The Fractured Tower

The sun never set in the savanna. It wiggled around a bit in the sky, traveling in a tight circle that took maybe six hours to make a complete revolution. At no point in that revolution did it ever make it down to the baked ground below with less than full brightness, a fact that perhaps harmed the long, brittle grass more than helped it.

That was why Sorin Atheral offered up a prayer of thanks to whoever or whatever was listening when, on his fourth day there, dark clouds started to form overhead. The temperature swung down noticeably over the span of an hour, providing the first bit of cool relief he’d had since dragging Samael back through the Liminal Gateway for the tower to claim the body.

He’d been resting in the questionable shade of a massive tree that seemed to just grow straight up more than it grew out at the top, but he’d been able to put his back against the trunk so long as he didn’t mind shifting positions as the sun circled it. Since he couldn’t afford to sleep, anyway, it hadn’t been that big a deal.

Then the rain started. At first, it seemed like a blessing. The ground drank up the water hungrily, the monsters fled to whatever holes they’d claimed, and if Sorin hadn’t been quite so tired, he’d have probably realized sooner that they knew something he didn’t.

The first lightning bolt disabused him of any notion of safety. It struck the ground a few hundred feet away, sending a plume of dirt exploding into the sky that rained down on Sorin all the way over where he was standing.

“Holy crap!” he yelped.

That might have been bad enough on its own to convince him to seek shelter—or, more realistically, build his own using Living Earth to mold the terrain to his needs—except that a jagged yellow and white light zipped out of the crater a second after it formed.

That explains the kinetic force, he thought grimly, recognizing the lightning elemental for what it was.

The light resolved itself into an orb about three feet across, mostly white but with flecks of blue spinning across its surface. Yellow lightning wreathed the whole thing, forming a deadly halo that reached out to scour the ground nearby. The elemental left small fires in its wake as it moved, but the rain quickly snuffed those out.

Wearily, Sorin pulled himself to his feet. Lightning elementals were simultaneously among the most dangerous of their kind and the easiest to kill. An unprepared climber would find themselves dead before they even realized what had attacked them, while the canny one would properly set up defenses and slay the creature in moments.

Sorin, unfortunately, did not have the proper defenses prepared. That meant he had only a few seconds to ready himself before the elemental rolled over him. At that point, he’d be cooked alive, though it would at least be a brief affair.

It was a good thing the savanna provided plentiful opportunities to farm anima. The monsters were strong, varied, and existed in great numbers. That had allowed him to grow from rank 15 to rank 17 in just a few days, which meant that he had plenty of free anima floating in his soulspace with which to cast C-rank spells.

The first one he wove together was called Lightning Rod. It created a sort of magical beacon that drew lightning to it, which included all the electrical lines coming out of the ball. The downside was that attracting lightning also meant it attracted the elemental’s attention. It was too fast to even track with unaugmented vision, and being living lightning meant it didn’t have a solid body. The Blind Sense portion of Horizon Watcher was useless for tracking its position, but the Aura Sense half worked just fine.

The lightning elemental struck the beacon with all the uncaring ferocity of the storm that had sired it. At the same time, Sorin free cast his second spell: Elemental Anchor. That was a must-have against all sorts of elementals, since it sharply limited their control over their element in the immediate area around the caster.

Climbers who didn’t master that soulprint quickly found themselves drowned on dry land or swallowed by the earth when they encountered powerful elementals, and this one certainly counted. In this case, Sorin needed two layers of defense because Elemental Anchor didn’t erase the lightning; it merely prevented the elemental from attacking him directly. Lightning Rod did the rest.

The final part of the three-step process for destroying a lightning elemental was a powerful earth manipulation soulprint. In that regard, if nowhere else, he at least had what he needed on hand. Living Earth reached up, a wave of scarred rocks and loose soil, and crashed over the ball of lightning, grounding it out and shattering its cohesion.

The ground smoothed itself back out, now a darkened patch that looked like freshly tilled earth, and the lightning elemental’s death released a satisfying burst of anima to flood Sorin’s soulspace. Ah. Good gains. Another twenty or thirty of these would push me up to rank 18.

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Lightning bolts were striking the ground with regularity, a new one hitting every minute or two. Thunder rolled across the savanna, and little fires started and stopped, making it look like someone was racing around lighting hundreds of candles in an effort to light up the dark, only to be foiled by the hard rain.

He studied the savanna and weighed his options. What he wanted, what he needed, was sleep. No matter how much endurance his soulprints granted him, he couldn’t survive on nothing but ten-minute naps twice a day. Unfortunately, that was all the monsters were giving him before something else found and attacked him.

The rain chasing everything into hiding might be his only chance to really rest for an extended period, but that wasn’t without risks. The lightning elementals roamed indiscriminately, blasting anything they passed by. There was no way to ensure one wouldn’t roll across his resting place, even if he built himself a burrow to rest in.

They were also excellent sources of anima and relatively easy to defeat, so long as a bolt of lightning didn’t drop one right on his head before he got a chance to set up Lightning Rod and Elemental Anchor. More than that, pushing up another rank would only make all the fights that came after the storm that much easier to survive.

And let’s be honest with ourselves, he thought with a smirk, the rain feels nice, and easy anima is fun.

With a shake of his head, he started jogging toward the closest elemental.

* * *

Climbing without a team came with a lot of risks. It was impossible to rest in safety or to have enough variety of soulprints to cover every situation, though in Sorin’s case, he made up for that with an encyclopedic knowledge of soulprint structures he could free cast. Fighting was just plain more dangerous without allies to help deal with overwhelming numbers.

A single mistake could lead to death, and even doing nothing wrong didn’t guarantee victory. Sometimes, a climber just got unlucky. Whatever the reason, dead was dead. It was inarguably foolish to climb solo.

But the anima gains were phenomenal. Not having to split that meant Sorin was climbing ranks faster than he’d ever thought possible. Normally, that would be wasted since a climber’s rank was capped by the highest floor they’d reached, but in Sorin’s case, he’d broken the floor limit when he’d reached Floor 100 of his original tower and been sent to a new tower in a younger body.

That was good, because even as skilled and knowledgeable as he was, the savanna was a trial ground on Floor 10, and there was no way a single rank 10 could have survived it. He’d been rank 15 when he’d entered, and even then, he’d had a rough go of it. The monsters were ferocious and powerful but also richly rewarded him for his victories with both anima and new soulprints.

Tempting though it had been, he’d refrained from absorbing any of them yet. Without a full team to back him up, he was relying on the flexibility his free casting granted him. If he stuffed his soulspace with new abilities, he’d lose out on the raw, unclaimed anima he needed to shape into whatever was appropriate for the situation.

But now that the rains were finally ending and the elementals disappearing, he reconsidered that stance. He’d blown past rank 18 hours ago and just hit rank 19, and with the way soulspace growth scaled, more than half his soulspace was currently empty. He had room for another C-rank soulprint in there easily, or space to upgrade another two or three soulprints from his current build instead.

What to choose, though? Still Winter is probably my most important defensive and control ability right now, but Warrior’s Vigilance and Blood of the Mountain are what are keeping me on my feet.

Upgrading either one wouldn’t make him less tired, but it would help him function despite the exhaustion weighing on his limbs. If he were just going to do a straight rank-up to his existing soulprints, those three were his first picks, but he had other options.

If I’m going to do this, I need to do it now before the rain clears up completely and the monsters start coming back out, he thought to himself. Entering his soulspace for half an hour to perform soulprint mergers without a partner to keep his body safe was a good way to get himself killed.

A memory came to Sorin unbidden—the lion guardian of the trial ground walking through Samael’s flames like they weren’t there and almost tearing him in two with casual ease. He’d have to fight that same guardian in order to leave. Samael had been above rank 30 when the guardian had ripped him open, albeit weakened from his battle with Sorin.

Not upgrading his soulprints wasn’t an option. Sorin needed to be much stronger than he currently was in order to finish the trial by himself. He could only hope that when he fought the lion, it wouldn’t be empowered like it had been to deal with Samael. It was supposed to be a trial for a team of rank 10s, after all.

As long as I don’t start openly announcing my plans to break my oath to the tower and kill its other champion, I’ll probably be safe from that particular fate. It helps that I don’t plan on breaking my oath, though it sure would be nice if I could remember the details.

Sorin pushed that thought aside. No matter how strong the guardian was when he found it, it would be easier for him to defeat if he was able to utilize some of the soulprints he’d gained in the trial. To that end, he needed a place of relative safety. It wasn’t necessarily more secure underground, but it wouldn’t hurt to dig himself a little box. Living Earth made it easy enough to do.

Sorin opened a pit, hopped in, then compressed the turned earth into a shell of stone, giving him a bit of space to work and the dubious protection of eight inches of rock. The savanna had plenty of digging monsters that could dissolve that bulwark with little effort, so he didn’t take it as a sign that he could work at his leisure.

Now, what to absorb, what to merge, and what to upgrade?

He’d had plenty of time to think on that while he hunted, and while there was always the chance of finding something better suited for his needs on the next kill, he couldn’t remain at his current level forever. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the first soulprint he wanted to add to his build.