A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 233: Chapter 233– The Gate Was Never the Target II

The soldiers took hold again. The skeletons did not tire and they did not flinch, and when a goblin arrow came through the arch and went into one of their shoulders it simply kept pulling with the arrow in it, so that between six living men and three dead ones the wagon came off its axle stump and began to move.

---

Maeve had been watching the riders since the corridor went up, and the wolves made sense to her, because the wolves ran at Ronan and at the lane and at anything with a heartbeat, over and over, like the animals they were.

The riders did something else, and they did it repeatedly. Charge in, break off, slide sideways, charge in somewhere further along, break off again, and every pass pulled Team Zero’s attention a little further from the settlement’s northern shoulder without one of them ever trying to reach the gate.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

The field sharpened for her, and it did not hand her an answer, but it gave her the distances between the rider groups, the angles they were withdrawing on, and the fact that all of those angles pointed the same way.

She counted a group of nine peel off, curve north, and disappear past the corner of the wall, and they did not come back.

”James.” She did not take her eyes off the field. ”The riders aren’t trying to get in.”

”Are they surrounding us?”

Another group broke off, went the same way, and did not return.

”No,” Maeve said. ”They’re going somewhere.”

A horn sounded out in the dark before James could ask where.

---

It was a curved horn, long and flat, and the war wolves heard it. Through the goblin line came a bigger animal, armoured across the chest and shoulders in overlapping plate, with a captain on its back and the horn at its mouth.

It blew again, two short notes, and every wolf on that field stopped hunting on its own and turned toward the gate together.

Ronan set his stance and got small behind the shield. The first one came in high and he turned it off the boss, the second came in low and hooked the shield’s bottom edge and levered it up, and the third arrived while his chest was open and hit him full in it, driving him back four steps into the mouth of the gate lane with the shield arm dropping.

He forced the arm up again, and it came up slower than it should have.

[RADIANT PULSE ACTIVATED]

The light hit him across the shoulders without Maeve dropping a centimetre of the corridor, and it did not put him back together. His breathing steadied, the shaking in the shield arm stopped, and he got his feet under him and locked out one pace forward of where he had been driven, which was all it did and all it needed to do.

The captain raised the horn again.

Maeve could not hold the corridor, keep Ronan standing, and throw anything large, so she had exactly enough for something small, and she made it the right small thing. She watched the armoured mount move, found the place where the harness plate ran up over the shoulder and left a hand’s width of hide at the joint, and burned it.

[HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]

The mark caught orange on the moving animal and stayed on it.

”Cillian! Harness joint!”

Cillian already had it, and he waited two seconds for the captain to swing clear of a knot of stragglers before he put everything down the line at once.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The armour split along the brand, the mount’s front leg went out from under it, and it went down onto the shoulder while the captain stayed in the saddle by main strength and got the horn halfway to its mouth.

Finn arrived on the collapsing animal. He drove one axe into the ruined harness for a handhold, hauled himself up the side of it, and got the second axe up before the captain could turn.

The captain slashed at his head, and Finn caught it on the shaft, forced the blade wide, and put the other axe straight into the gap Maeve had opened.

The mount came down on its side. The captain went into the mud clear of it, rolled, and reached for the horn again with one hand.

James was already casting.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[MANA: 2,640 → 2,580]

The blast took it across the chest and put it flat, and the horn stayed in the mud.

[GOBLIN OUTRIDER CAPTAIN SLAIN — PARTY KILL]

[EXP GAINED: 900]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 41,535 → 42,435 / 57,000]

Nobody on that field could have said whose kill it was, and that was the point. Maeve had found the seam, Cillian had opened it, Finn had brought the mount down, and James had made sure the horn never sounded again.

---

The wolves felt it go. Some kept coming, because they had been coming before anyone told them to, but others slowed or turned or went after the wrong thing, and the terrible single-minded shape they had held for the last two minutes came apart into a dozen separate animals making a dozen separate decisions.

Ronan felt the pressure drop and pushed forward into it, knocking a wolf aside with the shield rim, taking three full paces past the gate, and putting his back to the settlement so every person still outside could see him.

”RUN! ALL OF YOU! NOW!”

The commander picked it up from the wall and the guards picked it up from him, and the last groups came in through Maeve’s corridor at a flat sprint while the wagon finally scraped clear of the second gate leaf inside the arch.

”Close them!” the commander shouted. ”The moment they’re through, close them!”

And in the middle of all of it, four meters short of the gate, a small boy was shoved through the wall of the light corridor by the surging crowd. He went down.

His mother made it through the arch, turned, and could not get back against the flow of people coming in. A wolf saw the gap in the crowd and came for it.

Ronan was eleven meters away with two animals in front of him, and leaving meant opening the gate. Cillian had eight civilians in his line. Maeve could not widen the corridor to pull the boy back inside without thinning the light over everyone else, and Finn was forty meters out in the field.

James sent the nearest skeleton. It broke off the corridor wall and ran, and it got there first, and it threw its whole frame into the wolf’s path.

The wolf tore through its ribcage without slowing, and it slowed for one second.

[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]

[MANA: 2,580 → 2,520]

The blast hit it under the ribs on its exposed side and put it down two meters from the boy.

[WAR WOLF SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 210]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 42,435 → 42,645 / 57,000]

[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]

[MANA RESTORED: +30]

[MANA: 2,520 → 2,550]

Ronan reached the boy on the next stride, scooped him up on the shield arm, and carried him through the arch without ever turning his back on the field. The mother took him and was gone into the crowd without stopping to say anything to anyone.

The gates began to swing, and Finn came in through the closing gap last at a sprint, with a goblin spear arriving behind him and burying itself in the door timber where his back had been half a second earlier.

The leaves met, and the locking beam came down into its brackets.

---

For a while the inside of the gate was just noise — civilians crying, guards shouting for room that did not exist, someone calling for a healer over and over in the same two words, and underneath all of it the flat irregular thumping of things hitting the outside of the doors.

Nobody on Team Zero celebrated.

Ronan put his weight on the shield with the rim on the cobbles while Maeve got the damaged plate at his shoulder open and looked underneath it. Cillian opened and closed his hands, watching the light run clean from wrist to elbow, checking that both new conductors still answered after the night they had just had.

Finn wiped both axes down and did not sit, and did not look away from the wall, while James counted what he had left standing — four skeletons, two of them badly broken — and listened to the rhythm of the impacts against the gate.

The commander came down the stair and stopped in front of them.

”You bought us the town,” he said. ”I’ll say that once, and then I’ll tell you the rest of it. That road behind you is full of wounded, and my healers have been rationing since noon.”

James looked past him at the wounded laid along the inside of the wall in two rows, and at the healer working her way down them with a bottle in her hand, and at the row of empty ones beside her knee.

He crouched and turned one of the empties over. There was a seal painted on the shoulder of the glass, a military healer’s mark, stamped and repeated, and he had seen that mark twenty-two times in the last week on the ends of crates in his own storage.

James stood up and pulled one out. The crate came out of nothing and landed on the cobbles with a solid, ordinary thump, and the healer looked at it and then stopped what she was doing entirely.

”Where did you get that?”

”Redfield,” James said.

She got the lid up with the point of her knife. Inside, packed in straw, were rows of small dark bottles, treated bandage rolls in waxed paper, and sealed tins with the same stamp on the lids.

She lifted one bottle, turned it to the torchlight, read the mark, and did something with her mouth that was not quite crying.

”This is ours. This is what was meant to come north with the prince.” She gestured at the empties beside her knee. ”The Crown took the depot in the spring, and we have been making do since.”

”Is it good?”

”It’s concentrated tincture and it’s less than a year old.” She was already reaching for a second bottle. ”How much do you have?”

James took out six more crates and left the rest where they were, because dawn was a long way off and the bridge behind this town was still full of people.

The row of wounded changed in under ten minutes. A defender with a torn thigh who had been quietly moved to the end of the line — the end where the healer had stopped going — got a full dose instead of a shared one, and his breathing came back up out of the shallow place it had been in.

Two healers stopped arguing over how to split what was left of a bottle, because there was no longer a reason to split anything. Along the wall, men with bound arms and stitched scalps started getting up and going back to the stairs, because that was the difference the medicine actually made, not miracles, just soldiers who would otherwise have been lying down.

The commander watched a dozen of his people walk back onto his wall and said nothing at all for a moment.

”That’s the gate covered,” he said finally. ”Without your five standing on it.”

---

Maeve had not looked at any of it. She was up on the wall walk with her head turned toward the doors, and she was listening.

”It’s getting quieter,” she said.

The commander came up beside her. ”They’ll be pulling back to come again. They always do. Give it ten minutes and they’ll—”

”No.”

Thump. Thump. A wolf, and another wolf, hitting old wood — two impacts, where two minutes ago there had been twenty, with no horns, and no mass of mounted shapes anywhere along the western field at all.

”They aren’t regrouping,” Maeve said, and turned north.

The bell went off. It was not the deep one over the main gate but something higher and faster, coming from well behind them on the far side of the town, and the commander’s face changed before the second ring finished.

He was already running. Team Zero went up the nearest stair after him, along the wall walk, past the tower, to the northern corner where the roofs finally fell away below them and the whole river side of the settlement opened up.

The bridge was still packed. Wagons nose to tail, horses, handcarts, people walking between the wheels, the column strung out across the whole span and backed up onto the near bank behind it, a solid line of civilians with water on both sides of them and nowhere at all to go.

At the far end of it, on the north bank, the goblin riders had arrived. There were dozens of them, and they had come the long way around the outside of the walls while everything the settlement had was facing west, and they were on the crossing’s far mouth now, cutting down the eight or nine guards who had been left to keep the traffic moving.

Behind those riders, more were coming down the bank at a canter with clay jars in their hands, and the jars were burning.

James looked at the crowded span, and at the fire coming toward the open end of it, and at the empty western field behind him where an entire attack had spent an hour going nowhere on purpose.

The gate had never been the target.

On the tower rail, a lookout leaned out over the drop and screamed it across the roofs.

”RIDERS ON THE BRIDGE!”