A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 244: Chapter 244 — The Army That Passed II

Vane pointed toward the central road. ”Engage and delay.”

[ORDER ISSUED: DELAY THE ENEMY]

The next infantry group came through the narrow ground between two overturned wagons, packed in tight because there was nowhere else to be.

James anchored the chain in the first man who fell.

[DEATH CHAIN ACTIVATED]

[COOLDOWN: 4 MINUTES]

[MENTAL STRAIN DETECTED]

The black cords went out through the press and took hold of six of them at once, and their formation came apart from the inside as men who could not move properly fouled the men who could. Ronan and Finn went into the middle of that and finished it.

[7 CROWN SOLDIERS SLAIN]

[EXP GAINED: 980]

[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 43,425 → 44,405 / 60,000]

[CALL OF SOULS]

[MANA RESTORED: +210]

[MANA: 2,810 → 3,020]

The strain arrived behind James’s eyes and the junction went double for a moment, both versions of it sliding apart and back together.

He blinked it down and looked for the next thing to stop.

There was no next thing on the central road. There was nobody on the central road at all.

Away to the west, past the burnt tent lines, a work party of engineers was throwing the last boards down over the ruts of a passage they had been cutting the entire time, and Crown companies were already walking through it in file.

The soldiers in the wagon gap had never been an attack. They had been thirty men standing in a place Team Zero would feel obliged to hold.

[ORDER COMPLETED]

[COMMAND STACKS: 3/6]

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 24% → 38%]

”We’re playing his game,” James said. ”Every rank we kill down here is one he’s already written off. Leave the road. We go for the platform.”

”Through all of that?” Cillian said.

”Through all of that. He’s the only part of this army that matters, and while he’s standing up there talking, none of the rest of it stops.”

---

They went at the camp.

Ronan led it with blood coming out from under his shield arm where a spear had gone in below the plate on the second exchange, and he did not mention it and nobody asked him about it. Finn stayed on his open side the entire way. Cillian worked ahead of both of them clearing archers off the overturned wagons before they could set. Maeve threw angled barriers to their flanks — never in front, always at the sides, herding the Crown soldiers into a shape that could not close around five people.

James raised three more from the Legion dead as they crossed the camp.

Vane’s head turned, and this time he did not even use words on it. He put two fingers out toward the corpses and a volley came in from the eastern flank on the second beat, and two of the three came apart while they were still pulling themselves out of the ground.

One got up.

James sent it out wide toward the platform and made sure not to watch it go.

Then Vane looked north at his own column, and at the marker, and did the arithmetic of a man who has already won and is now deciding how much he cares about the manner of it.

”All northern companies,” he said. ”Cross without formation.”

[ORDER ISSUED: FORCED MARCH]

The army stopped being an army.

Six hundred men broke ranks and simply ran, in ones and threes and twenties, spread across four hundred meters of open ground toward the northern marker, and every tool Team Zero had was built for something else.

Maeve had one barrier and there were nine separate streams of men. Cillian could put lightning through four of them at a time and there were forty groups. James had corpses everywhere and could not detonate a single one of them, because Ronan was in the middle of it and Finn was somewhere past him and civilians did not enter into it — the thing stopping him was that his own people were inside every blast radius on the field.

They killed dozens.

It did not matter. It was never going to matter, and Vane had known that before he opened his mouth.

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 38% → 51%]

[CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE FAILED]

[BALDWIN’S VANGUARD WILL REINFORCE FLOOR 25]

The panel opened in front of James while he was killing a man with a sword, and stayed there while he killed the next one, and nobody on that field had a single second to react to it.

**[ZeroFan]:** NO

**[FrontierWife]:** WHAT DOES REINFORCE FLOOR 25 MEAN

**[Kieran_77]:** it means they fight this army AGAIN. later. with the boss

**[AshesAndBones]:** they were never going to hold that. look at the SPREAD

**[GraveEnjoyer]:** he broke his own formations to win. who does that

**[user48291]:** is the floor over??

[ORDER COMPLETED]

[COMMAND STACKS: 4/6]

—

Vane turned his back to the runners and grounded his poleaxe. ”Secure the perimeter.”

[ORDER ISSUED: FORM PERIMETER]

The six elite guards stepped out to the edges of the platform and locked their shields, sealing the timber structure behind a wall of steel.

[ORDER COMPLETED]

[COMMAND STACKS: 5/6]

James went for the platform.

His last skeleton was standing forty meters out from it, exactly where he had left it, and he took the jump the moment he had the angle.

Vane was waiting for it.

He didn’t swing at where James had been. He swung at the skeleton itself. He knew exactly where the jump ended, and the heavy butt of his poleaxe was already sweeping through the air to meet it. The wood connected the exact fraction of a second James took the dead thing’s place.

[GRAVE STEP INTERRUPTED]

[MANA: 2,810 → 2,690]

James came out of it sideways and half-formed and took the haft across the chest.

[DAMAGE RECEIVED]

[HP: 2,048 → 1,682]

He went off the edge of the platform and hit the ground on his back, and the poleaxe was already coming down at him.

[RONAN CLEARY — PIERCING STEP]

Ronan got there and got the shield up, and Vane’s follow-through bent the rim of it inward like a coin and threw Ronan clean off the platform boards into the wreckage below.

Vane did not follow him down.

He stepped back to the platform’s edge, looked north again, and pointed with the poleaxe at the last of his companies still moving on the road.

”Continue until the final banner crosses.”

[ORDER ISSUED: COMPLETE THE MARCH]

---

Team Zero hit the platform together.

Finn came up the steps with both axes, Cillian went up the far side, Maeve threw a barrier across the western approach to keep the reinforcements off them, and James got up off the ground with his ribs sending him a report he ignored.

Six elite guards closed around Vane before any of them reached him, and they moved like one object.

Cillian drew everything he had left in both arms and put it into a strike aimed past the guards at the man behind them.

Vane lifted his poleaxe and slammed the butt of it down flat against the boards.

[FINAL ORDER COMPLETED]

[CROWN VANGUARD ADVANCED: 63%]

[COMMAND STACKS: 6/6]

[MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY — SECOND FUNCTION UNLOCKED]

[THE MARSHAL MAY CONSUME COMMAND STACKS TO EMPOWER HIMSELF]

Out on the northern road, the last banner went over the marker and the column beyond it thinned and dwindled and was gone, and the junction went quiet for the first time since they had arrived.

Six thousand men had walked north through Team Zero, and every single one of them had made this man stronger on the way past.

Vane came down off the platform with his guards moving around him, and grounded the poleaxe on the broken earth, and looked at the five of them for the first time all day.

”The army has its road,” he said. ”Now we finish this.”