A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 220: Chapter 220 — Ahead of the Warning I

The war-wolf hit Ronan’s shield exactly where it had hit nothing at all the first time.

He did not simply stop it. He turned the shield at the last instant so the animal’s own speed threw it sideways off the boss, and it landed skidding in the road with its legs tangled.

It landed directly in the path of a man who had been waiting a week for it. Finn split its skull before the nearest convoy guard had finished drawing his sword.

”Left trees,” Cillian said, already turned that way, and fired into a treeline where nothing had happened yet.

The bolt cracked into the undergrowth at knee height and the ogre came out of it three steps early, roaring, one leg dragging where the lightning had found the tendon behind its knee.

It arrived in the open with its balance gone and its hands still empty, and Finn was standing in the road waiting for it with both axes up.

He went in under the first swing, took the forearm at the same seam he had used a week ago, and when the creature dropped its shoulder to grab for him he buried the second axe in the side of its neck. It went down across the verge instead of across the lead wagon.

[OGRE SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 640]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,180 → 43,820 / 54,000]

Maeve’s light was over the convoy’s third and fourth wagons before the orcs reached them, because that was where the escort had broken the first time.

James did not charge in sword-first. He walked to the rear of the column and stood at the stretch of road where the first bodies had fallen last time, and waited about four seconds.

An orc came around the last wagon exactly on schedule. James took its swing on Durendal, turned it wide, and put the blade through its chest.

[ORC SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 185]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,820 → 44,005 / 54,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

Three more came through the same gap. James spent sixty mana on a Necro Blast that put two of them down together, and Call of Souls handed him back most of what the cast had cost before Finn arrived to take the third.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[2 ORCS SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 370]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +60]

At the treeline, four goblins reached the medicine crates they had carried into the forest a week ago and found three skeletons standing over them instead.

The whole thing was finished while the convoy officer was still shouting for a shield line.

He came down the column afterward with his sword up and nobody left to point it at, looking from the ogre’s body to the five strangers and back again. Two wagons had lost wheels. Every driver was alive, and every crate was still on the road.

”You were formed up,” he said at last. ”Before the horn. Before anything came out of those trees.”

”We’ve travelled bad roads before,” James said, and left it there.

The officer waited for more, and did not get it, and eventually turned and called for his riders. They went north inside ten minutes, because there was no wreckage to clear and no dead to lay out, which meant Dunadd would hear about five foreign fighters earlier than it had last time.

That suited James exactly.

They rode the valley road at pace and stopped for none of it.

”Second bend,” Cillian said, twenty minutes on. ”We were here at about this light last time, except we’d already stood around reading two notices and a signpost. Call it a quarter hour up.”

Ronan spent the ride watching the southern hills instead of the road, and near the river crossing he lifted his chin at a fold of ground where two mounted shapes sat under a stand of thorn.

”Crown scouts. Same as last time, probably, except last time none of us looked.”

”They’ll report a convoy that didn’t get hit,” Maeve said. She had been counting the refugee column since the bridge, and she frowned at it. ”That line’s shorter than it was. Twenty carts, maybe twenty-five. It was longer.”

”Because we’re an hour earlier in the day,” Finn said.

”Probably. That’s my point — I can’t prove it, so I want it said out loud in case something bigger changes for the same reason.”

James rode with a different problem chewing at him, and put it to them before Dunadd came into sight.

”Raymond briefs us earlier, so the six hours start earlier, and six hours is still six hours. We gain nothing on the clock.” He looked across at Cillian. ”But the patrol leaves Greybridge when Greybridge decides. Not when our timer starts. So every minute we arrive earlier comes out of their head start instead of ours.”

”So the sun matters more than the countdown,” Maeve said.

”That’s the whole bet.”

Dunadd came into view with the sun still well above the western hills, and the mounted officer met them at the outer gate exactly as he had before.

”You’ll stay together. You keep your weapons, but you walk under escort.”

”Understood,” James said, before the man had finished, and started walking.

Inside the command hall, Raymond stood over the same map in the same blood-marked pauldron, and asked the same questions.

”Where are you from?”

”Outside Caerleon, far enough that your maps don’t reach it, and I can’t explain the road we took without lying to you.”

Raymond’s eyes came up. James had answered before the question had properly landed, and had answered it in the exact shape of a man reciting something.

”Do you serve any—”

”No ruler, no guild, no army. Five of us, nobody behind us.”

”And you want—”

”To stop this kingdom being destroyed, and no, that isn’t blind loyalty to you, and yes, we’ll fight Crown soldiers if they attack us, and no, we won’t butcher them because your brother is your brother.”

The hall had gone quiet. Raymond looked at him for a long moment with something new and unfriendly moving behind his eyes.

”You are very quick,” he said, ”for a man who has never been in this room before.”

”You’re an easy man to predict, my lord. That isn’t an insult.”

It nearly was, and Raymond took it anyway, because the map on the table was more urgent than his pride.

He gave them the same problem — the bridge, the depot, the artillery, the two walls he could not both hold — and he made the same admission about which of his assets he could afford to lose.

Then he turned the Greybridge map toward them, and Maeve leaned over it.

”When was this last confirmed?”

Raymond stopped.

”The garrison estimates are eleven days old,” he said, and when she did not move, he glanced at the aide beside him. ”The patrol route?”

The aide checked, and took slightly too long about it.

”The last verified report on their patrol pattern is five days old, my lord. The one before that was nine.”

”Five days.” Raymond’s jaw set, because he had just been told his map was a rumour with ink on it. ”Then treat the western route as likely, not certain, and look at the ground yourselves before you trust a line of it.”

”That was the intention,” Maeve said, and asked nothing else, because asking twice would have been the mistake.

James said nothing at all about the eastern gate, or the ridge, or a patrol ledger sitting in a desk in a fort that had not been attacked yet in this version of the world.

He took the maps and the three flares, and asked for one thing.

”Your fastest horses. Not the fastest you can prepare — the fastest already saddled.”

Raymond gave the order without asking why.

[FLOOR 22 — THE BROKEN CROWN]

[FACTION MISSION RECEIVED]

[CRIPPLE THE THREE CROWN POSITIONS]

[TIME LIMIT: 6 HOURS]

Nobody suggested a preparation room. They were through Dunadd’s gate at [05:58:12].

”Say it back to me,” James said on the road south, because he wanted it in five mouths and not one.

”Ridge road pinches at the top between the rock and the pines,” Ronan said. ”Wide enough for two horses. I close it, Cillian empties the saddles.”

”And we sit on the fort ridge and touch nothing,” Finn said, in the voice of a man who had already lost this argument once in a house in Dublin, ”until his lightning goes up.”

”Under two minutes to reach them if it goes wrong,” Maeve said. ”I’ll be watching for the flash and I’ll be watching the slope.”

”Nobody opens that gate until I see it,” James said. ”One rider loose and every hour of this is wasted.”

They came up the last rise at [05:33:04], twenty-five minutes out of Dunadd, and about forty minutes earlier in the day than they had managed on the first attempt.

It was almost enough.

At Greybridge’s eastern gate below them, three riders sat their horses in the open stable yard, waiting on someone inside.

Further out, small with distance, two more were already up the track and passing into the trees.

”Two are away,” Ronan said.

”Take the two,” James said. ”We’ll hold the three.”

Ronan and Cillian went east at a gallop.