A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 287: Chapter 278 — Five Points I

Three days was enough.

Ronan had his shield rebuilt and his forearm strapped. Finn’s axes came back from the Guild armoury with new hafts and edges you could shave with. Cillian had slept for eighteen hours of it. James’s mana had been sitting at full since Tuesday and his coat had a new shoulder in it.

He formed the party from the kitchen table with a mug going cold at his elbow.

`[PARTY FORMATION — TEAM ZERO]`

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL 41 — HOST]`

`[FINN HALE — LEVEL 40]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — LEVEL 39]`

`[RONAN CLEARY — LEVEL 39]`

`[CILLIAN WARD — LEVEL 38]`

`[CHALLENGERS: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`

"Coming?"

"Obviously," said Alice, and put her plate in the sink.

---

They came in at the centre of a ruined fortress.

It was built round — that was the first thing James understood, before the smell of dust and dry moss and old rain, before the light. A great broken ring of a place, open to a flat white sky, with the middle of it a wide cracked courtyard and everything else spreading outward in walls and ramps and stairs that had been falling down for a very long time.

Five stone platforms stood around the outer ring.

They were low, waist-high, circular, and spaced far enough apart that James had to turn his whole body to look from one to the next. Between them ran collapsed halls and open yards and staircases going up to nothing, and he could see all five from where he was standing, which he understood immediately was deliberate.

You were meant to be able to watch the others.

`[FLOOR 27]`

`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`

`[OBJECTIVE: ACTIVATE ALL FIVE WARD POINTS]`

`[CLEAR CONDITION: MAINTAIN CONTROL OF ALL FIVE WARD POINTS FOR 300 SECONDS]`

`[EACH WARD POINT REQUIRES ONE REGISTERED CHALLENGER]`

`[SUMMONED / REANIMATED ENTITIES CANNOT CLAIM A WARD POINT]`

`[LOSS OF ANY WARD POINT RESETS THE CONTROL TIMER]`

Six people read it. Five of them understood it at the same second.

"We’re splitting," said Finn.

"We’re splitting," James agreed.

Cillian made a small unhappy noise.

"Five points and five of us and no spares," Finn went on, tapping the fourth line. "She can’t hold one. Your lads can’t hold one. It’s us or it’s nobody."

Alice read the line about Reanimated entities twice and did not comment on it, which for Alice was practically a speech.

---

Nobody ran anywhere yet.

James turned a slow circle and counted the ways in. There were gates in the outer wall — a lot of them — and every platform had two or three of them within a hundred metres, and they were all shut, and they were all in good repair, which nothing else in the fortress was.

"They open when we claim," he said.

"They open when we claim," Maeve agreed. She had her staff across both palms and her eyes moving. "Give me twenty seconds."

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]`

She walked eight paces and stopped and looked, and then eight more, and it was not magic and it never had been — it was a woman looking at a building and reading what it had been built to do.

"Right." She pointed north, quick, without ceremony. "That one’s got a single stair up and one gate facing it. Whoever’s on it fights in a queue. Ronan."

"Mine," said Ronan.

"South platform’s the opposite, it’s sitting in an open yard with three gates on it and no cover at all. Anything organised is going to hit it in a line." She looked at Finn.

Finn was already walking that way.

"East has the long approaches. Two hundred metres of straight courtyard before anything gets near the boundary." She jerked her chin at Cillian. "You’ll see them coming for eight seconds before they arrive. Use the eight seconds."

"I love it here," said Cillian.

"West is broken ground, half a collapsed hall, one wide mouth and one narrow one. I’ll take that."

James looked at it.

It was not the safest one. It was the one where a person with good positioning and mediocre output could funnel a fight into a shape they could survive, which was a different thing entirely, and she had chosen it on purpose.

"You sure?"

"I’m sure. Don’t fuss." Maeve pointed at the last platform, the one on the northwest with four separate approaches and a mess of rubble around it. "That’s yours. Four ways in."

"That’s the worst one."

"That’s the one that fills up with bodies fastest," said Maeve.

James did not have an argument.

---

Alice stood in the middle of all of it with nowhere to be.

"And me?"

James was already moving. "Wherever it’s going worst. You’ll see it before I do — you’re the only one who can go anywhere."

"You are assuming it will go badly."

"It’s going to go badly."

Alice looked at him.

"You have not seen the enemy yet."

"Alice." James walked backward a few steps, spreading his hands. "In twenty-five floors it has gone well exactly once and that was because Cillian fell down a hole and landed on the objective."

"It counted," Cillian called.

"It counted," James agreed, and turned and ran.

---

They claimed in a wave.

`[WARD POINT 1 CLAIMED — R. CLEARY]`

`[WARD POINT 2 CLAIMED — F. HALE]`

`[WARD POINT 3 CLAIMED — C. WARD]`

`[WARD POINT 4 CLAIMED — M. CALLAHAN]`

James went up the rubble of the northwest platform two seconds behind Maeve and put his boot on the stone.

The markings under him lit pale blue and ran outward in a ring about six metres across, and he felt the boundary settle around him like a room he had walked into.

`[WARD POINT 5 CLAIMED — J. GANNER]`

`[ALL WARD POINTS ACTIVE]`

`[CONTROL TIMER: 05:00]`

Every gate in the fortress opened at once.

The noise of it went round the ring like a wave breaking — twenty-odd sets of old timber and iron hauling back into the walls, and behind every one of them, torchlight and movement and the particular flat rattle of shields being brought up to the shoulder.

`[BROADCAST LIVE — REGION: IRELAND]`

`[VIEWERS: 1,880,412 ▲]`

**[ZeroFan]:** THEY HAVE TO SOLO THESE??

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** ALL FIVE. ALL AT ONCE.

**[GalwayGoblin]:** every gate opened. EVERY GATE

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** five points, five Challengers. Alice literally cannot claim one.

**[user88317]:** SO WHATS SHE FOR

**[CorkClimber]:** running, apparently

**[FrontierWife]:** finn is going to enjoy this far too much

---

James’s first minute was the worst minute he was going to have all day, and he knew it going in.

Twelve of them came at him. A shield group of eight up the western ramp at a walk, and four fast ones — no shields, short swords, light — coming round the rubble on his blind side at a dead sprint.

He had no corpses.

That was the whole of it. Necromancer with nothing to raise is a man with a sword and a bad temper, and there was a reason Maeve had put him on the platform with four approaches instead of the one with a stair.

James backed until his heels found the edge of the ward circle and stopped.

Six metres of stone. Nothing behind him. Nothing could get around behind him without leaving the ground.

The first of the fast ones came up the rubble and James let him come, took the thrust off the line with Durendal, stepped inside it and put the point through his throat on the return.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,100 / 3,100]`

Capped. Nothing gained. He had gone in full.

The second came over the body and James blew a hole in his chest at four feet.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 3,070 / 3,100]`

And there it was. Two bodies on his platform.

James dropped to one knee with his palm flat on the second one’s sternum while the other two were still coming.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,990 / 3,100]`

It came up in five seconds and James did not keep it.

He looked north instead, across two hundred metres of ruin, to where Ronan’s platform was already black with shields.

"Ronan," he said. "Go."

The skeleton went off the edge of the platform at a run and did not look back, and James turned to meet the last two on his own with a sword and no support at all.

---

**South Platform — Finn**

They came at him properly, which was the only bit of luck Finn Hale had ever needed.

Twenty of them, in three ranks, shields overlapping and spears out at the second rank, moving across the open yard at a walk and not breaking stride for the rubble.

Finn watched them come and felt something in his chest sit up.

*Don’t wait.*

He had learned that the hard way on Floor 24. Let a formation arrive and set, and you were fighting twenty men who all knew where each other’s feet were. Hit the corner of it while it was still walking, and you were fighting three.

He went off the platform’s edge.

`[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]`

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