The Fractured Tower

“Got a deal for you,” Sorin said, squatting down to look the dying woman in the eyes. “I’m just going to assume you’d like to live, so let’s start with what I want.”

“Go on,” she gasped out. The pain in each word was almost enough to make Sorin feel a bit of sympathy for her. Almost.

If you hadn’t attacked us first. Reap what you sow, I guess.

Rue and Yoru were busy stripping their attackers of their valuables while Odric and Vendis patched Nemari up, leaving just Sorin to question their new dying-but-not-quite-dead prisoner. His initial plan had been to just put the woman out of her misery, not being particularly inclined to prolong someone’s agony for no good reason, not even if they were an enemy.

Then he’d had a thought, and with something to gain, he was fine with letting her wallow in agony for a little while if that’s what he had to do. He’d get what he was after if she could give it to him, or he’d kill her. Either way was fine with him.

“You’re here for this, right?” he asked, gesturing to the key dangling from his neck as he leaned over the woman. “I mean, the last guy tried to do a snatch and dash on it, so I know word’s gotten out that we have it. I can’t imagine a team of rank 16s is down here on Floor 10 for any other reason. That means you know what the key is. You know what it’s used for. Do you know where the door is?”

The woman hesitated for a second, maybe weighing her options before coming to the inevitable conclusion—cooperation or death. “Yes,” she said.

Sorin smiled down at her. “That is exactly what I wanted to hear. Now, we’ve got plenty of healing to go around, and I suspect we could find it in our hearts to share a bit with you if you were willing to play tour guide and take us there. What do you think?”

“How do I know you… won’t kill me… after?” she asked, coughing between words and spraying the ground next to her with blood.

“I guess you’ll just have to take my word on it and hope I’m a more honest climber than you are, huh? We’ll find it eventually either way, so I won’t argue if you want to say no. Your call. Maybe make it quickly, though. I don’t think you’ve got much time left.”

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take the woman that long to arrive at a decision. “Fine,” she snarled.

“Hey, don’t take that tone with me,” Sorin said, turning cold. “You attacked us. I’m well within my rights to run you through and call it a day.”

“All the… blood loss… making me cranky.”

Huh. A sense of humor? That’s unexpected.

“Right. Here’s the deal. We’ll patch you up enough to walk, not to full strength. You lead us to the door, then we let you go. You disappear, and we never cross paths again. I don’t want to know your name. I don’t want to know your plans. I don’t want revenge. You see me walking down the street next month, you turn around and go the other way.”

She gave a weak nod, and he pushed a healing spell into her. While he probably could have managed something C-rank if he really focused on it, he wasn’t interested in top-tier medical treatment for a failed assassin. Lesser Restoration had been good enough to fix Sorin’s arm back on Floor 2. It was good enough to get this climber back on her feet.

Bones popped back into place with a sickening wet suction sound, like a shoe being pulled out of the mud. Next came the grinding of end-on-end alignment and a slight whimper as they refused and ligaments attached themselves. She twitched and tried to hold back a full-body shudder, only partially succeeding, as her body put itself back together under Sorin’s not-so-tender ministrations.

The holes closed up slowly, torn flesh regrowing in a matter of minutes. Once she was able to move again, she stripped off all her magical gear at Sorin’s order. He then searched her, thoroughly but not roughly, and removed a hidden dagger clinging to her thigh by magic, three long, sharpened pins in her hair that he wasn’t sure if they were lock picking tools or weapons, but probably both, and a pinky-sized vial of some green liquid secreted away into a groove carved on the inside of her belt.

“Emergency regeneration potion or poison?” he asked as he examined it.

“Poison,” she admitted. “For dipping the hair pins in.”

“Clever,” he said. “You can have the rest of your gear back when we let you go. I’m keeping the stuff you tried to hide.”

“What about the rest of my team’s equipment?”

“Not part of the deal. I’m only giving you your stuff back because there wouldn’t be much point in making an agreement to let you live if I didn’t give you the tools to actually make it back to the portal hub, would there? We’re certainly not going to escort you home.”

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They bound her hands behind her back with rope, then looped it around her waist and gave Yoru the end to hold as her lead. Besides Sorin, he was the physically strongest member of their team, but in truth, the rope was a token gesture. It was just normal rope, and there wasn’t a person there who couldn’t tear through it with raw strength. Its only purpose was to slow the assassin down for a second if she tried to escape.

“How am I supposed to defend myself when we get attacked by monsters?” she demanded.

Sorin just laughed. “Put those soulprints to use and let us know if you see something or someone about to ambush us, I guess. If we die, I doubt whatever kills us is going to let you go.”

Ruefully, the woman shook her head. “You’re a cold son of a bitch, aren’t you? You’d have made a good assassin.”

“Not in this life,” Sorin told her. “Now, which way are we going?”

* * *

Sorin figured this would go one of two ways. Either the assassin would honor her word and guide them to the door, or she’d attempt to escape. An escape attempt would probably look like her using her soulprints to vanish and sneak away before they could find her, but Sorin didn’t discount the possibility that she had more allies lurking nearby on the floor that she might lead them to.

He was reasonably certain that wouldn’t happen, if only because overwhelming force was the rule of play for ambushes. If they had more people, they would have included them in the initial ambush Maybe there was a camp full of climbers who simply weren’t suited for ambushing victims, but in that case, they also couldn’t hide from Sorin. He’d see the camp long before they reached it.

While he was keenly aware of a chance for treachery in his near future, he thought he had the assassin pegged. She was a smart woman focused on her own desire to stay alive, and as long as she really knew where the door was, the best chance of that happening was to simply do what she’d agreed to. No doubt she’d flee if the opportunity presented itself, but Sorin didn’t give her that opportunity.

That was why, three hours later, they found themselves in a tunnel a few hundred feet long staring at a door made of ivory with a pattern of carvings decorating its border. The scrimshaw depicted a hunter and a lion, both stalking each other. The brief tale ended with the lion victorious and the hunter devoured.

A warning to anyone who thinks to enter about what they’ll find on the other side, Sorin thought. If so, he took it seriously.

If his suspicions were right, the other side of the door wasn’t just a new area in the Citadel. It was a sort of pseudo-floor, a ruin that was completely isolated from the rest of the tower except for this one connection point right in front of them. The technical term was a trial or challenge arena, and they were always far more dangerous than the floor they were found on.

The rewards were equally lucrative, often unique and always far more powerful than their counterparts. Whatever the team pulled out of the trial would likely serve them well for the next twenty or thirty floors, maybe longer considering the red tower’s lack of craftsmen capable of working with higher-floor materials.

“Release me,” the assassin demanded.

“In a moment,” Sorin told her. “We don’t need you following us in there.”

Her equipment was left in a pile a few hundred feet from the door, and the rope was removed from her wrists. That would only take her a second or two to clear, but between travel time and getting dressed, Sorin estimated a ten second window to get everyone through the door. Once the sixth person had passed through—or after a minute or two had passed—the door would reseal itself behind them.

“Ready?” he asked. With returned feelings of agreement coming from everyone, he removed the key from his neck and inserted it into the door. “Let her go.”

Odric and Yoru released their grips on the assassin’s arms at the same time Sorin turned the key. It vanished, along with the keyhole, and the door started to swing open. Light and heat poured out from around the edge and into an environment that so rarely saw either. Everyone else turned to look at it, perhaps unwisely, but the assassin shot off like an arrow, vanishing from Sorin’s senses before she was more than twenty feet away.

The door swung open. Sorin caught a glimpse of a savanna full of long grass waving in a gentle breeze. Hot air flowed over him, not as bad as the desert on Floor 3, but enough to make Thermal Insulation pull just a hair on his anima reservoir.

Then something appeared between him and the door. It was a man, black-cloaked with the hood thrown back to reveal an angular face with sharp cheekbones and cold, dead eyes. His hair was mid-length, swept back in a style that made his forehead appear too long for the rest of his features.

Sorin didn’t recognize the man from looks alone, but he didn’t have to. He felt like he was rank 24, putting him at the pinnacle of red tower advancement, but his aura told a different story. It hung off the man in tatters, clearly the result of a vicious mauling from some void creature, but despite the damage, it was still recognizable as something belonging to a climber well past rank 30.

Samael!

One hand latched onto Sorin’s breastplate, fingers hooking around the metal, and he was jerked off his feet to be thrown through the door. At the same time, the other hand came up and released a shockwave that hurled everyone else back into the darkness. Rock cracked and fell, quickly filling the tunnel with dust and overwhelming sound as they piled up.

Passing through the door cut Sorin off from the Citadel. Horizon Walker expanded out in every direction around him, feeling the auras of nearby monsters and mapping out the savanna, but it couldn’t push even an inch past the door’s threshold. He had no idea if the others had survived the cave-in or not.

Then Samael stepped through the door, his tall, thin form filling it and blocking Sorin’s view of the Stalking Depths. He hesitated there for a moment, his eyes settling on Sorin as he took a deep breath before slowly letting it out and fully entering the trial. The door remained open behind him, but it revealed nothing besides a wall of loose stones that would take Yoru and Odric a few minutes to dig through, assuming they were still alive. No one else was getting through the door before it closed.

“Your friends will not be joining us,” Samael said. “It’s time you and I had a real talk about what’s going on in the towers and our roles in this whole farce.”

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