A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 265: Chapter 265 — The Red Beneath Caerleon II

It hit Baldwin’s shoulder and did almost nothing except make him turn his head for half a step.

Half a step was enough for Maeve to move, and not enough to keep her from being hit.

Baldwin’s blade caught her across the pauldron and the arm beneath it, and she went off her feet sideways and landed hard on the churned ground and did not get up immediately.

James looked at Baldwin’s HP bar.

Then he looked at Ronan’s arm hanging, and Cillian’s fingers twitching without closing, and Finn bent over holding his side, and Maeve pushing herself up out of the mud with one arm not working properly.

Baldwin was going down about four thousand at a time.

Team Zero was going down faster.

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** his hp is dropping but LOOK AT ZERO

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONANS ARM

**[GalwayGoblin]:** CILLIAN STOP CASTING

**[CorkClimber]:** GET MAEVE UP

**[user88317]:** why is baldwin still this fast

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

---

James stopped trying to win exchanges and started building geometry.

There were bodies everywhere — this was the middle of a battlefield where two armies had been grinding each other for hours — and he stopped thinking of them as damage and started thinking of them as furniture.

Three went up, spread wide, each with one job.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x3]

One planted itself behind Baldwin’s most likely retreat and did nothing else. One went at his sword side purely to make him keep the blade turned away from Finn. And one stood twelve meters out on the left, well away from the fight, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Baldwin destroyed the first himself, in passing.

A Crown soldier wandering through the pocket put a spear through the second without ever knowing what it was for.

The third kept standing there.

James did not look at it.

Behind them, Raymond got up.

It was not a good thing to watch. He got the sword point into the ground and levered himself onto the bad leg and stood there swaying with blood running freely down his side and one boot not properly taking weight.

"Sit *down*," Maeve said, from one knee herself.

Raymond did not answer her and did not sit down.

But he also did not charge, which was the thing James had been quietly afraid of. He stayed where he was, four meters behind the formation, watching his brother — because he had worked out the same thing everyone else had, which was that Team Zero had finally stopped taking turns, and one more personal duel would break the only structure that had hurt Baldwin all day.

---

Baldwin came for James, because the skeletons were becoming a problem and James was making them.

James gave ground.

He gave it deliberately, at an angle, drifting toward the twelve-meter skeleton standing out on the left with its back to everything — the anchor, the obvious answer, sitting there in plain view.

And Baldwin saw it.

James watched him see it. Watched his eyes go out to the standing corpse and come back, watched his line shift by a few degrees, watched him set his weight in a way that had nothing to do with the exchange they were currently having and everything to do with a place James had not gone yet.

He did not know the rules. Nobody outside Team Zero did — the world had watched James teleport for four floors and had never once been given the conditions. But he did not need the rules. He had seen a necromancer move between dead things twice, and he had made a decision about the next one.

*Vane did this.*

Vane had stood where the fourth jump ended and swung a poleaxe into the middle of it.

So James did not jump.

He kept giving ground, kept the drift going, and let Baldwin hold that little piece of his attention out on the left where nothing was going to happen.

And Raymond, who had been waiting for exactly this, came in from the other side.

He was slow and he was ruined and it did not matter, because he was Raymond, and Baldwin’s head came round to him the way a compass finds north. Every priority the man had reordered itself in a quarter of a second, and he turned into his brother with the sword already moving.

Which carried him three steps forward and to the right.

James went then.

Not to the skeleton on the left. To a Crown sergeant lying face-up in the mud eight meters ahead of where Baldwin’s counter was about to put him — not where Baldwin was standing, but where Baldwin was going to be.

[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]

The lag came with him, because it always did.

But this time nobody was swinging at him during it. Baldwin was fully committed to Raymond, and Raymond was buying that second with his own body, and by the time the field resolved around James he was already on his feet at Baldwin’s recovery side with Durendal up.

Finn had read it and was pressing the far escape.

Ronan had put the shield across the route back.

"His hip!" Maeve, from the ground. "The mark’s still on it—"

James drove Durendal into the brand.

The blade went through the opened plate and into the wound underneath it, and Baldwin’s whole side seized. James put his shoulder in behind the sword, held the position for the half-second it took to be sure of it, and only then let go with one hand.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

At contact range, into a wound with a sword already in it.

[PRINCE BALDWIN — HP: 39,600 → 35,200]

Baldwin went backward.

Three steps, then a fourth, and his left hand came off the sword and went out to the side to steady himself, and for the first time since he had ridden through his own army the man’s breathing was audible.

He did not shout. He did not threaten anybody. He did not announce anything.

He simply took a moment he had not needed before.

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THEY GOT HIM MOVING

**[CorkClimber]:** RAYMOND IS STILL UP

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** HE EXPECTED THE WRONG TELEPORT

**[CrownLawIE]:** BALDWIN MOVE BRO

**[GalwayGoblin]:** ⚡⚡⚡

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

---

Then Baldwin showed them what thirty-five thousand HP still meant.

He came back through the formation harder than he had come at any point in the fight, and he did it with nothing new — no skill, no phase, no announcement. Just a man who had been holding something back and had stopped.

He caught Finn in the recovery of an axe swing and opened him across the forearm.

He put a strike into Ronan’s carried shield that drove the rim into Ronan’s ribs and left the arm underneath it barely able to do anything at all.

Maeve had to split what she had left between the two of them and could visibly hold neither, and the light on both went thin.

Cillian tried to lift the working arm and got it to chest height before it stopped.

And James burned mana. That was the honest shape of it — every corpse on that field was a resource and every single conversion cost him. Eighty for a body. A hundred and twenty for a step. Sixty for a blast.

Twice a Crown soldier died close enough to matter.

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

Thirty back. It was not nothing and it was not enough, and James did the arithmetic while fighting and did not like the answer.

Then he noticed something worse.

They were moving.

Not much, and not fast. But every time Baldwin gave ground he gave it in the same direction, and every time he chose an angle it was the same angle, and Team Zero had been following him for a minute and a half.

South. Toward the Crown fighting. Away from the last of Raymond’s Northern veterans.

"South," Raymond said, hoarse, behind them. "He’s walking you south."

James looked past Baldwin and saw it — the Crown formation forty meters behind him, intact, and the thin Northern line further and further behind Team Zero’s own backs.

Baldwin did not need to kill five Challengers. He needed to put them inside somebody else’s army and let it happen.

"Stop," James said. "Everyone stop. Don’t follow him."

They stopped.

And Baldwin stopped too, because there was no point walking backward alone.

---

For a few seconds nothing happened at all.

Six people stood in a churned pocket of a battlefield with maybe eight meters between them, and every one of them was breathing hard, and nobody moved.

Baldwin was bleeding from his hip and his side and had blood down one leg. Ronan could not lift a shield. Cillian could not close a hand. Finn had three separate cuts leaking through his gear. Maeve was upright and looked like she should not have been. Raymond was standing on one leg, holding himself up with a sword, and had roughly one exchange left in him.

Around them, the war filled the silence — steel and screaming and hooves, an ogre bellowing somewhere north, a horn going in the west, the flat continuous roar of thousands of men who did not know or care that this was happening.

Then the ground moved.

It was not an explosion, and nothing shook. It was a single low pulse that came up through the soles of James’s boots and out through his knees, one beat, and stopped.

His next step did not finish.

He stood there with his weight on the wrong foot and his eyes going down to the mud, and everything else on that battlefield went quiet in his head.

*Anything happening underneath. Anywhere underneath. You say it out loud.*

He had made all four of them agree to that in a strategy room in Dublin, and he had made himself agree to it hardest, because he had decided once already that this exact thing was scenery.

The second pulse came.

Finn’s head came up. Maeve got one hand onto the ground.

And in the churned earth six meters to James’s left, inside a crack where a horse had gone down and torn the ground open, a thin line of red appeared.

Not fire. Not reflection. There was nothing above it to reflect.

It was in the crack, and it was underneath, and it was coming up.

Another line opened four meters further on. Then a third, running out toward the Crown lines, thin as wire and getting brighter.

**[CorkClimber]:** THE GROUND

**[user88317]:** what red thing

**[GalwayGoblin]:** UNDER THEM. LOOK UNDER THEM.

**[CrownLawIE]:** palace light???

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT WAS IN THE VISION

**[user88317]:** WHAT VISION

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** the floor 21 intro. it came from under the palace. IT CAME FROM UNDER THE PALACE

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

James looked at Baldwin.

He did it without deciding to, the way you look at the only other person in a room when something breaks — and what he saw stopped him more completely than the light had.

Baldwin was not looking at Team Zero.

For the first time since he had dismounted, his attention was entirely off them. His eyes had gone down to the crack in the ground, and the point of his sword had lowered several inches, and his breathing — which had been fast and hard thirty seconds ago — had gone still.

Not sharp. Not caught. Still, the way a man goes still when something arrives that he has been expecting for a long time.

He looked at the red line for three full seconds.

Then he raised his head and looked south, past all of them, past the fighting, at the pale walls and the palace above them, and did not appear to see anything on the field in between.

Raymond saw it too.

James watched him work through it — the glow, then his brother, then the glow again — and watched something in the prince’s face come apart that Baldwin’s sword had not managed to touch all afternoon.

He did not ask a question. He looked at Baldwin, and he stayed silent, and his sword hand slowly lowered.

The red light spread through another crack, running toward Baldwin’s boots.

And Baldwin looked down at it with no fear in his face at all, and no confusion, and no surprise.

James finally understood what he was looking at a heartbeat after Raymond did.

It was recognition.

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