A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 246: Chapter 246 — The Marshal’s Last Order II

Vane looked at the five of them, and at his own dead, and did the last piece of arithmetic he was ever going to do.

[COMMAND STACKS: 3 → 0]

[MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY — FINAL ORDER]

[WITH ME]

[ALL REMAINING AUTHORITY TRANSFERRED TO THE MARSHAL]

[VANE — PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES GREATLY INCREASED]

[DURATION: 60 SECONDS]

The first thing he did with it was cross twelve meters faster than Finn could turn.

The second was hit Ronan hard enough to lift him off the ground, and Ronan had no shield to put in the way of it and went down on his back in the ashes of somebody’s tent.

James saw two things in the same second.

The first was that they were not going to beat this. The second was the number sitting under the panel, counting.

"Sixty seconds!" he shouted. "He has sixty seconds and then it’s gone — nobody trades with him, nobody stands still, we just do not die!"

It became the ugliest minute any of them had fought.

Maeve stopped trying to stop him, because nothing she had left could stop him, and started putting small barriers at angles in front of his charges — never in his path, always slightly across it, so that a man moving that fast had to turn, and turning cost him a full second every time. She could not have blocked him once. She made him corner nine times.

Ronan used Piercing Step to go the wrong way on purpose, crossing in front of Vane to drag Cillian out of a line, and then again to get Finn’s leg out from under a downstroke.

Finn hit him exactly twice, both times when the poleaxe was fully committed with both hands, and got out of reach before the recovery.

Cillian did not fire at all. He stood there with one dead arm and a full charge in the other and let Vane run past him twice, because putting it into a man with three stacks of authority in him would have been throwing his last one away.

At forty-one seconds, Vane broke Maeve’s last barrier with the haft and came through the pieces of it, and James was the only thing standing between him and her.

The poleaxe caught him across the chest and threw him into the burnt tent frame.

[JAMES — HP: 1,117 → 604]

[MANA: 2,540 / 3,100]

[DEATH CHAIN — AVAILABLE]

James pulled himself up out of the wreckage and used it, and he knew what it would cost while he was doing it.

[DEATH CHAIN ACTIVATED]

[COOLDOWN: 4 MINUTES]

[MENTAL STRAIN DETECTED]

The chains went out of a dead guard and into Vane and did not hold him. He tore two of them apart in the first second and dragged the rest along with him, coming on with black cords trailing off his arms and shoulders.

They slowed him from impossible to merely terrible, and James’s vision came apart into two junctions again, and the counter ran down behind all of it.

Nine seconds. Four.

[FINAL ORDER EXPIRED]

[VANE — TEMPORARY ENHANCEMENT REMOVED]

The chains fell off him. He came back to earth in the middle of a step and had to catch his own weight on the poleaxe.

---

Nobody rushed him, because he was still a level forty-six Crown Marshal with twelve thousand hit points and a weapon with more reach than anything they carried.

And because he was still thinking.

Maeve put the brand low, behind his right knee, where the plate ended and the joint had to bend.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

Vane’s stance changed the instant it landed. He turned that leg back and dropped his guard toward it, and set the poleaxe to cover the low line, because he had watched Finn open a war wolf’s shoulder with that skill and he knew exactly what came next.

Finn went for his shoulder instead.

The axe came up on the opposite side, high and slow and obvious, aimed at the burn Cillian’s overload had left in the plate — and Vane, committed to protecting a knee, had to bring the poleaxe back across his body to meet it.

Which took the guard off the knee entirely.

Ronan was already moving. He had the broken half-moon of his shield in both hands, and he did not try to block anything with it, he threw himself flat and jammed the ruined metal down over the poleaxe’s head and pinned the whole weapon against the ground with his bodyweight on top of it.

Vane hauled once, and the shaft did not come up.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

Cillian spent the last thing he had on the shoulder Finn had made him defend, and the burnt seam blew open, and Vane’s right arm stopped being able to pull.

Finn reversed the axe in his hands, dropped his hips, and swung down at the mark behind the knee.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

[VANE — HP: 12,600 → 4,850]

The leg went, and Vane came down onto that knee in the mud with his poleaxe still pinned under Ronan and half his arm out of use.

James took the jump.

There was an elite guard lying two meters behind the marshal’s back, whole, in one piece, with both arms still on it — because the men whose job it had been to prevent exactly this had all been dead for four minutes, and the last one had died with a sword in his hand rather than in a corpse’s shoulder.

Vane had solved the necromancer problem with six men, and then James’s team had killed all six of them.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

[MANA: 2,540 → 2,420]

He arrived and the world slid, one second of it, the way it always did.

Vane’s left hand came off the poleaxe with a short sword in it and stabbed backward without the man ever turning his head, because he had watched a skeleton walk across a camp an hour ago and had known this was coming since.

James caught it on Durendal by reflex and nothing else.

The blades locked, and Vane got a boot under himself and forced his way up off the knee, dragging James round with him, and it stopped being an assassination and became two men leaning on each other’s weapons with about four inches between them.

Vane’s face was entirely calm. That was the thing James took away from it afterward.

James let go of the shape he was holding.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[MANA: 2,420 → 2,360]

It went off through the locked blades at contact range and blew the burnt seam in Vane’s armour wide open, and the marshal’s guard dropped four inches.

James put Durendal through the gap.

[LORD MARSHAL ALWYN VANE SLAIN]

[LEVEL 46 ENEMY DEFEATED]

[PARTY EXP GAINED: 5,000]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 47,675 → 52,675 / 60,000]

[FLOOR CLEAR CONDITION MET]

Vane went down onto the broken ground beside the platform he had run his war from, and did not say anything else.

---

The world stopped.

The ash stopped falling. The fires in the tent frames stopped moving. Ronan lay where he was with a piece of his own shield under his chest, and Cillian stood with a dead arm hanging and could not lower it.

Far away past the northern marker, the last of the Crown vanguard was frozen mid-stride on the road, six thousand men caught in a walk, going north toward Raymond.

They had killed the man. They had not stopped the army, and the army was still there.

[FLOOR 24 CLEARED]

[CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE FAILED]

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 63%]

[FLOOR CLEAR REWARD]

[EXP AWARDED: 55,000]

[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 22,000 PER MEMBER]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 52,675 → 107,675]

[LEVEL UP]

[LEVEL: 39 → 40]

[EXP: 47,675 / 63,000]

[ALL STATS +1]

[STRENGTH: 61 | AGILITY: 83 | INTELLIGENCE: 150 | ENDURANCE: 87 | LUCK: 54]

[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]

Then the burnt camp thinned out around them, and a projection came up over it.

They were still standing on the crossroads. They could still see the platform through it. But the Tower had opened a window across the middle of the junction, and what was on the other side of it was a place all five of them had seen before.

Open country. A river bending away west. Pale stone walls on the southern horizon with a palace at their crown.

"That’s the capital," Maeve said. "That’s Caerleon."

"That’s the *field*," Finn said. "Look at it. That’s the field from the intro."

He was right, and James felt it go through him. In the vision the Tower had shown them at the start of all this, the royal army and the northern army had destroyed each other on open ground outside Caerleon, and the monsters had walked into the capital afterward over both of them.

This was that ground.

The projection filled it in, and the shape of the thing became clear.

Raymond’s army was in the north half of the field, drawn up and facing the city, and it was smaller than the force that had marched out of Dunadd. He had come south. After the eastern pass fell he had a monster host loose behind his own supply line, and rather than sit on the frontier and be ground between them, he had turned around and gone for the throne while he still had an army to go with.

The southern half of the field was Baldwin’s, and it was bigger.

And coming up its eastern side in a long grey column, arriving exactly on time, were six thousand men who had walked north past this junction that afternoon and were now turning to take their place on the line.

Vane had not been reinforcing anybody’s frontier. He had been marching his vanguard around to meet his prince on the ground where this war finished.

Behind Raymond, at the top edge of the projection, the black markers were still coming down out of the hills.

[FLOOR 25 UNLOCKED]

[THE BROKEN CROWN — FINAL FLOOR]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]

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