A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 264: Chapter 264 — The Red Beneath Caerleon I

The two blades met above Raymond’s head.

James never saw the contact. He was still arriving, the field sliding around him in shapes, no depth, no distance, and all he had was the sound of steel coming down and Durendal going up toward it on instinct.

It was barely enough.

Baldwin’s sword hit his and the whole weight of that strike went straight down through James’s arms into his shoulders and out through his knees, and his legs folded. He went down to a crouch in the mud with both hands locked on the grip and the blade shuddering an inch above Raymond’s shoulder, and for a moment he genuinely thought Durendal was going to come out of his hands.

His vision finished settling while he was already under it.

*That is not Morcant.*

Morcant had been strong. Morcant had made his arms ache. This was something else entirely — the difference between a heavy weapon swung well and a wall arriving.

Baldwin did not waste a second being surprised.

He pulled the blade back and came again immediately, because there was now a necromancer between him and the thing he had crossed a battlefield to finish, and the necromancer needed removing.

James survived the next twenty seconds and did not do much else.

He caught the first cut, and Baldwin did not disengage from it, he stayed at the bind and stepped in, close, using the crossed steel as a lever and his shoulder as the actual weapon, and James lost his footing and had to give ground he did not have. He caught the second on the flat and it drove him sideways into a dead man. He got under the third only because the ground beneath him was so thick with bodies that Baldwin’s own step caught on an arm.

There was no trading. James was not in an exchange with this man; he was in a controlled dismantling, and the only thing keeping him alive was that Baldwin’s real target was lying behind him.

He needed half a second and there was no half a second available.

So he made one.

There was an intact Crown soldier face-down two meters to Baldwin’s right, and James put a hand toward it while turning a cut with the other.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]

It came up directly in Baldwin’s path.

It did not hurt him. It was never going to hurt him. Baldwin cut it apart with one economical stroke without breaking stride, and the whole thing lasted less than a heartbeat.

The heartbeat was the point.

James got his feet properly under him, hooked his free hand into Raymond’s collar, and dragged him two meters back out of the line while Baldwin was finishing the swing.

Raymond immediately tried to stand.

His body would not do it. The leg that had failed him at the end of the duel still would not answer, and his side opened again when he twisted, and he made a sound through his teeth that had nothing to do with pain.

But he got one knee under himself and stayed there, upright, sword point in the mud, refusing to be lying down while his brother was on his feet eight meters away.

---

Ronan arrived first.

He did not come in swinging. He came in and put himself between Baldwin and James, carried shield braced across his ribs and his whole body turned into it, and stood there, because that was the only thing he had left and it was still the most useful thing on the field.

Baldwin looked at him for about a second.

Then he feinted at James, and when Ronan turned his trunk to bring the shield across, Baldwin changed direction and hit the other side.

The ruined side. The one that could not lift.

Ronan got the shield there with his hips and his good arm and it cost him everything; the impact drove the rim into his own chest and the shield dropped a hand’s width and did not come back up.

Maeve’s light was on him before it finished falling.

Which meant it came off Finn, who was arriving at Baldwin’s open flank at exactly that moment with nothing over him.

Finn attacked anyway.

Baldwin turned maybe fifteen degrees, took the axe on the strong of his blade, and used his hilt to knock Finn’s line up and outward — not blocking so much as steering, so Finn’s own momentum carried him past and behind, out of the fight for two full seconds.

Cillian came last, and slowest.

He got his hand up and it shook, and he had to look at it for a moment to make the fingers do what he wanted, and what he eventually produced was a thin flat burst that made Baldwin turn his head and nothing more.

The prince did not even shift his feet for it.

---

The war did not pause for any of this.

Twenty meters east, a Crown company and what was left of a Northern one were killing each other with no reference to the six people in the middle of them. Arrows crossed overhead in both directions. Something enormous roared somewhere in the smoke to the north, and a wounded man crawled past the edge of the fight without any of them looking at him.

And inside that, Team Zero learned that five people are not automatically better than one man who is better than all of them.

Ronan blocked. Finn came into the opening it made — and Baldwin had already closed the opening, because he had made Ronan block *in order* to close it. James went in from the far side and Baldwin changed direction mid-bind and drove him three steps back. Cillian had a clean line for a full second and could not use it because Ronan crossed in front of him.

And Maeve spent everything she had left fixing problems rather than making any.

[PRINCE BALDWIN]

[HP: 43,900 / 52,000]

[CROWN’S ASCENDANCY — ACTIVE]

Forty-three thousand nine hundred. They had taken eight thousand off him and every single point of it had been Raymond’s.

Then Raymond started talking.

He could not fight anymore. He could barely kneel. But he had spent ten minutes inside that man’s reach and he had learned things, and he began calling them out — short, flat, no explanation, the way a man calls a bearing.

"He exits left after a hard bind. Always left."

Baldwin bound with Ronan’s shield and came off it to the left.

"He follows a retreat. He doesn’t reset — if you give ground he comes with you."

Finn gave ground experimentally, and Baldwin came with him.

"When he commits both hands he can’t change line. That’s your window. That’s the only one he gives."

James listened.

That was the entire thing, and it was harder than it sounded, because everything in him wanted to be the one solving this. He shut it off and listened to a bleeding prince on one knee who knew this opponent better than any of them ever would.

And then, he used it.

"Finn — he’s going to press Ronan and come off left. Don’t attack him."

"Don’t—"

"*Be there.*"

Baldwin pressed Ronan’s shield, felt it drop, and came off the bind to his left toward the space Finn had been occupying.

Finn was already standing in it.

For the first time all fight, Baldwin had to abandon what he intended to do next and deal with what was in front of him instead.

Maeve saw it happen and was moving before it finished.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

She did not put it somewhere new. She put it on the wound Raymond had opened above Baldwin’s hip in the duel, the one already through the plate, and it burned orange there and gave four exhausted people one place to look.

Cillian went first, because interruption cost less than damage. A short arc into the marked side, badly aimed, enough to lock the muscle for a fraction of a second.

Finn’s axe went into the same spot while it was locked.

Ronan did not attack at all, he put the shield across the escape line so Baldwin could not simply move away from the marked side, and let his own body absorb the shove that came with it.

And James put Necro Blast into the opening last, at three meters, when there was nothing left in the way.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 43,900 → 39,600]

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** SAME SPOT SAME SPOT

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** FINN GOT HIM

**[GalwayGoblin]:** ONE MORE ⚡⚡⚡

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** THEY FINALLY MADE HIM MOVE

**[user88317]:** wait did raymond call that??

**[CrownLawIE]:** HE STILL HAS 39K 💀

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

---

Baldwin made them pay for it inside ten seconds.

He had been watching them the whole time, not their skills, which he had no framework for, but their *behaviour*. And what he had noticed was that every time one of them started to fail, the light changed direction.

Ronan’s shoulder went and the light went to Ronan. Finn got caught and the light went to Finn. The woman standing behind all of them with her hands out was the reason the formation kept not breaking.

So he went at her.

He knocked Ronan’s shield off-line with a strike that had no intention of hurting him, put a short counter into Finn’s chest that folded him backward two paces, and then simply changed direction and went through the gap toward Maeve before James had finished resetting his feet.

Cillian tried.

The bolt came out wrong, thin, low, spraying off a conductor that could not carry what he was asking of it.

[CILLIAN — MANA STRAIN CRITICAL]

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