The Fractured Tower

No soulprint was absolute. Horizon Walker was powerful, not in the least because of how many disparate parts went into its construction, but it was a D-rank sensory ability. It wasn’t surprising that someone had defeated it, especially not when Sorin was expecting climbers of higher ranks to be punching down in their attempts to steal the Lion’s Fang Key.

“We’re going to have to decide how much we’re willing to share with your father moving forward,” Sorin said to Yoru. “This would not be happening if we hadn’t told him about the key. Your house has leaks.”

Yoru just grimaced in response. Sorin wondered if he was even now going through the roster of servants and retainers, wondering who had divided loyalties, who was a spy for rival families, and who was just selling secrets to the highest bidder. It was disheartening to cast suspicions on people he’d known for years, possibly his entire life.

The would-be thief was scattered across the ground in chunks, but some clues had survived Force Weaver. The boots, for example, were scuffed to hell, but they were in one piece. Definitely enchanted. Probably speed or stealth. Maybe both if they’re high quality.

There was also a glove on one hand that had survived the blitz of force blades, and a pair of daggers had been thrown free from the assassin’s belt after it had been shredded. It was too bad life wasn’t so easy as trashy fiction. There was no convenient identification or letter detailing who the dead climber’s employer had been. It wasn’t even certain there was an employer. It could have been a case of a greedy climber who thought a team of rank 10s were easy prey.

They collected what they could and stowed it away with the other loot. The boots were tempting, but they were too small for Sorin’s feet, and he already had his own magical boots anyway. The glove was a simple, manual dexterity-enhancing piece, perfect for pick-pockets and stage magicians, but less useful for swordsmen.

The daggers Sorin made a mental note to have properly appraised. The enchantments were complex enough that he couldn’t figure them out with casual observation alone, but he suspected they were transforming, along with a few of the more standard upgrades like durability and sharpness.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but already having everything we need for soulprints and better gear given to us really takes the fun out of getting loot,” Rue said.

“Just be grateful for it. It’s the main reason the last few floors have been so easy,” Sorin told her.

“You think Floor 9 was easy?”

“No, but that was because it had monsters from higher floors on it. Imagine trying to survive that with a patchwork build and whatever equipment you could scrounge together.”

“We wouldn’t have been in that situation, though,” Nemari said. “Without our sponsor, we’d likely simply be a lower rank, progressing cautiously and taking our time farming what we needed to maximize our capabilities each floor.”

There was a lot of truth to that. Normal climbing teams did not go from rank 0 to rank 10 in the matter of a few months. They were well ahead of schedule to fulfill Sorin’s promise of rank 20 in a year, though he didn’t think he’d be hitting rank 100 in under half a decade. There’d been too many unaccounted-for variables, and while the sponsorship had sped up their already impressive climbing speed, they’d soon outgrow what Morlin could provide them.

“Just enjoy being overpowered while you can,” Sorin said. “It won’t last much longer. The stronger you get, the less of an advantage being two or three ranks over the floor is going to bring you.”

“Maybe we should make it part of our strategy to always gain two ranks on every floor,” Yoru suggested.

Sorin shrugged. “We can try. I don’t know how well it’ll work. I think it’s more likely that we can maintain a three to five floor lead, but that we’d spend years on individual floors trying to grind away the anima needed to progress even a single rank if we were already twenty ranks ahead.”

Another hour passed before they saw signs of another living creature nearby. It started as just a flicker of motion in the mist, something so faint and brief that Sorin wasn’t even sure if it was real or just the shadows themselves shifting. Not being one to ignore his instincts, however, he was instantly on his guard.

Projecting wariness to the rest of the team through Limited Telepathic Bond, he scanned the darkness around them. Living Earth showed only empty ground. Horizon Walker didn’t reveal any auras. His own eyes and ears showed him nothing. Despite all of that, Sorin was sure there was something out—

The ground seemed to spit a blob of black chitin at Yoru. With reflexes born from long years of training and the power of Speed Burst, he reacted instantly, and that was probably the only thing that saved him. The chitin unfolded into an unholy nightmare of segmented legs, pincers, and stingers heading right for his face, only to be turned aside mere inches away by a length of sharp steel.

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Yoru batted the enormous bug away from him and followed up with a needle of solid stone that pinned the monster to the ground. It thrashed in place, a strange combination of hissing and clicking coming from somewhere on its body. A second needle pierced through it, sending the monster into one last spasm before it went still.

“You didn’t sense that either?” Yoru asked Sorin.

“Nothing.”

“The ambush capabilities of monsters here are nothing if not terrifying. Stalking Depths is a well-earned name for this area.”

This wasn’t what I saw before, Sorin thought with a frown. This thing came from below, small enough to shield itself from Living Earth’s detection capabilities. There’s something else still here.

There wasn’t even a hole in the ground where the bug monster had emerged. Whatever it did to move through the earth, it was so complete that it left no trace of its passage. Sorin pointed it out with a stern warning. “There could be more of them. We can’t let our guard down for even a second. Next time, it might be dozens of them swarming us.”

Left unsaid was to be equally wary of human predators, but Sorin thought they were all on the same page. He didn’t want to say anything out loud, though. With any luck, whoever was stalking them—if it wasn’t another monster that just happened to move above ground—would think they were undiscovered and try to take advantage of the next attack to ambush them.

Even if Sorin was wrong, he didn’t want to linger in the area. Where there was one bug monster, there was sure to be more. The Stalking Depths was not a good place to farm anima, and the sooner they found the door, the better. That could only happen if they kept moving, so he once again prodded the rest of the team into motion.

* * *

Six hours of enforced watchfulness was enough to tire anyone out. They’d started off sharp, but as time dragged on without them finding anything else and exhaustion started to creep in, they’d slipped. That was what the ambushers had been waiting for.

The attack came as they were walking out of the mouth of a box canyon, having finished exploring it and confirming the door wasn’t hidden at the back end of it. Ever paranoid, Sorin had already flagged the area as the perfect spot to set up for an ambush. His team would have to pass back through it, and they’d have limited visibility moving forward due to the canyon walls narrowing their line of sight.

That gave the attackers time to prepare, to get everyone into position, and to eliminate variables since they could reliably determine their victims’ angle of approach. It really didn’t get much better than that, at least not for an ad hoc field-ambush.

The pulse of wariness Sorin projected to the others as they approached the exit probably saved at least one life. He went out first, and the mist swirled around him, masking their movements. That in and of itself was suspicious—the mist tended to sweep by in slow, creeping, horizontal flows, not swirl in place except when something passed through it at a high speed—so he wasn’t surprised when he suddenly found a woman standing in the middle of their formation.

She’d targeted Rue, perhaps thinking the youngest and physically smallest member of their team would be the easiest to eliminate. The blade she brought up was a dagger, almost identical to the one Sorin had taken off the first ambusher earlier in the day, and he had just enough time to note that the blade was actually curving with her swing, lengthening the cutting edge to help slice through armor and flesh.

Then he was dealing with his own attacker. A burly man who had no business being that sneaky loomed over him, bursting through the darkness and already coming down on Sorin’s head like an avalanche of muscle and steel. Two more climbers appeared to attack the rest of the team.

Sorin’s mind went to work analyzing the threat even as his body responded. Rank 16, by the feel of them. Tough, but not insurmountable. Survive the initial ambush and we’ll take them. They’re fast, but obviously hyper-specialized. I bet they try to pull back and disappear in the next few seconds when we don’t fall down and die for them.

A few seconds was a lot of time when Speed Burst was factored in, and since he’d ensured his entire team had it, none of them were blindsided by the sudden blitz. The man attacking him brought a sword that was six feet long and had to weigh at least forty pounds down in a two-handed swing that Sorin had no doubt could carve through a block of steel as easily as it could split him from crown to groin.

It had momentum and power behind it, but something like that wasn’t easy to redirect mid-swing. Sorin took one long step to the side, then whipped his own sword out, the draw-turned slash powered by muscle and magic to bite deep into the ambusher’s side.

Enchanted leather couldn’t stand up to the strength Sorin brought to bear. Neither could whatever fortifying soulprint the man had. Anima flared, as evidenced by a sudden deepening rush of color in the man’s aura, but it broke almost the instant it appeared. The sword cut deep, sliced cleanly through the man’s spine, and then kept going. Sorin finished the slice with a single step forward and a half-turn, ending the attack by cutting his target into two pieces.

The other three didn’t last much longer. The woman’s attack had missed completely, or rather, it had sliced through the air in front of Rue, her combination of light-and-shadow warping soulprints tricking her attacker into misjudging her position. She’d been hit from both sides by Odric and Yoru before she could recover, and while she wasn’t dead, she was on the ground and bleeding out.

Nemari had been run through by a sword, the after-effects of her Barrier soulprint already unraveling after it had been overpowered. In exchange, the man who’d stabbed her had lost his head to a jet of water that had blasted out of the uncapped waterskin hanging off Nemari’s hip. He was only upright still because his grip hadn’t slackened even in death, though the sword was already sliding free as his corpse sank to the ground.

Surprisingly, it was Vendis who’d fared the best. Perhaps the extra fraction of a second needed to reach him at the back of the formation had given him all the time he’d needed. Perhaps he’d simply been more alert than anyone else. Whatever the reason, the remains of what used to be a person were already crumbling to dust at his feet, and an orb of dark, dark blood rotated in the air behind Vendis’s right shoulder.

“Whoa,” Yoru said, blinking in surprise. “When did you learn to do that?”

“From studying the vampires in the previous area, sir,” Vendis told him.

“Uh, guys, little help here?” Nemari asked as the sword finished sliding free from her stomach.

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