A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 247: Chapter 247 — Six Thousand More I

The projection stayed open over the junction, and it kept moving.

The grey column was still arriving. It came up the eastern side of Baldwin’s formation in a line that had no visible end to it, and as James watched, the front of it reached the existing line and turned, and began filling out along the flank — company after company, slotting into gaps that had been left open for them, until the southern half of that field was noticeably deeper than it had been a minute ago.

The panel with Baldwin’s name on it sat there in the middle of the projection, and James did not look at it once.

He watched the column.

Those men had walked past him that afternoon. He had personally killed some of them, and had stood on the road with his own dead in a line trying to keep the rest of them from getting through.

Thirty-seven percent of that vanguard had not made it past the marker. Three and a half thousand men were lying in the mud around the junction because Team Zero had been standing on it.

The other sixty-three percent were the part of Baldwin’s army that was still growing, and six thousand was what sixty-three percent came to.

”Six thousand,” Finn said.

Nobody answered him. Ronan was still on his back in the ashes with the two pieces of his shield beside him, and he did not sit up, he just turned his head toward the projection and looked at it. Cillian stood with his casting arm hanging dead from the elbow and said nothing at all, which was answer enough. Maeve had walked three steps closer to the image and was looking at the ground between the two armies rather than at either of them, tracing something with her eyes.

James finally turned away from the column.

”He wasn’t reinforcing the frontier,” he said. ”That’s the part I got wrong. I kept thinking he was sending them north to fight Raymond’s rear, and he wasn’t. He was walking them round to *here*.”

”To the battle,” Maeve said.

”To this exact field. Vane’s whole job was getting six thousand men to a place they’ll be standing in when we walk in there.” He looked at what was left of the man, face-down in the mud twenty meters away. ”We killed him after he’d already done it.”

That was the shape of the day, and nobody dressed it up. They had cleared the floor. The floor had been the cheaper half of the bargain.

Then the System interrupted.

[CALCULATING FLOOR CONTRIBUTION...]

The panel sat there and did not resolve, which was unusual enough that Cillian looked over at James and started building an expression.

”Here we go,” he said. ”Go on. Say something humble before it comes up.”

The panel resolved.

[MVP: FINN HALE]

[REASON: HIGHEST BOSS DAMAGE CONTRIBUTION / ELITE COMBAT CONTRIBUTION / DECISIVE BREAK OF LORD MARSHAL ALWYN VANE]

Cillian’s mouth stayed open for a second on a sentence that no longer had anywhere to go.

Finn read it. He did not smile, and he did not look at any of them, and whatever went across his face while he was reading it was gone before it finished. He looked at the panel for about two seconds.

Then he looked past it, at six thousand men filling out a line.

[MVP REWARD: LINEBREAKER — A]

[PASSIVE SKILL]

[CONSECUTIVE KILLS AGAINST MEMBERS OF THE SAME HOSTILE FORMATION BUILD BREAKER STACKS]

[EACH STACK INCREASES STAGGER AND ARMOUR-BREAKING POWER]

[MAXIMUM STACKS: 5]

[STACKS EXPIRE AFTER 20 SECONDS WITHOUT A VALID KILL]

He read that one twice.

It was not a skill for killing a marshal. It did nothing at all against one large thing, because one large thing was not a formation and gave you no second kill to build on. It was a skill that got stronger the longer you stayed inside a body of organised men, killing them in sequence, and it switched itself off the moment you ran out of them.

Finn looked up from it and found James already looking back.

Neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the projection was not saying better.

”So let me get this straight,” Cillian said. ”We fail to stop an army. And the Tower’s response is to hand Finn a skill for breaking through armies.”

”Cillian.”

”I’m just saying it read the room and then made a *choice*—”

”Shut up,” Finn said, without any heat in it at all, and Cillian shut up, grinning, because that was the closest thing to a celebration any of them was going to get.

The projection began to fold in on itself.

---

James checked his own board while Caerleon came apart.

Nothing new arrived. Everything on it had been handed to him standing over Vane’s body four minutes ago, and he was only looking at it now because he had not had a free second then.

[JAMES GANNER]

[LEVEL: 40]

[EXP: 47,675 / 63,000]

[STRENGTH: 61]

[AGILITY: 83]

[INTELLIGENCE: 150]

[ENDURANCE: 87]

[LUCK: 54]

[FREE STAT POINTS: 5]

He left the five where they were.

Vane had been one man in a small space, and the answer to Vane had been precision. What was waiting on Floor 25 was a field with two armies on it and a monster host coming down behind them, and he did not yet know whether that fight would ask him for more output, more survivability, or the ability to get somewhere twelve times in an hour without dying on arrival.

Spending points before he knew the question was how people ended up with the wrong build in the right fight.

Two smaller notices came up underneath.

[GRAVE STEP PROFICIENCY INCREASED]

[TRANSITION STABILITY IMPROVED]

[DEATH CHAIN PROFICIENCY INCREASED]

No rank change on either. Just the Tower noticing what he had leaned on for six hours and giving it back a little smoother, and the Grave Step line was the one that mattered, because *transition stability* meant the second of blindness on arrival would be shorter.

Shorter, not gone.

James’s hand went to his chest without him deciding to send it there, to the place where the butt of a poleaxe had come round to meet him in the middle of a jump he had already committed to.

He had used that skill the same way all day. Pick the anchor, take the jump, arrive behind them. A man who had watched him do it three times had simply stood where the fourth one was going to end.

He put his hand down and did not turn it into a lesson. It went into the same place he kept everything else about Floor 25.

The junction dissolved.

[FLOOR EXIT — BROADCAST TERMINATED]

The last thing forty million people saw was five people standing under a projection of the field where Baldwin’s army had just got six thousand men bigger.

---

The Waiting Room took them, and gave them back their bodies.

James felt the ground glass in his chest simply stop existing. Cillian raised the arm he had burned out himself pulling Vane off James, slowly at first and then all the way over his head, opening and closing the hand. Finn shifted his weight onto the leg that had been carrying him badly since the cut down the outside of it, and it held. Ronan got up off the floor without using his hands.

Their gear came back exactly as it had gone in.

Ronan looked down at what he was holding, which was a set of arm straps, about a third of a shield face, and a rim that had been folded over like a bottle cap.

Cillian watched him look at it.

”Are you going to buy one of these every floor?”

Ronan turned the wreckage over once.

”Apparently.”