Chapter 97: The Tower Survivors

Asterion’s eyes went slightly wide.

’He can see that? How?’

He frowned the next moment.

"How can you see that?"

Theo shrugged.

"I have really good eyes for things. But that is not the point here. If this would work, don’t you want to be a hundred percent honest with me."

The dark elf stood still for several seconds. Then eventually he spoke.

"I am not like the rest of my tribesmen. I am a Climber."

Theo frowned.

"I didn’t know Towerians could be Climbers too."

Asterion shook his head.

"Natives of the Tower of course cannot be Climbers. Also being born in it doesn’t make you a Native, a Towerian is a part of the Tower system..."

’Like an NPC, I guess?’ Theo thought to himself, rubbing his hands on his chin.

"So what makes you different?"

Asterion leaned his head back against the bark. The bleeding at his shoulder had slowed, mostly because there was not a great deal in him to bleed.

"My mother was not from the Tower."

Theo waited.

"She came in through an aperture, the way your kind does. She was of the Wellroth, from a world with three moons and no sea, and she climbed to the eleventh floor and did not go any further because she met my father there."

Asterion said it flatly, the way a man says a thing he has said many times to people who did not care. "I was born on the fourteenth floor. I am not a Towerian. But with my ties to my tribe, the Tower treats me like one."

’Fourteenth floor again...Wait.’

Theo’s hand stopped on his chin.

’Wait, back up.’

’She came in the way my kind does.’

He kept his face where it was, which took some doing, and he did not ask the question sitting at the front of his mouth, because the question was very large and this was a man bleeding against a tree at six in the morning.

’So it isn’t ours.’

’The Tower opened over Earth ninety years ago and the whole world has been calling it the Tower like it belongs to us. Like it came for us.’

’And it has doors in other places... but... How many other places.’

Theo filed it. He put it in the drawer where he now kept a growing number of things, next to a flattened patch of ground under a beech tree and an old man on a wall who was never on the wall.

"Alright," he said. "Then explain the seal."

Asterion’s jaw worked for a moment before he answered.

"When they threw us out, they took it."

"Took what?"

"Access."

He lifted his good hand a few inches and let it drop.

"A Climber’s Authority is how the Tower knows you. It is how you enter, how you leave, how the floors read you when you arrive. Mine is still in me. It has simply been shut, and I cannot open it, and I have not been able to open it in nine years."

Theo looked at the panel still hanging quietly in the corner of his sight.

[Warning: Foreign Authority Detected]

[Source: Tower]

[Status: Partially Sealed]

’Partially.’

"It says partially."

Asterion’s head came up off the bark, and for the first time that morning, something in his face was not hostile.

"...It says what?"

Uthed came down through the trees while they were still looking at each other, sword sheathed, walking the way a man walks when he wants to be seen walking.

He took one look at the elf and one look at Theo and his mouth flattened out.

"Mr Theo. A word."

They went eleven feet up the path, which was not far enough for privacy and both of them knew it.

"You cannot bring these people onto this land."

"They’re already on this land."

"They are on it as thieves in a wood. That is a problem you can solve with a fence."

Uthed kept his voice down and did not manage to keep it steady.

"If you settle them, they are on it as yours. There are perhaps two hundred humans in this country who have ever seen a Tower native outside the Tower and most of them work for the Association, and every single one of them will want to know how a C-rank with a lake house came to be feeding a dark elf tribe forty minutes past a checkpoint."

’...Yes.’

"I know," Theo said.

"Then—"

"I know, Sir Uthed."

He looked back down the path at a man pinned to a tree by his own poor decisions.

"And I’m going to do it anyway, and I’d rather you were angry with me here than after."

Uthed stood there for a moment.

Then he sighed through his nose, and the anger went out of him the way it always did, which was all at once and without ceremony.

"You are going to be a very difficult person to work for."

The negotiation, such as it was, took nine minutes and was almost entirely about food.

"How many mouths?"

Asterion did not answer.

"I’m not asking for a battle count. I’m asking how much rice."

"...Rice."

"Or whatever it is you eat. That’s the actual question, and I need the number before the shops open, because if it’s under fifty I can do it on my own card and if it’s over two hundred I have to think about how a man buys two hundred people’s worth of food in Meteor City without somebody writing it down."

The dark elf stared at him.

’He is not asking how many of us can fight.’

’He asked how many of us there are to feed and he asked it first.’

"Sixty-one," Asterion said.

Theo’s face did something.

"Sixty-one."

"Nineteen of those are children. Six are too old to walk far."

He said it evenly and it cost him.

"We came out of the aperture with a hundred and forty."

***

[System Notice]

[A humble reminder that adding the book to your library, voting power stones and golden tickets will do so much more than you can ever imagine.]

[Hence, do it now!]