A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 252: Chapter 252 — What We Know II

One skeleton came up out of it. Then a second, from the next one, and James did not stack them beside himself — Grave Command pushed them apart, one to the left lane and one behind Ronan, spreading his own board out before he had a board worth spreading.

By the fourth body he had options. By the sixth he had a Corpse Explosion available and three separate places he could be standing in under a second. By the eighth, Call of Souls was feeding him back enough mana that the arithmetic stopped being a countdown.

The difference between minute one and minute five was the entire shape of him.

Maeve said the useful version out loud, when they stopped for water.

”First minute of anything big is when he’s least dangerous. Not the last. The first.”

”Then the first minute’s our job,” Finn said, and drank his water, and that was the whole conversation.

They ran crowd pressure after that, which was the thing the projection had promised more than anything else.

Ronan practised not trying to be everywhere. Constructs came around both sides and he stopped attempting to block all of them, picked the one lane Team Zero actually needed to move through, and stood in it and let the rest of the field be somebody else’s problem.

Cillian worked on placing lightning inside formations without ever crossing Finn’s line or Ronan’s.

Maeve deliberately did not heal things. Bruises, minor hits, anything the four of them could keep working through — she watched it happen and kept her hands down, and by the third run they had stopped glancing at her every time something landed.

Finn held Linebreaker back until an actual formation existed, and then went through it and did not stop.

James spread his anchors wide, because Highwatch had taught him what happens when a single volley erases every destination you own.

And one repetition went wrong.

He had picked a rear anchor, called it, started the shift — and Finn had rotated out of position two seconds earlier to deal with something, which put Cillian’s firing lane straight across the space James was about to occupy.

”ABORT!” Maeve shouted. ”James — lane!”

He killed it before the transition took. It cost him the mana and nothing else, and the four of them stood there in the middle of a paused drill working out how close that had been.

”Same rule as before,” Ronan said. ”Signal when you can.”

”And when I can’t?”

”Then we all live with it. But you can nearly always signal, and today you did, and it worked.”

They ran it eleven more times. Nobody had to abort again.

---

That night, alone, James opened the window one more time and went to the bottom of it.

[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1/5]

[ALICE — FIRST DISCIPLE OF LUST]

He looked at it for a while.

There was a red light under a palace that two other teams had seen and nobody could name, and there was a woman in that slot who had come off Floor 15 talking about a Father, and who had been a First Disciple of something before James put her in a box.

He could open the slot. He could ask.

He thought about what asking would mean — summoning her on Earth, in his own city, with a Bureau protection detail on his mother’s street and a child asleep upstairs, to interrogate a thing that had told him to his face that leashes fray.

He left the window open for a long moment.

Then he closed it without touching her.

She stayed where she was. Not the opening move, not a consultant, and not something he unpacked in his mother’s kitchen. Something he could reach for inside the Tower if it ever got bad enough to be worth what it cost.

---

His mother did not ask him anything about Floor 25.

She asked whether he had eaten, and whether the new gear had come, and told him there was a lasagne in the fridge for whenever he got back, which nobody could put a date on and both of them let stand.

She checked his bag while he was in the other room. Then she checked it again an hour later, and did not mention either time.

Nyra found him in the hall while he was setting the bag by the door.

”Do you know what you have to fight this time?”

Last time he had told her no, and she had stared at him waiting for one thing with a number attached to it, and he had not had one.

”Yes,” he said. ”A prince. Baldwin.”

She turned that over.

”Just him?”

James paused a second too long.

”No.”

Nyra accepted that, which she would not have six months ago. She stepped in, took hold of the collar of his jacket where it had folded under itself at the back, and straightened it out flat with both hands, the way he had straightened her sleeve in this hall before the last floor.

”There,” she said.

His mother held on a little longer than usual at the door, and let go without saying anything about it, and neither of them mentioned that either.

---

The final meeting ran twenty minutes, because that was all the material they had.

Finn put up the only thing they owned, which was what the Tower had shown them over the ruined junction — Raymond’s smaller army in the north half of the field, Baldwin’s larger one in the south, and black markers still coming down out of the hills behind Raymond.

Then he put two fingers on the long grey column feeding into Baldwin’s eastern flank and left them there until everyone was looking at it.

”And this,” he said, ”is ours.”

Nobody needed it spelled out, and he spelled it out anyway, because it was going to be standing in front of them in about eighteen hours.

”Six thousand men. That’s the sixty-three percent that got past us at the junction while we were busy killing the fella who sent them. Every one of them walked through the five of us on that road and we couldn’t hold them, and now they’re lined up on the wing we’ll have to go through to reach Baldwin.”

”We killed three and a half thousand of them,” Cillian said.

”We did. And the Tower counted the other six.” Finn took his hand off the projection. ”That’s the bill for Floor 24, and it’s waiting for us on the right-hand side of that field.”

That was the whole board. No map, no terrain data, no enemy counts, and no second image.

[THE BROKEN CROWN — FINAL FLOOR]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]

”We know the target,” Finn said. ”We don’t know how the Tower means to put him in front of us. He could be behind the whole army, he could ride out, we could start on top of him. We’ve no idea.”

”Then we don’t plan mechanics,” Maeve said. ”We plan priorities, and we adapt when it shows us the actual floor.”

They set them out one at a time.

Ronan’s was the simplest and he said it first. ”We do not get separated. Two armies collide and there’ll be a hundred ways to end up alone out there, and every single thing the five of us are good at stops working the moment we’re not within reach of each other.”

Maeve’s was arithmetic. ”I hold a reserve back, and I hold it hard. That host behind Raymond is still coming. Whatever we’re fighting when the armies meet may not be the last thing we fight, and if I’m empty when the second half arrives we’re finished.”

Cillian’s was restraint. ”I’m not spending my best output on soldiers because there’s a lot of them. Formations that block a route, things that would swallow us — that’s what I’m for. Otherwise I’m keeping it.”

Finn’s was narrow on purpose. ”I’m not fighting six thousand men. Nobody is. My job is breaking whichever specific formation is standing between us and where we need to be, and Linebreaker means once I go into one, I stay in it.”

James took the last one.

”And me. If that field is what the projection showed us, then somewhere in the middle of it there’ll be more dead bodies around me than on any floor I’ve ever fought on. That’s the strongest I get.” He let that sit. ”But only after people start dying. Until then I’m a lad with a sword and a blast spell, and the first minute belongs to the four of you.”

”We know,” Ronan said.

Then Grave Step, which James raised himself.

”Vane worked it out in about an hour. Anybody with sense will do the same. So — Ronan covers my landings when he can, and I’m not jumping just because an anchor happens to be near Baldwin. The destination has to be somewhere I can afford to be blind for a second.”

”And if you forget that,” Finn said, ”and I see you setting up to drop yourself alone beside a prince in the middle of his own army, I’m calling it stupid before you do it.”

”Can I call it stupid during?” Cillian asked.

”You’re going to anyway,” James said.

The last item took thirty seconds.

”The light,” James said. ”We don’t know what it is, we don’t know if we’ll even see it, and we’re not building anything around it. But if anything starts happening under that city, under the palace, under the field — anywhere underneath — you say it out loud immediately. Nobody decides on their own that it’s scenery.”

He had decided it was scenery once already, and had not mentioned it to anyone for four floors.

Finn closed the projection, and there was nothing else to plan.

---

They came into the secure chamber under Dublin Tower on the Thursday.

Ronan had the new shield on his arm and checked the straps once as he came through the door, then again, then left them alone. Cillian’s conductors ran clean blue-white from wrist to elbow when he tested them, all of them, including the two that had been dead ash a week ago.

Maeve set her focus and laid out her consumables in the order she wanted them.

Finn rolled his shoulders and worked both axe grips, and the difference from Floor 24 was not the bindings. It was that he now knew exactly what the skill on his sheet did and, more usefully, what it stopped doing the moment he walked away from something.

James had Durendal at his hip, five points spent, one afternoon of being hit with a padded axe fresh in his memory, and one name sitting quietly in a slot that he had chosen not to open.

He brought up the entry interface far enough to confirm what they had.

[FLOOR 25 AVAILABLE]

[THE BROKEN CROWN — FINAL FLOOR]

[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL PRINCE BALDWIN]

Nothing else came up. No preview, no enemy list, no warning, no second objective — the same three lines they had been given standing over Vane’s body, and not one word more.

Ronan looked around the chamber.

”Everyone ready?”

”Ready,” Maeve said.

Finn nodded once.

”Born ready. Emotionally unprepared,” Cillian said. ”Ready.”

Four of them, and then all four looking at James, because the broadcast and the door were his.

James looked back at them for a second — the new shield, the live conductors, the laid-out consumables, the twin axes.

Then he looked at the dormant console.

”Start the stream.”