A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 232: Chapter 232—The Gate Was Never the Target I

James did not tell him who they were. He put both hands on the parapet and read the ground instead, and it took him about four seconds to find the thing that was killing this settlement.

It was not the wolves, it was the wagon. The overturned cart lay across the inside of the main arch with its load spilled under it, and it had taken half the gateway out of service.

What was left ran four people wide, and two thousand people wanted through it, so the ones at the front were being pushed into the gap by the weight of everyone behind them. A woman was down on the cobbles with somebody’s boot on her wrist, and two guards had their shoulders against the crowd trying to make a space that would not stay made.

Beyond the walls, the last refugee groups were still out in the open and running, and the war wolves were faster than they were.

The goblin riders behind the wolves were not gathering into a charge at all. Several had already peeled wide, cutting north across the fields at an angle that took them away from the gate entirely.

"How long to shift that wagon?" James said.

The commander wiped his eye with the back of his sword hand. "Several minutes. The axle’s gone through the—"

James watched a war wolf close the last thirty meters on a family of four.

"We don’t have several minutes."

---

Ronan went over the parapet, hit the ground inside the arch, and drove straight out through the gap in the gateway with his shield up while civilians flattened themselves against the walls on either side of him.

The first wolf was mid-stride when he reached it.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

The shield caught it under the jaw at full speed, and he did not try to stop the animal, because nothing stops two hundred kilos going that fast. He turned with it instead, took the weight across his shoulder, rolled his hips, and threw the whole mass of it sideways into the outer wall, and the family behind it ran through the space where it had been.

The wolf came off the stone with a broken shape to its shoulder and tried to get up, and Ronan let it. He set his feet six meters outside the gate, in the middle of the only road into the settlement, and stopped moving.

Everything alive out there that wanted the gate now had to come past him first, and everyone alive out there who wanted to live now had a thing to run at.

---

Maeve came down the wall stair and out into the gateway behind him. She did not throw a barrier over the field, because a barrier over the field would have emptied her in ninety seconds and protected mostly grass.

She built a corridor instead. The light went up in a long, narrow band from the gate arch out to where the nearest refugee group was running, walls on both sides and open at the top, wide enough for four people abreast and not one meter wider.

Goblin arrows came down into it within seconds and burst against the sides in pale flashes, and a thrown spear hit the top edge, skidded, and went into the mud.

Maeve stood at the mouth of it with her hands open at her sides, and her eyes moved constantly between Ronan, the gate crush, the wagon, the riders going north, and back to Ronan again.

"Corridor’s live!" she shouted. "Get them into it!"

---

Cillian climbed the lower gate structure until he was above the heads of the crowd and could see out over the field. He drew, the conductors along his arms lit blue-white, and the nearest wolf came into his line at eighty meters.

A woman with a child on her hip ran across it.

He shut the strike down, all of it, gathered and then swallowed, which hurt somewhere behind his teeth. Then he waited until the woman cleared and the wolf came on another twelve meters with nothing between it and him.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The bolt went through the animal’s front shoulder and the leg locked mid-stride, so the whole thing cartwheeled into the dirt three meters short of the woman’s back. She did not even know it had been there.

**[LightningWatch]:** he cancelled that first one. civilian crossed his line and he just ate the whole charge

---

Finn went past Ronan and kept going, because the mounted goblins were the problem the wolves were not. They had reach, and they were quick, and one of them had swung wide with a hooked spear lowered at an old man who had fallen behind the group and was not going to catch up.

[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]

Finn crossed forty meters in the time the spear took to come down. He knocked the shaft aside with the haft of the left axe, stepped through into the wolf’s path, and swung the right one across the rider’s ribs as it went past him, and the goblin came out of the saddle already finished.

Its mount did not stop, and it ran on riderless straight for the corridor mouth, where Ronan took it on the shield and forced it off the line without moving more than half a step.

---

The rider Finn had emptied out of the saddle lay in the mud fifteen meters from the corridor, which made it the first confirmed monster corpse of the night.

James raised his hand.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

[MANA: 2,960 → 2,880]

The body split along its length as the skeleton pulled itself up out of it, still holding the goblin’s own hooked spear in one hand. James did not send it into the field, but walked it to the outer wall of Maeve’s corridor and set it there, facing out.

Finn killed another rider a moment later, and Cillian dropped a third off its mount at the edge of the torchlight, and James raised both of them where they fell.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x2 — MANA COST: 160]

[MANA: 2,880 → 2,720]

Both went to the exposed side of the corridor, spaced along it, and stood.

They were not going to beat anything out there, since a war wolf could take one apart in about four seconds, and the first one to try proved it by ripping a skeleton’s arm and half its ribs away in a single pass.

It took four seconds to do it. In those four seconds it was not moving toward the civilians, and Ronan had shifted eight meters to his left and was waiting when it finished.

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ronan isn’t chasing ANY of them. he’s just standing on the road they need

**[RaidStatsGuy]:** maeve narrowed the shield to a lane. she’s not wasting a drop of that on empty field

**[FloorTheoryPod]:** why are the riders going around? they keep breaking off north. that’s not an assault

---

A cart inside the gateway went over as the crowd surged, and the horse in its traces tore free and came out through the arch at a panicked gallop, sideways, straight across the mouth of Maeve’s corridor. The civilians packed in behind it went down like a folded fence.

Maeve saw the whole thing happen and could not lower the barrier for a second of it, because the moment the light thinned, goblin archers in the field doubled their fire into the lane.

"Lane blocked!" she shouted. "Ronan — lane’s blocked!"

Ronan started backing toward the gate without ever turning the shield away from the field. He reached the horse and got his free hand into the harness, and the horse dragged him three steps toward the fields before he set his heels.

A wolf hit his shield at the same moment. The impact drove him sideways with the horse still pulling the other way and people scrambling around his legs, so that for two seconds Ronan was a man holding a wall in one hand and an animal in the other while being hit by a third thing.

He dropped his centre, kept the shield between the wolf and the crowd, and walked the horse back through the arch one heaving step at a time.

A goblin rider saw the shield committed and came in on his open side.

Finn was already turning. He cut back from the field at a dead run, caught the goblin’s weapon between his axe head and haft on the way past, and hauled, and the rider came out of the saddle backward and hit the mud hard enough to bounce.

It rolled once, trying to get its legs under it, and Finn did not give it the second try.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

The axe came down and the threat stopped existing, three meters from Ronan’s unguarded ribs.

James raised that one too, and sent it the other way.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

[MANA: 2,720 → 2,640]

Not to the corridor, but through the arch and into the gateway, to the wagon. Two of his other skeletons came off the corridor wall and followed it in, and all three of them got their hands into the broken frame beside the soldiers who were already trying to lift it.

The nearest soldier let go and jumped back when a dead hand closed on the timber next to his. "It’s — sir, they’re—"

"They’re LIFTING!" the commander roared from the wall. "So LIFT!"

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