I find that Downpour is rather adequately named. Almost instantly when we arrive, the sky splits open, spewing rain and wind in droves. Kuro responds immediately, and despite that, my hair is drenched before the cloak weaves a hood to cover me. Despite that, I just laugh and face the sky.
Rain. It’s cold, but not freezing. Probably because of my enhanced heart. I can feel the blood pumping through my veins, my magically enhanced body fighting off the chill. Next to me, Opal closes their trenchcoat for perhaps the first time in her life, while Sylves stands - hovers, I correct - completely untouched by it. Richard, Thatch and Inu just kind of get drenched, and I snicker a little at that.
The tough girl I call my best friend brushes her drenched, dark hair from her face and shoots me a glare with no heat behind it. “C’mon,” she urges. “Let’s find an inn.”
With that said, she stalks ahead, and I look around us. We are at an entrance to the city, and there are guards watching over said entrance. Knowing how rude it is, I don’t brush my senses against them, just feeling the mana that spills from them.
Curiously, it seems that neither of them have an attunement loop. Their levels seem… low-ish. In the 110s? 120s? Something like that. I can’t imagine them being much higher. But what’s most interesting is the way that I can feel their authorities.
When we approach, they flare them. And the two spheres of influence even combine, pressing down on me. Not… painfully, but more in a testing manner? I flex my authority in response, and efficiency allows me to operate at 100% capacity despite everything.
I can feel that their aura should have stopped me from casting, should have weakened and slowed me, perhaps? I tilt my head as we walk up, and Thatch does the talking. Both the man and the woman, both of them feryran, I note, seem rather charmed by him, and soon let us inside.
Quietly, I lean over to Opal. “Unfairly handsome bastard,” I whisper.
Instantly, the echo knight snickers, pressing a hand to their mouth to hold back a laugh. “So unfair,” they whisper back, tone tinged with amusement.
Thatch rolls his eyes at us with a smile. “I can hear you, you know?”
“Ah dang,” I say, my tone entirely deadpan. “Well. You’re unfairly handsome, y’know?”
“Downright cheating,” Opal adds with a grin.
Instantly, Thatch’s face flushes. He gives a small huff, and a sigh, and looks forward again. “Where are we even going?” he says, trying to change topic.
Mercifully, Inu lets him do so. “To an inn?” she suggests. “Somewhere safe to stay. This place looks… rough?”
And she’s not wrong. It does look rough. Being inside the city is very different from the outside. The houses here are cramped, most of them poorly thatched and leaking, and tons of them are half-ruined, even. Blown apart by casual crashes of powers, I imagine?
My eyes drift across them, and the half-hopeless people hanging out in the slums… and then my eyes narrow. The mana that comes from these people is too low. Far, far too low. In suspicion, I even [Select] one of them, making the tether as small and weak as I possibly can, hiding it to the best of my ability.
[Zoof, lv. 33]
I blink. The number is too low to have climbed up here. They have no authorities, no mantle. I feel confused. Climbing up here was so hard… how did they make it here at this level?
“You think there’s a way to climb faster?” Sylves asks with a whisper. “One to bypass the restrictions?”
“Wouldn’t that draw the Tower’s Wrath?” Opal returns right away.
Inu shakes her head slowly. “It would,” she concedes. “But I’d wager some people do it anyways. Maybe there are hidden mechanics to help people climb faster if they make concessions? Time spent on floors… but I think the answer is simple.”
“Kids,” I say, instead of her, my eyes widening. “These are the kids of climbers, having grown up. They were born on this floor.”
Thatch furrows his brows, stomping through the water-slick cobblestone streets. “And the tower didn’t send them down?”
“They’d have to pass descendancy trials,” Sylves says with a shrug. “And the fourth floor… well, it seems like it’d be a lot more hostile to low-levels.”
“So they gather here,” Richard says, looking around. “Wet, hungry, poor, and yet better off than as a skeleton.” I see a shiver run through the hiy’ht at that thought, her six eyes glancing at the dregs. They’re moving all about, grunting, but the mass of people isn’t exactly dense. The… I can’t help but call them slums sprawl out far.
Rubble is carted away in wooden and metal containers, tossed onto heaps. Amateur earthmages move to fix the buildings, only for some to break even worse. I see at least one adult trying to steal candy from a kid - something I quickly put a stop to with [Suppression].
The faintest wink of mana exits my vessel. The man is less than half my level. Making him slow enough for the red-haired kid to dart away barely takes effort. For the first time, I realize the gulf between me and those weaker than me.
It’d take eight levels of supremacy to match my power stat for someone who went all in on it. For someone with a balanced build… I could match a level 15 or 20 warrior in a fist-fight. I blink at that thought. “How bizarre,” I whisper to myself. It’s the first time I notice that the world around me is beginning to be just a bit more fragile.
The mana density on this floor is higher than the fourth, though, and I can see the way that wears on the weaker inhabitants. They don’t have the luxury of suppressing their mana like I do; they need it as a shield against the elements. Downpour doesn’t just mean rain. It means wind, probably sometimes hail, and even mana.
I can feel it when I look for it. The way the raindrops carry the liquid. The way they sting my skin. Someone weaker than me, someone like the floor-borne, might need a barrier. Not just passive mana, but an actively maintained barrier.
My thoughts drift on the topic for a little while longer until Thatch finds an inn, books us rooms, and we head inside. The building is in decent shape, if a little cracked, and the roof a bit leaky. There are two buckets collecting the rain in the common room, but at the same time, there’s a fire crackling in the hearth, and the walls are solid enough to keep the wind out.
There’s a quiet kind of susurrus to the common room, people talking in whispers. They’re all wearing heavy cloaks, the kind that keep the rain off them, and drip it onto the tavern floor. At least the stone has channels, allowing the water to drain back out. The innkeep is an older woman, greying hair across metallic skin. Feryran, I guess.
A moment passes in peace as we find a table, all sit down, and I put on my headphones, zoning out the noise. For the first time in a while, I let myself feel safe.
Then, someone’s senses brush up against me. It’s the first time I properly feel it, and it sends a small shiver of discomfort down my back. Sighing loudly, I get up from the table again, grabbing onto the tether of mana that touched me.
Apparently, someone here doesn’t know a lot about manners.
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