A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 215: Chapter 215 — The First Signal II

The portcullis was already dropping.

Finn and Ronan hit the narrowing entrance and forced it — Ronan’s shield under the descending gate for one brutal second, Finn hauling him through — and one of James’s skeletons scraped into the passage with them, slipping past the defenders before their shield line finished forming inside.

The portcullis boomed down behind them. James was still in the courtyard.

He watched through the grate: Finn and Ronan against a formed line in a stone corridor, and his skeleton standing loose behind that line, where it had wandered past men who hadn’t counted it a threat.

There’s my door.

[GRAVE STEP ACTIVATED]

The courtyard folded away, and James arrived behind the Crown line — and the arrival cost him what it always cost, one second of the world sitting wrong, his balance arguing with his eyes.

The nearest guards were veterans. They saw the stagger and came at it.

For three ugly seconds James was defending on instinct — Durendal turning a spear, a Necro Blast at contact range, boots scraping for ground he couldn’t fully feel — and there was no second jump coming, because the skill was on cooldown and he’d known that when he chose this.

Then an arrow meant for his blind side rang off a shield of pale light — Maeve, working through the portcullis grate — and Finn and Ronan hit the line’s front while James and the skeleton were fouling its back, and the formation came apart between them.

Cillian arrived from the wall, dropped the man holding the portcullis winch, and the gate ground back up.

The commander made his last stand in the bridge-control chamber, and he made it well.

He wasn’t trying to win. He was trying to spend their time — his elite guard packed into a stone room with one door, defensive wards flaring along the walls, every man of them fighting for minutes rather than kills, because somewhere out there a messenger or a patrol might notice Greybridge had gone quiet.

It half worked.

Finn took the commander head-on and took the worst of him — a longsword with real weight behind it, twice through Finn’s guard, blood down his arm. Ronan kept the guards off Finn’s flanks and collected a spear gash over the knee doing it. Maeve read the chamber’s wards and called where the defence was thinnest; Cillian held the door so nothing left toward the beacon or the stables; James pressured the line from the side with Durendal and the last two skeletons — no Death Chain, with the strain still sitting behind his eyes, and no Corpse Explosion in a stone box with his own people in it.

The commander went down fighting, between Finn’s axes and Ronan’s shield, and nobody standing over him mistook him for a fool.

He’d cost them nineteen minutes.

The bridge controls were exactly as mechanical as Raymond had promised.

Two heavy chain drums. A winch taller than Ronan. Locking gears with teeth the size of fists. The drawspan sat lowered — the convoy had crossed it — and the deep water waited underneath.

They raised the span first, winch clanking, the wooden section climbing until it stood near vertical against the sky.

Then Finn and James killed the mechanism. Axes through the winch spokes, Durendal through both chain drums, mana down the blade turning iron links to falling scrap. The locking gears went last, teeth sheared.

The span stood unsupported for one groaning moment.

Then it tore loose, dropped, hit the river like a felled tower, and twisted away from the stone piers downstream.

No cavalry was crossing that. No supply wagon, no siege train. And no repair crew was fixing it with a new chain and an afternoon.

[GREYBRIDGE CROSSING DISABLED]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 1/3]

They fired Raymond’s flare from the southern wall — a red star climbing into the evening.

Dunadd’s high walls would see it. Nothing else would; the hills swallowed the sightlines south. Whatever Redfield and Highwatch learned tonight, they wouldn’t learn it from that flare.

Nobody rested. They counted.

Maeve went along the line of them — Finn’s arm bound, Ronan’s knee sealed enough to ride. James checked inward and reported honestly: the pressure behind his eyes hadn’t faded. Death Chain’s bill was still being paid.

Finn gave the mechanism one last professional look. ”Not quickly and not with what they’ve got here. It’s dead.”

”Four twenty-nine on the clock,” Cillian said.

Ronan had gone through the commander’s desk, and came out with a ledger, and went still reading it.

”Patrol ledger.” His voice was flat. ”Their route changed three days ago. They don’t circle west anymore — Raymond’s intelligence is stale. They go out the east gate, up the ridge overlooking the fort, then down the road.” He looked up. ”Toward Redfield.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

”The empty stalls,” Maeve said. ”The tracks.”

”Left shortly before we arrived.” Ronan closed the ledger. ”They could’ve been on that ridge while we were taking the courtyard.”

Or they could have been over the hills and gone before the first arrow. There was no way to know from a book.

”We hunt them,” Ronan said. ”If Redfield gets warned, it costs more than an hour.”

”If they’re even findable,” Cillian said. ”That’s three days of new route and a head start. They could be anywhere in those hills.”

”Chasing riders through unfamiliar ground, in the dark, with a timer running,” Finn said. ”We could burn an hour and come back with nothing.”

”We know exactly where Redfield is,” Maeve said. ”We don’t know where five horses are.”

James looked at the ridge, black against the last light, and made the second call of the night.

”We ride for Redfield. We can’t spend the clock searching hills for something we can’t confirm. If the warning’s ahead of us, it’s ahead of us — speed is the only answer we’ve got either way.”

[user77201]: GO GET THE PATROL

[FinnsAxes]: no?? the timer?? ride

[TowerWatchKR]: neither option is safe. that’s the point of the ledger

[user48291]: what patrol

James dismissed the two skeletons too broken to travel and kept the rest.

They mounted and rode south.

The road to Redfield climbed to a ridge, and the ridge answered every question the ledger had asked.

The fort below was awake.

Gates shut. Battlements lined with archers, and robed figures spaced between them — mages. Behind the entrance, work crews were building barricades by torchlight. Soldiers streamed between the outer storehouses, hauling crates deeper into the fort, and through the southern gate a line of wagons was already rolling out and away — medicine wagons, moving south under escort.

Above it all, Redfield’s warning beacon burned against the dark.

And far off on the southern horizon, a second fire answered it from a high ridge. Highwatch.

Beside that distant beacon, faint but growing, something else had begun to shine — a cold, steady glow that had nothing to do with firelight. The magical artillery, waking up days ahead of Raymond’s schedule.

The beacons had only carried the simple message: attack. The details — five foreigners, Greybridge fallen — had gone ahead on horseback, with a patrol whose tracks Team Zero had seen and left behind.

Greybridge was dead. And the price of it was standing on every wall in front of them.

The last medicine wagons shrank down the southern road.

[TIME REMAINING: 04:28:11]

[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 1/3]