march on vs tick away

march on

verb
  • To protest (a place or institution) 

  • To continue or keep on. 

  • To invade or attack (a place); to move towards a place in preparation for an attack. 

tick away

verb
  • To count down to zero (i.e. signaling the end (or start) of something). 

How often have the words march on and tick away occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )