A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 210: Chapter 210 — Floor 21 - The Road to Dunadd I

[TIME REMAINING: 3 SECONDS]

James pressed his hand to the panel.

Not because Raymond deserved a throne. He had no idea what Raymond deserved. He pressed it because somewhere north of a mourning city, a wall was already breaking, and only one of the two princes was standing anywhere near it.

[FACTION SELECTED: NORTHERN LEGION]

[SUPPORTED CLAIMANT: PRINCE RAYMOND]

[PARTY ALIGNMENT UPDATED]

[STARTING REGION: NORTHERN FRONTIER]

[OPPOSING FACTION: CROWN ARMY]

The chat went off like a struck hive.

[FrontierWife]: RAYMONDDDDD

[CrownLoyal_Kev]: lawful heir btw

[FinnsAxes]: BRO CLICKED WITH 3 SECONDS LEFT

[TowerWatchKR]: monsters were already past the wall. tactical choice, not moral choice

[user48291]: wait who is baldwin again

[CrownLoyal_Kev]: enjoy fighting the actual king lmao

[MOD]: Slow mode enabled.

James didn’t explain himself to the counter in the corner of his vision.

He didn’t get the chance anyway. The darkness broke apart around them, and the world arrived.

Cold air first. Real air, moving, with pine and woodsmoke in it.

They stood on a raised stone road along the shoulder of a hill, and below them the Northern Frontier spread out in late morning light.

It was beautiful. That was the part nobody was ready for.

Cold green hills rolling north into forested valleys. Rivers under old stone bridges. Farms behind wooden walls and sharpened stakes, chimney smoke standing straight up.

The same land they’d watched burn twenty minutes ago.

The road carried the rest of the story. Herds being driven south, away from the frontier. Columns of soldiers marching north, gear patched and repatched. Refugee families between the two flows, carts stacked past sense, homes on their backs.

Monster skulls hung from roadside posts, nailed up beside broken orc blades. Some of the skulls were old. Some were not.

Beyond the farthest hills, thin columns of smoke. Not chimney smoke.

Maeve stopped at a post where two notices were nailed side by side.

”I can read this,” she said. ”It’s not any script I know, and I can read it.”

”Tower’s translating,” James said. He could feel it working — a slight delay between seeing the letters and knowing them.

One notice carried a crown seal: the pretender Raymond is declared traitor and rebel. The other carried a stag over crossed spears: the north will not be abandoned. Return to Dunadd.

”Dunadd.” Finn stood at a leaning road marker, its arrow pointing along the ridge. On the horizon in that direction sat a high stone hill with walls climbing it. A fortress city.

”Every soldier on this road is walking toward it or coming from it,” Ronan said.

”Then that’s where Raymond is,” James said. ”We walk.”

They walked, and the road kept talking.

A family fought an overloaded cart up the grade — man on the shaft, woman pushing, three kids carrying what the cart couldn’t. One girl, about Nyra’s age, carried a hen in a basket and talked to it as she walked.

Cillian watched them pass and didn’t say anything for a while.

”She named the hen,” he said finally. ”You could hear her. We watched this whole place burn in the intro like it was a trailer. Her included.”

”Not yet, it didn’t,” James said. ”That’s why we’re on this road.”

Ronan counted soldiers, because Ronan counted things.

”Refugees south, every fit soldier north. And look at the state of them — repaired armour, no full supply trains. Whatever Raymond has, he’s spending all of it.”

Further on, Maeve read another pair of duelling notices and let it go without a speech.

”Same events, two stories. I don’t trust either version. Neither should you.”

”We picked a starting point,” James said. ”Not a religion.”

Nobody argued. The smoke on the horizon was doing most of the talking anyway.

Then, from the valley beyond the next bend — a horn. Military, urgent, cut off mid-note.

After it, breaking wood. Animals screaming. People.

They ran.

The bend opened onto the lower road, and the lower road was a disaster in progress.

A Northern Legion supply convoy — eight or nine wagons of food, weapons, and medicine — was being taken apart at four points at once.

At the head, an ogre had both hands on the lead wagon, walking it up onto two wheels to overturn it across the road and cork the convoy in place. The drivers clung to the bench, too high to jump.

At the centre, orcs had broken through the escort and were in among the wagons, cutting down guards.

At the rear, goblins swarmed the last wagons, dragging crates toward the treeline. Some were already gone, medicine boxes on their shoulders.

On the fringes, war wolves the size of ponies coursed the wounded and the fleeing.

The escort wasn’t small or stupid. It was simply losing — hit at four points by three times the expected numbers, every guard forced to choose between the supplies behind him and the screaming to his left. And trapped between the wagons: drivers, healers in grey, and families who’d been travelling with the convoy because the convoy was supposed to be the safe way south.

Team Zero didn’t hold a meeting.

”Ogre,” Finn said, already running.

”Centre,” Ronan said.

”Wolves,” Cillian said.

”Everywhere,” Maeve said, and James drew Durendal and went for the rear.

Finn hit the head of the convoy as the lead wagon’s wheels left the ground.

He put his right-hand axe into the ogre’s forearm, deep, through hide like bark. The grip convulsed open and the wagon crashed back onto four wheels, drivers still aboard.

The ogre reared back off the pain, and Finn ripped the axe free on the way out of its reach.

It turned on him and swung its good fist down like a falling roof.

Finn slipped the centre of the blow, crossed both axes, and took the rest of it on the crossed hafts — let it drive him back three steps, away from the wagon, which was the point. The ogre followed him. He kept giving it ground it wanted, one heavy exchange at a time, walking a mountain away from the trapped drivers.

Ronan reached the convoy’s centre through the gap between two wagons, and closed it.

He took an orc’s overhand cut on his shield, let it skate off, and put his shoulder through the creature’s chest, driving it back out of the gap. Then he planted there and became a wall.

”Wounded behind me!”

The surviving guards understood. They dragged their bleeding into his shadow, and the orcs that came to reopen the gap found it closed for business.

Cillian went through the fringes like the weather changing.

The wolf closest to running down a healer died first, mid-leap, lightning taking it out of the air. Then he was somewhere else, because another wolf had circled toward a knot of children behind the third wagon, and it died too, before its turn finished.

He wasn’t chasing kills. He was chasing whatever was closest to someone who couldn’t fight.

Maeve stood where she could see all of it.

Light pooled around the wounded and the bleeding slowed. A shield-charm snapped over two drivers as a thrown axe rang off it. When three orcs looped wide around Ronan, a bar of radiance staggered them long enough for recovering guards to meet them with spears.

No relic on her brow. Nobody could have told.

James met the rear of the convoy sword-first.