The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 53

“Anyone over rank 10 in this mess?” Sorin asked, turning to Rue.

“Nah. Two of them at rank 6. The rest are 4.”

“Oh,” Nemari said. “They’re a cadet branch of the family, the Sildinfalls. The rank 6 is my third cousin, Kaiori. He heads the branch. I didn’t realize they had so many rank 4s.”

“At least half of them feel like they just got there today,” Rue said.

That meant they’d likely carried the branch up a few ranks, no doubt hoping to overpower a superior foe with sheer numbers. Sorin mentally adjusted his expectations for the fight down a few more notches. It would still be dangerous, but capturing them instead of killing everyone was very much still an option.

“If we subdue them, can you make your family see reason?” Sorin asked.

Nemari chewed her lip as she stared at them. “I’d like to try.”

They were out of time to discuss it. The portal itself being only a few dozen feet away from where the climbers were actively interrogating their victims, it was inevitable that someone would notice them almost immediately. The cry went up, and the whole family turned to look at the portal.

Sorin drew his sword. “I’ll get things started. Feel free to use non-lethal measures if you’re comfortable doing so.”

The Sildinfalls came out from between buildings, the fire bending unnaturally to get out of their way. Those who weren’t actively standing over the current batch of captives all moved to surround Sorin’s team, with a few of the bolder ones attempting to slip between them and the portal.

“Nemari?” one of them asked. “It’s you? You’re here… She’s here! Over here!”

That got the attention of everyone else. Turning, Kaiori strode forward. Sorin stepped into the man’s path, his sword not raised, but presented clearly in an unspoken threat. Kaiori was a big man, easily taller than Odric and with a chest so broad that he was twice as thick as Nemari. Muscles strained against his skin, and he could effortlessly choke a person out one-handed.

“You’re in my way,” he said simply, staring at Sorin like that was all it would take to get him to move.

“I could be convinced to move if you could make me believe you don’t plan on attacking us,” Sorin told him. “It’d have to be an awfully good argument, though. All things considered, you haven’t painted yourselves in a very good light here.”

“We only want Nemari. Once we have her, we’ll go right through the portal and won’t bother anyone else,” Kaiori said with a sneer. “Promise.”

“Looks like we’ve already reached an impasse then. You can’t have Nemari. If you try to push this, it’s going to end badly for you.”

“Please, a bunch of fresh rank 4s. We’ve got you outnumbered two-to-one, and anyone who knows anything about us knows we’re a clan of heavy hitters. Now, I’m asking you nicely, step aside and stay out of our family business.”

Non-lethal, Sorin reminded himself. The good part about them all using physical-boosted builds was that they’d take a good deal of punishment without dying, but that didn’t mean Sorin could cut loose.

“You got a good defensive ability?” he asked.

Kaiori blinked. “What?”

“Well, I hope so.”

Then Sorin free cast a mallet of force and slammed it down on Kaiori’s head. The Sildinfall patriarch went down, his eyes crossed and all coordination out the window, to sit on the ground in a heap of tangled limbs.

That was the signal for the rest of them to cut loose. Waves of flame came roaring across the ground from every direction, impressively strong for rank 4s who’d been carried up in a hurry. Idly, Sorin wondered if he could have prevented the fight from breaking out if they’d all seen him as rank 8 or 9 instead of his projected rank. If nothing else, they might have hesitated.

But all he did was let Still Winter manifest around him, catching the flames and snuffing them out. By the time any of them reached Sorin, there was barely enough heat left in them to overcome the chill of his soulprint’s domain.

Earth spikes started shooting out behind him, both from Yoru and Odric. It was easy to see which ones belonged to which climber, with some of them being stone-hard, sleek missiles, and others being dense clumps of dirt that broke apart when they slammed into something. Measured by overall lethality, Odric was actually doing a lot better than Yoru. His attacks knocked people down. Yoru’s broke bones and cracked skulls.

The Sildinfall delegation’s inexperience quickly revealed itself, and in a matter of seconds, all but one of them were on the ground, writhing in pain and making piteous groaning sounds. Kaiori himself was still struggling to get back up, but he didn’t have a chance of succeeding. Sorin’s Earth Warder had loosened up the dirt enough that his targets had actually sunken into it.

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The one standing person was a woman in her forties who’d made no move to attack along with the rest of her family. She walked forward calmly, her head swinging left and right to make sure everyone was still breathing. “Thank you for not killing them,” she said as she came to a stop.

“Aunt Siriel?” Nemari asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying to keep these foolish children from breaking anything that can’t be repaired. Thought I’d failed for a few seconds there, too.”

“I’d be inclined to agree,” Sorin said darkly. The handful of buildings around the portal hub were still on fire, after all.

Siriel followed his gaze and, with a small frown, pushed out a bit of magic to calm the flames. One by one, the buildings snuffed themselves out until there was nothing left but a bit of sullen red glow and the last drifting remnants of smoke.

“I’m sure your whole family will be out here bright and early rebuilding everything they destroyed assaulting innocent people,” Sorin told her. “How great for you that you didn’t actively engage with the process.”

“Sorin,” Nemari said. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I’m sure it is,” he agreed. “A very fine mess that I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’d like to clean it up.”

“Don’t be a dick about it,” Rue muttered.

“I reserve mercy and forgiveness for good people. And good people don’t do this. I can’t imagine what reason you all could possibly have that would justify what happened here.”

All eyes turned to Siriel, who just bowed her head. “Nat took the children,” she said.

“He did what?” Nemari asked, eyes wide.

“A few weeks ago. He pushed us to all get up to rank 4 as quickly as possible. He said we had to find you, or the whole family would be killed. All the children got moved to a safehouse, but he wouldn’t tell anyone where it was. It was framed like he was doing it for our own good, to protect them, but we all knew what he was really doing.”

“Taking hostages,” Sorin said, his voice losing some of its earlier coldness. “You’ve been out in the field, climbing for weeks?”

“Yes. All we knew was that Nemari had reached at least rank 3, possibly rank 4, and they needed more people out looking for her. She has to come with us.”

“No reason for that,” Sorin said. “Nat’s been dead for a week now. Go home, figure out where he stashed the hostages, and save them.”

“Dead?” Siriel echoed. “Who… How?”

“Me, with a sword,” Sorin told her bluntly. “Nat’s vendetta against Nemari died with him. I suggest you go pick up the pieces of your family and try to save what you can.”

It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for the situation the Sildinfalls had found themselves in. It was a hard choice with no good options, but they’d still chosen to attack innocent climbers rather than stand up to their obviously compromised and maybe a little bit insane leader. That wasn’t something Sorin would forgive easily.

“You deal with this,” he told Nemari. “I hope for the kids’ sake that they come through this unscathed, but I’m not interested in helping the rest of these assholes.”

He walked away, taking no care to avoid stepping on Kaiori where he was still trapped in the ground. The concussion he was no doubt suffering from was doing more to keep the man there than the grasping, sucking mud.

There were five people at the hub. Three of them were faces he vaguely recognized from previous trips through the hub, but two were new. Probably climbers who had the bad luck to be here at the wrong time.

“Is anyone hurt?” he asked.

“A few burns,” said one of the men he recognized. “Nothing a rank 1 healer couldn’t fix.”

“Pretty sure I broke my fucking leg,” added the woman from the group he didn’t know. “That’s going to set me back a month paying for healing.”

“Let me see if I can help,” he said.

A simple free cast of Minor Restoration was enough to take care of the burns, which Sorin assumed were the result of escaping the buildings after the Sildinfalls had set them on fire. The broken leg was a bit trickier, but Sorin took his time setting up a Lesser Restoration. The D-rank soulprint was too big and too complicated to free cast on the fly with his current build, but it was a close thing. As long as he was careful and deliberate, he could manage it with a few minutes’ effort.

“I can’t afford to pay you for this right now,” the woman said, attempting to stop him when he got to her.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just a bit of time and anima. We’ll say you owe me a favor if you’d like.”

“I don’t even know who you are!”

Sorin ignored the question, and a few seconds later, the fractured bone knit itself back together. The damage was far below the threshold for what the spell was capable of dealing with, so Sorin doubted there’d be any further complications.

“And done. I’m not sure what your plans are now, but I don’t think that lot will be giving you any more trouble now.”

None of them questioned if there’d be any punishment. The only justice that was carried out in the tower was by those powerful enough to enforce their will on others. Sorin and his team hadn’t killed them, and if any of the Sildinfalls’ victims wanted revenge, they needed to grow strong enough to take it.

Of course, there was always the possibility that someone in the group had a family member or friend who was a high rank. In that case, the hammer could indeed fall on the fire-using climbers. If it did, Sorin didn’t plan to be around to shield them from it.

Eventually, all of Nemari’s family members were freed from their earthen prisons and forced through the portal back to Floor 0. Sorin hoped they’d devote their efforts to setting their house back in order, but he didn’t have any expectations.

“You’re staying?” he asked Nemari.

“I said I would.”

“That was before… all of this.”

“There’s nothing I can really do to help there. I can do something here.”

“I’ve sent a message back home to order some assistance for their search,” Yoru said. “I hope you don’t mind the interference. The instructions are to help find the safehouse the children are being held in. Not knowing if they’re being taken care of makes it imperative that we locate them quickly.”

“I’d say we’ve done all we can here short of abandoning our own mission to go help directly,” Sorin said. “Are you satisfied with that?”

He wasn’t sure he believed her, but when Nemari nodded, he didn’t argue or press further. “Let’s get moving then. We’ve got two days to the portal guardian, then who knows how long before we reach the Floor 5 hub. The sooner we get started, the quicker we can return to Floor 0 and find out how things played out.”