A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 295: Chapter 286 — It Chose Him I

James had spent four days not finding anything out.

He had gone back through the Floor 25 recording twice. He had read the Bureau’s Caerleon file, which was six pages long and said nothing. He had asked two people at the Guild who knew about Tower phenomena, and both of them had asked him to describe the colour again and then gone quiet.

Nobody had a name for it. Nobody had seen it anywhere except under Caerleon.

Except it had not been under Caerleon. It had been in a dry valley on Floor 28, three floors and one dead kingdom away, coming up through cracks in pale stone.

`[TEAM ZERO]`

`[JAMES GANNER — CONFIRMED]`

`[FINN HALE — CONFIRMED]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — CONFIRMED]`

`[RONAN CLEARY — CONFIRMED]`

`[CILLIAN WARD — CONFIRMED]`

`[TEAM COMPLETE — 5 / 5]`

Alice was at the door before he stood up.

---

Floor 29 went uphill.

Three enormous stone terraces stacked up the side of a slope, each one a hundred metres deep and each one higher than the last, joined by wide ramps and broken stairs. Old defensive walls ran along the front edge of every level, most of them collapsed into gaps you could walk four abreast through.

It had been built to be defended. Somebody had defended it badly.

And at the far end of the third terrace, up past all of it, stood the exit structure — a plain stone arch with light already sitting inside it, visible from where James was standing.

You could see the whole climb from the bottom. That was either a courtesy or a threat.

`[FLOOR 29 — STANDARD FLOOR]`

`[MISSION TYPE: SUBJUGATION]`

`[OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES]`

`[ENEMY COUNT: 21]`

`[CLEAR CONDITION: ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED]`

`[FAILURE CONDITION: PARTY DEATH]`

`[LIVE BROADCAST STARTED — REGION: IRELAND]`

”Twenty-one,” said Cillian. ”Three more than yesterday. Riveting.”

Six of them were already coming down the lower terrace before Maeve had finished reading the wall line.

”Front,” said Ronan.

---

`[FLOOR SOLDIER]`

`[LEVEL: 43]`

`[HP: 4,600 / 4,600]`

Five of those, in dark mail under plate, two with shields at the front and one working a spear from behind them.

And one bigger.

`[HEAVY FLOOR SOLDIER]`

`[LEVEL: 45]`

`[HP: 7,200 / 7,200]`

The Heavy hung back off the line and did not come in with the rest, which James disliked immediately, because a thing that waits has been told to wait.

---

Ronan took the two shields and did not stand flat against them. He turned across the pressure, gave the outside one somewhere to go, and left its shoulder open for about half a second.

Finn’s axe came down on it.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 4,600 → 3,150]`

Not split. Not through. A dent in a shoulder plate and a man staggering, because this was Floor 29 and these things wore proper armour.

It answered with a shield shove and a short thrust up under Finn’s guard. Finn turned the thrust off an axe haft, let the point go past his hip, and buried the other axe in the front of its thigh.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 3,150 → 1,920]`

Cillian had a clean angle and did not take the big shot.

He put a short discharge through the weapon arm instead, elbow height, and the sword dropped four inches.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 1,920 → 1,180]`

---

James took the one coming round Ronan’s right.

It caught Durendal on the shield, and then it did something the Floor 28 warriors had not done — it did not stand there waiting to be hit again. It shoved. Put its shoulder behind the boss and drove James two steps backward, and then came after him to do it again.

James let the second shove come and was not there for it.

He stepped outside the line of it, put his palm flat against the open side, and fired.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

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

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 4,600 → 1,740]`

The plate blew inward.

It came at him anyway with its side hanging open. James caught the sword on Durendal, rolled the guard wide with his wrist and put the blade in through the hole.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 260]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 13,375 / 69,000]`

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

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

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

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

He raised it behind the enemy line and sent it straight at the spearman.

The spearman had to turn. The two shields in front of Ronan lost the thing that had been covering their backs, and Ronan felt it go and pushed forward into the gap.

---

Maeve was watching Finn’s wounded one.

”He’s resetting — the leg, the leg’s not taking it—”

Finn hit the leg.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 1,180 → 430]`

The knee nearly folded. The soldier caught itself on the butt of its own sword and stayed up on one good leg, and Finn brought the axe back for the last one.

Then the stone lit red.

---

Thin lines came up through the cracks around its boots, three or four of them, feeling their way to the surface.

James’s arm stopped where it was.

*Here we go.*

The red gathered at the ankles. Started to climb.

Then it stopped.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 430 / 4,600]`

It did not wrap the leg. It did not go up the back or round the chest. It hung there for a second around a dying man’s boots — and then it slid off him, back down onto the flagstones, and left him standing.

James felt something go cold that had nothing to do with the scythe.

It had never done that.

On a field outside Caerleon it had gone into Baldwin and stayed until Baldwin was dead. On Floor 28 it had taken three separate wounded bodies and worn every one of them into the ground.

It had just walked away from a man with four hundred hit points and a leg hanging off him.

---

The red ran.

Everybody’s head went with it. It crossed nine or ten metres of open flagstone in a low bright line, and it went *past* the second Floor Soldier, which was standing at half health with blood coming out of its side, and it did not so much as slow down.

It went up the terrace to the Heavy that had been waiting at the back.

`[HEAVY FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 7,200 / 7,200]`

Full. Untouched. Had not swung at anybody yet.

The red went up its boots, up the greaves, round the waist and across the shoulders, and there was no healing to do because there was nothing wrong with it.

Its head came up. The two-handed blade came off its shoulder.

And then it moved, and the movement was obscene on something that size — a lumbering, deliberate, armoured thing crossing fifteen metres like a dog off a lead.

Ronan got the shield across in time and it drove him back four steps with his boots scraping.

---

Maeve was not looking at the Heavy.

She had turned right round, back down the terrace, to the first soldier — the wounded one, the one it had left.

Still standing. Still bleeding. Still four hundred and thirty.

Finn killed it with one stroke.

`[FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 430 → 0]`

`[FLOOR SOLDIER SLAIN — PARTY KILL]`

`[EXP GAINED: 260]`

Nothing came out of the body.

No red off the shoulders. No threads on the stone. Nothing at all, because there had been nothing in him to leave.

James saw that too, and filed it, and did not have time for it.

---

Ronan did not try to take the second one head-on.

He came off the centre line, put the shield across at an angle and let the Heavy’s own weight carry the swing past him, and the follow-through turned it far enough for Finn to reach the ribs.

`[HEAVY FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 7,200 → 5,460]`

Alice had not moved.

She was standing eight metres off the fight with her arms loose, watching the red on the Heavy’s shoulders, and James caught it out of the corner of his eye and left it alone, because you do not stop mid-fight to ask a Fallen Angel what she is thinking.

Cillian put a controlled bolt into the planted leg.

`[HEAVY FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 5,460 → 4,510]`

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

Finn hit the brand.

`[HEAVY FLOOR SOLDIER — HP: 4,510 → 2,780]`

And the Heavy came round on him faster than the wreck of its leg should have allowed and caught him across the chest with the flat of the blade.

Finn went off his feet and landed six metres away on his shoulder.

His breastplate had a bend in it you could lay a thumb in. He got up on one knee, made a sound like a punctured tyre, and could not stand for three full seconds.

”Finn—”

”I’m — grand — give me a *second*—”

James started in.