The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 70

Sorin had a strong, almost overpowering, urge to snap the slate in two. Instead, he carefully placed it into his pack, stood up, and walked a few steps away.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Okay, that’s not helping. What the absolute fucking fuck, tower? Why doesn’t this slate fit? Why the hell did I go through all that, all for something I can’t use?! What, do you want me to just randomly guess until I extend the mosaic in whichever arbitrary direction this piece is supposed to connect to?

“Sorin, you alright there?” Rue asked. “You, uh… You look a little…”

“I. Am. Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. Breathe in. Breathe out.

“You don’t look fine. Or your aura doesn’t. I’ve never seen so much red shift into one so quickly.”

Spinning in place, Sorin announced, “I am going to take the armoire back to Floor 0. I will be back in ten minutes. Then I am going back to that ruin, and I am stabbing beetles in the face until I feel better. You are welcome to join me. Or take the day off if you want. I don’t care.”

“Maybe I should go with you,” Yoru offered. “Easier to carry with two people.”

“Sure. Good time to test out your new mosaic soulprint anyway. Let’s go.”

The armoire wasn’t really that heavy. It was mostly just awkwardly big. Even a rank 0 could have lifted it, but it was easier to move with an extra set of hands. Sorin pulled himself, Yoru, and the furniture through the gate, not relaxing until they both appeared on the path. The warning to say nothing held, so they worked in silence walking the armoire toward the far end where the Floor 0 node waited for them. Passenger Through the Void at least made it so they didn’t need to remain in contact the whole time.

The room itself was empty by design. It had only Sorin’s mark, carved by his own hand, on the back wall, opposite a door locked from the inside. Nobody was supposed to enter the room ever, for any reason, and supposedly, only Yoru and his father had copies of the key that would grant access.

It was only once they came back into the world in an empty, locked room deep in Yoru’s family’s estate that they could talk about it. They stood the armoire up against a wall, Yoru went to find a servant to fetch his father, and then they settled down to wait.

“The trip felt different this time,” Yoru said casually, like he was just making conversation.

“Yeah?”

“Less intimidating. Still terrifying in its own way, but more like witnessing something happen from a safe distance than being in the middle of it.”

Sorin gave a grunt for an answer.

“We should probably test it at some point in a controlled environment. We don’t want another incident like what happened on Floor 4.”

“Yep. Good idea.”

Yoru paused, struggling for something to say. Finally, he sighed and let it drop. They waited in silence for a few minutes until Morlin showed up, then Yoru explained what they’d found and what they thought it was. Sorin could practically see the old Telpike salivating with greed as he regarded the armoire.

“We’re not certain,” he said, hoping to douse that flame before it got out of control. “It’s speculation, so temper your expectations. If it does work, we’ll be claiming first dibs on getting some real enchantments from it. You’ll have the rest of your life to exploit it. We have months at best.”

At some point, Samael would realize what Sorin was doing. When that happened, it was possible the other climber would try to move against him. Sorin meant to be as strong as possible, even though that meant dragging the rest of the team up in rank faster than their skills could develop to match. Having them at rank 30, even if they were still clumsy with their power, was better than a team of rank 10 allies. At least they’d have anima reserves true to their rank and builds that Sorin himself supervised.

“Hrmmm,” the old man said, clearly unhappy about that idea. Morlin wasn’t a man used to being made to wait for what he wanted, but Sorin wasn’t budging on this one. If the armoire could do what it was supposed to, it could give them a huge advantage when it came time to confront Samael. And he knew that Morlin knew that, so Sorin wasn’t surprised when no further protests were produced.

“Unfortunately, the real prize we were after didn’t make itself known,” Sorin said. “We did loot the cache, at least.”

“We did get a slate like you wanted,” Yoru pointed out.

“Yes, but not a useful one. Or at least not an immediately useful one,” he amended. “It wasn’t what I was looking for, either way. Right now, my biggest concerns are void creatures and climbers over rank 20 coming at me in teams.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“But not singular,” Yoru interjected with a snort.

“And the idea of this tower-forged cache was to fix one of those problems,” Sorin said as patiently as he could. “Which we failed to accomplish.”

“It’s the wrong shape, or size, or something,” Yoru explained. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t fit. The tower could make it work anyway. Maybe the slates are just standard size when you get them and reshape themselves when used. It’s not like we’ve got anyone to explain the process.”

“Maybe,” Sorin considered.

“You don’t think so?” Morlin asked, apparently picking up on Sorin’s lack of enthusiasm for the theory.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Why not?”

“The symbol on the slate looks like it’s for some sort of traveling. I don’t have anything like that in my mosaic, so whatever this thing does, I’m going to have to find the right place for it first.”

“I suppose you’re the expert,” Morlin said.

He wasn’t. He really, really wasn’t. Sorin was making pretty much everything up as he went along, and there were enough differences between his home tower and the new one that he couldn’t take anything for granted. That was particularly annoying because there were also enough similarities that it was very easy to do exactly that.

“Right, well, the ruin’s cleared. Assuming the monsters react normally to losing the heart, we’re going to spend a day or two farming anima, then move on to the Giant’s Finger and head up to Floor 6. We’ll come back for a resupply before taking out the floor guardian, then check in once we reach the next portal hub.”

Sorin gave Yoru a few minutes with his father to discuss whatever personal things he wanted to talk about, most of which was mundane updates about inter-family drama and politics, though there was the confirmation that the team’s mosaics let them push past their previous floor-limited rank.

The idea of rotating the team was kicked about to see if they could get a few dozen climbers with that capability, but it was quickly shot down by both Sorin and Morlin, if for different reasons. Sorin wholly believed the tower was alive and sentient, and that it likely wouldn’t take well to them trying to milk it like that.

Morlin didn’t come out and say it, but since he was still ineligible to join Sorin in the Antechamber for another fifteen floors, he couldn’t personally benefit from the idea. Combined with his reluctance to see a large number of probably-not-loyal-to-him climbers potentially growing stronger than anyone else in the tower, it was no surprise that he let the idea die almost as soon as Yoru suggested it.

Ten minutes ended up taking closer to twenty, but eventually they returned to the rest of the team. Yoru took point in apologizing for the delay, then they set off as a group to go see if they could return to killing the massive, armored beetles without Sorin’s mere presence inciting them to uncontrollable and suicidal levels of aggression.

Everyone else waited while Sorin tested the first of the beetles. It attacked him immediately, of course. They’d always done that, though. More beetles started coming up out of the ground from various nearby locations, not all of which were inside the former boundary of the ruin. They weren’t showing up in an inexhaustible wave, however, which was what Sorin had been worried about.

He killed a few of them—just enough to keep the area relatively clear while another ten made their way up to ground level—then he took off running. The ones that were already locked onto him gave chase, as usual, but the beetles that were still deep underground quickly lost interest.

I knew it! The ruin heart was functioning as some sort of hive mind. Without its coordinating influence on the swarm, they’re reverting to individualistic behavior, just like the guide predicted.

He’d only been concerned because there’d been nothing about them pursuing him across miles of terrain in the original report, so it stood to reason that making sure the details about what happened after destroying the ruin heart were also correct. Between the abnormal behavior and the fact that he might have been the first climber to ever manage to properly sneak past thousands of the monsters, there were too many inconsistencies to take the outcome at face value.

After killing off the beetles, Sorin returned to the rest of the team. “Looks like we’re set to repeat yesterday’s strategy,” he informed them. “There are still a bunch outside the ruins, but they’re less dense. I think we can keep ahead of them, especially if we kill them two at a time.”

“And… how are we going to do that?” Nemari asked. “We’re a bit light on firepower to be splitting the ranks unless you want to let our melee get up close.”

“I was thinking I’d soften one for you to hammer and one for myself to kill.”

“You’d be relying on us to take our target down before it gets to you,” Yoru pointed out.

“Then I guess you’d better work hard,” he said simply. “If it ends up not working out, we’ll abandon the strategy, but I want to stab some giant fucking bugs and get a ton of anima today.”

And that was what they did. For the next six hours, the team slowly cleared out all the bugs outside the boundary to the ruin, then, once they had their staging area set up, proceeded to bait out hundreds and hundreds more targets.

Everyone made swift progress, though none of them broke through to rank 7. That was fine; there were still plenty of monsters left for them the next day. It was on day three that Yoru finally pushed past the threshold, followed soon enough by everyone else. Sorin himself didn’t reach rank 12 like he wanted, but he was close enough that he thought he could if he was a bit greedy about the monsters they killed while they traveled.

It was tempting to sit around waiting for the ruin heart to regrow, but the rewards were never worth the effort a second time, and they didn’t have weeks to sit still, anyway. The anima gains had been fantastic when the team was rank 5, and they were honestly still not bad at rank 7, but the extra ranks weren’t much of an advantage for anyone who couldn’t free cast.

For Sorin, it was no longer worth the effort. Going up to the next floor would result in more anima for his time, and since no one else could do anything with the extra soulspace until they got their next set of soulprints, they decided to move on.

Three days later, they were camping out on the plains near the Giant’s Finger when Yoru’s eyes snapped open. “I did it,” he announced, his lips curling into a self-indulgent smile.

“Did what?” Rue asked. “Wait. Thermal Insulation? You pulled off the merger? Holy crap! Congratulations, man! Tell me how you did it. I swear I’m close, but I can’t figure out how to make it all fit together.”

Sorin watched everyone crowd around Yoru with a small smile. I remember the first time someone on my team did that. God, I was so jealous. Time really does have a way of getting away from you.