Chapter 484 – Tower of Raging Storms

Sophia spent the next month and a half swearing at herself for her impulsive decision to rescue her brother without considering other options. She didn’t know what other options she might have had, but Revanos’s information that people at higher upgrades had Shields that could handle the mana density near the pillar meant that there was at least one way she could have avoided the damage.

There was no way to go back and change things now. She had to live with the consequences of her choices. Leo did, too, but naturally he escaped essentially unharmed.

Revanos’s advice made it easier but it still wasn’t easy to fix her Sphere. Dav made better progress; his Abilities weren’t broken, they were only different, and once he figured out each of the basic versions, he was able to quickly figure out variants and how to Shape them, to use Revanos’s terminology. He blitzed through them at a rate of one or two Abilities a day, far faster than Sophia could repair hers, even with the occasional returns to previously-understood Abilities with new ideas.

In a way, that was good because it meant that Sophia was not the one who had to deal with figuring out how to get people to buy dungeon cores to act as Tower controllers; Dav had to. All Sophia had to do was go over everything Cliff offered with Dav a few times and contrast it with what they learned about other Towers. 

Dav handled everything from there, from contacting everyone he could think of who might be able to find people who wanted to improve their Towers to escorting people into the Broken Lands to experience the Maze. 

Two tendays after the encounter with Revanos, Dav closed the first deal with a group from a Tower that had only been connected to Arcatiz for five years. Their Tower, the Tower of the Raging Storm, was fourth upgrade and they were very interested in a Tower controller that might let them shape its progress. They were especially interested in anything that would let it have zones with fewer environmental hazards; getting people to explore their Tower was difficult even though it was relatively easy to put together a kit that handled the storms and that meant the Tower was growing slower than average.

Dav gave them a “promotional” price of a hundred Suns because they were the first customer. Part of the promotion was that Dav, Leo, and Sophia all traveled to the Tower of the Raging Storm to install the Tower controller. This was good for everyone, though Sophia was fairly certain that Dav made it seem like it was a large concession to the locals.

A hundred Suns was a huge amount of money for three people, but it was still far less than the normal cost of a crystal mind. Sophia wasn’t sure what they were going to do with it until Dav pointed out that hiring someone to create a Gateway was likely to be a similar expense to buying a Tower controller or crystal mind; a hundred Suns probably wouldn’t be enough for the deposit. 

That was when Sophia became grateful for the hassle Leo and the dungeon cores caused. Getting their hands on hundreds or thousands of Suns was possible, especially if they did as well in Events and Branch Lord assaults as they had so far, but it wouldn’t be fast. 

The trip to the Tower of the Raging Storm was odd. They arrived through the Gateway on the side of the Tower into a thunderstorm. The Tower was surrounded by fields that looked surprisingly well-kept, probably because of the sheep. In the distance, Sophia could easily see the closest settlement; it was a surprisingly long distance, farther away from the Tower than Mazehold was from the Maze. Despite the distance, it wasn’t far enough to escape the storm.

It was apparently always storming around the Tower of the Raging Storm. Somehow, Sophia hadn’t expected that. She’d assumed the description applied inside the Tower, not outside.

She was even more surprised to find out that despite the continual storm, the local area was not a swamp; in fact, there weren’t even any earthworks to move the water. It was a magical storm that somehow infused the local vegetation with the right mix of things to make it grow despite the relatively dim light. The rain was magical, as well, and mostly vanished before it hit the ground.

Sophia had to check, but it wasn’t an illusion. She wasn’t sure what it was; she’d never seen anything like it. All she could tell for sure was that it was a stable magical phenomenon of some sort. If she were back home, she was certain her Aunt Red would be intensely interested. As it was, all Sophia could think was that it was similar to a Mazestorm but more controlled. 

The World Tree didn’t have anything like that unless she counted the fog and floating islands. Maybe they were a different manifestation of the same effect?

Sophia wasn’t sure why a giant tree would result in fog and floating islands, but it seemed to make sense. Maybe it was a gravity effect; after all, the World Tree was quite a bit bigger than trees got without magic. It wasn’t strange to think that it might locally affect gravity to help itself, and that might leak the same way broken, chaotic mana did around the Maze and storm mana did around the Tower of Raging Storms.

Getting inside required only a short walk around the building. It was even pleasant; the weather was comfortable and the Tower had some sort of protective barrier that meant the rain didn’t even land nearby, so it was a lot like watching a storm play out on the other side of a window, even though they were outside. The barrier even reduced the wind speed to a nice, fresh breeze.

According to the locals, it hadn’t always been that way. The crystal mind they’d added a few years earlier allowed them limited control of the storm outside the Tower and they’d taken full advantage of that control. It also allowed them to control the storm inside their City of Storms, the Tower of Raging Storms’s equivalent of the City of Stars or the Moonlit Branches. They wouldn’t say what that meant, but Sophia could excuse them a little mysteriousness when she was about to find out the answer.

It was obvious the moment they walked into the Tower. Despite the fact that they entered the City of Storms after they paid the nominal aurichalc fee to enter without passing through a combat zone, they walked into an active lightning storm. The sky was covered in lightning that flickered across the sky but still provided a near-constant illumination almost as bright as a sun.

The floor was covered by a layer of fog thick enough that it looked like they were walking on a fluffy white cloud and the buildings were made of dark grey stormclouds with roofs that were sheets of lightning instead of shingles. The building structures looked byzantine to Sophia, fancy domes with a spire in the center; every single spire seemed to act as a lightning rod that stole lightning from the sky to create the buildings. 

Despite the continual lightning, there was only a soft background buzz. Sophia thought it came from the buildings rather than the sky, but it was hard to be sure.

The City of Storms was impressive in a completely different way from the Moonlit Branches. This felt deliberately created, as if people built something that harnessed the power around them instead of the far more natural-feeling tree structure of the World Tree. It was also only a single level; while Sophia was certain there were areas that required reaching higher in the Tower, they didn’t seem to be physically higher the way they were in the World Tree.

Sophia didn’t have time to sightsee. They were in the City of Storms to deliver the dungeon core Hail, who was absolutely thrilled to be able to design zones for the Tower of Raging Storms. Leo assured them all that Hail was happy to make zones that didn’t have storms as well as ones that did. It was as much of a reassurance as they were going to get.

It took over an hour to walk from the Gateway to the central part of the City of Storms, which put it well into the afternoon. The man leading the group offered to take them to an inn and pick them up in the morning, but Leo immediately turned him down because Hail didn’t want to wait.

The building that held the Tower of Raging Storms’s central pillar was taller than the ones that surrounded it, but that was the only difference; it was easily as large as the mansion that held Ansuz. Sophia suspected that the Kestii Tower would change a lot over the next few years if the building that currently acted as the Tower and Gateway hub was only a single piece of the City of Stars … once it started going back together. Cliff hadn’t even offered that as an option to her yet.

The interior of the building had a miniature storm, just like outside, though also like outside there was no actual rain or thunder and the lightning was more of a light source than anything else. Sophia thought that was just plain weird and it made her wonder what the City of Stars would be like when it eventually recovered. 

As much as she wanted to see it, it wasn’t worth pushing Cliff to try to reach whatever conditions were necessary to rebuild it. That would happen eventually and there was no hurry.

The central pillar looked remarkably similar, a crystal-covered column that ran from the floor to the ceiling and exuded magic. Unlike Ansuz, the pillar didn’t say anything. Also like the installation in the broken Kestii tower, there was an access way to a lower level below the pillar a few feet away. It was the same layout.

Interestingly, there was no wild magic near the crystal mind, but there was a little wild magic in the compartment below. It wasn’t enough to threaten any of them; as Revanos predicted, it was no stronger than what a fourth upgrade shield could handle, and Sophia’s shield was stronger than most at that upgrade. Leo was the most at risk, but he’s learned from his previous experience. Instead of changing himself, he changed the properties of the space around him to encourage the magic to arc past him. It wasn’t perfect protection, but it was enough that he’d be fine.

Once he was certain he was safe, Leo didn’t wait for anyone to tell him they were ready; he moved forward, pulled Hail out of his pack, and pressed the dungeon core to the column of clouds that stood below the crystal mind’s location in the room above them.

Hail disappeared. 

“Oh, this is nice!” A voice Sophia had never heard before exclaimed. “There are all sorts of storms! Most of them have hail, even if the hail usually becomes rain.”

That had to be Hail’s voice. It was a surprise; Sophia hadn’t expected to hear it. She probably should have; her Scion of the Towers Ability wasn’t damaged, after all.

“Wait, you’re done?” Their guide said in shock. “It took weeks for the crystal mind to grow and you can just … hold a ball of crystal up and it works? How do we control it?”

“We head upstairs and check one of your consoles,” Dav answered smoothly. “Or talk to your crystal mind; that will also work. Yours didn’t seem talkative, though, so a console is probably a better choice.”

Hail was completely unlike Cliff. He kept up a constant chatter about everything he found in the Tower as they returned upstairs and followed Dav’s suggestion. When they checked, Dav was right: Hail had integrated with the crystal mind’s control system and even adopted its lockouts, so the Tower controller was the only person who could direct him unless he gave permission. 

Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. Both Leo and Sophia could also give him instructions, but that was different. 

The Tower’s controller spent about a day looking into the new features of his Tower before he handed over the rest of their payment, completely satisfied with their work. While he couldn’t completely remove the storms, he could deemphasize them and that was more than enough. Dramatic storms were good; constant miserable soaking cold rain in a third of the zones was not.

The trio ended up taking several days in the City of Storms to relax before they headed back to the Moonlit Branches and their next sale. Everything went smoothly this time. They were off to an excellent start.