City of Fallen Souls: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 3) by Jez Cajiao (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

He wheezed, then straightened, trying to catch his breath. “The city guard are smashing their way in, supported by a pair of Mages.”

“Shit!” I said, moving closer to the stairwell. I listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything.

“We’re eleven floors up, Jax.” Augustus reminded me, and I shrugged.

“How long do we have?” I asked, and Rinko responded.

“Maybe fifteen to twenty minutes before they get here. More, if they check each floor as they go, and…”

A shout echoed from below, and I moved back from the stairwell, setting myself with my naginata as Grizz took up a position on my right side, the others spreading out into a battle formation.

“You were saying, Rinko?” Augustus growled as I snapped to Hellenica to get her people moving.

“We need those ships, and we need them now!” Hellenica swooped away, examining the view from each window, as all but two of her Djinn took off, blasting holes in the windows.

“Help!” a voice cried from the stairwell, and I blinked in surprise at the sight of a bedraggled and worn-looking woman staggering up into view, followed by another that was supporting an older man. All three were clothed in rags and looked like shit, and it took me a second to place them, considering all the shit that had happened so far tonight.

“The cages…” I said suddenly, realizing who and what they were as I straightened up. “Stand down, people,” I called out as the three staggered onto the floor, gasping and holding onto each other.

“You… said the… people down below ...wouldn’t… be welcoming…” the woman at the front wheezed. “…You were… right…” she managed, and I swore, realizing that the noblewoman was gone.

“What happened?” I asked her, a Legionnaire dragging a long, low bench across for them to sit on.

“Lady Hightree went down. She… demanded that we follow her, said she’d… have us whipped to death… if we didn’t,” she explained, still trying to catch her breath as Nerin shouldered her way through the group to examine them. “She was below… us. She was shouting to… them to let her out, and… who she was. Then… she started screaming, and we… we ran…” Her shoulders shook, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“The guards have broken in the doors… but I think they’ve got specific orders…” Rinko said quietly to Augustus. I turned, overhearing them, and raised an eyebrow to the pair. Rinko ensured the three refugees couldn’t see him, then swiftly drew a finger across his throat.

“Fuckers.” I snarled, shaking my head. “Okay, people, barricade this level as best you can,” I said loudly before turning to the three refugees.

“Look, there’s no time to really go into this right now, but your luck sucks,” I said apologetically. “We think the Guard are coming, smashing their way up to kill anyone they find. Don’t know why, don’t really care, but they hate the Legion, and that’s too long a story to go into right now. You’ve got two choices, really, if you don’t want to take your chances going down there,” I said, gesturing back to the stairwell, and I wouldn’t want to do that, personally. You can come with us, and we’ll let you go free as soon as we can. We don’t take slaves, so you’ll be free, regardless; it’s just a matter of whether we get the chance to land again before we leave the city or not. The other option is to come with us permanently, leave the city behind, and join us. I’m Jax, Lord of Dravith, as I said downstairs, so I’m kinda at war with Himnel. Sorry that I’ve no time to sugar coat shit, but that’s how it is. So… you want to tag along and join us, or get dropped off whenever we can stop?”

“We’d have nothing. No food, no clothes; we literally have nothing to offer you, and no way to survive if we leave here without joining you,” the woman said slowly, glaring at me. I sighed, trying to keep my voice patient.

“I’ll give you some gold, if you decide to leave, and we’ll provide you with food and clothes as best we can, either way. Look, we’re taking a load of refuges away from this shithole of a city tonight. You need to decide if you want to stay with us or not. You can come for now; just tell me your decision by morning, and I’ll sort things as best I can. It’s all I can do,” I shook my head, turning from them and walking over to Hellenica.

Augustus and Bane went with me, while the others grabbed anything they could and started barricading the stairwell.

Grizz, being the cheerful, mad bastard that he was, had turned it into a game, and they were all chucking shit into the stairwell, clogging it up with everything they could carry, including balling up anything flammable and rolling it down the steps. I shook my head as I reached Hellenica, guessing that it would be a nightmare trying to climb those narrow stairwells if someone were to set fire to them.

I just hoped Grizz didn’t smoke us out as well.

“What do you have?” I asked Hellenica as she conjured a floating flat disc of gray mist to hover before us.

“It’s a scrying tool,” she said simply. “It’ll give us the best view of the building from the outside.” She shifted it, spiraling it around and around, until she found a relatively flat surface outside.

“There,” Augustus said, pointing to the visible ledge outside the tower. “We can have the first ship pull alongside there, slightly lower, and we can jump.”

“Okay, that’s not gonna be scary at all…” I muttered, but I nodded in agreement, and we quickly turned, inspecting the floor we were on and matching landmarks until we figured out which window it was nearest to.

We guessed at it being three windows down on the left, and I blew the wall out with an explosive mortar spell, the same one I’d used to take the ceiling out lower down