The Fractured Tower

Sorin spent his time in the Antechamber examining the illusion of the red tower. He wanted to see how far the void infestation had spread, and the news was every bit as bad as he’d feared. Floor 25 was almost completely black, and Floor 24’s black splotches had more than doubled in size. New spots had formed and grown at an alarming rate, as well.

Thankfully, the lower floors seemed to be holding their own. There were little speckles of black on Floor 23 and—to a lesser extent—22. But the tower seemed to be handling that, at least well enough to keep any infestation there from spreading.

“We’ve still got a little bit of time,” he said.

He couldn’t know how true that actually was. Right now, there were still climbers on Floor 24 fighting. Samael’s mutagenic build helped keep them effective against void creatures, but it didn’t make them immune to being hurt. They’d die or flee eventually. When the line fully broke and the void had no more resistance, the infestation would spread much more quickly.

His upgrade, if it could be called that, slotted itself into the middle-left of those three images, right between Void Eater and Eldritch Tongue. Unfortunately, he’d need at least one more rank to actually spread the mosaic far enough to touch the soulprint and gain access to it.

That wasn’t a huge issue, but there was no way he was going to gain enough ranks to fill all three of the remaining images. That meant his plans to have everything unlocked before he hit the Void Wall had unraveled, and he’d just have to hope the advantages the tower had already given him were enough.

Sorin emerged through the portal before anyone else, so that part of the plan had at least gone right. It was a good thing, too, because Floor 19 was a massive labyrinth of twisting underground tunnels that were either pitch-black or illuminated by the glow of molten rock. Either way, noxious fumes made much of the air unbreathable without soulprints, and his team hadn’t taken the ones they needed.

They’d survive for an hour or two on their own, but it was almost impossible for them to clear the floor as they were, which was why Sorin was going to whisk them right back to Floor 18. At least, he would have if not for the fact that the Antechamber had dumped him out into the middle of a magma lake. Only his quick reflexes got Lava Walk going before his boots hit the semi-solid surface.

The ability kept him on top of the magma, but didn’t protect from the heat. Thermal Insulation was not strong enough for this kind of strain, either, which meant that Sorin was seconds away from starting to cook if he didn’t do anything. Fortunately, Still Winter was powerful enough on its own to drop the temperature.

He pumped more anima into it than was strictly necessary, so much that the magma started to cool and harden beneath his feet. It was only a thin layer, barely a quarter of an inch, if that, but it provided a solid anchor for Force Weaver to reinforce. Working quickly, Sorin built up something more substantial with Living Earth until there was a narrow spit of stone jutting out from the nearest wall.

That should keep everyone from dying the second they arrive, he thought with some small amount of satisfaction, though at the same time, he wondered what was taking them so long.

By the time the portal flashed into existence and spat them out, he’d widened the stone into a full bridge anchored between two walls and half a foot thick. It wouldn’t last long, but it was sufficient for his purposes. One after another, the rest of his team dropped onto it.

Nemari probably was best equipped for dealing with the heat, but Odric was beating her for raw durability. Rue and Yoru were immediately on the backfoot despite the power of Still Winter keeping the temperature down, their faces turning red and sweat popping out across their skin.

“Took you long enough,” Sorin said.

“We decided to wait a little longer so as not to have a repeat of the kraken incident,” Nemari informed him.

“I suppose I can’t really argue with that. But come on, let’s get you out of here.”

“No arguments here,” Rue said as she wiped her forehead on her sleeve and tried not to cough.

After the blistering heat of standing over a literal lake of magma, the coolness of liminal space was refreshing rather than frigid. None of them broke the rule about speaking, but Sorin could see tension draining out of them the moment they stepped onto the path.

The void shifted endlessly overhead, somehow forming motions in the black-on-black of liminal space. Maybe it was just Sorin’s imagination, but it felt like the higher they climbed, the more agitated it got. That thought worried him, if only because he could very clearly remember the last time he’d agitated the void to the point where it had chased him through the gateway and back into the tower. Other than the fight with Samael, he hadn’t come so close to death as when he’d had to put down the behemoth that had emerged onto Floor 4.

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None of the others seemed to notice the change, though Sorin couldn’t say if that was a lack of familiarity or because it was all in his imagination. He put it out of his mind, though, because even if he was right, all it indicated was that the void was gaining a stronger hold over the tower, and that wasn’t news to them.

“Before we get going, I wanted to ask you about the Antechamber rewards,” Nemari said once they were back out the other side.

She held up the rust-red-tower wand she’d gotten many floors back, a weapon that allowed her to overcharge spells she cast through it. That was useful in and of itself, but it had always struck him as odd that such a weapon did nothing against void creatures when his own tower sword ate through void flesh like it was nothing.

Now, the black gem set into it had a flicker of white light in it, like sparks that briefly glowed before dying, only to return to life again a moment later. Sorin could almost feel anima shifting in it, but it was twisted in such a strange way that he couldn’t trace the structure at all.

“Some sort of upgrade,” he mused. “Have you tried it yet?”

“It didn’t seem prudent to experiment in the Antechamber,” she said.

Nodding, Sorin looked over at the others. “You all got upgrades like this?”

After confirming that yes, the black gem set into their weapons now glowed the same way Nemari’s did, they took a few minutes to test them. Nothing seemed any different, though, and Sorin couldn’t figure out what the upgrade actually did.

“Well, it’ll probably be obvious once you have a voidling to test them on,” he finally said. “I’m sure it won’t be too long before we find another one.”

Sorin got the rest of his team reunited with Azlo and helped them return to the area they’d been farming after they’d refreshed their supplies. Once they were settled, he returned to the portal hub and used that to move back up to Floor 19, where there was, thankfully, no lava, magma, or lung-scorching toxic fumes.

The portal deposited him in a large, empty cavern that had dozens of holes in the walls. There were even a few in the ceiling, and one large tunnel in the floor leading straight down. That last one was Sorin’s path, according to the guidebooks he’d claimed from Samael’s workshop. Most of the monsters he could expect to encounter would be various elementals—earth, fire, or both.

He’d already picked up Lava Walk, Smoke and Ash, and Depth Sense earlier and had merged the last two into other soulprints to save space. What he was really hoping to find on Floor 19 was a hive mind monster, a colony of bees with obsidian carapaces that nested around various ore deposits and made it difficult for climbers to extract the valuable metals.

They were tough monsters, both because of their numbers and because even individual specimens were well-armored. They also weren’t worth much for anima relative to other, easier prey on the floor, which meant that the soulprint they sometimes formed, Administrator, didn’t often appear on the market.

Administrator itself wasn’t that valuable. All it did was help the user keep things organized by aiding in memory retention and minor pattern recognition. Sorin didn’t want it for itself. He wanted it for the mental components, which would help him finally complete his own C-rank Second Mind. That would in turn make it considerably easier to fight while free casting soulprints and ease the burden of trying to process sensory data when he was moving at superhuman speeds.

The shaft descended about a thousand feet straight down before it started branching out. Side tunnels appeared regularly, but the one Sorin wanted was deeper, so he drifted down at a speed that was half free-fall and half controlled descent. It was only when he spotted the glow of magma below him that he arrested his fall completely, free casting Spider Climb and clinging to the smooth stone of the wall.

It should be around here somewhere, he thought to himself. Directions were by their very nature imprecise when the tower erased all markings and landmarks were scarce, but the exit he was looking for had been described as distinctive. It was barred by a pair of stone pillars and had a ridge around the outside that gave the appearance of a pair of lips, which combined to make the entrance seem like a mouth.

It took another ten minutes of careful descent before he spotted it. Like a vampire’s mouth, the pillars resembled teeth that narrowed to a point, just barely touching in the middle and not really close enough to prevent a human from entering or exiting freely. That was somewhat misleading, since the ‘throat’ of the tunnel behind that mouth narrowed so much that Sorin had to use magic to break it open.

Once he was through, he followed the tunnel as it wound its way back and forth. Sometimes it sloped down; other times he had to climb straight up for a hundred feet before it twisted in a different direction. Twice, he came into caverns with waterfalls of molten stone splashing across the path and had to walk across the walls to avoid the hazard.

Things got more complicated when new trails started crossing the one he was on, but his pathfinding soulprints kept him on track. Eventually, he came across a ribbon of leg-thick, glittering silvery metal gleaming in one of the walls. It was barely visible beneath the thousands of black insects covering the wall. Their tiny wings flicked and hummed as they crawled all over the metal and each other, each one secreting a substance that dissolved tiny pinhead-sized holes.

The bees then slurped the metal-infused secretion back up and returned it to the hive, resulting in the metal ribbon having a rather pockmarked appearance, though Sorin suspected that the bees could never truly exhume all of it, no matter how many there were. The tower would simply keep creating more.

None of that was to say that the bees were too distracted by their work to notice the intruder in their territory. It was simply a case of Sorin’s senses being far superior to theirs. He was far enough away that they hadn’t noticed him yet, which was perfect, because he wasn’t there for the metal. He wanted the bees themselves; specifically, he wanted to trace them back to wherever their hive was. With a combination of Stealth Phase and Living Earth to avoid detection and keep track of the bees that returned to small holes burrowed in the stone, Sorin quickly found what he was looking for.

Unlike normal bees, these ones were slaved to the hive itself. There was a queen—several, actually—but her purpose was nothing more than producing more larva. To kill the monster, Sorin needed to excavate and destroy the hive. As soon as he touched the stone between himself and the core of their home, the bees would start to swarm him, though.

But a little risk makes the reward all the sweeter, right?

He reached out and pressed a hand against the smooth, warm obsidian.

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