A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 288: Chapter 279 — Five Points II

He crossed forty metres in about two and a half seconds and came into the left-hand corner of the front rank at a speed that took a shield out of a man’s hands before he could set his weight, and the axe in Finn’s right hand went through the gap it left and into the join of neck and shoulder.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — SLAIN]`

`[LINEBREAKER (A) — ACTIVE]`

`[BREAKER STACKS: 1 / 5]`

`[STACK EXPIRY: 20s]`

The second one was harder. He had seen the first one die and got his shield properly braced, and Finn’s axe came down on it and rocked him back on his heel and did not break anything.

Finn hit it again and the man’s arm folded and the third strike went into him under the rim.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 2 / 5]`

The third shield buckled.

That was the moment Finn actually laughed — because it was the same wood, the same iron, the same stance, and it caved under the first impact this time instead of holding, and the man behind it went down on his back with his own shield across his face.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 3 / 5]`

The fourth lost the shield entirely.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 4 / 5]`

The fifth, Finn hit through the shield and the arm and the helmet in one downward stroke, and the whole left corner of the formation stopped being a formation and became eleven men trying to get out of the way of each other.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 5 / 5]`

Finn stood in the hole he had made, breathing hard, both axes running.

Then he turned round and walked back onto his platform before the ward could notice he had left it.

---

**North Platform — Ronan**

They worked Ronan out inside ninety seconds, which was faster than most things did.

The first six tried to kill him and got nowhere, because killing Ronan Cleary through a braced shield is a job for a siege engine. The seventh one figured out that they did not have to.

He put his shoulder into his shield, planted, and shoved.

And the eighth understood, and the ninth, and then there were nine of them across the front of Ronan’s shield with the butts of spears and the flats of shields, not stabbing at all, just pushing — one long grinding heave toward a glowing blue line two metres behind his heels.

Ronan gave them the two metres.

He gave it a boot’s width at a time, turning under the pressure instead of standing flat against it, letting the weight go past his shoulder and off to the side the way he had been taught by a very bad afternoon on Floor 19.

One metre.

Half a metre.

His right heel found the light.

`[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]`

He drove forward off the boundary line — one violent step straight into the centre of the press with the shield leading — and four of them left the ground and the rest lost their footing, and every single body that had been inside the ward circle was now outside it.

Ronan reset his feet in the middle of his own platform and rolled his shoulder.

"Again, then," he said.

---

**East Platform — Cillian**

Cillian had two hundred metres of straight empty courtyard and forty men walking up it in a block, and for about six seconds he was the happiest he had ever been.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

The bolt came down in the middle of the block and the middle of the block stopped existing. Eleven of them went over. Four more were still moving when the light went out of the air, and Cillian took those with three quick jabs of white as they came.

He was grinning.

Then the second gate opened at the far end and another forty walked out of it.

Cillian looked at the timer.

`[CONTROL TIMER: 04:11]`

Four minutes.

He had done that in six seconds and it had cost him — a proper, noticeable, permanent-conduit-and-all amount, and there were four minutes left and about two more of those in him before there was nothing.

The grin went.

*Right. No.*

He let them come.

He let them come the whole two hundred metres, and when they got to eighty he put small tight bolts into the front rank, one at a time, cheap ones, the kind that killed a man and cost him almost nothing. At thirty metres he stopped casting entirely.

When the first one came over the boundary Cillian put a fist into his sternum with the ward light wrapped round his knuckles and dropped him where he stood.

`[CILLIAN WARD — MAGE FIST]`

"Come on then," he said, to forty men, on his own, with his good hand shaking. "One at a time. There’s a queue."

---

**West Platform — Maeve**

Maeve did not try to hold a circle.

She put one barrier up — a single slab of stone across the wide mouth of the collapsed hall, four metres of it, jammed into the standing walls on both sides — and left the narrow mouth completely open.

Then she stood where she could see the narrow mouth and waited.

They came through it in ones and twos because they had nowhere else to come through, and she killed them in ones and twos as they arrived, which was the only rate she could kill anything at, and it was enough because the door decided the rate.

It was not glamorous. Nobody was going to clip it.

It worked for two minutes.

Then Field Reading caught the thing she had been afraid of — a big one at the back of the queue with a maul and a proper set of shoulders, moving up along the barrier wall and dragging his hand across it, feeling for the join.

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

She put the mark on him and killed him at the mouth before he reached the join, and it cost her more than the last nine put together.

And the queue kept coming.

By three minutes there were bodies stacked at the narrow mouth and the ones behind were climbing them, which made the mouth wider, and she had to spend on the barrier to shore it and she was spending faster than she liked.

By three and a half, they were coming over the top.

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** MAEVES POINT

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** LOOK AT MAEVES POINT

**[GalwayGoblin]:** oh thats not good

**[user88317]:** ALICE. ALICE DO SOMETHING

**[CorkClimber]:** SHES BEEN ON HER OWN FOR THREE MINUTES

**[FrontierWife]:** 😭😭

---

James saw it from the northwest with two skeletons around him and a sword in his hand.

"MAEVE’S FOLDING," he shouted, across two hundred metres of ruined courtyard, to nobody in particular.

He did not tell Alice to go.

He watched her hear it, and turn her head west, and look — actually look, for about a second and a half, at Maeve’s platform and then at Cillian’s and then at Ronan’s, and make the sum herself.

Then the wings came out and she was gone off the ring wall.

She hit Maeve’s approach like a dropped anvil.

The red-gold blade came out on the way down and she went through the men climbing the body pile without slowing, and then along the inside of the barrier, and the noise of it was less like fighting than like something structural coming apart. Eleven of them in about four seconds. Then nine more.

Maeve did not stand back and watch her do it.

"Behind you — the barrier join, they’re on the join—"

Alice went at the join without a word and put her shoulder through three men and the corner of the wall they were working at, and the barrier held.

"Narrow mouth. Two more coming. Left one has a bow."

Alice took the left one.

They did not say anything else to each other, and they did not need to, and Maeve got her breath back and started rebuilding her wall.

---

James’s own board was finally up.

Three more bodies, three more skeletons — and every one of them had cost him eighty and every kill had given him thirty back, and the arithmetic of being a necromancer was that you went downhill slowly no matter how well it was going.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +120]`

`[MANA: 2,870 / 3,100]`

He kept two of them.

The third went east to Cillian. The first one he had ever raised on this floor was already two hundred metres north with Ronan, and James stood on his own platform and watched the new one go, and that left two skeletons on the whole floor standing anywhere near him.

That was the shape of this floor, and it took him until now to see it properly.

Five people nailed to five rocks. Nobody able to help anybody.

And two things on the whole board that could move.

*Her. And mine.*

`[CONTROL TIMER: 02:30]`

`[ENEMY PRESSURE INCREASED]`

Six more gates opened.

---

They came at Ronan and Cillian and James all at once, in numbers that made the first wave look like a patrol.

James did the sum in about a second and hated the answer.

Alice was west. She could reach one more point in time and one only. Ronan losing his platform reset the entire timer to five minutes and there was not a person in this fortress with five more minutes in them.

So James emptied his own board.

He had two beside him. He raised four more off the bodies piled at the foot of his ramp, which took three hundred and twenty out of him in under ten seconds and left him standing in the middle of six.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×4`

`[MANA: 2,550 / 3,100]`

All six went north.

He kept none.

---

**South — Finn**

The formation pulled back.

Not broken — pulled back, deliberately, twenty metres, re-dressing its ranks with the shields going up in a new line and a fresh forty coming out of the gate to join them.

Finn’s stack counter sat in the corner of his eye.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 5 / 5]`

`[STACK EXPIRY: 14s]`

He understood exactly what was happening to him, and it was not because the enemy was clever.

Twenty seconds without a kill from that formation and five stacks became nothing, and he would be starting again at one against a hundred men instead of finishing this at five.

*They don’t have to beat me. They just have to make me wait.*

He did not chase them into the open yard, because that was the other way to lose.

He went to the near corner of the regrouping line — the corner closest to his own platform, eleven metres, still inside a distance he could get back from — and took the outermost man off the end of it with a downward axe that went through the shield rim, the shoulder and most of the ribcage.

`[BREAKER STACKS: 5 / 5]`

`[STACK EXPIRY: 20s]`

Then he was back on the stone before anybody had closed the gap.

"You’ll have to come to me."

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