A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

He had eight hundred and sixty mana. He had decided on the way round that he was going to spend four hundred of it in the next ninety seconds, because if this position did not produce something then nothing on that floor was going to.

He got to the spot.

Finn forced the exchange. Ronan closed the route. Cillian’s light came in across the man’s left side and the Steward turned into it.

His back came round.

James went.

---

And the Steward’s right hand came off the sword and swept sideways through the air beside him.

Something came with it.

It came out of nothing at all — no ground opening, no light, no sound that James registered — and it was standing four metres to the man’s left before James had covered three strides.

It was him.

Same height. Same dark surcoat over mail, same heavy chain across both shoulders, same short grey beard. Same sword in the same hand.

And the same wounds.

That was the thing James saw and could not stop seeing, in the half-second he had to look at it: the forearm Finn had opened eleven minutes ago was open on that one too, in the same place, bleeding at the same rate. The tear Durendal had put across the surcoat was there. The burn across the shoulder plate where Cillian had first hit him was there.

Every single mark Team Zero had spent nineteen minutes putting on that man was on both of them.

`[THE STEWARD]`

`[FLOOR BOSS]`

`[LEVEL: 66]`

No health bar. Not on either of them. James looked and the number simply was not there anymore.

”*There’s two,*” Cillian said, in a completely flat voice.

---

James knew which one was which for about four seconds.

The original had been at the foot of the steps with its back three-quarters to him. The new one had appeared four metres to its left. He had that, clearly, and he held onto it — *left is the copy, left is the copy* — and then both of them moved.

They went in opposite directions round the base of the platform and one of them passed behind a tendril and came out the other side of it, and James lost it.

He genuinely lost it. Not for long. But by the time he had the two of them in his eyes again they were nineteen metres apart on opposite sides of the approach and he could not have said with any confidence at all which one he had been chasing.

”*Break off,*” he shouted. ”Break off, don’t stand together — Finn, Ronan, *split*, don’t let them get you both—”

Finn went left and Ronan went right, which put a Steward in front of each of them.

Cillian came off the outcrop and moved back eleven metres to get both of them inside the same field of view, because a man who has to turn his head is a man who has already lost one of them.

Maeve went straight back along her cleared route to a point where she could see all five of her own people and both of the others, and did not go one metre further than that.

---

”*Which one’s real?*” Finn shouted.

”I don’t know.”

”You watched it happen—”

”I *watched it happen* and then one of them went behind a tendril,” said James. ”I don’t know. Fight both.”

---

The one in front of Finn and Ronan turned its shoulders to the left and the air went.

”*WAVE*—”

And at exactly the same moment, on the other side of the approach, nineteen metres away, the second one turned toward the low outcrop where Cillian had been standing and toward James coming round the base of the platform, and raised its left hand.

James saw both of them start.

He saw the front of the cold going out across the floor toward Finn and Ronan on one side, and he saw a hand come up on the other, and he saw the route that Team Zero had been using all fight — the clear ground on the left, Maeve’s road, the way back to the shelf — sitting directly between the two of them.

Anybody who went back that way went into one and turned their back on the other.

Nine hundred mana. Eight hundred and sixty. Fifteen casts if he wanted to be empty in the last two minutes of the hardest fight of the year, and he did not have anything he could throw at a problem twice.

”*Split it,*” James shouted. ”Finn, Ronan — off the wave, go *across* it, don’t come back this way. Cillian, on me. Maeve—”

”*Moving.*”

”—*don’t come between them.*”

And then he stopped talking, because the hand on his side of the approach was already coming down.