Chapter 224 — Floor 22 - Before They Could Prepare III [Bonus]
That order emptied the yard, and it filled the passage.
Eighty soldiers packed themselves into a stone corridor eight abreast, which was exactly the right decision for holding the passage and exactly the wrong one for what was standing at the other end of it.
James looked at the nearest body and then at Finn and Ronan, who were four meters from it.
"Ronan, back. Take him with you."
Ronan did not ask. He got his shield across the front of both of them and walked backward up the corridor with Finn swearing behind him, and when they had covered nine meters James’s two remaining skeletons hooked their arms under the corpse and dragged it forward into the middle of the packed line.
A soldier in the second rank worked it out and shouted.
It was late.
[CORPSE EXPLOSION — MANA COST: 150]
[MANA: 1,660 → 1,510]
The corridor turned into a bell.
The blast went both ways along the stone and took the front third of the formation off its feet, and the men behind them went down under their own people, and where a wall of shields had stood there was a gap wide enough for five.
They went through it and down the bastion stair.
[TIME REMAINING: 01:41:12]
The chamber was exactly as they had left it, in a world that had never happened.
The consecrated sphere sat under the floor in its banded containment, cold light turning slowly inside the iron, and the conduits ran up the walls toward a frame that would never be finished now.
Nobody spent a second discovering anything.
Maeve went straight to the outer ward and started stripping runes in the sequence she had memorised, calling each one as it opened.
"Third. Seventh. The pair on the left, both together — Cillian, now."
Cillian sent thin, controlled lightning through the gaps she opened rather than at the plating, and each one cracked with a sound like ice under a boot.
Ronan and Finn set on the containment bands, Finn’s axes and Ronan’s shield rim working the same seam from both sides, and the first band went with a ringing snap that shook the floor.
James put Durendal into the crack it opened and channelled.
[HIGHWATCH ARTILLERY CORE]
[INTEGRITY: 100% → 71%]
The commander came down the stair with eleven guards behind him and went straight for Maeve, because he could see which of them was killing his wards.
Ronan got there first.
He caught the descending blade on his shield and the impact drove him back a full step through the dust, and his knee held, and his stance held, and the commander did not get past him.
Finn came in on the man’s open side and forced him to turn, and after that it was two on one and the commander was fighting to survive rather than to reach anyone.
Cillian put himself between the guards and James and made that eleven-man problem into a corridor problem.
James did not turn around. He stayed on the core.
Then a guard came past Cillian’s flank in the smoke, and reached James while he was two seconds into a cast.
James let it go early.
[NECRO BLAST — INTERRUPTED]
[MANA: 1,510 → 1,450]
The half-formed blast went into the sphere and made it flare rather than crack, and James turned Durendal up in time to catch the guard’s blade on the flat and put his shoulder into the man’s chest.
[HIGHWATCH ARTILLERY CORE — INTEGRITY: 71% → 66%]
Sixty mana for five percent, when a clean cast would have paid four times that.
The commander threw Finn off with a shoulder and put himself in front of the containment breach, between James and the core, with his sword up and his weight set.
James looked at him, and looked past him at the skeleton still standing at the far side of the chamber where it had followed him down the stair.
[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]
[MANA: 1,450 → 1,330]
He arrived on the other side of the core with the world sliding sideways, and a guard swung at his head while he was still finding the floor.
Maeve caught it on a shield the width of a door panel without letting go of the failing outer ward.
"Now, James!"
James drove Durendal into the crack and pushed everything he had left down the blade.
[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]
[MANA: 1,330 → 1,270]
[HIGHWATCH ARTILLERY CORE — INTEGRITY: 66% → 0%]
The sphere went out.
It did not explode outward. It collapsed inward on itself with a sound like a great door closing underwater, and the cold light drained out of the chamber, and every conduit in the walls went dark at once. Somewhere far above them, in the yard, the half-built artillery frame lost whatever had been holding it and groaned.
Then the ceiling began to come down.
[HIGHWATCH MAGICAL ARTILLERY DESTROYED]
[STRATEGIC TARGETS CRIPPLED: 3/3]
They went up the stair through the dust with the chamber falling in behind them, and the surviving garrison did not follow, because the surviving garrison was busy running the other way.
Finn fired the third flare from the outer wall.
It went up red over the ridge, and the five of them stood there and watched the north.
It took a long time to arrive, and then it did.
Far away across the dark, Dunadd’s southern gates opened, and lights began to move out of them and turn onto the northern roads — not a patrol, not a rider, but company after company of Raymond’s soldiers, marching away from the wall they had been chained to since before Team Zero ever reached this floor.
Marching toward three villages that had burned, in a world that had happened once.
Nobody said anything. Cillian took his helmet off.
[FLOOR 22 CLEARED]
[THE BROKEN CROWN — FORTIFICATION MISSION COMPLETED]
[ATTEMPTS USED: 2/5]
[COMBAT EXP RETAINED]
[FLOOR-CLEAR REWARDS CALCULATING]
[TIME REMAINING: 01:18:44]
The transport light took them off the wall and put them in the Waiting Room.
Bodies came back whole, mana filled, and the ache in James’s ribs where a spear shaft had cracked into his plate simply stopped being there. The gouge in Ronan’s shield stayed exactly where it was, and so did the burn along the hem of Maeve’s cloak.
James checked his storage first, before anything else.
Twenty-two crates, still there, still sealed, still stamped with a military healer’s mark from a kingdom that had not been rolled backward this time.
"It kept," he said.
Then the rewards came.
[FLOOR 22 CLEAR REWARD]
[EXPERIENCE AWARDED: 45,000]
[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 18,000 PER MEMBER]
[COMBAT EXP GAINED — HIGHWATCH: 3,410]
[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 47,125 → 95,535]
[LEVEL UP]
[LEVEL: 37 → 38]
[EXP: 41,535 / 57,000]
[ALL STATS +1]
[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]
[STRENGTH: 59 | AGILITY: 79 | INTELLIGENCE: 142 | ENDURANCE: 83 | LUCK: 52]
[FLOOR 23 UNLOCKED]
[THE BROKEN CROWN WILL CONTINUE]
[PRINCE RAYMOND’S ARMY HAS ENTERED THE NORTHERN FRONT]
[RETURN TO EARTH IN 60 SECONDS]
They came out into the Hale Estate basement with their gear scarred and their bodies fine, and for about four seconds it was the best any of them had felt since Floor 20.
Cillian got as far as opening his mouth.
Then James’s interface opened on its own.
It was not a message. It was a map, and it hung in the air of the basement where all five of them could see it — the northern frontier of Caerleon, drawn in the Tower’s cold lines, with three settlements marked along it.
Black monster markers sat around all three of them, thick on the eastern and central positions, thinner on the western one and moving.
And on the roads between them, strung out across forty miles of country, were the companies they had just watched march out of Dunadd, divided across three separate approaches.
Raymond’s army was in the field, and it was in the wrong shape.
The westernmost settlement marker turned red.
[FLOOR 23 — THE NORTHERN FRONT]
[PRINCE RAYMOND CANNOT REACH ALL THREE SETTLEMENTS]
[CHOOSE WHO RECEIVES HIS ARMY]