A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 339: Chapter 330 — The Man-Eater at the Ford II

A ghoul ran into the middle of it.

It had come down the near bank and gone for the wagon, and its route took it inside four metres of the manticore’s hindquarters, and it did not even slow down.

The manticore killed it without turning its head.

The paw came back and took the ghoul across the spine and put it into the gravel, and the manticore did not look at what it had done and went straight back to trying to get around Finn.

James stopped moving for about a second.

*They’re not together.*

He had been treating the riverbed as two groups of enemies with one plan. It was not. It was two predators that had both come to the same caravan for the same reason.

He tested it once, because he was not going to build anything on one dead ghoul.

He moved the rear skeleton six metres wide on the eastern side — not to fight anything, just to stand in the way — and the four ghouls coming up that flank had to bend their approach around it, and the bend took them across the ground behind the manticore.

The manticore’s head came round.

It went at them. It took two of them in about a second and a half, and for four full seconds it was not thinking about Finn or the wagon or anything else.

”Right,” said James.

---

He put the other skeleton out on the same line and started feeding the flank.

It was not elegant. It cost him a skeleton inside a minute and cost him another one thirty seconds later, and it did not do a single point of damage to anything.

What it did was buy four seconds at a time, over and over, out of an elite that could otherwise spend every one of those seconds trying to kill two horses.

And in those seconds, Fossor got under the ford.

James had sent it the moment the manticore charged, and the riverbed was the best ground he had been given all day — dry gravel over packed silt over stone, no water anywhere in it, soft enough to move through and deep enough to move under.

He brought it back down the bed underneath the fight, and waited, and watched Finn’s feet.

”Finn — *hold him there*—”

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,500 / 3,100]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 20,500 → 18,800]`

The blast went into its face and it reared to get away from it, and all its weight went onto the back legs.

Fossor came up underneath them.

---

The gravel gave out in a two-metre circle and the manticore’s whole back end dropped into it.

It did not go over. It was far too heavy for that and Fossor was not going to throw a thing that size anywhere. What it did was lose the ground it had just put every kilo of itself onto, and the rear legs scrabbled, and the enormous forward-curving tail that had been coming up over the shoulder for a volley swung wide and came down across the gravel instead.

Finn was on it before it hit.

Both axes, together, into the joint about two-thirds of the way along where the spines thinned.

`[MANTICORE — HP: 18,800 → 16,000]`

It did not come off.

It buckled. There was a wet crunching noise and the last third of the tail suddenly had a bend in it that had not been there before, and when the manticore hauled itself out of the hole and tried to bring the tail back over its shoulder, the tip did not come all the way round.

”*There,*” Maeve shouted. ”James, *there* — that joint, that’s the—”

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

The violet ring went onto the buckled joint and stayed there.

After that, nobody attacked anything else.

Cillian stopped shooting ghouls. Finn stopped going for the chest. James stopped putting blasts into its face.

Everything went into one bend in one tail.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 16,000 → 12,400]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 12,400 → 9,500]`

---

And it stopped trying to shoot anything.

That was when it got dangerous.

It gave up on the tail entirely, put its head down, and went straight through Finn at the wagon.

Not around. Through — it took a full axe stroke across the skull to do it and did not slow down, and Finn went off his feet, and there were nine metres of open gravel between a charging man-eater and two horses that were already past managing.

Ronan came off the driver’s board.

Three steps. Not more. He did not go out to meet it, because going out to meet it meant leaving the wagon, and the entire point of Ronan Cleary was that he understood that better than anyone alive.

He got his left foot planted, and his shoulder into the back of the shield, and his head down.

It hit him.