The Fractured Tower

Floor 11 was small, but it was an outlier in terms of climbers going missing. And pretty much everyone knew a missing climber was a dead climber, Sorin’s miraculous return notwithstanding. It wasn’t that the monsters were particularly dangerous, or that the climb was particularly daunting. It was having to defend against various flavors of elemental while clinging to rain-slicked stone that made the whole floor so incredibly lethal.

Sorin did what any good climber would do in that situation: he cheated. Handholds sprouted out of the stone, and water flung itself away from him, leaving both him and the stone of the mountain dry. For any decent climber following his ascent to the top, their route would have been no more challenging than a particularly steep staircase.

That didn’t make him safe from the elements, of course. More rain skippers showed up regularly, not so much a threat as a steady drain on his anima, but he couldn’t afford to drop his guard even though Water Breathing negated their primary form of attack. An earth elemental made of granite and quartz might burst out of the wall he was scaling at any moment, and allowing himself to be distracted could mean finding himself thrown into the open air.

Which wouldn’t kill me, but most climbers wouldn’t be so lucky. I wonder how the rest of the team approached this floor.

They’d probably used climbing tools and absorbed something like Spider Climb to assist them. Odric’s Earth Shaping would have alerted him to elementals in the stone itself, and Nemari’s Water Bond would have helped keep the water off them. There wasn’t much they could do to stop a wind elemental from scouring them off the face of the mountain beyond hunkering down and holding on, though, so they’d either gotten lucky or come up with some new tricks.

After a few hours of following winding trails, scaling cliffs, and leaping over crevices, Sorin reached the second part of Floor 11. The cloud layer was in some ways even worse than the bottom. Everything was still wet, but now the mountain was shrouded in a thick fog. Cloud elementals swirled through the air, completely invisible and actively malicious toward climbers they caught in their domain.

No amount of heat could fully disperse the fog, but it did hurt the elementals that came for Sorin. He tracked them calmly with Horizon Walker, watching their auras more than catching even a glimpse of their physical forms. Even with his impressive perception, all he saw was the swirls and eddies of mist carried on currents of air.

Six hours after he arrived on Floor 11, Sorin emerged from the cloud layer. Ribbons of mist and arcs of lightning clung to him like they were trying to pull him back in, the remnants of one last cloud elemental desperate to rip him free from the mountain and cast him to his death. It fell away, ignored as Sorin set his eyes on his destination.

The summit of Floor 11 was a narrow spire of stone that tapered off to a point. Somewhere on the other side of the mountain was the portal hub, but Sorin didn’t care to look for it. If he missed the window, he’d have to wait an entire day, and the sun was already starting to sink behind the clouds to his left. In its place, cold, windswept stones would be bathed in moonlight.

He reached the summit with half an hour to spare. Below him, the thunderstorm raged, occasionally trumpeting its fury for him to hear, but he was beyond its reach now. Above him, the Empyrean Vault waited. He merely needed the stairway to appear.

The moon slid into position, and, without so much as a whisper of anima, light congealed before his eyes. Sorin tested his weight on the first step, then, finding it solid, started the final leg of his climb. The arena would only last minutes, according to what Yoru had told him. There was no time for a leisurely hike, and so Sorin veritably flew up beyond the mountain’s peak and into the night sky.

It wasn’t like he needed any new proof that Floor 11 marked a drastic change from the earlier floors. Where before monsters had been flesh and blood creatures and the landscape had been something humans could survive on, his experience here was nothing but a struggle against the fury of the elements and the beings of pure magic they spawned.

And so it was no surprise when he reached the top of those thousand steps a minute later and found a pulsing orb of living fire waiting for him. About two feet across and casually drifting on nothing, it was the cold spark of a hidden sun held in a cage of moonlight.

It also served as a stark reminder that for all its casual cruelty, for all the pain and death, all the suffering the tower brought down on them, it could be beautiful, too. Sorin almost hated to destroy such a being.

It held no compunctions about killing him, though. As soon as he crested the stairs, a bar of solid flame lanced out from it. Sorin darted to the side and returned fire, though in his case he was lashing out with bands of raw force. They sliced through the orb like it wasn’t even there, passing cleanly through it with no real effect.

That wasn’t a surprise, and he didn’t waste his time or anima trying different types of kinetic attacks. He’d merely been testing the guardian to confirm that the fastest and most reliable method of dealing with monsters was off the table here. It wasn’t unusual for such magic to fail against a being made out of a living element, and, normally, he’d fight fire with water, but there wasn’t much available here.

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That’s fine. I’ll make my own.

Still Winter was barely even noticeable as it rolled out around him. The environment was already so cold that ice had no trouble forming, and Ignition Aura in turn quickly melted it. Sorin dodged the sun-and-moon elemental the whole while, easily keeping ahead of its attacks. Normally, he’d take more drastic measures, but he was on Floor 11, and it wasn’t a trial. He knew his team had defeated the portal guardian with Nemari’s Water Bond.

Sticking to what worked was for the best. He was on a sharp time limit to destroy the guardian and pass through the Antechamber portal before the whole arena vanished and sent him falling to his death. Normal climbers would be prepared for that with expensive enchantments or potions. Sorin hadn’t bothered.

A torrent of water directed with a free cast hydrokinesis smashed through the moonlight cage like it was delicate glass and extinguished the core of sunfire held within. Anima seeped out of the body and into his soulspace, signifying his victory.

Not so satisfying this way, he thought with a melancholy sigh. It really just feels like I’m going through the motions.

He collected a shard of solid moonlight that hadn’t vanished with the rest of the guardian’s body and pocketed it. Someone would find a use for it, somewhere. Now that he’d cut ties with Morlin, he needed to start worrying about that kind of stuff again.

I could probably make all the money I’ll ever need from that enchanter’s cabinet. I shouldn’t leave that hidden away, but I don’t really have a good spot to put it right now. Sure would be nice if I could track down Lorvaine.

The Antechamber was nothing special, just a pedestal with a jewelry box on it. A bar of what looked like ordinary silver but which Sorin suspected was considerably more valuable was resting inside it. Considering how little time or effort he’d put into the floor, he couldn’t complain about the lackluster reward.

He had bigger plans for Floor 12. There were still three empty spots in his mosaic that needed new slates to fill, and the next floor had a more traditional layout than Floor 11’s. Though he could scarcely afford the time to detour, he needed the power those soulprints offered. That meant obtaining the requisite pieces now while he still had Antechambers left to burn placing them.

It was better to do the ruins now while he could still easily clear them solo, so when he arrived on Floor 12, his first destination was a ruined abbey that had been swallowed whole by the trackless forest that made up the entire floor. Navigation was the real challenge since there were no actual landmarks, but North Homing proved its worth. If anything, Sorin needed to start acquiring more soulprints to build on its power, things that would allow him to intuit elevation, depth below the surface, and feel when the landscape shifted around him.

The concept of sapient monsters wasn’t new. The warblers back on Floor 1 had been intelligent, to a point. Goblins and hobgoblins, orcs and ogres, and so many other monsters were smarter than the average animal. The big jump now that he was on a double-digit floor was the civilization scale expanding past tribal communities that could be counted in the dozens to a floor-spanning territory held primarily by a single, united type of monster.

In the case of Floor 12, there were actually two warring tribes. One side was a type of wood elf, tool-using, coordinated, and hostile to all other forms of life. The other was a species of green-scaled, bipedal dragon kin. They were individually more powerful, but far less numerous and prone to in-fighting as much as they were to banding into raiding parties that attacked elven outposts.

Both sides were equally ready to slaughter any climbers they came across, of course. The primary difference was now the elf that tried to put an arrow in Sorin’s eye would be able to tell him how much they hated him and how elves were superior to humans in every way. There would probably be some racial slurs mixed in.

This wasn’t the floor Sorin would have chosen to go hunting for a ruin under optimal circumstances. If there was ever an environment where he risked being overwhelmed by a coordinated assault by a large number of monsters, it was this one. Life wasn’t always convenient, though, and he was confident that he could get what he needed here.

First step: rank 26. I have to get this new sensory soulprint integrated into my soulspace. That will make finding everything else much, much easier.

That was also why he’d chosen Floor 12 as the place to hunt for a ruin instead of looking for another one on Floor 10. Hostile civilization also meant large numbers of monsters to kill in small, often-times enclosed spaces. It was certainly dangerous, but he was fast, durable, and had a nigh limitless well of stamina to draw on now.

Everyone knew the best way to find elves was to play to their arrogance. He blundered through the forest randomly, snapping branches and trampling small plants underfoot. He left overturned rocks and went out of his way to place clear footprints in mud wherever it was convenient. At one point, he even stopped for lunch, where he left the remains of his meal plainly visible on the ground.

It took less than two hours for the first elves to find him. They thought they were being sneaky, observing him with a variety of abilities while they remained hidden behind trees a thousand feet away. Making so little noise that the whisper of a breeze rattling leaves overhead drowned them out, a patrol of a few dozen slowly encircled Sorin. Arrows were drawn. Bows were nocked.

And then when the commander gave the order to fire, Sorin suddenly wasn’t there anymore. He vanished through the trees, slaughtering elf after elf in the span of seconds. Their sadistic, feral smiles vanished as fear set in, then turned to panic. Most of them died, their anima mere drops of water in the extremely large bucket that was rank 25. Ten of them lived. They fled immediately, and Sorin let them go with a smile.

The trail was clear to him. Wherever they were running, he could follow, and he was confident he’d find many, many more of the pointy-eared monsters waiting for him at the end. It might even be enough to push him to rank 26. And if not, he’d just keep walking until the next opportunity arrived.