A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 236: Chapter 236 — What the Bridge Could Carry I

James went down the slope of the bank at the far mouth until he was almost at the waterline, and lay along it to look under the bridge.

From there the whole underside opened up ahead of him as a long dark tunnel of stone and beam, and the three fuses kept disappearing into it. They showed as small orange points whenever a boat slid through open water between two supports, and then a pier would come across the line and the point would be gone for two or three seconds before it reappeared somewhere he had not expected.

Looking down the length of it from one end, the three fires sat almost in line with each other, and he could not tell which was nearest to its work or which had least cord left to burn.

Maeve could. She was up on the wall walk with the whole river laid out flat beneath her instead of stacked end-on.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

It did not solve anything for her, but it gave her the distances between the three boats, the speed each one was making against the current, and how much cord was left burning on each of them.

"Middle first," she said. "Then the one coming toward us. The third’s behind the pier and I can’t see its fuse at all."

"Cillian," James said. "River line."

---

Cillian went along the river-facing wall until he found a place where the ground fell away enough to give him a flat angle underneath the deck.

"I have about a meter of clearance," he called. "Charge is right against the beam."

"Then don’t hit the charge." James was still watching through the boards. "You set that off against the support and you finish their job for them. Kill the goblins, not the bundle."

So Cillian stood there with a full charge in both arms and waited.

A pier came between. Then a wagon on the deck above dropped its silhouette across the whole line. Then two civilians stopped walking directly in front of the only gap he had, and he held it and held it while the burn crawled up his forearms.

The middle boat came out into the open water between two supports, and a sapper stood up in it to set its shoulder against the charge and tighten the lashing.

[GOBLIN SAPPER — LEVEL: 24]

[HP: 1,150 / 1,150]

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 1,150 → 0]

[GOBLIN SAPPER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 130]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,285 → 43,415 / 57,000]

The bolt went flat under the bridge, through the meter of clearance, and out through the goblin’s chest. It dropped straight down into the bottom of its own boat instead of over the side, which was exactly what James had been waiting for.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

[MANA: 2,090 → 2,010]

The corpse came apart and stood up in the middle of four surviving sappers, with the dead goblin’s own cutting knife still hanging at its belt.

James gave it three things and nothing more. Cut the lashings. Take the charge. Put it in the river.

The feed was moving too fast for anything to stay on screen for longer than half a second, and what surfaced out of it came through in fragments.

**[LightningWatch]:** ONE CORPSE

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** HE RAISED IT INSIDE THEIR BOAT LMAOOO

**[GoblinRights]:** worst boat trip ever 💀

**[user48291]:** wait what happened i looked away

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** INSIDE. THE BOAT.

**[AshesAndBones]:** CILLIAN AGAIN

**[Kieran_77]:** chat it has their KNIFE

---

The sappers went at it before it had straightened.

One drove a boat hook in under its ribs and hauled sideways, trying to pull the whole frame over the gunwale and into the water, and the skeleton did not resist it, because nothing James had said to it involved staying in the boat.

It simply walked along the hook.

It came up the shaft with the barb still through its spine, and the goblin holding the other end had about a second to understand its mistake before the knife came across its throat.

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 1,150 → 0]

[GOBLIN SAPPER SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 130]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,415 → 43,545 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,010 → 2,040]

A second sapper came over the thwart at it with a mallet and got two swings in, and the skeleton took both of them across the shoulder and did not turn around for either. It caught the third swing on its forearm, put the knife up backhanded, and left the goblin folded over the side of the boat.

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 1,150 → 420]

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 420 → 0]

[GOBLIN SAPPER SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 130]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,545 → 43,675 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,040 → 2,070]

Then it went back to what it had actually been told to do.

It reached the pitch-soaked bundle lashed to the beam overhead and got the knife into the first cord. The rope was wet and wound thick and it took four passes of the blade, and by the third the fuse had burned down past the wrapping and was cooking against the bones of its hand.

It sawed through the last strand, tore the bundle off the beam, and threw it.

The charge went into the river about eight meters out, sank, and detonated under the surface. The water came up between the boards in a white column that knocked people flat the length of a wagon and rocked the whole span on its supports, but it went off in open water rather than against stone, and when the river fell back the pier was still standing.

The last two sappers took the skeleton apart in the bottom of the boat a moment later. They were welcome to it, because the charge was gone.

**[AshesAndBones]:** ONE

**[ZeroFan]:** TWO MORE TWO MORE

**[GoblinRights]:** it threw the bomb like a bin bag 😭

**[Kieran_77]:** why doesnt james just blow the whole thing up

**[RaidStatsGuy]:** He can’t. There are civilians standing directly above those boats.

**[Kieran_77]:** oh

**[Kieran_77]:** OH

---

The second boat had already reached its support.

Its charge was fixed. There was no goblin standing up to tighten anything, nothing exposed for Cillian to kill, and no corpse anywhere near it for James to raise.

Maeve went down the wall stair to the lowest walkway on the river side and got her eyes level with the water.

From there she could see the ropes. Three of them ran from the boat up to the bundle, and they were not carrying equal weight — two were slack enough to move with the current, and one was taking the whole hanging mass of the charge and creaking with it.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

The mark went onto the rope rather than the explosive, and burned orange along a hand’s length of it.

"On the mark," Maeve said.

"Beam’s in my way," Cillian answered. "Give me four seconds."

He waited while the current pushed the boat, and the outer beam of the bridge slid out of his line, and the branded cord came clear against the water.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The rope parted where it burned. The charge dropped under its own weight, still lit, swung on the two slack lines until they tore, and came down across the gunwale of the boat beneath it.

It went into the river on the bounce and blew a moment later, close enough to lift the boat and turn it over, and fragments went up and rattled off the underside of the deck.

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 1,150 → 0]

[GOBLIN SAPPER — HP: 1,150 → 0]

[2 GOBLIN SAPPERS SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 260]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,675 → 43,935 / 57,000]

No mana came back to James off either of them, because the second support was most of the length of the bridge away and Call of Souls did not reach that far.

The support took the spray, and stood.

---

The third boat never came out from behind the central support.

Maeve could not brand what she could not see. Cillian had no angle that did not go through a stone pier. James could not put a Corpse Explosion under the middle of that span with eight hundred people standing on top of it, and there was no corpse down there to raise, because nothing had died where he could reach.

He shifted twice along the boards, trying to find a crack that gave him a sightline past the pier, and got nothing but wet stone.

The orange point behind the support went out of view and did not come back.

Maeve saw the meaning of that a second before anyone said it, and stopped trying to reach the charge at all.

She turned everything she had left to the place where the support met the deck, and threw a curved barrier across the joint itself — not around the boat, not over the explosion, just across the one structural connection that the entire centre of the bridge was hanging from.

The third charge went off.

Her barrier caught the first force of it and folded inward like sheet metal. The light fractured across its whole surface, held for less than a second with every crack running wider, and then shattered.

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