"Where were you?" the girl asked. She was sure that Ning had a shift during the day today, but had been surprised when she didn't see him leave the tower during the sudden attack earlier.
"I was out to the east, doing my job," Ning said.
"Well, then you are one of the lucky few that managed to not get injured during the attack," she said.
"What happened here?" Ning asked.
"Some convict must have decided to fight back instead of accepting their punishment," she said. "Go on and help the others. Many of the other prisoners decided to leave during the attack. The other officers are trying to keep them in, and they are fighting back."
"Alright, take care of him," Ning said, referring to the guy on the ground.
He left the place and went just a few meters ahead, before seeing another fight that he hadn't before because of the dirt and smoke.
A man with a bleeding left hand had a gun pointed towards a man on the other side that was getting ready to fight.
Surprisingly, the one with the gun was actually the convict and not the lawman.
'Was his gun stolen?' Ning thought.
The officer had his hands in the air, his eyes slightly moist, likely from the fear. He was only an invoker and wouldn't be able to fight against someone with a gun.
Ning tried to do the same thing as before to point the gun downwards towards the ground.
But he was too late. The man was already pulling the trigger. So, instead of creating gravitational well below the man, he used Aether to push the gun upwards.
The gun fired, but the aim was vastly off as the gun was pointed upwards. The convict himself was surprised how that happened before he saw Ning to the side.
His eyes went wide and pointed towards Ning. This time, Ning had ample time to snatch away his gun.
As the gun pulled down, it got shot again due to the convict's finger still being on the trigger.
Ning felt a trace of fear in his heart when that happened. He had strengthened his body, but it was still not as strong as it would have been before as an Aether saint.
He looked down to check if he had been shot, but fortunately, he wasn't.
'That would've hurt a lot,' he thought.
When the bullet left the barrel of the gun, just like the gun itself, the bullet too was pulled by the ground.
Along with the gun and the bullet, the man was also dragged to the ground and was currently trying to pull away from his fingers from the gun that was stuck to the ground.
"Sedate him," Ning told the stunned lawman next to him. The man woke up from his stupor and ran up to the convict before sticking a syringe onto his arm.
The convict slowly lost the ability to think and simply laid on the ground with his eyes open, not sure what was happening around him.
"You can take care of him?" Ning asked.
"Ye-Yes," the man said and started wiping tears that were flowing down his eyes.
"Why are you crying? Were you hurt?" he asked.
"N-no," the man said and pointed towards the front. Ning looked upfront and behind a column of smoke, he could see a female silhouette lying on the ground.
He walked to the front to see if she was injured, but when he went past the smoke, he realized the truth.
The woman was dead.
Ning recognized her. She was the only of his classmates that learned about the law with him just a few weeks ago.
Now, she was lying on the floor, with a bullet in her head. She had died not long ago as her blood still slowly seeped out of the wound.
Ning felt horrible looking at her.
He had seen dead people before and even lost people close to him, but that never made it easier.
Fury blazed in his eyes like a raging fire as he turned around to kill the person responsible for it.
However, just as he did, he saw the officer, diligently tying up the convict, even though he had nearly been shot before by the same person.
He shook his head. He sometimes forgot that justice in this world was different from the other planet he had been to.
Either way, this man was likely going to be killed later anyway. His crime was too severe to not be hanged for it.
Ning decided to leave the place and go help the others.
He stopped dilly-dallying and directly pushed people onto the ground as he saw them.
The convicts didn't usually expect someone to use Aether to Enchant their bodies themselves and that was usually very hard.
As he made his way through the outer ring of the tower, he finally met a convict that he couldn't easily push down.
This convict seemed to be an Aether Magister like Ning himself and was an Enchanter as well. He seemed to have his body constantly strengthened to the point that normal attacks did nothing to him.
Ning started thinking of ways to find him. Normally, he would get rid of his weapon, but this was holding nothing.
He was using his superior physical ability to fight the 3 officers that surrounded him.
2 of the officers were Enchanters, and the third one an Invoker.
None a single one of them were at Aether Magister rank, so they had a hard time fighting against this one convict.
The convict was like a juggernaut. He smashed through the places, not caring for his body, and tried to attack the officers.
The officers had guns in their hands, but they weren't able to fire it with how much the convict was moving around, and destroying stuff.
One of the officers was Hans, the man he saw before leaving the tower just an hour ago.
That was when Ning recognized the convict as well. It was the same person that Hans had brought back.