A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 258: Chapter 258 — Between Two Monsters III (Bonus)

He caught Finn’s next axe against the crossguard and stepped inside the length of his own weapon, which was the last place a man carrying two feet of steel in each hand wanted to be, and Morcant knew it before he did it.

Finn’s free axe came round into his ribs immediately, exactly the way it was supposed to, and opened the plate along his side.

[MORCANT — HP: 34,720 → 34,080]

Morcant took it.

He took it the way a man takes a cost he has already agreed to pay, without flinching off the movement, and drove the pommel of the war blade into Finn’s face on the same beat. Finn’s head snapped back and he came off his line, and Morcant was already reversing the blade and putting the point toward the gap under his raised arm.

James had a skeleton standing directly behind Morcant, which was the obvious anchor, and which meant Morcant already knew it was there.

He took the ugly one instead — a dead Crown warhorse lying eight meters off Morcant’s left, big enough to break a return swing, bad enough that nobody would cover it.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 120]

And it was not fast enough, because it never had been.

Grave Step was not a thought. It was a cast, and a crossing, and a second on the other side where the world had to catch him up, and all of that together came to something close to two seconds — which was time enough for James to be somewhere else and nowhere near enough to stop a thrust that had already started.

The war blade went in under Finn’s arm while James was still between one place and the other.

He arrived behind the dead horse to the sound of it, spent his blind second there with his hand on the carcass and no idea yet how bad it was, and came around the front of it into Morcant’s flank a full beat after the damage was done.

That beat was all he got, and he spent it on the only thing left worth buying.

Morcant had the point buried and was turning it to open the wound wider. James came in on his blind side and forced him to abandon the twist and get the blade back up, and the war blade came out of Finn rather than going further into him.

It was not a rescue. Finn was already hurt and went down onto one knee holding his side.

But he went down bleeding rather than finished, and Morcant had to give ground two paces to deal with a necromancer at his flank, and Maeve’s light was on Finn before the Lord Commander had finished stepping back.

---

Then Kargan arrived in the same twenty meters of mud.

Raymond cut at his side as he came past. Ronan went low at the damaged knee. The Orc Chief did not acknowledge either of them, because there was suddenly something closer.

James was the nearest living thing in front of him.

Kargan brought the Blood Axe up over his shoulder for a full overhead strike.

James saw it start.

He also saw what was standing directly behind him, in line with the axe, four meters back, where Finn had spent the last minute driving him.

*Come on. Commit.*

He waited. He watched the enormous shoulders rotate, watched the weight go all the way forward, watched the point of no return arrive on the Orc Chief’s face — and only then did he move.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 120]

The axe came down into the space where James had been standing, and kept going, because a swing like that does not stop.

Morcant was standing in the rest of it.

The Lord Commander saw it coming and had perhaps a third of a second, and he did the only thing available, which was to get both hands on the war blade and put it up over his head.

The impact drove him knee-deep into the churned mud.

[MORCANT — HP: 34,080 → 32,340]

For a moment they stayed exactly like that. The Orc Chief leaning on the axe. The Lord Commander in the ground beneath it with both arms locked.

Then Kargan looked down, and Morcant looked up.

Neither of them spent a second on the fact that this had been an accident.

Kargan ripped the axe sideways and Morcant went with it rather than against it, twisted out of the mud, and cut across the Orc Chief’s forearm on the way clear.

[KARGAN — HP: 26,810 → 25,940]

Kargan roared and came at him, and Baldwin’s Lord Commander stopped facing Team Zero for the first time since he had walked into the lane.

James landed out of the shift and let his balance come back and looked past both of them.

The road was not clear. There were soldiers in it, and dead horses, and broken formations, and monsters somewhere in the smoke.

But there was no Orc Chief in it and no Lord Commander in it, and for a few seconds that was the difference between impossible and merely terrible.

Raymond saw it in the same instant.

He pointed with his sword at his brother’s standard.

"Move."

---

They went.

Ronan took the front with a dented shield and an arm he could barely lift above his chest. Finn came up on his shoulder with blood down one side of his face from the pommel strike. Cillian broke off his firing position and fell in behind Maeve, and Maeve was already reading the ground ahead of them for the next seam.

Behind them, the Orc Chief and the Crown’s Right Hand tore into each other in the mud, with a hundred ordinary soldiers scattering out of the space around them.

It would not last. One of them would break off, or kill the other, and whichever way it went, something enormous was going to come after them.

They had bought minutes. Maybe fewer.

James ran with Durendal in his hand and looked ahead, down the length of the corridor, through the smoke and the moving bodies toward the centre of Baldwin’s army.

And Baldwin was looking back.

The prince had not moved from his standard. But his head had turned, and he was no longer watching the field in general — he was watching this. The gap his brother’s cavalry had broken. His Lord Commander tangled with an orc. Five foreigners and a prince coming up the middle of his army with a corridor behind them.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** he’s moving

**[RaymondWasRight]:** oh no

Baldwin’s hand came off the reins.

It went to the hilt at his side, and this time it did not stop there.

He drew the sword all the way out, unhurried, and let the point rest down alongside the horse’s shoulder, and sat there with it bare in his hand.

He had watched the entire battle from that saddle.

Now he was ready to be in it.

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