short of the master fuse, before the man could turn the fire toward the yard.

Cillian wrecked the southern gate mechanism for good. The trapped wagons were staying trapped.

[REDFIELD SUPPLY STOCKPILE DESTROYED]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 2/3]

The second flare went up from Redfield’s wall, red against the smoke.

There were no hidden Legion soldiers coming for the medicine — Raymond had none to send, and everyone knew it. James carried what his storage held. The rest of the crates stayed stacked in the sheltered yard, behind stone, in the hope that the third flare would rise before any Crown force came back this way.

[TIME REMAINING: 03:31:46]

They mounted and rode. Nobody suggested resting.

The road to Highwatch was the long one. Almost ninety minutes, and the ride itself became a ledger of what two forts had cost.

Maeve healed what she could from the saddle, and it was less than usual, because two breaches’ worth of shielding had drained her deep.

Finn’s arm — cut at Greybridge, abused at Redfield’s gate — had stiffened into something he was visibly working around.

Ronan mounted wrong. Swung the bad knee wide, made it look casual. He hid it well enough that only James, watching him twice, caught the change.

"Knee?"

"It’ll finish the night."

James let it stand, because there was nothing else to do with it.

His own damage didn’t show. It sat behind his eyes, where Death Chain had left it, tightening whenever he focused hard — a debt still drawing interest. Most of his skeletons were gone. And Cillian, who’d spent the whole night controlling walls and messengers and fire crews with precision work, said out loud what his mana had left:

"I’ve got maybe six real hits left in me. I’ll be picking them."

Ahead, the cold glow above Highwatch grew as they rode, minute by minute. The weapon wasn’t finished. But every one of those minutes, the engineers were moving more of it behind the inner walls.

[user77201]: they look tired man

[FinnsAxes]: redfield ate like 40 minutes. the maths is getting bad

[TowerWatchKR]: raymond can’t move a single soldier north until flare three. remember that

[user48291]: they can still make it right. right

[TIME REMAINING: 02:03:18]

Highwatch stood on its ridge, waiting, and it had used its warning well.

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