A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 239: Chapter 239 — The Second One Stood I

The horns kept going beyond the western wall, and out on James’s side of the river the circling riders stopped circling.

They came round onto a line, forty or so of them, and lowered their spears together at two thousand people standing in an open field.

There was nothing new out there. This was the same warband that had spent the first half of the night pretending to attack a gate, and it had finally run out of clever things to do, so it was spending everything it had left in two places at once — the rest of it going back at the settlement, and every rider still mounted on this bank coming for the civilians before anyone could put a line in front of them.

James looked once across the broken span.

The intact skeleton stood a pace behind Ronan on the other stump of the bridge, exactly where it had been all night, and a hundred and twenty mana would put him beside his team in a second and a half.

"Stay there," Ronan said through the party channel. "They need you."

James turned away from the river.

"I know."

---

"Along the bank!" he shouted at the nearest guards. "Move them downriver, wounded and children in the middle of the column, keep walking and do not stop!"

Nobody moved for a second, because he was pointing them at open country with no wall anywhere in it, and every instinct those people had was screaming at them to get behind something.

Then the first rider put its heels in, and the argument was over.

James placed his three damaged skeletons in a shallow crescent between the column and the field, and he placed them badly on purpose. He set them wide, two on the left arm and one on the right, and left the middle of the arc empty except for himself.

Then he stood in the gap with Durendal down at his side and let them see it.

[GOBLIN RIDER — LEVEL: 26]

[HP: 1,400 / 1,400]

---

They took the opening, because it was the only opening there was.

The lead rider came for the empty centre and the three behind it funnelled in after it, shoulder to shoulder, all of them pointed at the same three meters of ground.

James let it come. He let it come far closer than was comfortable, until he could see the wet on the goblin’s teeth, and the hooked spear dropped level with his chest.

He turned the head aside with Durendal and put his hand out.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[MANA: 2,100 → 2,040]

[GOBLIN RIDER — HP: 1,400 → 0]

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN]

[EXP GAINED: 160]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,575 → 44,735 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,040 → 2,070]

The body came off the saddle and hit the grass at his feet, and the three behind it were already too close together to turn.

James anchored the chain in it before the corpse stopped rolling.

[DEATH CHAIN ACTIVATED]

[CHAIN RANGE: 10M]

[DAMAGE TRANSFER: 35%]

[COOLDOWN: 4 MINUTES]

[MENTAL STRAIN WARNING]

The black cord came out of the dead thing and went into the nearest rider like a hook finding a mouth, and it started eating.

[GOBLIN RIDER — HP: 1,400 → 910]

The chained one wheeled and could not break the link. The two behind it came in around the corpse to reach the thing killing their own, which put all three of them in a ring about four meters wide with a body in the middle of it.

James stepped back one pace and turned the shape of the blast away from the column.

[CORPSE EXPLOSION — MANA COST: 150]

[MANA: 2,070 → 1,920]

The chained rider was inside it and did not come out.

[GOBLIN RIDER — HP: 910 → 0]

The other two came through the fire on their feet with their armour opened down one side and their mounts screaming, and they were still trying to work out where the ground was when the damaged skeletons arrived.

The left-hand one got a hook into the first goblin’s collar and took it out of the saddle backward. The second stepped in front of a spear thrust meant for James and lost its arm at the shoulder stopping it. The third came around the outside and put its stolen weapon through the rider the spear had belonged to.

[2 GOBLIN RIDERS — HP: 1,400 → 380]

[2 GOBLIN RIDERS — HP: 380 → 0]

[3 GOBLIN RIDERS SLAIN — 1 NECROMANCY KILL | 2 UNDEAD KILLS]

[EXP GAINED: 480]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 44,735 → 45,215 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +90]

[MANA: 1,920 → 2,010]

The strain arrived about two seconds later.

It came up behind James’s eyes the way it always did, and the field went briefly double, and the next order he gave came out a half-beat behind the thought that made it. He set his jaw and let it sit there.

Once was survivable. Once he could carry.

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** THERE IT IS

**[ZeroFan]:** HE FINALLY HAS ROOM

**[user48291]:** HOW MANY SKELETONS NOW

**[AshesAndBones]:** the dead line is GROWING

**[GoblinRights]:** they really charged the necromancer through a corpse 💀

**[Kieran_77]:** through his OWN corpse pile

**[ZeroFan]:** THE FUNNEL WAS ON PURPOSE

He raised four of them where they lay.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x4 — MANA COST: 320]

[MANA: 2,010 → 1,690]

They came up still holding the hooked spears they had died with, and James put them into the gaps beside the three that were left, and the failing crescent stopped being a crescent and became a line seven bodies wide.

He gave them one instruction and moved to stand behind them. Hold the line. Kill anything that crosses it. Do not chase.

---

On the settlement side, the four of them were standing on the wrong wall.

The river wall looked out over the water and the two broken stumps of the bridge, and nothing with legs was ever coming at them across that. The horns were somewhere out past it and the noise was moving, and Ronan listened to it for about three seconds before he worked out where it was going.

"They’re coming round," he said. "Main gate. Everything on this wall is useless — go, go, across the town, MOVE."

They went off the river wall at a run and down through the streets.

The town was empty. Every civilian in it had walked across that bridge in the last two hours, and what was left of the place was four hundred meters of open lanes with front doors standing wide, cooking fires still going in grates nobody had banked, a child’s shoe in the middle of the road, and not one living soul between the river and the main wall.

Nothing slowed them down and it still took too long, because four hundred meters is four hundred meters and the gate at the end of it was already being hit. Cillian went with a hand under Maeve’s arm the whole way, and she ran on legs that had been shaking since the bridge and did not ask him to stop.

They came up the stair onto the main wall with the western field spread out below it, and the first thing any of them saw was a man with his forearm strapped and a fresh line of stitches through his eyebrow carrying two sheaves of arrows past them onto the walk.

Behind him came another with a bandage around his ribs and a water bucket in each hand.

They had been lying in rows against the inside of that wall four hours ago, and there were a dozen of them up here now, and not one of them was there because Team Zero had told him to be.

Maeve got to the parapet and put both hands on it before she tried anything at all.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

The field opened up in front of her, and what she saw in it was a warband that had stopped being one thing.

The wolves were forty meters ahead of the riders who were supposed to be arriving with them. The jar carriers were coming in from the left before the gate assault had pinned anybody down. Every part of that attack was arriving at a different time, because the animal that had been keeping them in step was lying dead in a field on the other side of the settlement.

"Left wall, four carriers, low and fast," she said. "Wolves are massing straight at the gate and they’re early."

Cillian was already turned left.

He waited until the lead carrier came up out of the saddle to put its shoulder behind the throw.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

[GOBLIN RIDER — HP: 1,400 → 0]

[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 160]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 45,215 → 45,375 / 57,000]

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