The Fractured Tower

No monster was a real threat to Sorin at this point. The only way he was going to die was by doing something extraordinarily stupid. Mistakes happened. Climbing was never truly guaranteed to be completely safe. But he was confident in his skills and his power. Floor 10 wasn’t going to be a challenge.

However, the most direct route from the portal hub to the floor guardian involved passing through an area he had no good memories of: the Mortuary. He’d be going down this time, which was unpleasant for various reasons, and it completely made sense why most people took the long way. They didn’t need to climb over a dozen floors in a month, however, so he pushed through.

“You again?” he asked, both exasperated and disgusted. Of all the monsters to run into, it had to be this one.

A gigantic, black viper barred his way, one of the roaming area guardians for the Mortuary. It was a necromancer, capable of both empowering all the native undead and carrying its own minions compacted into a flesh ball in its stomach. Sorin had already killed it once before. The smell had... lingered, even after he’d bathed in literal fire to cleanse himself.

The viper didn’t seem to recognize him, which was about what Sorin expected. It looked the same, had the same abilities, and even acted the same, but it wasn’t. It was a fabrication of the tower, just like the one he’d killed and just like all the previous iterations killed by the climbers who’d come before.

The difference was that now Sorin was rank 25, and since he hadn’t taken in that C-rank sensory soulprint he’d gotten from the trial yet, he still had plenty of room in his soulspace to free cast C-rank spells.

His spell of choice was called Ignition Aura. Normally, burning undead just made the smell worse, but in this case, the spell had sufficient range that the monsters burned up well before they got close to him. A Wind Wall anchored to his position served to keep the ash from reaching him, and Sorin advanced at a steady pace through the necromancer snake’s minions.

It hissed its displeasure and disgorged fresh balls of compacted corpses. If Sorin had been a true rank 10 like he appeared, it probably could have simply outlasted him. He wouldn’t have had such a powerful attack to begin with, and an area guardian would certainly have deeper anima reserves than any single climber could match.

But he wasn’t a rank 10, and the field of heat didn’t weaken. If anything, it intensified, and the undead visibly dried out in real time, the stomach acid evaporating in seconds, then their flesh igniting, and finally, they were reduced to ash. All of it occurred in the time it took Sorin to take four measured steps.

When the heat hit the viper, it recoiled. A smart monster would have fled. That instinct apparently didn’t exist in an area guardian. That was fine. Sorin didn’t care how the monster was removed from his path, just that it was.

It lunged forward, perhaps deciding it would pay the price in order to eliminate the source quickly. That was a common undead tactic, but it was also a mistake. Its scales immediately brightened, then started peeling off. By the time its mouth reached Sorin, it was more pink than black.

It crashed into the metal floor, missing him entirely by virtue of the fact that he was no longer there. Sorin landed lightly on its back, thirty feet behind the base of its skull, and considered what to do next. Force Weaver was the proper answer. He’d sliced this exact monster apart the last time they fought, but the clean up afterward was something he wanted to avoid.

His wall of wind also couldn’t protect him from the stink of cooked flesh, though the toxic fumes of an undead monster in the middle of being cremated couldn’t actually make him sick anymore. Truthfully, disintegration was the most elegant solution to his problem, but that was still beyond him. More mundane flames would have to suffice, even if that meant suffering from the stink of it.

The massive viper cooked inside his Ignition Aura over the next thirty seconds or so. It writhed around, curling up on itself in an attempt to crush him or eat him, but it was far too slow to keep up with Sorin now that he had Lion’s Blood empowering him. It died without ever touching him.

The anima gain wasn’t insignificant, but it was less than a hundredth of what he’d need to rank up again. If he did nothing but hunt monsters on Floor 10 that were equally powerful, he could probably push to rank 26 in a week or so. That was too inefficient for his tastes when he could simply climb to Floor 15 or 16 and find common monsters as powerful as this one.

The corpse was a length of pink specked with crisp black where its skin had bubbled up and flaked off. Noxious vapors rose from it, but Sorin kept them away, letting them blow down the hall behind him. It might alert some other undead, but he hardly cared at this point.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

They were just resources on legs, and if they wanted to deliver themselves to him, he was happy to collect the bounties. They’d have to come quickly, though, because he wasn’t planning to stand still and could move very, very fast now.

* * *

The Citadel was the kind of floor a climber could spend years exploring and still find new surprises. Under less pressing circumstances, Sorin would have loved to poke around the various biomes just to see what kind of monsters—and what kind of soulprints—he could find. Unfortunately, that would have to wait indefinitely.

It took him close to an entire day to finally make his way to the floor guardian’s arena, which consisted of a couple square miles of forest and an entire pack of wolves taller than he was. Pack monsters weren’t rare, but guardians typically came in the format of solo elites, so it was a bit of a departure from what Sorin was used to.

It didn’t stop him, of course. If anything, the hardest part of the kill was tracking them all down. After their initial attack, where he killed three-quarters of them in seconds, the rest scattered. It took him about two minutes to kill them all, then another minute to harvest what looked like a pearlescent marble out of one of them. He didn’t know what it did, but some alchemist was going to be happy to see it.

He stepped into the Antechamber and found what he’d come to think of as the tower diagnostic display already waiting for him. After sparing a glance for the other towers and noting no real changes, he narrowed his focus down to the red tower.

“Come on, show me what the damage looks like,” he muttered.

The tower expanded, and Sorin couldn’t help but scowl at what he saw. The darkness coating Floor 25 had spread to cover the majority of the floor, and Floor 24 had gone from having to contain it around singular points to slowly being engulfed as well. If this was two months of progress without Samael, but with the rank 24s he’d created slowly abandoning their posts, then Sorin imagined it was going to be much, much worse by the time he got there.

Both floors might be lost entirely. Floor 23 would probably be at least partially infested. It was clear that the tower couldn’t contain this by itself, though the infestation still wasn’t going up to Floor 26 for some reason.

Whatever is happening there, it sure would be nice if it could duplicate it on the other side, too. If we could figure that out, it might just be the key to wiping out the void completely.

Ultimately, the image of the red tower only served to remind Sorin how little time he had left. He dismissed it with a thought and let the whole thing vanish so that he could use the slate he’d gotten from the trial. It connected with the section of his mosaic he’d expected it to, filling in the final gap in the pattern and granting him a new soulprint called Void Eater.

With that, he thought he could actually make some headway against the infestation, but then he reconsidered. Samael had had the same abilities and years of time to work on the problem, and he’d never finished it. Sorin was going to have to be cleverer than just throwing brute force at the void if he wanted to succeed where his predecessor had failed.

Or maybe I just need to be more willing to sacrifice. I can’t see Samael pushing hard at the cost of his own well-being. How much did he actually do himself? How much did he leave to an endless parade of mind-slaved disposable minions? For that matter, how much was the tower itself doing to fight this? It’s definitely growing, but I don’t have enough information to really say how bad it is.

Whatever the answer was, it was an undeniable truth that the sooner he got there, the less void he’d need to clear out. Now that he had another tool to help him undertake the job, he was eager to put it to work.

“One floor cleared, two more to go. Then we’ll figure out what to do from there,” he muttered. “Can’t let them slow me down, but I can’t leave them behind.”

As far as Sorin could tell, having a real team all capable of fighting the void was the biggest advantage he had over Samael, even if they were down to five people now. Addressing that loss wasn’t something he was looking forward to. He hadn’t known Vendis that well, and he was more than accustomed to losing teammates, but the same wasn’t true for Yoru. Sorin had expected to deal with this if and when either Rue or Odric died, but it had struck a different part of their group instead.

It was easy to see that Yoru was still grieving, even if he was trying to push past it. Sorin wanted to tell him to take some time, but the stakes were too high. They needed to reach the Void Wall. Once that was dealt with, there’d be plenty of time to address all the other problems plaguing the team.

Speaking of rushing, I’m spending too much time lost in thought.

The portal to Floor 11 was hanging open in front of him, just waiting for Sorin to step through. He approached it casually and, without stopping to so much as draw his sword, passed through. Immediately, he was soaked. A torrential downpour slammed into him, so heavy that he’d have thought he’d emerged at the bottom of a waterfall if he hadn’t been expecting it.

Floor 11 was an extremely small floor, at least compared to Floors 10 or 12. It consisted of a sole mountain that jutted out of an endless sea. Wreathing the solitary landmass was a perpetual storm, its black clouds blocking out the sky.

That made travel far more vertical than any other floor that came before it, which was treacherous enough on its own even without the water. No rank 0 could have hoped to scale that mountain, never mind survive the monsters that called it home.

As if summoned by the very thought, a rain skipper formed right in front of his eyes. It was a type of water elemental, only a few inches long, and not particularly dangerous on its own. They were as numerous as the rain drops they rode down from the sky, however, and their favored method of interacting with climbers was to glue themselves to their victim’s face in an attempt to suffocate them.

Ignition Aura roared out of him, vaporizing the elemental and its hundreds of kin in an instant. The mountainside was lost to a cloud of steam, but Sorin didn’t need his eyes to see. He oriented himself to face up toward the peak and started climbing.