The Fractured Tower

Mind Shell wasn’t anything fancy. It was simply a blanket protection against mental intrusions of all kinds. That made Limited Telepathic Bond redundant, or it would have been if Sorin hadn’t scrapped it out for parts when he was building his new soulprint.

There would be time for sophistication later once he pushed it up past D-rank. Right now, it satisfied his requirements for a passive defense against a rare, but potent, form of magic. Once he reached rank 27, he was going to add in his first mental bolstering soulprint, and it would be a powerful one. It was complete overkill for the current floor of the tower, but at some point in the future, he was going to need to be able to process and sort out attacks from dozens of sources all arriving at the same time.

It was only after Sorin was done merging the soulprints together that he noticed something was missing in the house. “Hey,” he said. “Where’s the enchanter’s cabinet?”

“Ask Yoru,” Rue replied, which Sorin couldn’t do since the man had left while he was working in his soulspace. “He took it to some enchanter he knew to get the process of charging it up started.”

“I hope it’s someone he trusts with his life,” Sorin said. “Climbers have killed to claim ownership over things worth a lot less.”

“That’s what Nemari said, too. Yoru vouched for the guy, so I guess it’s fine.”

Sorin couldn’t locate a piece of furniture, magical or otherwise, nearly as easily as he could find a person. If this enchanter was overcome by greed, it was going to be a chore to track down the cabinet. Even if they were honest, that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t take it from them. There wasn’t really a good solution, though, not unless Sorin wanted to stand guard over it himself.

That was obviously out of the question. He’d just have to trust Yoru knew what he was doing. And if not, well, he’d make tracking the cabinet down his top priority after dealing with the Void Wall. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if someone else made use of it for a month or two.

“Any news about the Hellion factions?” Sorin asked, changing the subject.

“Nothing’s really changed in the last few days. They might be holding back now while they wait to see what you’re going to do,” Odric said.

Sorin hadn’t, in fact, given any thought to that. If anything, he hoped they’d simply kill each other off, leaving one faction that was too weak to hold control of the city’s underworld. Unfortunately, they would almost certainly cause a lot of collateral damage during the fighting. The city was already in rough shape, almost on the brink of collapse, really.

I wonder what happened to the city at the base of the indigo tower. Then again, maybe there never was anyone there. The void infestation predates humanity coming here, if I’m understanding everything right. Regardless, if we don’t get the void under control here, everyone in the red tower is eventually going to die.

“Any movement from the high families?” he asked.

Rue just snorted while Odric took a moment to consider the question, but he finally heaved a heavy sigh and answered. “Yoru or Nemari would be able to give you a better answer, but no, as far as I can see, they’re turtling in their strongholds and waiting it out.”

“Useless assholes,” Rue growled.

Sorin had to agree with her assessment. The city labored under their taxes while they enjoyed the privileges of being the ruling elite. That meant when a disaster threatened, it became their responsibility to address it. But as far as Sorin could tell, the red tower high families did nothing but take. Deposing them was probably every bit as worthy a goal as ending the remnants of the Black Hellions.

But if we do that, it’ll just be a matter of time until some new assholes climb to the top of the pile and take their turn. Then we’re right back where we started, except probably worse off from all the resources and lives lost in the fighting. This is why I avoided Floor 0 back home. I don’t have the time or the desire to deal with this shit.

“You think the city can hold together for another month?” he asked.

“No idea. Food prices are already skyrocketing,” Odric said.

“Yeah. I noticed everything at the market seemed more expensive than usual. Supply lines are going down, I guess.”

“The climbers who normally bring that stuff back to Floor 0 are hiding in their masters’ estates,” Rue said bitterly. “Because fuck everyone who relies on them.”

“That reminds me, we need to start looking into dimensional storage.”

“Dimensional what now?” Rue asked.

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Sorin hadn’t seen many signs of it in the red tower, not even when he’d been given access to the Telpike vaults. He’d asked, and Morlin had denied having access to any. Sorin hadn’t pressed the issue. Dimensional storage didn’t really show up until about the same time C-rank soulprints did, which wouldn’t be until Floor 20 at the earliest, though Lorvaine had had access to something. He’d hoped to ask her what that was once they finally caught up with her.

If the red tower had gotten unlucky, it was entirely possible that getting it from a soulprint just wasn’t an option in the handful of floors where monsters were powerful enough to have the soulprints for it. Similarly, the materials needed to enchant something with the ability could be unavailable. But lower quality reagents could be substituted in if the enchanter was powerful enough.

Or, lacking power, an enchanter’s cabinet could work. And since Sorin was sick and tired of hauling around bulky, cumbersome bags, he wanted a storage enchantment from the cabinet as the next two or three things it produced. In order to do that, though, they needed an enchanter who knew how. That was where he was afraid they were going to stall out in the process.

“Bags that are bigger on the inside than the outside, or objects which anchor a portal to a closet somewhere else that allows you to dump all your loot into without having to lug around heavy bags or decide what to keep and what to abandon.”

“Sounds handy. You’d think more people would use something like that.”

“They would, if this tower wasn’t all screwed up. It starts getting real common around Floor 30, and not all that rare below that as low-ranked climbers simply buy it from more powerful ones,” Sorin explained.

There were probably some dimensional storage bags in some high family’s armory. If nothing else, they’d be leftover from the previous generation, back when climbers could still reach high enough to find them. Morlin might even have been lying about not having any, but Sorin hadn’t wanted to press him about it when they’d first met, and he’d been too pissed to think to do so at the end.

Either way, Yoru would know what they were and understand the value in using the cabinet to make some now that they no longer needed to worry about maximizing their chances of surviving a fight with Samael. That portal had already opened and closed months ago.

The conversation ended soon after that. The rest of the team knew what Sorin wanted, and he was in a hurry to get caught up to them so they weren’t sitting on their hands. Losing Algial as a front-liner made climbing with just the four of them much riskier, but there was only so much they could accomplish on Floor 0. That meant the sooner Sorin gained access to Floor 13, the better.

* * *

Sorin knew the rough location of the portal guardian, somewhere in the dragon kin territory on the east side of the floor. One tree pretty much looked the same as another though, at least when there were a few million of them. The only real landmarks were some towns—noted to be avoided at all costs in the guides—and a few of the larger rivers that wound their way across the floor.

That wasn’t a lot to go on, which was why Floor 12 was considered so frustrating to navigate. It was too easy to get turned around end up having a hostile, organized, sapient, nigh-invisible force hunting a climbing team. Even climbers that were well-equipped to survive such encounters often found themselves separated and turned around in the chaos of a fight.

Sorin didn’t have that particular issue, thankfully. He was good enough at keeping track of things to not lose his way in the first place, but North Homing was an excellent soulprint to counter exactly that kind of problem. It might keep him from accidentally going the wrong direction, but what it didn’t do was point to his actual goal.

For that, Sorin relied on his heavily enhanced speed and endurance combined with the unparalleled range of Observer. It also helped that dragon kin, unlike elves, were quite fond of burning down the woods for miles-long stretches. The tower grew it all right back, of course, but it made for a stark change of scenery when Sorin finally reached it.

The whole sky was a haze of smoke with shadowy, winged, humanoid figures flitting through it. Occasionally, a flash of light lit up the haze as one of the dragon kin belched out another gout of fire. Not being terribly interested in hunting them down, Sorin took that as a sign to steer clear. Dragon kin had fantastic senses, but they’d blinded themselves with clouds of smoke.

The ones on the ground, however, had no such issues spotting him. That wasn’t a huge problem since, for the most part, they failed to catch up to him and eventually gave up. Every now and then, it just wasn’t worth the effort to go around, and in that case, Sorin tore through the offending monster like it was made of paper.

Eventually, after two days of non-stop searching, he finally located the portal guardian. It was a thirty-foot-long spider with dragon scales for armor. Web cables thicker than Sorin’s waist were strung up all throughout its territory, much to the dismay of more than a few dragon kin who’d found themselves trapped there. Most of them had starved without ever escaping, and that was if they were lucky. Being picked as lunch while still alive was inarguably a much worse fate.

Sorin killed the spider almost before it even realized he was there. Stealth Phase got him to within twenty feet of it—it relied far too heavily on intruders brushing up against the maze of web lines covering the arena—and his sword did the rest.

Still not enough to hit rank 27, he noted as he pulled in the relatively large amount of anima the portal guardian had given up upon its death. It was only two or three times as much as the average monster back in the savanna had contained.

Part of him regretted not sticking around to keep pushing, but he’d made the right choice. He could find anima like that again in a few floors, and it would be far safer once he could retreat to rest and recover. That wasn’t even considering the profit angle. There was no telling how many danirs he’d left behind simply because he couldn’t carry anything else.

Of course, I was a lot less worried about money when I thought the deal with Morlin would hold. He was an unreliable ally, though, and it was only going to get worse once Samael died. That was one less thing he needed from me, one less piece of leverage to keep him behaving.

The Antechamber portal opened a few seconds after the spider finished twitching. Sorin gave the dead monster one last look to ensure there was nothing crystallizing in the body—not that he expected there to be; portal guardians almost never manifested a soulprint—then stepped through.

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