Xavier watched as Adranial stepped out of the portal, closely followed by three other Denizens. Adranial herself somewhat matched the description that Howard had given him—white robes, white mask, unarmed—except for the fact that she wasn’t wearing a mask of any kind. She was dressed in all-white robes that clung to her figure and almost touched the ground. Her hair was pure white, and he wondered if it had somehow been dyed, or if that was entirely natural. Her skin was pale, almost as though it had never seen the sun’s rays.
Adranial stepped over to him as the other members of her party gathered behind her. She had a smirk on her face as she gave him a once over. “Xavier Collins.” She inclined her head in a slight bow.
“Adranial.” Xavier remained standing straight. “Welcome to Earth.” He glanced behind her at the other members of her party.
A woman standing behind Adranial, wearing silver robes, a crystal necklace, and dangly, crescent moon earrings tapped, Adranial on the shoulder. “Well, aren’t you going to introduce us?”
Adranial motioned to the woman in the silver robes. “This is Elsie, our healer.” She motioned to another person, a man wearing full-plate armour that was a head taller than Xavier. It was clear he wasn’t human—or, at least, that he wasn’t entirely human. He had curved horns jutting from his head. They weren’t the type of horns Xavier had seen on demonkin. There were different, longer, but still gave him the similar vibes. “Domical, our tank.”
Domical nodded.
Those horns look mighty sharp.
“And finally—”
“Larson!” A grinning elf took a step forward. He wore light, leather armour that looked like something an archer or ranger might wear.
Ranger hadn’t even been a class option after I’d chosen Champion, it was either warrior or mage.
Perhaps there was a way to pick up a ranged weapon as a warrior that he’d simply not known about, or maybe different races were able to choose different classes in the tower.
The elf had a mostly shaved head except for a spiked strip that ran down the middle, making Xavier blink. An elf with a mohawk. He never thought he’d see something like that.
I don’t think Tolkien would approve.
“So.” Larson rubbed his hands together. “What passes for fun around these parts?”
Adranial sighed. “Don’t mind him.” She glared at Larson. “He’s never known when and when not to speak.”
Larson shrugged. When he spotted the expansive window behind Xavier, he walked straight over to it. His head zipped left and right like a puppy tracking cars driving different ways on the street.
“We’ve all known each other since we were young,” Elsie said, playing with a strand of her dark hair, twirling it around one finger. “We’re more like siblings than anything else.” She scrunched up her face. “Which can sometimes come with its own problems.”
Xavier never had any siblings, and was quite the introvert, so he struggled to imagine being raised around three other people for his entire life—people who he was expected to party up with in the Tower of Champions, assuming they all even survived the first challenge.
“What if one of you hadn’t made it through to the tower?” Xavier asked. Once the words had tumbled out of his mouth, he realised it might not have been the nicest question to pose.
Adranial and Elsie exchanged a significant glance. Adranial was the one who spoke. “We are trained since birth to survive, and with the privileges we have access to… we go into the first fight with certain advantages. However, we are also grouped with other parties as we grow up. You might think of it as a larger class with smaller teams. There’s always a chance of something… unusual happening. If it is only one person in a party who is lost, often there are proxies that can be added, people who have been with the larger class but weren’t attached to a particular party.”
Xavier frowned, trying to understand how that worked. “So if no one loses that first match, where do these proxies go?”
“They’re trained predominately to solo the tower floors, though sometimes they might rotate into different parties as long as they’re at the same point in the tower, just to gain experience fighting in a team, or to help gain more Mastery Points,” Elsie said. “They tend to prefer going solo if they can.”
Xavier nodded. He might not understand all of it, but he supposed he didn’t need to know the intricacies of how other worlds tackled the Tower of Champions—all he needed was to focus on how he was going to tackle it, and as he was pretty much soloing every floor except when he was helping to level up his party… whatever tactics these people used to fight in a group wouldn’t be all that applicable to him.
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Though he did wonder if there was perhaps something he could learn from these people that would help him support the other teams of Champions that he had out there, the ones that didn’t benefit from having a True Progenitor on their side, which was… every single one of them besides his own.
The main reason he’d been looking forward to having Adranial come here was because she knew things about the tower that he didn’t. In fact, she would know basically everything about the rest of the floors, or should at least have a way of accessing that knowledge.
This is something she’s been training to do since she was born, of course she’ll know all about the tower.
But he also didn’t really know whether she would either be able, or willing, to share that information. He hadn’t been able to get her to agree to any terms about doing so in the contract. It wasn’t something that he’d been able to push—not when Howard’s life was in the balance. Besides, the woman had said she and her party had their own information-privacy contracts they needed to adhere to.
However, he had ensured that her and her party couldn’t go after Earth’s resources without his strict permission. And considering a dungeon would most definitely be considered a resource… something told him he would have plenty of things to trade for any information they were able to hand out.
Xavier still wasn’t really sure what her main reason for being here was—what exactly did she want to get out of this relationship? Was it really just him that she was after?
I know what Empress Larona wants out of me. She wants me to protect the Silver River sector in the future, something that right now feels impossible. But Adranial and her party are clearly from a much more powerful sector. What could they need from someone like me, still so close to the beginning of my path?
Adranial walked over to the expansive window that Larson was looking out of. She peered down at the base. “An impressive start.”
“It mustn’t look like much to you,” Xavier said.
“No,” Domical said. “It doesn’t.”
Xavier raised an eyebrow at the tall, horned tank.
“Don’t mind Domical.” Elsie slapped the man’s massive shoulder. “He’s allergic to not speaking his mind.” She paused. “Not literally allergic.” Elsie looked at Domical. “Right?”
Domical glanced at her with an unveiled look of contempt. “Of course not. That would be stupid.”
Xavier held back a small laugh. He didn’t mind blunt honesty, especially from people like this…
“We may be used to a planet that has moved forward significantly farther than this one, but we’re watching the rebirth of a new world. A world entering the System for the very first time.” Adranial smiled. “A new frontier. This is where the magic happens.” She looked over at Xavier. “Where is your tank, Howard?”
All humour Xavier had been feeling at the situation disappeared. “He’s not here. He’s looking for his family. He was separated from them when he entered the Tower of Champions.” He tilted his head to the side, giving her a harsh look. To her credit, it didn’t make her shift in the slightest. “What do you want with him? I don’t think he will be happy to see you.”
Adranial paced around Xavier’s quarters. “I wanted to apologise to him.”
“Apologise?” Xavier hadn’t been expecting that. “All this, to get onto my good side?”
Adranial shook her head. “What I did to him was necessary, but I understand how unpleasant it must have been. I want to apologise for putting him through the pain he must have experienced.”
Xavier took a step toward the woman from the other side of the Greater Universe. “Necessary? When he returned to the tower, he wanted me to end his life to break the contract he’d signed with you, because he didn’t trust himself enough not to go through with it when he returned to Earth.”
“Yes,” Adranial said. “I was counting on that.” She held out a hand. Something appeared in it—multiple things, actually. About ten small spheres, not much larger than marbles. She must have materialised them from her Storage Ring. “What if I helped him find his family?”
Xavier looked at the items in her hand. He tried to use Identify on them, but it didn’t work. He supposed that made sense—he couldn’t Identify other people’s armour and weapons when they were being worn, maybe that also meant he couldn’t Identify items when they were in someone else’s possession?
“And how would you do that?” Xavier asked.
Adranial closed the distance between them, standing about a foot away. The woman was roughly a head shorter than him. She was looking down, at the spheres in her hand. “These are called Blood Trackers. It’s all in the name, really.” She raised her other hand. Something materialised in it. A small needle, like a sewing needle. There was a hint of red on the top. “If I imbue someone’s blood into one of these trackers, like blood will search for like blood—closest relatives.” She looked up at him. “I can also have it find the owner of the blood, assuming that person doesn’t have any preventative measures in place to stop a tracker like this.”
“And you just happen to have Howard’s blood.” Xavier stared at the spheres. The Blood Trackers. “That sounds too good to be true.”
This was exactly the solution to their problem—the world was a complete mess right now. Xavier wasn’t finding it difficult to defeat the enemy invaders whenever he came upon them, but finding their own people, when the System had jumbled everything up? That was a different story.
“Too good to be true.” Adranial smirked. “Not the first time I’ve been called that.” She twirled the needle from one finger to the other. “When I observed Howard’s memories, I tried to find what was most important to him, and if there was a way that I could give it to him.” Her smirk turned into a warm smile. “In anticipation of gaining his forgiveness.”
“In anticipation of manipulating the situation to your benefit,” Domical said.
Adranial shrugged. “It’s what we’ve been taught to do, and I’m especially good at it.” She tossed her white hair back over her shoulder. “Isn’t that what everyone’s trying to do?”
“And what is it, exactly, that you want in return for finding them?” It wasn’t lost on Xavier that these Blood Trackers wouldn’t only be useful in finding Howard’s family, or at least the man’s children—he could also use one of them to find his mother.
If only I’d snagged some of Alistair Reed’s blood. Though at the time, considering I knew nothing of these trackers, that would have just been strange…
“Everything we do is a negotiation,” Adranial said. “It’s just a matter of finding the right leverage. Sometimes that leverage is power, other times its information, other times it’s resources.”
“And baby worlds are rife with resources,” Domical added.
“Indeed. Now tell me, Xavier Collins, how many dungeons have you discovered nearby?”