A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 230: Chapter 230 — Three Roads, One Army I

The secure entry room under Dublin Tower had the cameras and the certified broadcast line, which was the only reason they were standing in it instead of the Hale Estate basement.

Floor 22 had gone in and come out of Finn’s cellar with nobody watching. This one was going out live.

Ronan had his shield up on the bench under the lights, running his thumb along the re-faced edge where the Greybridge gouge had been. He turned it, checked the new rim seating against the old, and put it back on his arm.

"Holds," he said.

Finn worked the grip of the left-hand axe, then the right, and swapped them and did it again, because they had come back from the smiths with fresh binding and fresh binding was always half a millimetre wrong until his hands agreed with it.

Cillian went down the conductors along his forearms one at a time, tapping each contact and watching for the small blue answer. Two of them were new. Both answered.

Maeve had her back to all of it, running the last security check on the broadcast profile — geolocation off, private-window suppression confirmed, party-panel visibility set to public-story only.

"Feed’s clean," she said. "Nothing of ours leaks unless one of us says it out loud."

James checked one thing, quietly, in a window nobody else could see.

[DIMENSIONAL STORAGE]

[REDFIELD MEDICAL CRATES: 22]

Still sealed. Still there. He closed the window without opening a single crate, because they had no appraisal yet, and because he had no idea whether medicine from a dead world would matter one way or another on the floor he was about to walk into.

The broadcast page had been open an hour. The waiting chat was already going too fast to read comfortably, because there was a hole in the public record the size of an entire floor.

[FloorTheoryPod]: FLOOR 22 WAS PRIVATE. WE KNOW THEY CLEARED IT AND NOTHING ELSE.

[FrontierWife]: raymond’s army reached the north. please let the villages still be standing

[ShieldMainSiobhan]: full team. no substitutes. good.

[user48291]: nobody knows what floor 23 is. stop pretending you have a guide

[CillianStorm]: LIGHTNING MAN BACK ON MY SCREEN

Cillian read that last one, straightened up about an inch, and became extremely interested in a conductor that had already answered twice.

"Say nothing," he said.

"I said nothing," Finn said.

"Rules," Maeve said, over both of them. "Same as Floor 21. No private System information on the air. Nothing about Alice, at all, in any form. If you use something, use it, don’t explain it. No guild, no building, no contracts, no families." She looked round them. "The stream gets the floor and nothing else."

Four confirmations came back.

James took one last look along the line of them — shield seated, axes bound, conductors live, Maeve’s feed clean — and started the broadcast.

The viewer counter came up out of the corner of his vision and went vertical.

"Team Zero," he said. "Floor Twenty-Three."

He confirmed entry.

The white light took them, and it did not put them anywhere.

They came out standing on nothing, in the dark, with no floor and no walls and no horizon, exactly as they had before Floor 21 began.

"Form up," Ronan said, and all five of them closed without thinking, back to back, weapons ready against a darkness that had not so much as moved.

Then the dark opened.

It did not start with a dead king this time. It started where they had left off.

A red flare climbed over a ridge in the night, and every one of them recognised the ridge and the flare, because Finn had fired that one himself off Highwatch’s outer wall four hours before he ate dinner in his own kitchen.

[FrontierWife]: THAT’S THE THIRD FLARE

[FloorTheoryPod]: this is AFTER floor 22. the story didn’t reset. it CONTINUED

The projection swung north and down, and Dunadd’s southern gates opened.

Raymond’s army came out of them in order — infantry by company, archers behind, healer wagons and supply carts strung between, riders working the flanks — and it kept coming, column after column, turning onto the northern roads by the light of the walls.

Behind them, the ground the army was leaving stayed quiet. No Crown force moved on Dunadd’s back. The bridge at Greybridge lay in the river with its span twisted downstream, Redfield’s stockpile row was a burnt trench, and on the southern ridge the Highwatch frame stood dark and unfinished with nothing alive inside it.

Six hours of their lives, sitting in the projection as the reason nobody was stabbing Raymond in the back.

[OrcRaidVeteran]: look at how many wounded are already travelling with that army. they’re marching sick

Team Zero said nothing to the chat, and watched.

The army moved north, and the country it moved through got worse.

Farms stood open with their doors gone. A watch post on a hill had burned down to its stone footing and the snow of ash around it had not been disturbed by anyone. Refugee groups came south past the columns, and the soldiers gave them the road, and the further north the army marched the fewer roofs there were on anything.

Riders kept reaching Raymond at the head of the column, and the picture they brought kept changing shape.

The monster host that his scouts had been tracking as one mass had come apart. It was moving on several roads now, not one. Two settlements further north had stopped answering — no beacons, no riders, nothing — and the people who had lived in them were not dead on the road, which meant they were inside the settlements that were still standing, adding mouths to walls that were already short of arrows.

Raymond listened to all of it without slowing his horse.

"Wider," he said. "I want scouts on every road that touches this frontier, not just the ones I like the look of. Go."

The projection jumped.

His army had reached a crossroads and built a camp on it, and from that crossroads three roads left.

One went west, toward a river.

One went straight north, toward walls.

One went east, toward a gap in the mountains.

The projection took them west first.

A settlement sat above a river, and its walls were timber over a stone base, and they had been repaired often enough that the repairs had repairs.

Its gates were open, because people were still coming in.

Behind the settlement, a single intact bridge crossed the river, and the evacuation was already moving over it — carts, handcarts, families on foot, animals being dragged by children, all of it going south at the speed of the slowest thing on the span.

The settlement’s own defenders were nowhere near enough for the job they had. Some were on the gate. Some were on the bridge keeping the column moving. A handful stood on the wall watching the fields, and the fields were where the trouble was.

Goblin riders came out of the west, low over their mounts, spread wide.

War wolves ran ahead of them in loose packs, and neither the riders nor the wolves turned toward the walls.

They went around.

They ran the long way about, past the gate, past the wall, toward the far end of the settlement where the refugee column was strung out along the approach to the bridge with no wall around it at all.

Half a mile of civilians on an open road, and the fastest thing on the field was coming for the middle of it.

[FrontierWife]: oh no. no no no they’re not sieging it. they’re going for the BRIDGE

The projection shifted to the central road.

The settlement at the end of it was the biggest thing left standing in the north, with proper stone walls, real towers, and a garrison in matching colours.

It was also full past its capacity, because every village for thirty miles had emptied into it.

Its courtyards had become field hospitals. Wounded lay in rows under covered walkways with the walkways’ own residents stepping over them. Under guard in the market square, sacks were being counted, opened, and counted again. Every civilian who could carry something was carrying something toward the walls — stones, water, arrow bundles, timber — in a chain that went from the square to the ramparts and did not stop.

The thing coming for them was an army.

Orcs, in ranks, on the north road, and they had discipline in them, and among them walked ogres carrying slabs of shield and hammers made for gates rather than for men.

The walls were good. The walls were far better than the western settlement’s walls.

There were simply not enough soldiers standing on them to hold every gate and every tower at once when the ogres arrived.

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