A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 237: Chapter 237 — What the Bridge Could Carry II

The joint stayed connected. Everything around the joint did not. The deck tore open in a ragged line across the span, and one side of the bridge dropped four feet and stopped there at an angle, groaning.

[BRIDGE INTEGRITY: 78% → 44%]

Maeve went down onto one knee on the wall walk. Her hands stayed up, but her fingers were shaking badly enough that the next shape she tried to make came apart before it formed.

**[ZeroFan]:** MAEVE

**[ZeroFan]:** MAEVE ARE YOU OK

**[Kieran_77]:** 44% INTEGRITY THEY’RE COOKED

**[AshesAndBones]:** she’s DOWN

**[FrontierWife]:** THOSE ARE PEOPLE ON THAT BRIDGE

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** She saved the support. The bridge is still breaking.

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** get them OFF

**[ZeroFan]:** MOVE MOVE MOVE

**[HIGHLIGHTED — €100] [TowerDadJim]:** dump the wagons. dump every wagon. NOW

---

On the bridge, a supply wagon’s front wheels went through the broken deck.

The horse stayed on the standing section, screaming, with the harness pulled bar-tight over its shoulders, and the wagon hung behind it half in the hole and turning slowly across the span until it lay wedged between both railings.

The people behind it could not see any of that. They kept pushing.

The people beside it could see all of it and started forcing their way back the other way, and the column began compressing against itself from both ends at once.

[BRIDGE LOAD WARNING]

[STRUCTURAL FAILURE ACCELERATING]

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 61%]

"Everything on wheels comes off," James said. "Every wagon, every cart, all of it, right now."

The commander did not argue with him for a second. Several of his people did.

A man had both hands on the side rail of a grain cart when two guards started throwing sacks off it, and he was not shouting about the cart, he was shouting a number — how many sacks, how many mouths, how many weeks. Further along, a woman stood in the bed of her own wagon with her arms out across a chest and a rolled mattress and would not step down, and her husband was trying to get her wrist and she kept pulling it back.

The timber under all of them made a long splitting sound.

"TAKE WHAT YOU CAN CARRY," the commander bellowed down the span. "EVERYTHING ELSE STAYS."

It went along the bridge in pieces, repeated by guards and then by civilians, and people began doing arithmetic none of them had expected to do tonight. A man came off a cart with a toolbox and put it down again and took a child instead. Two women stripped a wagon down to one sack between them. The woman in the wagon bed got the chest open, took something out of it that nobody else could see, put it inside her coat, and climbed down.

They left a winter’s food on that bridge, and their tools, and their beds, and every heavy thing they owned.

---

The hanging wagon began to slide further into the break.

The horse felt it and went up, and came down, and the whole tilted mass shifted another foot toward the hole with the harness still holding the animal to it. If the rear went through, it was going to take the harness, the horse, the boards under both of them, and everyone standing in that section into the river.

Ronan got there first, and getting there was the easy part.

"BOTH RAILS!" he roared. "CLEAR THE CENTRE!"

Nothing happened. Eight hundred people were screaming on a bridge that had just dropped four feet under them, half of them were facing the wrong way, and the ones close enough to hear him were being carried by the ones behind who could not.

A woman with a child under each arm went past his shoulder without her feet touching the deck, moved bodily by the press. Two men were fighting each other beside the rail over which direction to go. Somebody’s dog was loose in the middle of it.

[RONAN CLEARY — RALLYING CALL]

The second shout came out of him with the whole weight of the Guardian art behind it, and it did not sound like a man anymore, it sounded like the bridge itself had spoken.

"BOTH RAILS. NOW."

It reached the far end of the span, and it got him about a third of what he asked for.

The people who could move moved, and the people who could not stayed exactly where they were, and Ronan waded into the middle of it and made the rest of the lane himself. He put the flat of the shield into backs and shoulders and walked people sideways into the gaps, and one man swung at him and hit the shield rim and broke his own hand and had to be pushed to the rail anyway.

It took eleven seconds and it was not clean, and the lane he opened was narrow and already closing behind him.

He used it before it did.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

He came down the open lane with the shield forward, and he did not hit the wagon straight on, because hitting it straight on would have punched it through the hole. He took it on the rear quarter at an angle, turned the whole frame with the impact, and drove its one remaining wheel hard against the base of the railing where it jammed and stopped moving.

Then he got the shield in under the tilted frame and braced, and stayed there, because the moment he let go it was going to keep going.

Finn came down the same lane before the crowd could close it.

[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]

He covered the distance in a straight sprint and went for the horse first, cutting the traces with two ordinary strokes and slapping the animal off toward the far bank, where it went with its head down and its harness trailing.

Then he put a hand on the wagon’s damaged axle and set his second axe against it.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

The blow went through the axle and the main frame in the same line. The rear half of the wagon fell away through the hole and hit the water somewhere below with everything still in it, and the front half came free and light in Ronan’s shield, and Ronan shoved it up against the railing and let it lie.

The lane stayed open behind them, and it stayed open for people, because nothing with wheels was ever crossing that bridge again.

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