A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

James went to the nearest one and put his palm flat on its ribs.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,020 / 3,100]`

It came up on four legs.

It was, by a distance, the worst thing he had ever raised. Enormous, slow, wrong at every joint, with a head the size of his own chest and no offensive value whatsoever — it could not swing at anything and it could not catch anything and it was never going to be quick enough to matter.

It could stand next to a wagon. It could take a talon meant for a canvas roof.

And it was a body, in a place with no bodies, which meant it was somewhere to Grave Step to.

He walked it in behind the tailboard and left it there.

”That’s grim,” said Cillian.

”It’s a wall.”

”It’s a *horse*, James.”

---

They found the Harpies’ one real weakness about two minutes in, and it belonged entirely to Cillian.

He stopped shooting at them.

He stopped tracking the ones circling forty metres up, which had been a waste of everything, and started holding — hand up, light on his knuckles, doing nothing while three of them wheeled overhead.

And when one committed to a dive, and was locked into a line it could not leave, he took it.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

It came apart in the air eleven metres above the road and the body came down in front of the lead horse and skidded.

”*THAT’S* the timing,” he shouted, with more joy than the situation deserved. ”You have to let them start!”

Finn got to it before it stopped moving and finished it, and James was on the corpse four seconds later with his hand on its sternum.

`[HARPY SLAIN]`

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

`[MANA: 2,050 / 3,100]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 1,970 / 3,100]`

That one came up on two legs with a wing frame on each side and was worth about four of the horse.

He put it on the roof of the wagon.

---

After that it went well enough that the next stretch compresses into almost nothing.

Cillian took three more on committed dives. Ronan turned two off the shield without moving his feet. Finn caught one on the ground when it misjudged its own speed and came in too low behind the tailboard.

Fossor stayed out ahead, a hundred metres up the road, and found nothing at all, and that was exactly what James wanted it doing. It was no use whatsoever against something forty metres in the air and there was no point pretending otherwise — but it was the only thing in the party that could promise him the next bend was empty.

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:06:50]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 0.95 KM]`

And the number of them went up.

There had been four when it started. By the time they had put five down there were eleven above the road, on both walls, at four different heights, and more coming along the ledges from the eastern end of the pass.

They had followed the wagon in. All of them.

---

Then the Harpies stopped taking turns.

Four came off the western wall at once, from four different heights, in a spread that covered the whole front half of the wagon — and Cillian had to pick one, and Finn had to cover the horses, and Ronan had to be on the board.

The fifth came from behind and above, silent, over the tailboard.

It landed on the canvas.

The whole roof went down under it with a crack of hoop timber and the talons went straight through the covering as though it were paper — four long tears opening at once, and the creature hauled backwards and ripped a hole in the top of the wagon a metre and a half across.

Halden was directly underneath it.

”*ROOF—*”

He tried to move. James watched him try, from eleven metres away with a Harpy coming at his own head. The man got one arm up and one shoulder off the boards and then his own abdomen stopped him dead, and he made a noise, and did not get any further.

The Harpy reached through the hole and got a fistful of the front of his shirt and the strap of the dispatch satchel.

And it pulled.