The Fractured Tower

Rue wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. Her whole body was trembling with exhaustion, and no amount of anima pushed through her soulspace could still it. If she’d thought Sorin had been a harsh taskmaster back when they were on Floor 2, she knew better now. He’d been pushing them, true, but he’d more or less let them set the pace. Those days were over.

Two weeks passed in a blur of work. The team cleared Floor 13 the same day they entered. Floors 14 and 15 followed quickly enough, but once they reached Floor 16, progress slowed. Sorin pushed up to rank 27, and the rest of the team joined Yoru at rank 16, but that wasn’t enough of an advantage to just crush the floor anymore.

They still took what other climbers might have charitably called wild risks, but that was only because Sorin was there to act as a safety net. That part wasn’t so bad. It was keeping up with him between fights that was the problem. There wasn’t much he could do to ease the burden, but he was so damn fast now that he could easily double their top speed, and he never, ever, ever showed the slightest hint of fatigue.

Goddamn B-rank physical enhancement soulprint! It’s not fair! How’s a girl with E and D-ranks supposed to keep up?

Rue wasn’t the only one struggling, either. In fact, Nemari and Od were both doing significantly worse than she was, and she was sure the only reason Yoru led the pack was that he was the best at merging soulprints. She wasn’t even sure what all he had going on with his build anymore, just that he probably had twice as many soulprints as he should.

She didn’t know where he found the time to practice. Every time Sorin called for a break, Rue basically dropped where she was standing and didn’t move again until someone put food in front of her or it was time to start walking.

“There is no way I can do this for another eight floors,” she told Nemari.

“There’s no way I can do this for the rest of this floor.”

Someone was going to die if they kept going like this, and Sorin had to know that. He couldn’t be everywhere, protecting everyone, all the time. Sooner or later, one of them was going to make a mistake too big to be fixed. It had already almost happened once on the previous floor when Rue had been on the verge of bleeding out from four spears pierced through her stomach.

At the moment, Sorin was circling their temporary camp. Rue could feel him flickering around in her aura sense, sometimes there and sometimes out of its range. That meant he was going more than half a mile out, searching for monsters to kill.

“We need more than half an hour at a time to recover,” Rue said. “I think we should pull back to Floor 0 and take a day, maybe more than a day.”

“One day might not hurt, but if we do that every floor, we’re going to lose over a week,” Yoru said. “And I suspect it’ll be more than once a floor. A month of downtime could allow the void to completely consume Floor 25.”

“It’s not like we’re half-assing this,” Rue argued. “I am giving it everything I’ve got, but I don’t have the energy in me.”

“You need stronger endurance soulprints,” Yoru told her.

“I know! That’d be great, but I don’t have them.”

“I’m working on that,” Sorin said, scaring the hell out of Rue.

How’d he get back here without me sensing his aura?!

He ignored her flinch. “Ideally, you’d all have at least a C-rank soulprint, but that’s... unlikely. Merging some Fs or Es is one thing. Mixing multiple disparate soulprints into a C-rank is a whole other level of complexity. You could spend months or years learning how to do that.”

“What’s your alternative?” Rue asked.

“Buy one that’s already C-rank. Failing that, find them myself.”

“That would mean going ahead by yourself,” Nemari pointed out. “If you do that, we won’t receive void-related rewards from the Antechambers.”

They were quite certain about that. Despite the amount of time it had taken them to clear Floors 10, 11, and 12 without Sorin, the Antechamber rewards had been nothing unique. His return had resulted in a strengthening of their Void Resistance traits at the Floor 13 Antechamber and a set of slates for all of them except Sorin on Floor 14. He’d been quite upset about that development.

They’d set the plates into their mosaics at the Floor 15 Antechamber, giving them all a new soulprint called Soul Tether, which Rue had to admit she didn’t understand at all. She knew what it did—kept her anchored to the tower—but she had no idea how or why that was useful. It had something to do with voidlings, though, so she supposed she’d figure it out once they started fighting them regularly. It had been months since the last time she’d had to deal with one.

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Really, she never even saw them unless Sorin was with them, but they’d encountered three in the last few weeks. Two had been so weak that he’d killed them almost before Rue knew they were there, but the third had been the size of a damn tree, and not a sapling either. Apparently the soulprint Sorin had gotten from the tower was called Void Eater, and it lived up to its name. The big one lasted almost twenty seconds before it broke apart.

“I think Samael had a way to combine soulprints outside a soulspace,” Sorin said. “I don’t know how he did it, but if I’m right, and if I can find a way to replicate it...”

“Maybe, but is that something you can figure out in a few weeks?”

“No,” Sorin admitted. “Probably not.”

“Then we’re right back where we started. There are no C-rank soulprints on the open market, and we’ve lost our connections to the high families. Unless you go up another six or seven floors ahead of us, there’s no chance of a C-rank crystallizing out of anything we kill.”

“We could stack multiple endurance soulprints of lower ranks,” Od suggested. “It wouldn’t be as efficient, but we’re pressed for time.”

“It doesn’t work that way. If you took five D-rank soulprints that grant you increased stamina, you might get one and a half’s worth of effect out of it. Too much overlaps and is wasted. If we’re going to go that route, better to focus all your anima into growing the ones you already have to C-rank.”

“And why aren’t we just doing that?” Yoru asked.

“Because you’d cripple yourself later when you go to pull them out to replace them with something better,” Sorin said.

It was those kinds of statements that reminded Rue that Sorin thought on a completely different scale than she did. C-rank was basically the pinnacle, as far as she was concerned. Climbers who had B or higher soulprints were mythological figures. Supposedly, there’d been a handful in the tower back when she’d been a child. The old generation, mostly retired or dead now, sometimes spoke of the people who’d reached rank 30 or even 40, who had abilities that could casually rearrange the face of an entire floor.

And Sorin considered that to be an intermediate step on the climb. C-rank soulprints were trash to him, and he didn’t want his team crippling their long-term potential with subpar garbage C-ranks that wouldn’t function as the building blocks for something better. It was like the idea that they’d stop before hitting at least rank 50 didn’t exist.

“Sorin,” Rue said. “We’re probably never going to replace a C-rank soulprint, even if it’s not as good as it could be.”

It was almost comical the way his mouth hung open. It never even occurred to him that any of us would be fine with just pouring anima into our current build, she thought as she tried not to laugh.

“Are you... Are you sure?” he asked. “You’d be sacrificing your future as climbers if you build toward this. Maybe you get to Floor 40 with a little luck and a lot of patience, but too many weak soulprints will make it impossible to keep up with the tower on the higher floors.”

Rue rolled her eyes. “Show of hands. Who here ever thought they’d make it to Floor 30, let alone 40?”

No one moved.

Sorin looked around, his shoulders slumped, and he heaved a great sigh. “Alright, if you’re sure. I know you don’t think of this as some big sacrifice, throwing away your potential, but... it is. It means a lot to me.”

“Alright, don’t get sappy on us,” Rue told him. “So we’re just going to pump up Strength of the Blood and Sentinel’s Vigilance until they’re C-rank?”

“You’re still using those?” Sorin asked, aghast. “No, don’t do that. We’ll find something good that’s D-rank. You guys take a break. I’ll go farm it myself.”

He turned to Yoru to consult about monsters that might have what they needed on the last few floors. After a few minutes of deliberation, they decided on a thirty-mile stretch of woods on Floor 15 that was utterly infested with smolderhide gnolls. The runts were nine feet tall and four hundred pounds, and they only got bigger from there.

A dense population and a predisposition toward physical soulprints was the perfect setup. The fact that climbers tended to avoid it, not wanting to tangle with a tribe of sapient monsters, meant Sorin could expect a higher-than-average coalescence rate. The only issue—other than actually fighting the furry killing machines—was that Sorin would need to travel over a hundred miles to reach them.

Liminal Gateway and Passenger Through the Void got them all safely back to Floor 0, where most of them immediately collapsed into sleep. Sorin stuck around for a few hours to go speak to the enchanter about that dimensional storage project he was pushing for. Yoru went with him, and Rue wished them both luck before falling face first into one of the beds.

She woke up twelve hours later to find Sorin sitting at the table, eating a bowl of stew and a load of bread. Yoru, sitting across from him, had bags under his eyes, but he’d volunteered to stand the watch, so Rue didn’t feel any pity for him.

“Did you get what you were after?” Rue asked, eyeing up a bag that smelled distinctly of burnt fur.

“Plenty of stuff,” Sorin said. “But I’m not done yet. I only came back because the storage device is supposed to be ready today.”

“The enchanter was able to make it?”

Rue was surprised to hear that. She’d figured it was a lost cause. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe such a thing existed. She just didn’t think anyone on Floor 0 would have the skill needed to make it. It seemed she’d been wrong to doubt.

“We’ll see,” Yoru said. He stifled a yawn and took a sip of something dark with steam rising from it. It certainly looked like coffee, but it didn’t smell like it.

“What are you drinking?”

“Melted chocolate mixed with some milk,” Yoru said.

“Interesting.” Her eyes gleamed as she stared at the cup. “Got any more?”

“No,” Yoru informed her. He hunched over the cup protectively. “Go get your own.”

Sorin ignored the banter and mechanically shoveled food into his mouth. Something about his build let him store energy, she thought, because the amount he could put away wasn’t normal. That was probably how he went weeks without eating, come to think of it. It wasn’t that he was consuming less than everyone else; it was just that he was building up reserves all at once and living off that until he found his next meal.

Beats carrying fifty pounds of cheese and dried fruit around.

“Alright, let’s go see if it’s ready,” Sorin said a few minutes later.

Yoru grimaced and took a sip of his chocolate drink, which was still half full. With a sigh, he stood up and shot a look at Rue. “Touch it and you die.”

“I’d like to see you try,” she told him.

Rue watched them both leave with a smirk, then settled herself into Yoru’s chair and lifted up the cup to her nose. She inhaled deeply and sighed happily. “Why does it taste better when I know it’s not mine?” she wondered.

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