The Fractured Tower

Urd had been tremendously helpful. Anything Sorin had asked for, he’d provided without hesitation. Sorin couldn’t even guess how many tens of thousands of danirs of value he’d taken from Samael’s vault, and not only had Urd given him access, he’d freely shared his knowledge of the contents.

With all that in mind, Sorin didn’t think this attack was any sort of attempt to force him into a position he didn’t want to be in. If anything, Urd probably felt confident that he was helping push Sorin’s agenda forward, or at least that nothing he was doing was going to hinder Sorin’s work.

That was technically true, but he still wasn’t a fan of the idea of open warfare in the city. Floor 0 was humanity’s only refuge from the tower. Most powerful climbers were well aware of how precarious their species’ position was. Even knowing there were seven towers—six, really, since presumably the indigo tower had no population—Sorin wasn’t reassured. He doubted there were more than a few hundred thousand people alive right now, and that estimate was making some generous guesses about the populations of the towers he hadn’t personally seen.

This tower would probably survive the day. C-rank was about the point where soulprints gained the power to deal widespread destruction, but there couldn’t be that many fighters who had them. But it set a bad precedent. Even if Floor 0 wasn’t wiped out, one open brawl would invite another, and another, and eventually too many people would die.

Sorin wasn’t the only one with that mindset, either. He could vaguely sense climbers with powerful auras scrambling to mobilize from the various estates owned by the high families. It was entirely possible that they’d contain the street fighting and keep the damage to the minimum. It was also possible that they’d kill the climber Sorin and his team needed to add to their ranks.

“Stay here. Absorb your new soulprints. Work on merging what you can,” Sorin said. “That’s your number one priority. I’ll go sort out whatever the fuck this is that’s happening.”

He was gone before anyone could protest. At rank 27, and fortified by a B-rank physicality soulprint, there probably wasn’t anyone faster than him in the city. The biggest problem was that Observer’s range had grown, but it could only passively see perhaps fifteen-hundred feet now. He had to actively scan the city to pick up things farther away than that, and that dumped a lot of information into his brain.

Mind Shell helped insulate him from any sort of overstrain the sensory soulprint could have dumped on him, but it did so by shedding a lot of the information he was trying to parse until it was down to a manageable level. He needed a new tool, but Samael’s vault hadn’t given it to him. At best, he had most of the pieces.

Too bad I needed Mind Shell more than I needed Rapid Processing or Second Mind. I had the components needed to make this a month ago.

He’d thought he’d be able to find them again, but that gamble hadn’t paid out for him. Now, the best he could do was cobble something together that kind of helped, but not really. It wasn’t worth the damage ripping it back out later would cause, so he’d limited himself with Observer. Truth be told, in any normal circumstances, it was already more powerful than he needed, so he hadn’t felt the pinch all too often.

If he’d had all the time in the world, he’d have searched harder for the soulprints he needed. He’d known it was going to be difficult if for no other reason than Morlin hadn’t had them on hand either. But he’d been forced to order his priorities, and hunting down esoteric and rare soulprints hadn’t made it to the top.

Today, he was regretting that. Whatever operation Urd was pulling, it was a big one. There were multiple points of conflict erupting all at the same time, and Sorin didn’t have the ability to take them all in at once. He scanned one spot where a bunch of climbers who felt like street level enforcers were battling a pair of probably-rank 13s. It was a surprisingly even match, close enough that he couldn’t call who’d win. But it wasn’t where he needed to be, so he quickly left it behind.

Over the next ten minutes, Sorin scouted out no less than seven fights. Most of them were structured similarly to the first one, with a handful of higher-ranked climbers punching down at a whole gang of weaker ones, often outnumbered ten-to-one. Urd had apparently decided to strike at every safehouse and hideout at once, probably in an attempt to keep the other faction’s members from supporting each other.

It was a dangerous gamble, since the street-level Hellions had numerical superiority and their own core of elites, mostly around rank 15 or 16. Whenever one of those was on the scene, Urd’s people quickly found themselves overwhelmed and slaughtered, at which point the Hellions would follow their boss’s directions and reinforce another battle.

Urd’s climbers couldn’t win their fights quickly enough, and, worse, Sorin found a full team of six climbers all rank 16 moving out of what was probably the enemy faction’s main base. They were the real threat, the ones who could knock down buildings and considered deceased bystanders nothing more than collateral damage.

There was no room for a conversation, here. If he was going to contain them, he needed to hit them hard enough and fast enough that they didn’t have time to retaliate. Stealth Phase couldn’t really keep him hidden at the speed he was moving, but he used it anyway. A fraction of a second’s delay in their reaction mattered.

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He came in from their right, his sword leading. It cleanly bisected the first target, cutting the man in half at the waist and triggering Chain Bolt. The lightning leaped across three more climbers, and Force Weaver lashed out at the remaining two. One climber died from the force attacks. The other used some sort of reflexive barrier to save herself.

Despite the shock written across their faces, the remaining four climbers didn’t hesitate. They’d been attacked, and Sorin had hit them hard enough that there could be no holding back. Their auras spiked, anima pouring out of their bodies to form a series of attacks that would no doubt flatten the whole neighborhood.

The one at the end of the lightning rope first, he decided. That man was the least distracted. Sorin flung his sword and activated the telekinesis enchantment built into it to guide it home. His target practically sneered as he shifted to the side to avoid the blade, but then his eyes widened comically when the sword moved with him. His arrogance cost him the chance to defend himself.

Still Winter rolled across the group next, further slowing down their ability to react. Sorin killed the fourth climber with a lance of raw force at the exact same time a billowing cloud of flames erupted from her lips. It burned away much of the cold, but more anima poured out of Sorin to patch the magic back up.

Taking advantage of the blinding cloud to hide his movements from one of the remaining two climbers, he focused on the woman who’d survived his initial attack with the barrier magic. It was already failing, which led Sorin to believe it was some sort of enchanted trinket she was wearing and not an ability she could call forth on her own.

It had served its purpose, though. She was alive and, face twisted into a snarl of rage, already lunging forward. Her bare hands were curled into claws, and force magic enveloped her fingers. It was a bad match up against Force Weaver. He couldn’t hijack her magic, but it was easy to add onto it. The force went from razor-edged and ready to project out through the air between them to blunted and heavy. When she slashed her fingers, all that happened was both their constructs shattering.

The woman clearly hadn’t been expecting that to happen, but she didn’t let it slow her down. Blurring forward, she drew a knife and rammed it up under Sorin’s ribs. Only, the knife didn’t quite make it to him before his hand closed around her wrist in an iron grip. Twisting, he pulled her off balance. Rather than stumble, the woman went with the motion, actually throwing herself into the twist so hard that both feet left the ground.

Two quick kicks flashed at Sorin’s head, each one accompanied by a surge of anima in her aura that told him in no uncertain terms that her strikes would shatter stone. His sword swept through the still-blooming flames and chopped through her back, severing her spine and morphing the lethal kicks into limp flailing.

She landed on the street with a gasp of pain. Force Weaver closed in on her and finished the job before she could formulate her next move. All told, the fight had taken perhaps four seconds so far, but there was still one climber left to deal with: the one who’d taken the brunt of the damage from Chain Bolt.

Sorin had gambled on the stunning effect of the lightning giving him a few seconds to work. He’d been right, but he hadn’t bought himself as much time as he needed. In retrospect, it was obvious why. The man was a lightning mage himself. It was just Sorin’s bad luck that the target he’d picked to hit with the stunning magic had been the best suited to resist it.

Twin bolts of blue lightning erupted from the climber’s outstretched hands, both striking Sorin and hurling him from his feet. He slammed into the house behind him, felt an instant’s resistance, and then was driven through the wooden wall. More lightning chased after him, heedless of the damage it caused as it tore through the interior.

Two teenagers stood there, mouths agape, as Sorin hit the floor in front of them. “Run,” he snarled, already back on his feet almost the instant he made contact with the floor. There was no time to find out whether they’d obey his order, not with the lightning mage’s next attack about to pour through the hole in the wall.

A hailstorm of tiny force darts erupted out into the street, aimed only through Observer since Sorin’s physical eyes had lost contact with the enemy mage. There was no chance it would kill the man; its only purpose was to slow him down. In that regard, it was entirely successful. By the time the climber had erected a defensive spell to protect himself, Sorin was already back on the street.

“Get back!” the mage yelled. “I’ll kill everyone here if you don’t.”

Held in one hand was a pulsing orb of clashing blue and white energy. It was made up of a thousand tiny strands of lightning that all coiled around each other, cracked when they came into contact, and split apart to make even more smaller, finer strands. The only thing holding it in check was the mage’s will.

I kill him, it goes off, and anybody who can’t survive the hit within a hundred feet dies, Sorin thought, eyeing the orb up. Unless...

“That’s right. You know what this is,” the mage said. “So here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll walk this way. You walk that way. I’m going to hold this spell for as long as it takes. You come any closer, I’ll let it go. Don’t think I won’t. I’ll survive the detonation, even if no one else does.”

“Sorry,” Sorin said. “If that’s your play, you’re going to lose.”

He leaped forward, too fast to be seen with the naked eye, and drove his sword through the lightning mage’s chest. Blood spurted, and the mage’s eyes widened in a mix of agony and rage. Through red teeth, he spat out, “Fine then.”

The ball of lightning erupted, arcing out in every direction around the pair. Sorin took a few hits, but he was tough enough to absorb the damage and more than capable of healing himself back up. As for the rest of the strands, they didn’t do what the mage wanted.

Instead of flying everywhere, they were drawn into the four Lightning Rod spells Sorin had put up around the man. The energy ground itself out into them harmlessly, leaving everyone in the nearby homes safe. The mage himself died, his last gasp a wet gurgle as he slid off Sorin’s sword.

Leaving the bodies for the locals to loot, Sorin sped off to where he could sense more powerful climbers fighting.

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