An hour later, the fighting finally came to a stop.
The area surrounding the tower became a ruin like any other battleground.
There had been about 20 people in the tower when the fighting broke, and maybe 15 more arrived to help after they learned of the situation.
Of them, 7 had died, and 12 were heavily injured. Ning got to helping the heavily injured folks first before going for the ones that were mildly injured.
The people were surprised to see his medical skills, but they weren't in a mood to show it.
Once Ning was done with the lawmen, he moved onto the convicts. There had been about 120 criminals in the cells below the tower, but most weren't strong enough to fight their way out.
So, about 70 or so were either immediately caught, or never even bothered to leave at all.
Of the remaining 70, they had managed to capture about 40 of them through sedating them. About 8 of them were killed without other actions being possible, and finally, 2 had managed to escape away.
Fortunately, none of the civilians were injured… except maybe one.
Ning watched the corpses get taken away, both the lawmen and the criminals… as well as the lone civilian. The man who had died while under his hold.
He hadn't gone through with the process to become a criminal, so he could still be counted as a civilian.
His words still floated in Ning's mind. Words like injustice, cowards, helping the rich, boot lickers.
And then the words about revenge. Revenge against who? For what? Ning felt curious.
So, he decided to look into it. He pulled up the man's information from the system and read it.
The man's name was Rejiro. He lived with his sister with no parents. From a young age, he had started working in the steel mill to make what little money he could.
He wasn't really good at farming, so he never bothered with getting land for himself.
Working in the mill, the boss saw his ability to lift steel bars better than any of his other men. So, he started making the boy do more work.
As he did, he also started a farm once his sister was old enough.
They were happy. The boy worked on the farm during the morning and evening, while working in the steel mill during the day.
They weren't earning a lot, but it was sufficient.
As the boy grew older, he got stronger. He was passively enchanting his body, but he didn't know.
The boss, however, knew and made the boy work a lot more than usual while keeping the pay the same.
Then, tragedy struck. His sister came down with an illness that could not be cured easily.
He needed thousands of Gols worth of medicine, something he could never hope to have within his lifetime.
He tried asking his neighbors for help, but they didn't have the money. He asked his boss, but he refused to give him any.
In fact, the boss even cut his pay during the days when he stayed at home, looking after his sister.
Still, the boy couldn't do anything but watch his sister die. Once she was dead, he cremated her body and took her ashes to the place where he had heard legends of people being taken after death.
The peak of Afterlife.
It was a few weeks-long journeys, but he took it and gave a proper farewell to his sister.
Finally, he returned back home. The first thing he did after coming back was going to the boss to tell him where he had been for the past few weeks.
However, when he got there, the boss told him that because of his disappearance, the mill had lost money and that money was docked from his pay that he had yet to receive. In fact, if he wanted to work again, he would have to work a couple of more weeks without any payment to pay back for the loss.
The boy left the place angrily and went back home. He didn't need to work in such a place. He now knew how to farm, so he would be fine.
However, when he returned to his farm, he realized that it was not there anymore. The farm he had owned since childhood with his sister was now owned by someone else.
When he went to find out who it was, he was stunned. It was the boss.
The boss seemed to have been eying the land for quite a while, so when he saw the chance after the boy and his sister stopped working on it for a while, he took it.
Anger flared in the boy's eyes. Not only did the boss take away his pay, but he also took away the only other thing that his sister cared about.
So, in his anger, he went to kill the boss.
If Hans wasn't accidentally there, he would've likely succeeded in killing the boss.
However, life wasn't so fair towards the young boy.
Ning sighed once he read through the information. 'No wonder he thought of us like that. To his eyes, we were just like the boss, using our powers to hurt him,' he thought.
However, whatever the young man thought, he didn't deserve to die.
Ning went to the boss and captured him. He made the boss confess everything to the tower, and before long sent him to the prison where the boy was supposed to go.
"So that's what happened huh?" Hans said as he learned everything as well. "That's quite unfortunate."
Ning nodded.
"Well, his is not the only unfortunate story," Hans said, looking around at the empty desks where the others used to sit.
"They died too, they got hurt too," Hans said. "If the prisoners weren't strong, if the bad guys didn't get stronger, this would've never happened."
Ning was about to nod when he realized where Hans was going with his train of thought.
"If only that bastard that called himself the Apostle of Alexis never publicly revealed how to get stronger with Aether, we would've never gone through this trouble."
