The Fractured Tower

Sorin had two goals for the abbey ruin. The first one was to crack the ruin heart and hopefully find another mosaic slate in the cache. He couldn’t guarantee that he’d accomplish that one, but he was confident. Every ruin he’d done to date had contained a slate, and the tower still owed him three more. There was no reason to think it’d get stingy now.

The second goal was more nebulous, but demonic elves had a lot of psychic attacks. He was hoping to collect two or three soulprints in the ruin of that flavor and combine them into something useful. He’d gotten away with processing fights at extreme speeds and handling immense sensory input through sheer skill thus far, but the load was getting to be too much for his brain to handle unaided. That was primarily the fault of him merging soulprints to create new ones that were far too powerful for the floor he was on.

Now he needed to do the same with a mental enhancement soulprint, and this ruin seemed like his best opportunity to get the pieces he needed. In fact, it was the whole reason he’d allotted himself a week to reach Floor 13. Three days would have been more than enough if he just wanted to get there as quickly as possible.

Observer showed him most of the layout of the ruin aboveground, including no less than three different entrances into the catacombs. It started to fail at that point, but it was no great difficulty to go check, and once he actually got down there, he found outposts of elves guarding their territory from each other and from packs of wyrms that burrowed through the ground.

Sorin cut them down without mercy, elf and wyrm alike. With Observer helping him map out the catacombs in real time, he quickly charted a route that hit monsters in as efficient a manner as possible. The elves didn’t simply roll over and die, of course. They retaliated with waves of mental pressure meant to paralyze him and black fire that clung to bare stone, burning it until it resembled tar.

Fortunately, Sorin had the mental fortitude necessary to resist the stunning magic—at least partially—and the physical capabilities to fight through what did manage to slow him down. He still needed to free cast a constant D-rank Frenzied Will to keep himself stable just in case multiple spells hit him at once. He also made a point to target the demonic elves that could hit him with it, just as a matter of sound strategy.

In some ways, he got lucky. Within twenty minutes, he’d retrieved his first copy of Shock Pulse, the stunning spell the elves were wielding against him. It was great in that it provided critical parts to make a spell that affected the mind, but it was all offense. He needed defense. Still, he was willing to call it a win since he could probably just buy some defensive soulprints to merge with it, even if that was incredibly wasteful.

He got lucky again killing a wyrm that dropped Scale Skin. It was a mutagenic F-rank, not something he’d normally even consider using, but it did have the underlying defensive anima matrix he was looking for. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a start. He needed a more traditional soulprint with a passive defense that drew on anima to complete the design he had in mind, and even then, it would only be an E-rank mental defense soulprint.

He cleared out the first section of the catacombs and retreated back to the surface. There were ways to reach a different section, but that involved digging through wyrm-crafted tunnels that he didn’t like the idea of being ambushed in. Besides, it was faster to just run, even if that did mean facing the next set of elven outposts from their most fortified sides.

It wasn’t until the second day, after he’d cleared out all the parts of the catacombs that he could freely access, that he was forced to start digging. Predictably, the wyrm attacks got far worse at that point. In some ways, they were easier to deal with, being far stupider and more predictable than the elves, but the battlefield left much to be desired and often forced him to resort to Living Earth as both his sword and shield.

That soulprint, once among his strongest, had been outstripped by half a dozen other options, which made him feel clunky and inefficient compared to how he’d been fighting over the last few days. It wasn’t a new feeling, unfortunately. He often felt like that since he’d lost rank 100, but for some reason, this in particular bothered him.

Probably because I keep getting bitten, he mused as Counter Heal triggered for the fourth time in half an hour. The wyrms on Floor 12 were significantly better at earth manipulation than their lower floor cousins, so much so that he was repeatedly failing to block them from popping out of the stone even if he could see them coming. Their numbers often ensured that even if he dodged ten of them, the eleventh was right there to sink its fangs into his leg.

Eventually, he forced his way through into a massive, half-mile wide cavern. This was the equivalent of the surface towns of the wood elves, a sulfurous tomb that pushed his Thermal Insulation to the maximum and still left him sweating. Hundreds of scaled, black-horned elves were scattered across the cavern.

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Where to start?

The elves weren’t kind enough to dress their psychics in robes and pointy hats, else he’d have targeted them first. Black fire that clung to whatever it was burning was something he could deal with on his own. Elves with martial might, experts though they might be in their chosen weapons, weren’t enough of a threat to warrant priority treatment. It was the ones who could hit his mind that were the issue.

Let’s make the first targets the ones I can kill without being noticed, he decided after studying the cavern from the entry point he’d torn through the wall. There were plenty of elves that were isolated enough from the main group, though he doubted he’d get them all before the alarms went up.

One way to find out.

* * *

“Might have underestimated them,” Sorin muttered as hellfire rained down on him.

An entire artillery squad had set themselves up on a ledge halfway up the wall, and they did not seem to care about friendly fire. It was impossible to say who’d been responsible for more deaths, but if he was being honest about it, he was pretty sure he wasn’t in the lead.

Thankfully, the tower did not care who killed a monster when it came to soulprints crystallizing in the body. Sorin had spotted one elf, dead and its body slowly being devoured by flames, with a soulprint in its skull. He didn’t stop to identify it, but based on the location, he was hoping for a mental one. He’d promptly decapitated the corpse and flicked the head under some rubble where it would probably be safe until he could return to claim it.

Sorin hacked his way through a squadron of elves wielding pikes in formation, a tactic that might have worked better if they’d been holding a chokepoint instead of meeting him on open ground. He simply juked sideways, pushing Lesser Aspect of Grace to full power to give him more speed, and hit the elves from the left. By the time they caught up to what was happening, he was already in the middle of their formation. Force Weaver took it from there.

One obstacle removed, he sprinted forward, throwing himself into a sideways flip that let four spiraling bolts of black flame roar past him, ending up on the roof of a crafting house that he suspected was used for enchanting their weapons.

With only a few hundred feet separating himself from the artillery platform, he faltered. The weak mental defense soulprint he was holding by free casting wasn’t strong enough to protect him from a concentrated attack, and it seemed the demonic elves had merely been waiting for him to reach the ambush site.

Psychic shocks slammed into him from every direction the instant his boots left that roof. Sorin’s jump immediately turned into a headlong crash that threatened to break his neck. He rolled just before he hit the stone, absorbing the impact across his back, and threw himself back to his feet just in time to parry the rush of an elf who’d appeared out of nowhere.

An assassin build? Observer didn’t see this one coming at all, and that’s a hell of a strong opening strike.

Normally, assassins would use their speed and magic to vanish again if the first attack failed, but this one pressed the advantage by deftly redirecting the momentum from Sorin’s parry to spin around and bring a second blade up, its tip angled to slide up under his ribs.

It wasn’t fast enough, not by a long shot, but then a second wave of stunning psychic shocks hit him. Only this time, instead of being a dozen elves attacking in unison to overwhelm him, it was a single overpowered blast fired from point blank range. Sorin’s planned defense collapsed; the sword dug through flesh and muscle, easily breaking through Iron Bulwark as it flashed into existence to defend him.

This guy’s a ruin guardian! What happened to the damn frog?!

Counter Heal triggered, but it was far too weak to repair the damage on its own. Sorin pushed anima into his weak mental defenses, springboarding off the pain to regain control and put some distance between himself and this unexpectedly powerful adversary. At the same time, another round of stun shocks from the weaker elves crashed into him.

Being overwhelmed was the primary risk of such an attack, and Sorin had planned for that eventuality. His hope was that he’d deplete their numbers too quickly for that to be an issue, but his expectation was that he’d find himself in a situation almost exactly like this one. The ruin guardian was an unpleasant addition, but he could work with it.

At least, he could if he could just remove the psychic team interfering with his duel. Observer showed him where auras were flaring; he’d marked which elves needed to die immediately. It was just a matter of getting to them.

The ruin guardian appeared behind him, seemingly teleporting from one spot to the next, and Sorin responded by pulling out his own boost of speed to regain the lost distance. Not coincidentally, it put him near some of his targets. Those elves promptly found themselves skewered on spears of raw force, which might not have been enough to kill them, but it took them out of the fight for a few seconds.

When the next pulse of psychic shock came out of the ruin guardian, Sorin wasn’t nearly as incapacitated by it. He still got hit, but this time it was a deep gash in his arm he took when he blocked the blade from gutting him. Barely a flesh wound. You’ll have to do better than that to stop me.

The artillery squad continued to rain fire down on the battle, but the flames seemed to roll off the assassin like water. That hardly seemed fair to Sorin, but then, climbing rarely was. He took out the rest of the psychics slowing him down over the next thirty seconds, noting absently as he worked that there was a second mental soulprint in one of them. He didn’t have time to isolate it and protect it like he’d done with the other one, not with the ruin guardian harassing him. All he could do was drag the fight away from the corpse and hope for the best.

“No more helpers,” he told the guardian, who sneered at him and licked the decidedly red, human blood off its blade in response. “Let’s see what you can do when it’s just you, me, and the flames.”

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