A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 289: Chapter 280 — Five Points III (Bonus)

**North — Ronan**

They nearly had him.

Fourteen across the shield and more behind, all pushing, and Ronan had given the two metres and then the last half and his right boot was on the line with the blue light coming up through the sole of it.

James’s skeletons arrived into the back of the press and started pulling men off their feet.

It helped. It was not enough, because a skeleton weighs what a skeleton weighs and could not hold the ward point if every human being on the floor died, and the only thing on that platform that mattered was one exhausted man with a shield.

Ronan felt his heel start to go.

Then something hard and grey wedged itself in behind his back — one of James’s skeletons, thrown flat against his spine, arms braced against the stone, two hundred metres from the necromancer who was steering it and turned side-on like a chock under a wheel.

Ronan braced against it and took the impact.

The skeleton came apart under him with a crack. Ronan did not move a centimetre.

One second. That was all of it.

Then Alice came down on the press from thirty feet up and the front two ranks stopped being a problem, and Ronan straightened his back and stepped forward off the boundary and said, quite calmly, ”Cheers.”

---

**Northwest — James**

Which left James on the worst platform on the floor with nothing raised, a sword, and a formation coming up the western ramp.

He could not Grave Step out. There was nothing to step *to* that was not the objective he was standing on, and leaving the circle for two seconds cost everyone five minutes.

He did not reach for the scythe.

He did not think about it at all, which he noticed afterwards and not at the time.

He killed the first one over the rubble with Durendal — a short thing, no flourish, the point in under the arm where the plates gapped — and then dragged the body two steps and dropped it in the gap between two blocks of fallen masonry, and the second man had to come round it instead of through it.

That put him side-on for half a second.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,490 / 3,100]`

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,520 / 3,100]`

Kill. Raise. Block with what you raised. Kill the next one through the hole that makes.

It was the same loop he had been running since Floor 3 with a rusted knife and forty-one mana, and he was running it now with a legendary sword at Level 41, and it worked exactly the same and it worked much, much better.

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED: +120]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`

`[MANA: 2,400 / 3,100]`

Three of them stood up around him off his own ramp, and the men still coming up it had to climb over what they had been standing on ten seconds ago.

`[CONTROL TIMER: 00:59]`

---

The last minute came apart into pieces.

Finn had five stacks and a shrinking formation and was smashing through shields that had stopped meaning anything, and every time they backed off he took one off the end of the line and reset his clock.

Ronan was grey in the face and inside his boundary.

Cillian was standing in a ring of bodies with his hand shaking, holding one cast in reserve like a man holding the last match in a wet field.

Maeve’s barrier was thin and going thinner and she had stopped trying to make it thicker and started making it *narrower*.

And James had raised eleven bodies since the gates opened — three of them standing round him and the other eight scattered across two hundred metres of somebody else’s fight — and had gone from the weakest man on the floor to the hardest position on it, which was the entire point of being what he was.

Then two things broke at once.

Maeve’s barrier came down — the whole slab, at the join, with the sound of a slate roof going.

And at the same second a fresh formation crossed Cillian’s boundary line and kept coming.

Alice was at Ronan’s platform. Skeletons were at James’s.

The distances were not close.

James did not shout a plan.

He looked west, and Alice was already off the ground — she had seen Maeve’s wall go before he had — and he turned east and sent every skeleton he had off his own platform at a dead run toward Cillian.

Which left James alone on the northwest with a sword and a formation on his ramp and forty seconds on the clock.

---

Alice hit Maeve’s approach at a shallow angle and did not stop at the men climbing the rubble — she went through the ward boundary itself, along the inside of it, and cleared the line of the circle from one side to the other, and the four attackers who had a foot inside it did not have feet anymore.

Maeve stayed on her point.

She did not step off to fight beside her. She stood in the centre of the ring with her staff planted and her chest heaving and let Alice do the outside work.

---

At Cillian’s, James’s three skeletons arrived into the formation from behind and did not try to kill anybody.

They fouled it. They grabbed spear shafts and hung off shields and got under feet, and all three were gone inside six seconds, and in those six seconds the formation lost its shape and compressed into the narrow gap between two fallen columns to get past them.

Cillian had been waiting three and a half minutes for exactly that.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

The lane went white.

Cillian sat down hard on his own ward stone afterward with nothing left in him at all, and there was nobody upright within forty metres.

---

`[00:10]`

At the north, they came at Ronan one last time and he turned the impact off his shoulder and stayed inside.

`[00:07]`

At the south, Finn’s fifth-stack axe went through the last standing shield and the arm behind it and the man behind that.

`[00:05]`

James took the nearest one on his ramp through the collarbone, kicked the body back down the rubble into the two coming up behind, and put a Necro Blast into the space it opened.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,340 / 3,100]`

`[00:03]`

Maeve’s ring was clear and Alice was standing on the boundary line with her back to her.

`[00:02]`

Cillian was sitting down and did not need to get up.

`[00:01]`

Finn killed the last soldier inside his circle.

`[CONTROL PERIOD COMPLETE]`

`[ALL FIVE WARD POINTS HELD]`

`[FLOOR 27 CLEARED]`

---

**[GalwayGoblin]:** THEY HELD ALL FIVE

**[ZeroFan]:** FIVE PEOPLE. FIVE ROCKS. FIVE MINUTES.

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** RONAN NEVER LEFT THE CIRCLE. NOT ONCE.

**[CorkClimber]:** cillian sat DOWN 💀

**[FinnsLeftAxe]:** finn didnt get help. nobody went to finn. he just DID that

**[user88317]:** MAEVE HELD ON HER OWN FOR THREE AND A HALF MINUTES

**[FrontierWife]:** i have not breathed since the gates opened

**[AshesAndBones]:** the skeletons running across the map to whoever needed them. that’s the whole floor right there.

---

The five ward points went out one after another, north, south, east, west, northwest, the blue light draining out of the stone in the order they had claimed it.

Then the fortress began to go.

Not dramatically. The walls simply stopped being solid at the edges, and the sky came through them, and the bodies went first and the rubble after.

`[FLOOR 27 CLEAR REWARDS DISTRIBUTING]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP GAINED: 7,900]`

`[LEVEL UP]`

`[LEVEL: 42]`

`[EXP: 2,615 / 69,000]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS: +5 — TOTAL UNSPENT: 10]`

`[FLOOR MVP — RONAN CLEARY]`

`[REASON: ZERO BOUNDARY LOSSES UNDER SUSTAINED DISPLACEMENT]`

Ronan looked at it with the expression of a man reading somebody else’s post.

”I didn’t kill anything.”

”You weren’t meant to,” said Maeve.

”Finn cleared a hundred men on his own. Nobody went near him the whole time.”

”Finn was being *attacked*,” Finn said, from the ground, where he had sat down. ”You were being *evicted*. That’s the only way anyone was losing this floor and they picked you for it and you didn’t go.”

”They had me on the line four times.”

”And you were still on the rock at zero.”

Ronan turned the panel over in his head for a second, then let it go, which was the most anyone was going to get out of him.

`[REANIMATED SLOTS: 1 / 5 OCCUPIED]`

`[ANATHEMA — ALICE]`

Nothing else appeared under Alice’s name. No contribution, no rating, no share. She had killed more things on that floor than any two of them and the System had recorded it the way it records weather.

She read it, and did not react, and James decided that was hers to bring up if she ever wanted to.

`[FLOOR 28 AVAILABLE]`

James left it closed.

Alice was looking back across the courtyard as it came apart — at the five faint circles where the platforms had been, spaced round the ring, too far apart for any one person to have covered two of them.

Then at the five of them walking back in toward the middle. Ronan with his arm strapped and his shield dragging. Cillian being hauled upright by Finn. Maeve limping slightly and still, even now, looking at the ground where her barrier had stood, working out what she should have done differently.

”I understand it now,” Alice said.

James waited.

”I could have taken any one of those platforms,” she said. ”I could not have taken five. That is not a thing that gets solved by being stronger.” She watched Cillian get an elbow in the ribs for something and swat at Finn’s head. ”There is no version of that floor where you did not need all four of them.”

”No,” said James. ”There isn’t.”

He did not say anything else, and neither did she, and the white sky came down over the last of the fortress and took them home.