A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 243: Chapter 243 — The Army That Passed I

The light let them out at the three-road junction, and James knew where he was standing before he had finished arriving.

They had watched Raymond give orders on this ground. There had been a command tent here with a map table in it, and a quartermaster who told his prince the truth about dividing an army, and a young rider who could not get his words out about wyverns.

The tent was a burnt frame. The map table was firewood.

Northern Legion dead lay in rows along the eastern side of the camp where somebody had dragged them out of the way, stripped of anything worth taking, and the wagons beside them had been emptied and left on their sides. Above the barricades on all three roads hung Crown banners, and they were not new. They had been hanging long enough to get wet and dry again.

And the army was already moving.

Columns of Crown infantry were tramping through the wreckage toward the northern road in good order, at a working pace, with archers spaced along their flanks and engineers going ahead of them with boards and mallets.

James looked at the nearest formation and pulled it.

[CROWN INFANTRY]

[LEVEL: 28–32]

[CROWN ARCHERS]

[LEVEL: 30–33]

[CROWN ENGINEERS]

[LEVEL: 26–29]

He moved his eye down the column and found the ones walking behind the ordinary soldiers in heavier plate.

[CROWN ELITE GUARD]

[LEVEL: 39–41]

”Elites are our level,” he said. ”There’s six of them.”

”Six is fine,” Finn said. ”How many of the rest?”

Nobody answered that, because the column went back through the camp and out along the road behind it and did not visibly end.

At the centre of it, on the raised timber platform Raymond’s officers had used for the map table, a man in a dark surcoat stood with a poleaxe grounded beside him, watching his own army walk past and pointing occasionally at things.

[LORD MARSHAL ALWYN VANE]

[LEVEL: 46]

[CLASS: CROWN MARSHAL]

[HP: 24,000 / 24,000]

[UNIQUE SKILL: MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY — S-RANK]

[ISSUED ORDERS EMPOWER SOLDIERS WITHIN THE MARSHAL’S COMMAND RANGE]

[EVERY SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED ORDER GRANTS ONE COMMAND STACK]

[ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS UNKNOWN]

Then the floor told them what it wanted.

[FLOOR 24 — THE CROWN’S SPEAR]

[FLOOR CLEAR CONDITION: KILL LORD MARSHAL ALWYN VANE]

[CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE: PREVENT THE MAJORITY OF THE CROWN VANGUARD FROM CROSSING THE NORTHERN MARKER]

[FAILURE THRESHOLD: 50%]

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 0%]

**[ZeroFan]:** LEVEL 46

**[FrontierWife]:** they’re already MARCHING. this started without them

**[Kieran_77]:** additional functions unknown is the worst sentence in this game

**[AshesAndBones]:** SIX ELITES AND AN ARMY

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** the tent. that’s raymond’s tent

”North road,” James said. ”Before the first full formation crosses. Go.”

---

Ronan went into the lead shield wall at a dead run.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

He came through the front rank at an angle and took three men off their feet in the first two seconds, and the ones behind them tripped over the ones in front, and the whole leading edge of that formation stopped being a wall.

[FINN HALE — BERSERKER DRIVE]

Finn came through the hole Ronan opened, went past the soldiers entirely, and put both axes into the rear axle of the supply wagon they had been escorting. The axle went, the bed dropped, and he got a shoulder under the raised side and heaved it over across half the road.

Maeve was not looking at any of that. She was looking at the ground.

[MAEVE CALLAHAN — FIELD READING]

”Eastern side’s soft,” she called. ”Whole strip of it from the tent line down. They’ll bog anything with wheels. Firm ground is the middle and the west.”

Then she put her barrier across the middle, which was the only route a horse could take at speed, and left the soft ground open for them to discover on their own.

Cillian took the west.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

The second wagon came apart at the front wheels and slewed into the barricade timbers, and the western passage closed with it.

Three roads, three answers, and the front of the Crown vanguard piled up behind them.

James raised four of the Northern Legion dead from the row along the eastern side.

[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x4]

[MANA: 3,100 → 2,780]

Two went in behind Ronan. One went to Maeve’s flank where the barrier met the wreckage. The fourth went the long way round the outside of the camp, past the burnt tents, toward the platform — not to fight anything, and not fast, and James did not look at it while it walked.

The trapped front rank died where it stood.

[12 CROWN SOLDIERS SLAIN]

[PARTY EXP GAINED: 1,460]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 40,705 → 42,165 / 60,000]

On the platform, Vane lifted his poleaxe off the boards.

”Advance by companies,” he said. He did not shout it. ”Eastern ground. Leave the wagons.”

[MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY]

[ORDER ISSUED: ADVANCE]

The change went through that army like water finding a crack.

The soldiers behind the wreckage stopped waiting for the road to be cleared and simply came round it. Engineers were already ahead of them tearing boards off the burnt tent frames and throwing them down across the soft eastern strip, laying a corduroy track two boards wide while men walked over it before it was finished.

Cavalry came off their horses without being told twice and led the animals across on foot.

Nothing about them was individually faster or stronger. What had changed was that six hundred men had all decided the same thing at the same instant, and none of them had hesitated at the edge of the mud, and the whole column came round the block in one continuous movement.

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 0% → 11%]

Out at the edge of the camp, James’s fourth skeleton walked on toward the platform.

Vane saw it.

He did not step down, and he did not send anyone after it, and he did not even look at it for very long. He pointed with two fingers.

”Destroy the lone dead.”

[ORDER ISSUED: ELIMINATE TARGET]

Three archers on the eastern flank turned from what they were doing, together, and put three arrows through it before it had covered another ten meters.

[ORDER COMPLETED]

[COMMAND STACKS: 1/6]

James stood in the wreckage with the anchor gone and understood that he had just shown a stranger how his teleport worked.

---

”Hold the road,” Vane said. ”Thirty breaths.”

[ORDER ISSUED: HOLD]

A full company came off the column and locked shields around Ronan and Finn — not to kill them, which was obvious immediately, but to close on them from all four sides and simply stand there.

Ronan hit that ring hard enough to move a house and it did not break. The men in it were levels below him and they took the impact and stayed on their feet, and the ones he did knock down were pulled upright by the men behind them before they hit the ground.

Behind the ring, the rest of the army kept walking north.

James put two Necro Blasts into the back of the formation where nobody was watching for them.

[MANA: 2,780 → 2,660]

The shield wall thinned by four men in two seconds, and the deaths came close enough for the cold to run back up his arm.

[CALL OF SOULS]

[MANA RESTORED: +150]

[MANA: 2,660 → 2,810]

Finn found the captain.

[FINN HALE — EXECUTION SWING]

The axe came down through the man’s shoulder and into his chest, and the section of the ring he had been holding lost its shape. Ronan got his shield under three overlapping rims and lifted, and Cillian put lightning through the gap that opened above them.

[9 CROWN SOLDIERS SLAIN]

[PARTY EXP GAINED: 1,260]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 42,165 → 43,425 / 60,000]

They broke it. It took them nearly forty seconds.

[ORDER COMPLETED]

[COMMAND STACKS: 2/6]

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 11% → 24%]

”He didn’t want them to win,” Maeve said. She had her back to the wreckage and her eyes on the platform. ”James. He asked for thirty breaths and he got thirty breaths, and that’s the whole thing that happened there.”

”They were spent,” Ronan said, breathing hard. ”He spent a company to buy half a minute.”

”He spent a company to buy half a minute and a stack. Every formation that dies holding us up pays him twice.”