A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 219: Chapter 219 — What We Know Now I

They rebuilt the second attempt from confirmed ground only.

The faction was locked, so there was no Baldwin conversation to have. They would arrive on the same northern road, meet the same convoy, reach Dunadd the same way, and receive the same three-fort mission from Raymond — unless something they changed earlier rippled forward, in which case they would adapt.

The stale intelligence problem came first, because it was the trap hiding inside their advantage.

"We can’t tell Raymond his Greybridge patrol report is three days old," Maeve said. "There’s no version of that sentence that doesn’t end with him asking how five foreigners know his enemy’s stable schedule better than his scouts do. So we don’t tell him anything. When he hands us the maps, we ask him when each report was last verified — it’s a question any careful commander respects, and if he admits the patrol information is old, then our interest in the eastern ridge sounds like caution instead of prophecy."

"And if he says it’s all current and believes it?" Finn asked.

"Then he’s wrong and we already know it."

"Which is my point." Finn tapped the ridge on the map. "We don’t build this on persuading Raymond of anything. Whatever he believes, we know where those riders go, and we get there first."

The interception plan went onto the map in grease pencil.

They would approach Greybridge together, exactly as before, but before the assault began, Ronan and Cillian would take the overlooking ridge where the patrol road climbed away east. The road up there was narrow enough for one shield to close it, which was work built for Ronan, and Cillian could drop horses and riders faster than any of them without needing the others’ support. James, Finn, and Maeve would hold position within sight of the fort, close enough to support the ridge if it went wrong and close enough to open the Greybridge assault the moment the patrol was contained.

"To be clear," Ronan said, "this is not the splitting we refused."

"It isn’t," James agreed. "Five people across three forts was five people dying separately over an hour apart. This is two people, one narrow road, a few hundred meters from the rest of us, for the length of one ambush. If it goes wrong, we’re there before it finishes going wrong."

The forts came next, and the corrections were shorter, because knowledge was doing the work that blood had done last time.

At Greybridge they already knew the gate, the beacon, the messenger exit, the control chamber, the commander’s delaying instincts, and the mechanism itself, so the plan cut everything that didn’t touch those objectives. Defenders who couldn’t interfere with the beacon, the gates, or the drawspan would be left standing rather than fought.

At Redfield, James would take only the medicine that fitted directly into his storage while the others fired the stockpile, and there would be no shielded collection point in the yard this time.

Ronan pushed back on that one, as James had known he would.

"If Attempt Two is the clear, then those villages and Raymond’s wounded need what’s in that depot, and we’d be burning it."

"We’re not abandoning all of it — my storage comes out full either way," James said. "What we’re refusing is trading the mission for crates. The collection point cost us most of an hour, and that hour is the difference between reaching Highwatch’s core with eight minutes and reaching it with ninety. If this attempt becomes the clear, the minutes save more people than the medicine would."

Ronan held the argument in his jaw for a moment, and then he let it go, because the timeline on the wall was on James’s side.

At Highwatch, they would not spend a single swing on the visible frame. Maeve had the outer rune sequence recorded in order, Cillian knew which overloads had cracked the deeper seal, and the route to the chamber was mapped in all five of their memories.

"So," Finn said, looking at the whole board. "Patrol dead, warning stopped, every fort fought cold instead of warned, and we walk into Highwatch knowing the answer to a test we already sat. Is that enough to break the core in time?"

"It may be," James said, and left it there, because the last week had burned the taste for guarantees out of him.

Cillian raised the last piece on the board, the one nobody else was going to name.

"Alice." He said it plainly. "Strongest thing we have, sitting in a slot, never used. Is this the attempt where she comes out and flattens Greybridge before anyone inside knows there’s a war?"

"No," James said, and gave the reason rather than just the refusal. "The first attempt didn’t fail because we lacked power — we reached the final core through six hours of warned, prepared defences and still nearly broke it. Attempt Two tests whether removing the warning solves the floor. If it does, we never needed to show the world Alice, and if it doesn’t, then I’ll think about changing the battlefield with something we’ve never once deployed together. She’s the escalation, not the opening move."

Cillian nodded, satisfied less by the answer than by the fact that there was one.

The remaining days went into edges. James set himself mana thresholds for each fort, hard floors he would not spend past before the next objective, and wrote them where he’d see them. Maeve budgeted her own reserves backward from Highwatch, deciding what the first two forts were allowed to cost her. Cillian replaced his burnt conductors and drilled for mounted work on the ridge. Ronan studied the patrol road until he could draw its bends from memory and had chosen the exact pinch where five horses could be stopped without leaving one gap for a single rider to break away through. Finn walked the fort maps until the shortest route through each was reflex instead of reference.

A week after the failure, the five of them stood in the Hale Estate basement in repaired equipment, and James opened the entry panel.

[FLOOR 22 AVAILABLE]

[THE BROKEN CROWN — ATTEMPT 2]

[FACTION LOCKED: PRINCE RAYMOND]

[REMAINING ATTEMPTS: 4]

There was no selection to make and nothing new to read, so nobody said anything ceremonial.

James confirmed entry.

The transport light took them, and there was no darkness this time, no projection, no dying kingdom playing across the void — just the light, and then cold air with pine and woodsmoke in it, and the raised stone road along the shoulder of the hill.

The Northern Frontier lay below them in the late morning sun, beautiful and doomed and exactly as they remembered it, with the herds moving south and the soldiers marching north and the refugee carts between them. Somewhere down the road, a girl was carrying a hen in a basket and telling it everything would be grand.

Nobody stopped to feel the strangeness of it, because they had spent a week deciding not to.

They moved down the road at pace, and they reached the convoy with time in hand, because this time nobody was reading roadside notices along the way. The wagons were strung out along the valley floor exactly as before, the escort was spread exactly as before, and the trees on the flanks held exactly what they remembered.

The five took their places without a word passing between them. Maeve’s field began spreading over the wagons before the convoy officer had even finished noticing the strangers. Ronan planted himself at the point where the first war-wolf had come through, Cillian turned to watch the treeline that had produced the ogre, and Finn loosened both axes and rolled his shoulder like a man about to repeat a job he’d already been paid for once.

The convoy soldiers stared at them, and someone reached for a horn, and nobody understood what the five armed strangers were forming up against, because the valley was quiet.

James stood at the rear wagon with Durendal drawn, and looked past the convoy entirely, south, toward roads none of these soldiers were thinking about, where a fortress sat on a river crossing and five horses stood in a stable that had not been saddled yet.

The treeline broke.

The first war-wolf came out of the shadows at full stretch, exactly on its schedule, and instead of an unguarded flank it met Ronan’s raised shield with a crack that rolled down the valley, and the whole ambush arrived behind it into a wall that had been waiting.

James watched the nearest soldiers’ faces as they understood that the strangers had been ready for an attack nobody announced.

Then he looked south again.

"Finish this fast," he said. "We have a patrol to catch."

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