A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 256: Chapter 256 — Between Two Monsters I

Kargan came at Ronan, because Ronan was the wall and there was nothing subtle about the Orc Chief at all.

Ronan planted, dropped his weight through his hips and got the shield square, and Maeve did not waste a fraction of a second thinking about anyone else. Her light went into Ronan’s shoulder and arm and nowhere else on the field.

[ORC WAR-CHIEF KARGAN]

[SKILL ACTIVE: BLOOD-AXE CHARGE]

The axe hit the shield face.

Ronan did not bounce it and he did not stop it. He went backward — boots carving two long trenches through the churned mud, four meters, five, his shield arm folding until the boss was almost against his own chest, and something in his shoulder made a sound he felt rather than heard.

The shield held. The new face took a dent the shape of the axe head and stayed on the arm.

Ronan stayed on his feet.

Kargan looked at him standing there and made a noise low in his throat, and pulled the axe back for another one.

And Morcant moved.

He did not help the orc, and he did not wait for the orc to finish. He used the charge — used the fact that every eye in Team Zero’s formation had gone to the enormous thing hitting their Guardian — and came straight down the lane at James.

James caught the first cut on Durendal, and the impact went down his arms into his spine.

*Stronger than Vane.* Not slightly. He had crossed blades with the marshal at contact range with everything he had, and this was a different order of weight coming through the steel.

The second cut came in low and fast, and James started moving Durendal down to meet it, and halfway through its arc the war blade changed direction.

It went up instead, at his head, and James got the blade across in time only because he had already been moving and Morcant’s change had cost him a fraction too.

Finn came in from Morcant’s right and swung for his ribs.

Morcant did not block it. He rotated the war blade, caught Finn’s axe near the haft where the leverage was, and pulled — using Finn’s own committed weight to drag him a step past his own balance point. Then he put a shoulder into him, and while Finn was still recovering his feet, cut across his armour.

Finn came away from it with a line opened down his side and did not go down.

[LORD COMMANDER EDRIC MORCANT]

[SKILL DETECTED: BATTLEFLOW — A-RANK]

[THE USER READS AND EXPLOITS OPENINGS CREATED BY ALLIED MOVEMENT WITHIN HIS COMBAT RANGE]

James read it once and understood the shape of the problem immediately.

Every Crown soldier moving anywhere near this man was a tool he could use. Every shield that shifted, every spear that came forward, every body that fell in the wrong place — Morcant was not fighting them in a battle, he was fighting them *with* one.

Which meant beating him where he was standing was not the objective.

Getting him away from his own army was.

**[GalwayGoblin]:** RONAN JUST GOT MOVED LIKE FIVE METRES

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** NEW SHIELD EARNING ITS SALARY

**[CorkClimber]:** MORCANT IS ON JAMES

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** FINN GOT CUT

**[FloorTheoryIE]:** they fight completely differently

**[user88317]:** ORC = HAMMER / MORCANT = KNIFE GOT IT

**[MOD]:** Slow mode enabled.

---

Kargan tore the axe out of Ronan’s shield and swung it horizontally at his head.

Ronan had felt what the first one did. He did not try to catch the second.

He dropped underneath it, and the axe went over him and kept going — straight through two Crown soldiers who had been working around behind the Orc Chief to reach the Northern line. The first came apart at the waist. The second went twelve feet sideways and did not get up.

Kargan did not look at either of them.

He was not fighting for Baldwin, and it had never once occurred to him to check what colour a thing was wearing before he killed it.

Cillian took the opening.

He waited until Ronan was clear of the swing arc, set his feet in the mud, and put everything through both conductors at once.

[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]

It hit the Orc Chief across the chest and shoulder.

Kargan’s whole body locked. Smoke came off the top of his left shoulder where the plate had been, his head snapped back, and his right knee went into the mud with enough force to throw water.

[KARGAN — HP: 32,000 → 28,940]

For about a second and a half the biggest thing on that part of the field was kneeling.

Then he came back up through it — not shrugging it off, but *dragging* himself upright against the current still running through him, one hand on the axe haft, the muscles in his neck standing out like cable.

And he turned toward Cillian.

”Ah,” Cillian said. ”That’s on me.”

Ronan cut across the Orc Chief’s path before Kargan had taken two steps, and put himself directly in front of a boss he had already been thrown five meters by.

Maeve moved with him and kept her light where the axe was actually landing, and nowhere else.

---

James and Finn kept Morcant.

James pulled mana for a Necro Blast to buy himself two meters of room, and Morcant saw the gathering before the cast finished and simply stepped behind a Crown shieldman.

James changed the aim in the last quarter-second and blew the soldier off his feet instead.

Which was exactly what Morcant had wanted, because the body came backward through the air between them, and Morcant came through behind it while James’s eyes were on the wrong shape.

[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED]

[MANA COST: 60]

The war blade came at his throat.

James turned his shoulders sideways and let the point scrape along the gorget instead of going through the front of his neck, and felt the tip skip off the metal an inch under his jaw.

Finn hit Morcant from the other side.

Morcant caught the first axe on his blade — and Finn had not committed the second one. It came in low, underneath, and clipped the Lord Commander across the front of the thigh.

[MORCANT — HP: 38,000 → 36,920]

A thousand and eighty points off thirty-eight thousand.

It was almost nothing.

It was also the most important thing that had happened in the last minute, because it meant the number was going to move, and everything after that was just a question of how long they could keep making it move.

Morcant seemed to reach the same conclusion.

He gave one order over his shoulder, in the flat unhurried voice of a man who had been giving them for thirty years.

”Close on me.”

Crown infantry came in around him — not a wall, not a shield ring, just eight or ten soldiers moving into the space, doing ordinary soldier things, and Morcant’s fighting changed inside three exchanges.

A spear came at James from Morcant’s left and James turned it, and the turn opened his ribs, and the war blade was already there because Morcant had known where the spear was going before the man holding it did.

A shieldman stepped past and blocked James’s view for half a second, and when the shieldman moved, Morcant was two meters closer.

”Finn.” James took a cut on Durendal that he should not have had to take. ”He’s better with them than without them.”

”Then he doesn’t get them.”

Finn understood without a second sentence, which was the entire reason it worked.

They stopped trying to hold ground and started giving it — not backward toward the Northern line, but diagonally, sideways, away from the Crown formation and out toward the churned no-man’s ground where the monsters had come in.

Morcant followed, because he had come here for James.

His soldiers followed too, and fewer of them arrived each time.

---

Raymond saw the corridor before James did.

Morcant and Kargan had stalled the head of the spearhead for three minutes, and three minutes was enough. Behind Team Zero, Crown infantry had begun swinging around to seal the road they had cut, and Raymond’s thinned veterans were fighting on two faces to keep it open.

He did not ask James what to do about it. It was his field and his army and his brother.

The System caught him properly for the first time as James’s eye went to him.

[PRINCE RAYMOND]

[LEVEL: 50]

[CLASS: FRONTIER WARLORD]

[HP: ?/?]

Fifty.

James looked at the number and thought about thirty years on a frontier where the things coming over the wall did not care about succession law, and decided he was surprised by exactly none of it.

Raymond did not charge.

He sat his horse and watched the Crown formation for what felt like a very long time and was probably six seconds — watching the way part of its shield frontage had turned toward Team Zero, and the way another section had angled away from Kargan because nobody in it wanted to be near the Orc Chief when he swung.

Between those two adjustments, the formation’s left side had stopped being a line and become a corner.

Raymond raised his sword.

He did not shout anything. The forty or so riders still with him began moving before the sword finished coming up, which told James more about Raymond than any speech would have.

They started at a trot, close, stirrup to stirrup, holding the shape.

Then they lengthened.

Then they came.