A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 231: Chapter 231 — Three Roads, One Army II

The projection shifted east.

The last settlement was smaller and built hard against the foot of a mountain pass, with a wall that used the rock itself for half its length. Fewer people. Fewer houses.

And a road behind it that ran through the pass, around the mountains, and came out behind Dunadd on Raymond’s northern supply route.

Wyverns turned in slow circles above the pass.

Below them, goblins and orcs were already coming up through the lower rocks, hand over hand in places, and behind those, shamans stood beneath rough banners with their hands moving.

On the wall, the defenders had spears and hunting bows, and the wyverns were four hundred feet up.

[FloorTheoryPod]: the east isn’t a town. it’s a DOOR. that pass gets behind raymond entirely

Back at the crossroads camp, three riders came in almost together.

The western rider was off his horse before it stopped. "They’re not attacking the walls, my lord, they’ve gone round — they’ll be on the refugee column before the bridge clears. We need horse. We need horse now, or they’ll take them in the open."

The central rider had a tally in his hand and did not need to read it. "Orc host on the north road, in formation, with ogres. Six thousand at least. The commander says he can hold sections but he cannot hold the whole wall, and once the ogres are at a gate he loses whichever one he isn’t standing on."

The eastern rider was the youngest and the least composed. "Wyverns over the pass. Wyverns, my lord, a dozen at least, and shamans behind the climbers. We can’t reach them. If the pass goes—"

"I know what the pass is," Raymond said.

His officers were already going at each other around the map table.

"The bridge. The bridge, my lord, there are two thousand people on that road and no wall between them and a wolf pack—"

"And thirty thousand behind the central walls with the field hospital in the courtyards. You want to spend the army on the smallest of the three?"

"I want to spend it where people die in the next hour rather than the next day."

"Then you lose the pass, and the pass is not a town, it is a road, and when they come down it behind us there is no campaign left to argue about—"

"Enough." Raymond put one hand flat on the table. "Can we divide? Three columns, one road each. Answer me properly."

His quartermaster did not soften it.

"You can divide, my lord, and I can tell you exactly what you get. The companies are under strength and they have marched since Dunadd. Split three ways, each force arrives too small to break what is waiting for it, at all three places, on the same night." He tapped the map twice. "You would lose three fights instead of winning one."

"Scouts and messengers, then."

"Those you can send anywhere. It is the army that can only be in one place."

Raymond looked at the three roads.

"When does each one begin?"

"West is already begun," the quartermaster said. "Those riders reach the column before your cavalry could clear the camp. Centre is slower, because an orc host that size moves at the speed of its ogres, but when it arrives it arrives everywhere at once. East—" he glanced at the young rider "—east has wyverns, and wyverns do not wait for the climbers to reach the top. They can open that fight whenever they choose, and spears will not answer them."

Raymond stood over the table with three roads in front of him.

Then the world stopped.

The dust hanging over the camp road stopped falling. A banner froze mid-snap. The young eastern rider stood with his mouth open around a word that never arrived, and the quartermaster’s finger rested on a map that no longer meant anything to him, because nothing in that camp was moving at all.

Except five people.

[FLOOR 23 — THE NORTHERN FRONT]

[PRINCE RAYMOND’S MAIN ARMY CAN REINFORCE ONE SETTLEMENT]

[WEST — REFUGEES AND EVACUATION BRIDGE. ATTACK IMMINENT]

[CENTRE — LARGEST POPULATION. MAIN ORC FORCE APPROACHING]

[EAST — NORTHERN PASS. WYVERN ASSAULT APPROACHING]

[SELECT RAYMOND’S DEPLOYMENT]

[SELECTION IS FINAL]

[TIME REMAINING: 90 SECONDS]

The chat came apart instantly.

[FrontierWife]: WEST. THEY ARE ALREADY AT THE BRIDGE

[OrcRaidVeteran]: the centre needs a real army. five challengers cannot cover those walls

[FloorTheoryPod]: east is the campaign loss. if that pass falls the monsters get BEHIND raymond

[user48291]: pick the town with the most people?? why is this a debate

[ShieldMainSiobhan]: because team zero has to go fight somewhere after this one

"Nobody reads the chat," James said, without looking at it. "One each. What your role can do, and what it can’t. Ronan."

"The centre’s a length problem." Ronan had already turned to face that road. "Look at the wall. Four gates, six towers, and a curtain long enough that a man walking it takes twenty minutes. I can hold a gap. I cannot hold four gaps a quarter mile apart, and neither can any five people alive. That town needs hundreds of bodies standing in hundreds of places, and there is no clever version of that."

"Cillian."

Cillian was staring up at the frozen wyverns.

"Raymond’s lads can’t touch those. Bows that size at that height, they’d need a hundred archers and luck." He flexed a hand and the conductor along it woke. "I can. I can drop those out of the sky one at a time, and Maeve can reach the shamans, and James’s summons hold a wall so the defenders don’t have to. The east is a specialist problem, and we’re specialists."

"Finn."

"West is speed." Finn had his eyes on the goblin riders strung out across the field. "That’s a raid, not an army. Light cavalry and wolves, no siege, no formation. They’re fast and they’re spread and there’s nothing there that stops the five of us the way six thousand orcs would. If we hit that field we break it." He paused. "But those people die in the next hour. Not tomorrow. The next hour."

"Maeve."

"I want to change the question you’re all answering." She had not looked away from the three frozen scenes since the panel opened. "You’re weighing the most people against the most strategically important, and that’s the wrong axis, because it makes this about which of those three places deserves to live. None of us gets to decide that and I’d rather we didn’t pretend we do."

"Then what’s the axis?"

"Where does Raymond’s army do something we physically cannot reproduce." She turned to face him. "That’s it. That’s the only question. Five people can’t be a garrison. Five people absolutely can be a strike force, and five people are the only thing on this floor that can fight something flying. So don’t ask where the army is most deserved. Ask where it’s least replaceable."

[TIME REMAINING: 00:46]

James looked at the three roads one more time.

The west needed somebody fast enough and violent enough to break a raid in an open field before it reached a column of civilians, and that was a job for five people who hit disproportionately hard.

The east needed something that could kill a wyvern, and Raymond’s infantry could stand in that pass all night and never touch one.

The centre needed men. Thousands of them, standing on a wall, in every place at once, for as long as it took.

There was no version of this where Team Zero was the answer to the centre.

"The centre needs bodies," James said. "We don’t have bodies. Raymond does."

Nobody argued.

He selected the central settlement.

[PRINCE RAYMOND’S MAIN ARMY WILL REINFORCE THE CENTRAL SETTLEMENT]

[SELECTION CONFIRMED]

The panel vanished, and the world came back on.

The banner finished its snap. The dust fell. The young eastern rider’s word finally arrived, and nobody heard it, because Raymond had already lifted his head.

"North road," he said. "Infantry, archers, the healers, the heavy equipment, all of it. We reinforce the centre."

His officers moved before they finished disagreeing.

"Riders west." He was already writing. "Tell that settlement to evacuate everything across that bridge tonight and hold the crossing as long as they can hold it. Not the walls. The crossing." He signed it, and started a second. "Scouts east. Tell them plainly. Tell them no army is coming, and tell them what is climbing toward them, and let them decide what to do with the truth."

The horns went up across the camp, and the whole shape of the thing changed direction — banners swinging north, wagons turning after them, companies peeling off the crossroads onto the central road in a long braid of torchlight.

Down the western road and the eastern road went two small groups of riders, carrying paper.

[FrontierWife]: THEY LEFT THE WEST

[ShieldMainSiobhan]: he sent warnings. that’s all raymond has left to send

[FloorTheoryPod]: so team zero is going to one of the other two. which one

The projection darkened around the marching army.

[FLOOR 23 MISSION ASSIGNED]

[THE NORTHERN FRONT]

[RAYMOND’S ARMY HAS BEEN DEPLOYED TO THE CENTRAL SETTLEMENT]

[TEAM ZERO WILL DEFEND THE WESTERN SETTLEMENT]

[CLEAR CONDITION: TWO SETTLEMENTS MUST SURVIVE UNTIL DAWN]

[FAILURE CONDITION: FEWER THAN TWO SETTLEMENTS REMAIN]

James read it twice, and the arithmetic came out the same both times.

Raymond had to hold the centre. Team Zero had to hold the west. Two settlements had to see the sun, and there were only two settlements being defended by anybody at all — which meant neither of them could fall, and it meant the east was standing on its own with a warning and no help.

The System had not asked them to save it. The System had said nothing about it whatsoever.

"That’s not two out of three," Ronan said, working it out at the same speed. "That’s both of ours, or nothing."

"Yes," James said.

The light took them.

They came out standing on a wall, in noise.

Below and to the left, the main gate was jammed. A wagon had gone over inside the arch with its load spilled across the cobbles, and it blocked half the entrance, and the half that was left had people forcing through it four abreast while two guards on the gate leaves tried to work out how to close anything without taking somebody’s legs off.

Children were being handed over the top of the fallen cart. A horse was down in its harness beside it, screaming, kicking, and nobody could get near enough to cut it free.

On the wall around Team Zero, defenders were shooting into the fields, and they were shooting badly, because the fields were full of moving shapes and half of the shapes were their own people.

Out there, past the wall, the war wolves had reached the stragglers.

The goblin riders behind them were not stopping at all. They came on past the walls at a long angle, spread wide, aiming for the far end of the settlement where the road ran down to the bridge and two thousand people stood on it with nothing on either side of them.

Further out again, more shapes were crossing the fields in the dark.

Ronan’s shield came up before his feet had settled, and he was already reading the gate.

Finn drew both axes.

The conductors on Cillian’s arms lit and stayed lit.

Maeve looked at the bridge first, then at the line of wounded being dragged in through the gap in the gate, and James watched her decide she could not be in both places.

James looked for corpses, because corpses were his opening move, and he found plenty of them out on the fields.

Then he looked harder.

At two hundred meters, in the dark, with the light of the wall torches reaching about a third of the way, he could not tell which of those shapes had been a goblin and which had been somebody’s grandmother.

He kept his hands where they were.

Not until I can see what I’m raising.

The settlement’s commander came along the wall walk at a run with his sword still dripping and stopped in front of five armed strangers who had arrived in a column of white light on his rampart.

He looked at them for about a second and a half.

Then a war wolf brought down the last refugee still moving on the open ground below the gate, and he stopped looking at them and pointed his blade out at the fields.

"If you’ve come to help, start now."

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