A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 285: Chapter 276 — The Warden’s Blind Spot I

They were in place before the third footstep landed.

Ronan crossed the mouth of the corridor and set his feet at an angle, shield high and turned, not square. Finn drifted out to his right, four feet, axes level. Cillian backed off down the passage until he had a clean lane past both of them. Maeve put her shoulder to the corner block and watched the corridor edges instead of the corridor.

James took two long steps back from Ronan’s heel to give himself casting room.

Alice stayed at his shoulder with her wings half out and did not move forward at all.

The fourth footstep came, and then it was close enough to see.

`[THE WARDEN]`

`[FLOOR BOSS]`

That was all the System had.

It came up out of the dark at a walk — four metres of pale grey stone in the rough shape of a man, shoulders like the lintel of a door, hands the size of Ronan’s shield. The plates of it were fitted, not carved, and the seams between them ran with the same shallow grooved markings that Maeve had found cut into the base of the corridor’s doorways.

The markings were lit. A thin sullen orange, running down through the joints of its arms and legs and back out of its heels into the floor.

The floor was lit too, the same lines, in the same places.

It carried a maul on one shoulder. Head of it was a single block with the corners knocked off, and it had been swung enough times to polish the face of it smooth.

Finn saw the grooves and did the arithmetic out loud in three words.

”It’s the corridor.”

The Warden brought the maul off its shoulder and came.

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Ronan did not plant.

He took the first swing on the angle, shield turned thirty degrees off the line, and let the head of the maul skid across the face of it and go into the wall — and even then it drove him back half a metre and put a crack through the flagstone under his rear boot.

He came off it shaking his forearm out.

”Heavy,” he said. ”Heavy and slow to reset. Don’t stand square.”

Finn was already inside.

He came in under the maul’s follow-through while it was still low, both axes into the back of the Warden’s right knee where the plates had to open to bend, and the second one went in far enough to stick.

Stone chips came off it. Orange light bled out of the seam.

The knee held.

”It’s not going down off that,” Finn said, ripping the axe free and getting out.

”Then don’t spend it all,” said Cillian.

He put one bolt in. Not the wide thing, not the overload — a single tight lance of white into the same right side, hip height, and the crack it made in the plate was the length of a hand.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

Maeve did not cast anything.

She stood at the corner with her staff planted and watched how the thing turned, which was on the ball of its left foot, always, and always ending with its heels back toward the corridor.

The Warden pivoted to face Finn and gave James four clear feet of ribs.

James took them.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,880 / 3,100]`

The grey light went into the seam under its arm and blew a plate off the shoulder, and James was moving after it with Durendal already coming round, the edge screaming off the stone.

The Warden stopped caring about Finn.

Its head came round to James, and the maul came round with it — and the swing did not stop at James. It carried on through the arc, past him, out toward the small still figure standing behind his left shoulder with her hands empty.

Alice moved.

One beat of the right wing and she was not there anymore. The maul went through the space she had been standing in and into the wall, and Alice came out of the movement already low, already inside its reach, and the red-gold blade was in her hand.

She put it through the elbow joint of the arm holding the maul.

It went in like the arm was a curtain.

Red-gold light came out the far side of the joint and the stone around it went from grey to nothing in a fist-sized circle, and the Warden’s whole right arm stopped answering.

”*There*,” Finn shouted, and went.

He hit the open elbow from the outside while Alice was still in the seam.

Ronan came off the wall and put shield and shoulder into the Warden’s hip before it could turn, and it could not step back to reset because Ronan was where the step needed to go.

”Cillian—”

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The bolt went straight into the hole Alice had opened. The seam blew wide and orange light came pouring out of it and the arm came off at the elbow and hit the flagstones with the maul still in the hand.