The Fractured Tower

It was amazing to Sorin how quickly he’d become nonchalant about lurking around portal hubs where people he didn’t want to see might find him. Mostly, it was realizing that Samael wasn’t going to personally show up that had inspired the change in perspective, but it certainly hadn’t hurt that he’d gained enough personal power to fight off literally anybody he’d met in the red tower. Knowing they had a low ceiling had helped, too.

There was a problem with daring the powers that be to do their worst, though. Sometimes, they actually did. Sorin was nearing the edge of the hub when the portal flared up on its hill, and five men and women dressed in black with bared steel stepped through. Immediately, their eyes locked on Sorin, and they leaped down to ground level.

“Friends of yours?” Yoru asked.

“No one I recognize.”

“They recognize you,” Kashi said lightly. “I know that woman with the shaved head. She’s in the same line of work as me.”

“And I’m reasonably certain that the big man with the spiked gauntlets is a Hellion enforcer,” Yoru pointed out.

“Which would make this a team of Hellions who hired a bounty hunter to track me down, probably after word got back down to Floor 0 that I was appearing here in public,” Sorin said. “Gentlemen, it appears I have an unavoidable appointment. I hope you won’t think too harshly of me if we leave a few minutes later than planned. Maybe go get yourselves a drink while I deal with this.”

“That bounty hunter is at least rank 10,” Kashi warned him.

“Could she be persuaded to step aside?” Sorin asked seriously.

“Depends what the bounty on you is up to. But on the whole, I’d say… no, probably not. This looks like an easy payday to her. It’s not often you find your target a quarter mile from the portal, standing in plain sight and waiting for you to come up and apprehend him.”

“I’m not really sure how much assistance we can offer here,” Yoru said with a glance at Kashi.

“I’m not asking for assistance,” Sorin said before the bounty hunter could reply. “I understand that you’re rank 4, and however well-trained you might consider yourself, a group of five climbers that are probably all rank 10 or higher is outside what you’re comfortable fighting, never mind the political ramifications.”

“Er, yes… That.”

“So just do what I asked. Go find yourself a cool bit of shade, have a drink, and enjoy the show.”

Yoru looked like he wanted to protest, but he allowed himself to be drawn away by Kashi. Vendis dutifully followed both of them, and Sorin turned to walk out into the desert. He kept his pace sedate so that the Hellions wouldn’t think he was trying to flee and force the encounter in the middle of the hub.

Once he was a few hundred feet away from the nearest tent, he turned and waited for the group to catch up to him. They spread out as they approached, the shaven bounty hunter hanging back, and the other four circling around him. They always do that, Sorin thought with silent laughter. If I wasn’t running before, why do they think I’m just waiting for them to get close enough to grab me before I try now?

“Smart enough to know not to try running,” the Hellion in the middle remarked with a sneer. Sorin took one look at his nose and mentally dubbed the man, ‘Beak.’

The person next to him, a somewhat anemic-looking woman with a set of silvery scars running down her jawline, snorted and said, “Not smart enough to stay out of sight in the first place.”

The upside of them getting so close was that Sorin finally got a feel for their actual ranks. Beak and Scars were both rank 15. The other two, both men with the stocky builds of someone who relied on soulprints to give them bulk, were rank 8s, and the bounty hunter was rank 11. Two threats and three possible distractions.

They also felt out his rank—appearing as 4, of course—and other than the bounty hunter, they appeared to accept that at face value. She alone wore a cold, calculating expression as she sized him up. While the Hellions were busy sneering or smirking at what they thought was their helpless victim, she discreetly backed up a few feet.

Smarter than these idiots, or maybe just better informed. I wonder if she’s got an aura reading soulprint like Rue’s, Sorin thought. If she really was smart, she’d stay out of the fight. Since she wasn’t a Hellion, Sorin wasn’t necessarily opposed to letting her live if she understood that this was one bounty she wasn’t claiming.

Beyond the Hellions, Sorin could see Yoru’s group watching from the edge of the hub. It wasn’t only them, though; a dozen climbers had wandered over in the wake of the hunters’ passage. Some of them were no doubt just looking forward to a show, but others were probably spies getting ready to report in to whoever owned their loyalty.

“Why are you looking for me?” Sorin asked. He knew Samael didn’t care to capture him right now, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out the contradictory orders where Samael himself couldn’t be bothered but was fine losing men harassing Sorin.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Why?” Beak echoed with an incredulous laugh. “Man, were you dropped on your head as a baby?”

Sorin shrugged. “I’ve been cracked on the skull once or twice in my time. I mostly healed alright from it.”

“Cracked on the… What? Are you fucking with me?” Beak snarled, suddenly enraged at Sorin’s flippant tone.

“No. It’s a legitimate question. I know your boss wanted to talk to me. Well, we’ve already talked, so why exactly are you guys still being a pain in my ass?”

“You killed Hellions!” Scars exploded. “Nobody gets away with that. You think you’re special?”

Wait. Seriously? Does Samael even know about this?

“Hellions who attacked me first,” Sorin pointed out. That was… kind of true, for the most part. Eh, two out of three times, they attacked first.

“As if that matters in the slightest.”

“So, all of this is just revenge for successfully defending myself? Does Samael know you’re doing this?”

The way the two silent ones shifted told Sorin the answer to that. Unbelievable. He has no control over his own organization. No wonder I couldn’t figure out why he was doing this. It wasn’t him. He doesn’t even care.

It was all starting to come together in Sorin’s head. Samael had established an organization to feed him money, soulprints, and talented climbers. At some point, probably early on, he’d created enough middle management to run the day-to-day operations without his input. If he came to them and told them he wanted something or another, they made it happen, but otherwise he almost certainly ignored them.

It was exactly how Sorin would have done it if he’d decided he needed something like that. Considering how corrupt the power structure in the red tower appeared to be, he couldn’t even say he disagreed with Samael’s decision to forge his own organization rather than latch onto an existing one. It was only the fact that Sorin was portraying himself as a solution to the problem Samael had created that gave him any leverage to negotiate with a high family in the first place.

“Alright, well, that’s all I needed to know,” Sorin announced when neither Beak nor Scars gave him a straight answer. “I guess I’m ready to move onto the part where you try to… I guess capture me? Or kill me? I was never really clear on what exactly you wanted.”

It did not escape Sorin’s notice that the bounty hunter had retreated another twenty feet back. Scars had finally noticed as well, as she turned to scowl over her shoulder. “What are you doing back there? If you want your cut of this bounty, get your ass up here and contribute.”

The two nameless thugs chose that moment to strike, possibly on some sort of rehearsed signal that Sorin didn’t catch, but more likely based on the fact that he’d taken a deliberate step forward to put himself right in line with them. They’d simply recognized the opportunity and decided to capitalize on it.

It might have worked, except they’d gotten ‘opportunity’ and ‘trap’ mixed up. Beak saw it, and he even started to say something, but before the first syllable came out of his mouth, both rank 8s were lying face down in the sand at Sorin’s feet, blood pouring out of their severed throats and the lingering traces of dual force blades dissipating into the air.

Scars whipped back around, the bounty hunter forgotten and cold fury radiating out of her posture. Despite visually missing the execution, her perception must have been augmented enough that she’d registered the opening attack.

Force Edge was only the first step. Bleeding from a sliced throat wasn’t an instant death sentence, not even to rank 0s, and Sorin whipped his sword out to finish them off. Speed Burst got his blade down fast enough to hack into the first of the enforcers’ necks, but then Beak was there with a spear he’d pulled out of seemingly nowhere to drive Sorin back before he could kill the second one.

The sand rushed away from Beak’s lead foot, breaking his stance as he thrust the spear at Sorin’s chest and threatening to send him down to one knee. Beak wasn’t slow on the uptake though. He adapted immediately, abandoning his defense of his comrade’s life to leap free of Sorin’s magic. That was the smart move—it probably saved his own life since Sorin would indeed have prioritized killing a rank 15 early over ending an already-downed rank 8—but it did give Sorin time to kill his intended target.

He realized his mistake the instant he made it. The rank 8s were sacrificial pawns, always intended to be killed during the course of the fight. Or maybe they weren’t supposed to die, but their superiors certainly didn’t care if they lived. Their main purpose was to be a source of blood for the anemic, scarred woman, whose magic had grabbed hold of their corpses and was already funneling wrist-thick ropes of red fluid into the air.

At the same time, Beak was coming down from dodging Sorin’s terrain shift, his spear leading. Sorin stepped to the side and unleashed Still Winter. The blood frosted over, drawing a grimace from Scars as it became just a bit harder to keep it moving. Beak crashed into the frozen aura, his movements slowed but not stopped.

A spark of light flashed at the spear tip—all the warning Sorin got before lightning ripped its way through Still Winter and struck him in the chest. The bolt threw him into the air, but Counter Heal was there to wash away the damage. By the time Sorin landed, he’d already gotten his feet back under him. The only evidence he’d been struck at all was the black scorch mark on his cuirass.

It was all very impressive. Rank D soulprints were a qualitative upgrade over the rank Es that Sorin’s soulspace was full of, even if they lacked the destructive breadth of rank Cs. His enemies didn’t need wide-area devastation at the moment though. There was only one target—Sorin.

The duo worked well together. Scars kept Sorin from committing to an attack with a constant barrage of blood bullets, blood whips, and blood blades, and Beak pressed his advantage with blindingly fast spearwork interspersed with bolts of lightning. They made it look effortless when they dodged around Earth Warder and parried the force attacks Sorin sent their way.

The duo was so successful that the bounty hunter who’d just been standing back and watching started to edge forward again. She produced a needle made out of gleaming silver and etched with runes from inside her coat and let it dance around her fingers for a moment, as if debating whether to throw it.

Greed got the better of her, and the needle flashed through the air. Whatever magic it was imbued with, it pierced the aura of Still Winter without issue and slammed into Sorin’s elbow, which immediately went numb. He regarded the needle for a moment, then dismissed it as unimportant compared to the flurry of spear strikes Beak was dropping on him.

Well, about time to end this, I suppose. At least I know where they all stand now.