The tower is an octagon, made of the sa gray stone as the rest of the city, and reaches about twenty-five feet tall. It rges seamlessly with the top of the wall, like it was raised straight out of it by so stone mage. As Daniel works on the tower door, which is made of a rusty tal just like the last one, my spatial senses allow to peek into the tower before he can get it unlocked. The inside is empty, almost completely empty. It is made of two floors that extend above the wall and one that goes down below like a basent. There is a staircase that runs along the wall, leading from the bottom floor all the way to the roof, which has a hatch to access it.
It takes Daniel just a few monts to open the door, the creaking of centuries-old hinges alerting to his finished task.
“The tower is three floors. One is a basent and two are above. It looks clear from what I can tell.” I tell Daniel, but we both ready our weapons just in case.
I‘m the first to enter the tower, since I still have the small light stone. The first room is completely empty, save for the rotting remains of what I think used to be a wooden table and chairs on the right side. The staircase is directly opposite from the door, with light coming in from the floor above. There are no windows on the outside, so sothing must be producing the light, but I still don’t see anything up above.
“Up or down?” I ask as Daniel stops next to .
“Hmm, let’s go up. I want to see what's making that light. Could be so sort of magic light or sothing.”
I walk up the stairs, cautious but not worried, sword held out in front in a stance Halon taught . As soon as my head rises above the floor, I see what is creating the light, or rather, what is letting it in. Set flush into each of the eight walls are windows. Or magic windows, I guess. They are all identical two-foot by two-foot squares of so kind of glass that are probably more like screens than windows now that I think about it. The rest of the room is filled with the rotting remains of tables and chairs that once used to be set right up against the windows.
I give the man behind the all clear and walk up to one of the screens, examining it with everything I have. The view is definitely a screen, not a window, as the picture is kind of blurry and flickers sotis. My mana sense is completely blocked. It feels like when the goblin resisted my attempts to push mana into it, but way stronger. No matter how hard I try, it resists .
“It’s like a magic CCTV system.” I hear from the panel to the left of .
“Do you think there are caras for it? I didn’t see anything from the outside.”
Daniel just shrugs, responding with, “Couldn’t tell you, but this place seems pretty safe. And it’s as far from the center as you can get without leaving the city. It’s defensible, easy to find, and has more than one exit.”
I nod my head, seeing where he is going. “Let’s clear the basent, and then we can decide to stay or not.”
I lead the way back down the stairs, passing the middle floor and continuing to the basent. It’s just as empty as the other rooms and only has a few raised stone slabs, probably for sleeping.
“Well, what do you think?” Daniel asks after we clear the room.
“It seems safe, and the long narrow path to get here should help if we get sward by a horde again. And it's easy to find if we get lost.”
“Then we agree!” He says as he walks back up the stairs. “Let’s eat so lunch and figure out a plan from there.
Daniel locks the door we ca in from, and we settle down on the top floor to eat a al of dry rations and water. The plan we co up with is pretty simple, as there are only a few hours left until the sun sets. Daniel needs more tal to repair and reinforce the door, and for our weapons in general, so we will go back down into the city and loot nearby houses for scrap tal, and whatever else we find. I study the enchanting prir that Rayke gave while Daniel finishes his preparations, mostly taking account of the materials and supplies we have. We have about a week's worth of food and water left, so we need to gather more at so point, probably from the forest.
We empty our packs of the heavy or bulky items that would just slow us down and leave our new temporary base. Daniel locks the door behind us, and once again I lead us through the dark passageways, back to the gate where we entered.
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There are still no undead in the street, which puts on edge a little bit more than I already am. Why are there no undead in a city that is supposed to be infested with them? rrick made it sound like we would be sward with them. Is it just because we are still on the edge of the city? Is it worse further in?
I take a deep breath and push down my fears. I put one foot in front of the other, hugging the left wall until it ends at the street. Around the corner is another street, or maybe an alleyway with how narrow it is, that runs between the wall and the buildings closest to it. I step into the alley, moving low and fast like the man behind instructed, and move to press up against the first building. None of the buildings are uniform in shape or size, but this one is a bit bigger than the rest and the closest, making it a good target.
The building is empty of anything moving but looks to have so stuff scattered about inside. I walk around the corner to where the back door rests. Daniel does what he did the last few tis, even quicker now that he has had so practice, and gets us into the building. We search room to room, sifting through the few items that have survived the test of ti. We don’t find much, but I grab anything that might be useful or interesting anyway. There are the remains of so kind of jail cell, which Daniel dismantles and stores the remaining bars in his bag, and another room that looks like an office. We think the room must have been so kind of guard checkpoint or outpost based on its distance to the gate and, well, the forr jail cell.
We leave the guard building and loot several others nearby, finding nothing but scrap tal, rotting wood, and a few crystals set into a tal fixture in one room. I ask Daniel to remove the tal, and store them in my pouch. I even use my spatial senses to keep a constant lookout for secret stashes or hidden loot but find nothing. We move slowly, making as little noise as possible, trying to hide from the undead that may or may not reside in the city. We decide to move into the city a little bit after finding nothing at all in three buildings in a row, hoping to find sothing good, or maybe we are just a little overconfident after all of our recent success.
We pick a tall, three story building in hopes of it having once belonged to soone wealthy, and start our looting process. After about five minutes of picking through what’s left behind, my spatial senses pick up movent in the alley outside the building. A group of undead, five of them, are shambling by the building, just a few feet away from the open door.
“Daniel, there are undead outside, five of them, close to the door.” I whisper, getting his attention.
He nods to , taking out his hamr as a small grin forms on both of our faces. “Five should be easy.”
He starts tapping his hamr on the floor, making noise that the undead imdiately hear. I notice them stop for a second, then move a little bit quicker towards the door. Daniel hides right next to the door, and as soon as the first head rounds the corner, the tal spike of his warhamr enters its forehead, killing it instantly. I realize that he is probably going to kill them all before I can help, so I decide to try out a new trick that should be useful in combat. I’ve managed it before, now I just need to use it in a fight.
I grab a good chunk of my mana and start feeding it into [Space Control], creating two spatial warp points, one in front of and another behind the head of the last zombie in the group. I raise my sword up next to my head, ready to thrust it forward, as I connect the two points, feeling the strain that breaking the laws of the universe puts on my mind. I feel the tunnel form and throw extra mana into it, hoping that I don’t ss this up.
My mana-boosted arm shoots forward, sword blade extended in a piercing stab, into the warp in space right in front of . My sword disappears as it enters and appears at the other side, right at the base of an undead's neck. I get the kill notification and retract my arm, closing the warp as soon as my sword is clear. I notice Daniel has killed another one and is getting ready to smash in the skull of the third as I set up my long-distance stab on the last one.
We are able to kill the last ones with no issue, as they are nothing more than mindless undead. We pull the corpses into the building so we can hide and loot them, not that they had anything on them.
“Cool sword trick. Did you teleport the end of it into their necks?” Daniel asks as he examines the corpses of the undead I killed.
“No, more like I opened up a portal and stabbed through it.”
“Ah. Pretty badass. Do you think you will be able to teleport? Or open portals big enough to travel through?”
“Probably. I need more mana first. Just killing those two took nearly a quarter of it. And from what rrick has told and the little I’ve tested, fucking up space magic has dire consequences. So human testing will have to wait a bit. Unless you're volunteering?"
“I’ll wait until you iron out the kinks,” he says as he pokes his head out of the door. “Let’s finish looting this building and head back. It looks like the sun is setting.”
It takes us about an hour to finish looting and walk back to the tower, the sun getting lower and lower the whole ti. Once we are at the top of the wall, we see why there were so few zombies in the city while we looted. They only start to co out en masse after the sun sets. Under the light of the moon, I see dozens of undead start to leave buildings deeper in the city, shambling aimlessly in the streets. I point it out to Daniel, and he hurries us inside the tower.
Once inside, we head to the top floor and go through all that we managed to gather.
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