The Fractured Tower

“How have these things not burned this whole damn forest to the ground?” Sorin wondered aloud as yet another corpse burst into flames.

The gnolls didn’t seem to care about the licks of flames crawling up their fur while they were alive, but the fact that they combusted upon death made it difficult to harvest soulprints from them. Sorin could do it, but only because he could kill a whole pack in seconds. If he’d been an appropriate rank who wasn’t enhanced by a B-rank soulprint, it would have been an exercise in futility.

As it was, he could cut away whatever body part the soulprint had formed in and submerge it in water until the anima reaction that caused it to ignite finally ran out of fuel. That required him to dig a hole and fill it with water every time he found a new pack, which wasn’t difficult but was costing him anima.

Meanwhile, the corpses he had no interest in burned up where they fell. Often, that meant lighting something else on fire, too. Usually, everything was wet enough that this went no farther than thick clouds of white smoke. Sometimes, Sorin had to intervene if things got out of hand.

Maybe they do burn it all down. Maybe it kills everything and the tower just brings it all back. Makes about as much sense as anything else.

Eldritch Tongue had not, unfortunately, revealed itself as a communication tool with the tower once he’d ranked up and revealed more of the image in the mosaic. Or rather, it seemed to function more like a sixth sense, like a form of intuition that guided him toward voidlings. A void detector was useful, he supposed, but disappointing compared to what he’d wanted. He could only hope that it would reveal more uses as he filled in the rest of the image over the next few ranks.

Sorin brought his sword down on the arm of his latest kill, severing it from the main body. Then he slipped the blade under the limb and flicked it into the puddle he’d made a few minutes ago to let it soak. None of the other gnolls had a soulprint in them, so other than kicking their eleven-foot-tall frames into a pile to keep the fire relatively contained, he ignored them.

The good thing about the fire was that, for some reason, the smell of burning gnoll flesh seemed to act as bait for more gnolls. All he had to do was lurk nearby, and within twenty minutes, new scouts would come to investigate. Then he’d follow them back to the next pack and repeat. About once every two hundred gnolls, he’d find another soulprint, which translated to roughly two hours of work.

He’d found three different types of soulprints so far. The most worthless of them was the F-rank Musclebound, which probably explained their huge size. Marginally more useful was Flame Shroud, a D-rank soulprint that functioned similarly to Sorin’s Ignition Aura. Nemari would likely want a copy, and they could sell the rest at a good price.

Then there was the actual goal. The soulprint wasn’t ideal. It was called Frenzy, and while it was a D-rank endurance augmenting soulprint, it came with some side effects. The pain dampening part was fine. That was plenty helpful, though anyone using it needed to be aware of the effect. The part Sorin wasn’t thrilled about was that it also altered the mental state to increase aggression toward anything that injured the user.

In essence, it was a somewhat milder version of Berserker. It was very controllable—if it hadn’t been, Sorin wouldn’t have gone for it as an option—but it did require the climbers to maintain their discipline. Since everyone on his team had mental augmentation soulprints, he wasn’t terribly worried about that, but part of him still balked at the idea of using a subpar soulprint instead of hunting for the perfect one.

But the ideal soulprint wasn’t available. They’d checked the market with no concern for cost and couldn’t find a single one for sale. It was almost suspicious, but Yoru reminded him that D-rank soulprints weren’t all that common to begin with, and C-ranks on the open market were practically unheard of. So, Frenzy was the compromise.

He’d collected two of them so far. Those had been dropped off at Floor 0, along with the other loot, and now he was back on Floor 15 with his new enchanted pouch. It was barely the size of a coin purse, but promised three times as much storage as a standard backpack. That didn’t mean he could collect every single thing he found, but it was nice to have the extra space so he wasn’t picking and choosing all the time.

The arm finally finished hissing and sputtering a minute later, and Sorin fished it out of the puddle. He already knew it contained Musclebound, so after paring down the limb to just the stretch of meat with the actual soulprint in it, he unceremoniously tossed it into the pouch and moved on.

At least the anima is decent. Three or four days more here might be enough to push me up to rank 28.

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He wasn’t going to stay that long, of course. As soon as he extracted the fourth Frenzy, he was done here. With any luck, the next pack would have another one. He could already sense them closing in. Activating Stealth Phase, he stepped back from the corpse pile and waited.

* * *

It took half a day longer than he wanted, but Sorin finally filled the last vial with blood from a gnoll, because Frenzy was located in one of the most difficult places to extract it from, of course. It required him to open up the ground, dump the flaming corpse into it and then pour water over it continuously to keep the temperature low enough that the blood didn’t boil away before the flames died down.

But it was done. He corked the vial, stowed it away, and stepped through Liminal Gateway. A minute later, he was back on Floor 0. For once, everyone was already gathered. Rue greeted him with a casual, “You’re late,” the first to notice his arrival.

“It took as long as it took,” he said. “But I’ve got them.”

“We’ll just have to work harder to make up for lost time,” Yoru said.

While the rest of the team absorbed their new soulprints and got used to the changes, Sorin and Yoru spent their time discussing how Frenzy would interact with the stamina soulprint he already had. “Merging two D-ranks is a lot harder than what you’ve done so far,” he said. “The big hurdle is keeping track of it all. It’s more than ten times the size of what you’ve been doing, but there’s also a lot of new architecture to familiarize yourself with.”

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” Yoru told him. “Admittedly, I’ve mostly been studying my own E-ranks, but it’s not like I never took a minute to look at the D’s.”

“C gets even worse. Things start getting complicated here. This is the dividing line between weak abilities with limited range and the ability to affect the world. Only the best D’s can even start to do that, but C does it as a matter of fact.”

Their time was limited, forcing Sorin to focus on the most important parts rather than being thorough. They made notes of concepts to revisit later, but at the end, Yoru said he was satisfied that he had enough to keep working on his current projects.

Other than a trip to deposit Sorin’s latest haul into their store front to be sold by Bradford, there was nothing left demanding their attention in the city. This time, they went for a week, clearing up through Floor 17 and retreating after they passed through the Antechamber.

It wasn’t as fast as Sorin wanted to go, but it was getting to the point where even he couldn’t guarantee the rest of the team’s safety, especially if they didn’t at least maintain the same rank as the floor they were on. Yoru’s information was getting spottier with each floor they progressed, as well. He’d lost access to the family archives and had been working from memory, and that combined with the fact that the higher floors were just less thoroughly explored meant that they were almost climbing blind.

“I have an idea,” Yoru said one evening after they stopped for a break. “The fact of the matter is that we only have the vaguest idea of which direction the portal hub is even in, let alone the floor guardian. We don’t know the good farming spots. We’ve stalled out until we can get some information.”

“Where do you propose we get it from?” Nemari asked. “You think your father would let you into the library? Or maybe we could strike a deal with a different family?”

“We can explore that, but no, I was thinking somewhere else. The thing is... you’re not going to like it.”

“Ah,” Sorin said. “I think I’m following. The Black Hellions, numerically speaking, have the strongest presence on these floors. Samael ushered hundreds or even thousands of climbers up to Floor 24.”

Yoru nodded. “Exactly. Even with him dead, his organization no doubt still has the records. It’s not like he was personally escorting them all the way to the Void Wall. They should have maps with documented farming areas, hazards, portal locations, and everything else we need. It might just be a single route through each floor, but that’s still something we could follow.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, but it did require Sorin to get involved with the splinter factions. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, they hadn’t torn Floor 0 apart. Instead, they’d settled into an uneasy balance where two of the factions had agreed to a truce, which prevented the third one from striking at either of them.

“The alternative is to wander around more or less blindly,” Nemari said. “We only vaguely know which direction to go. It’s entirely possible we’d pass by the floor guardian without ever realizing it.”

“If I have to deal with the Hellions, I’m going to end up killing most of them,” Sorin warned.

“Can you do that after you get the maps from them?” Yoru asked.

“Depends who has them, I guess. You get why I’m not interested in cooperating with a gang of thugs and murderers, right? These are not good people. I do not want to help them do the things they do.”

“So kill them, then,” Rue said. “God knows none of us will be sorry to see them go. The high families will probably give you a medal.”

It left a bad taste in his mouth to contemplate going to them for help and then repaying them with blood. But then he thought about the instincts Eldritch Tongue had dropped into his head, about the mass of void he could practically feel crawling through the door up above. And he was practical enough to push aside his distaste and do what needed to be done.

“Run down the other ideas for me, okay?” he asked. “Yoru’s probably right. The Hellions are the best lead we’ve got, but it’s not a sure thing. I’d rather waste some of your time hedging our bets than go all in on this one strategy, only for it to fall apart.”

“Of course,” Yoru said. “We’ll divide up the labor. It’ll give us time to collect some of the money we’ve got waiting and reinvest it into a few more E and D-rank soulprints, anyway.”

“And touch base with your enchanter,” Rue added. She’d made no secret of the fact that she wanted her own dimensional pouch, but they could only be made so fast. Odric had the second one by unanimous decision, since he was holding all the food supplies.

“Fuck. Can’t believe I’m doing this,” Sorin muttered. “Anyone know where to find that guy who reached out to me?”

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