A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 292: Chapter 283 — The Same Red I

The update came in while James was lacing his boots.

**Guild Zero — Operations:** *Applications closed overnight at 31,400. Screeners start Monday. Portal held. Two press requests declined per M. Callahan. Nothing needs you.*

*Nothing needs you.*

James read that line twice, decided he liked it more than he expected to, and put the phone face down on the table.

Twelve people were in that building right now doing things he did not have to do.

Alice was already by the door with her coat on.

`[TEAM ZERO — PARTY FORMATION]`

`[JAMES GANNER — CONFIRMED]`

`[FINN HALE — CONFIRMED]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — CONFIRMED]`

`[RONAN CLEARY — CONFIRMED]`

`[CILLIAN WARD — CONFIRMED]`

`[CHALLENGER PARTY: 5 / 5]`

`[REANIMATED — ACTIVE]`

`[ANATHEMA — BOUND — MANIFEST]`

”Ready?”

”I have been ready for eleven minutes,” said Alice.

`[FLOOR 28 ENTRY CONFIRMED]`

---

Floor 28 was wide open, and after eight days of buried streets and blind corners James stood there for a second just enjoying it.

A dry valley in flat white light. Pale stone everywhere — a ruined city that had never had a roof over most of it, spread out along the valley floor in terraces and broken causeways, with columns standing in rows like teeth and long clean sightlines running between everything.

No fog. No ceiling. Nothing that moved when you weren’t looking at it.

Ronan turned a slow circle and let out a breath.

”I can see the whole floor.”

”Don’t say it like that,” said Cillian.

`[FLOOR 28]`

`[FLOOR CLASSIFICATION: STANDARD]`

`[MISSION TYPE: SUBJUGATION]`

`[HOSTILE ENTITIES: 18]`

`[OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES]`

”Eighteen,” Finn said. ”That’s it? Eighteen?”

”That’s it.”

Maeve was already reading the ground rather than the panel — the causeway running east, the terraces above it, the places somebody would come from.

”Eighteen of *something*,” she said.

`[LIVE BROADCAST STARTED]`

`[REGION: IRELAND]`

**[GalwayGoblin]:** open floor. thank god

**[ZeroFan]:** 18 enemies and thats the whole floor?? easy day

**[CorkClimber]:** dont

**[FrontierWife]:** DONT SAY THAT

---

Six of them came down off the second terrace in step.

Armour first — plate over mail, full helms with no faces in the visors, big oval shields carried properly at the shoulder. They came in a wedge and they came without a sound except boots on stone, and they did not hurry.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR]`

`[LEVEL: 40]`

`[HP: 3,600 / 3,600]`

And at the back of the wedge, half a head taller and twice as wide, one carrying a two-handed blade across its shoulders.

`[HEAVY WARRIOR]`

`[LEVEL: 42]`

`[HP: 5,400 / 5,400]`

”Front,” said Ronan, and went.

---

He did not charge them.

He planted himself twelve feet off the centre of their line, deliberately, so that the whole wedge had to swing to face him — and swinging a wedge means the outside man travels furthest, and the outside man’s shield comes off his shoulder while he does it.

Finn was watching that shoulder before it moved.

The first sword came down on Ronan’s shield and Ronan turned it, took it off the angle and let it skate away to his left, and the warrior behind it was still recovering when Finn hit the outside shoulder with everything.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 3,600 → 2,150]`

It turned on him. Committed its weight onto the back foot to do it.

Cillian did not use anything with a name on it. He put one short white lance through the back of that knee while the weight was still travelling, and the leg went out from under it.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 2,150 → 980]`

”That’s the cheap one,” Cillian said, mostly to himself. ”There’s seventeen more of these.”

---

James took the one coming up his side.

He led with Durendal and the warrior read it and got its shield across, and the blade rang off the boss and skidded, and James felt the whole impact go up his forearms.

*Right. They’re not orcs.*

So he stopped trying to go through it.

He stepped left, outside the shield’s edge, where a shield stops being a wall and becomes a piece of furniture the man is holding. The warrior’s sword came round after him and James caught the arm on Durendal’s crossguard, jammed it, and put his other palm out at four inches.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 3,600 → 1,080]`

The breastplate came apart in a spray of hot metal.

It did not fall down.

It swung at him one-handed with its chest hanging open, which James found more unsettling than anything it had done so far, and he put Durendal in through the hole and out the back of it.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 220]`

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

`[MANA: 3,070 / 3,100]`

James had his hand on its sternum before it finished settling.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,990 / 3,100]`

It came up holding the sword it had died with.

James did not keep it beside him. He sent it wide and long, round the outside of the wedge, straight at the spear fighter standing behind the shield line — because a spearman with something coming at his flank stops being a spearman and becomes a man turning round, and the two shields in front of Ronan suddenly had nothing behind them.

Ronan felt the pressure come off and pushed a metre forward into it.

—

Which left the first one.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 980 / 3,600]`

Finn caught its sword on the flat of one axe, rolled the guard open with his wrist, and cut across the front of its thigh with the other.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 980 → 310]`

The leg nearly went.

James saw the whole thing from twenty feet — saw it drop onto that foot and have the foot fail, saw it catch itself, saw the sword come down four or five inches because there was not enough left in the arm to hold it at guard.

It dragged the foot. It was finished and it knew it and Finn was already stepping in.

Then the stone underneath it lit up.

---

Thin red lines came up between the flagstones.

Not from the warrior. From *under* it — up through the cracks in the pale stone, three or four separate threads of it finding their way to the surface around its boots like water coming up through sand.

James stopped moving entirely.

The red gathered at the ruined leg first. It went round the thigh where Finn had opened it, a wrap of light two inches thick, and then it climbed — up the hip, across the back, round the torso.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 310 / 3,600]`

The number did not move.

The wound did not close. There was still a hand’s width of open meat above the knee and blood still coming out of it and running down the greave.

The dragging foot came up and planted flat.

The shoulders came back.

The sword came up to guard, and past it, and higher than it had been at the start of the fight.

Then it moved, and the speed of it was obscene — a thing with one leg half cut through crossing four metres in the time it should have taken to fall over — and it went past Finn’s finishing swing entirely and hit Ronan’s shield before Finn’s axe had finished travelling.

The bang was wrong. The same enemy, thirty seconds ago, had rocked Ronan’s forearm.

This one moved him a full step.

Finn’s head came round to James so fast it looked like a flinch.

”Baldwin,” James said.

That was all. He did not explain the colour or the cracks or the light. He said the name and Maeve’s eyes went from him to the red glow at the warrior’s leg and back, and her jaw set, and she did not ask a single question.

”Finn — it’s still three hundred,” James said. ”It’s still three hundred, take it—”

The warrior came again, faster than it should have, and Finn met it.

He took the first strike on one axe and let it slide off wide instead of standing against it, gave the speed somewhere to go, and put the second axe through its side under the arm.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 310 → 0]`

`[ARMORED WARRIOR SLAIN — PARTY KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 220]`

Three hundred and ten was three hundred and ten.

The corpse hit the stone.

And the red came off it.

It did not fade and it did not burst. It unwound from the body the way a bandage unwinds, poured off the shoulders and down onto the flagstones, and then it *ran* — three thin lines of it, moving across the pale stone with purpose, until they reached a crack and went down into it.

James watched the last thread go under.

He had seen that exact thing once before, standing in mud, over a dead prince, four floors ago.

---

**[ShieldMainSiobhan]:** THAT RED

**[user88317]:** WAS THAT BALDWIN???

**[ZeroFan]:** NO WAY

**[FrontierWife]:** SAME LIGHT???

**[CorkClimber]:** WHY IS THAT HERE

**[GalwayGoblin]:** JAMES SAW IT TOO HE STOPPED DEAD

**[user88317]:** THATS THE CAERLEON LIGHT

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

---

They finished the first six fast, because standing around looking at a crack in the floor was how people died.

Ronan put a shoulder into one and knocked it off its line, and James’s skeleton came in from behind and put the dead man’s own sword through the back of its neck.

`[ARMORED WARRIOR — HP: 640 → 0]`

`[ARMORED WARRIOR SLAIN — UNDEAD KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 220]`

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

`[MANA: 3,020 / 3,100]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,940 / 3,100]`

Alice broke the Heavy’s arm at the elbow on her way past, and Ronan held its blind side against his shield just long enough for Finn to dismantle the rest of it.

`[HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED: 6 / 18]`