The Fractured Tower

As a general rule, bees did not like the cold. These ones, despite being part elemental, were no exception. A D-rank soulprint, no matter how powerful, wasn’t enough to shut down the entire hive, but it served its purpose. It slowed the little insectoid monsters down long enough for Sorin to create wide planes of force, which then swooped through the air, smacking into the bees and each other, leaving crushed corpses that leaked trickles of magma scattered all over the stone.

While he worked at defending himself from thousands of tiny attackers, Sorin was also boring through the obsidian with Living Earth. He wasn’t delicate about it either, not with the amount of distance he needed to cover and the distractions he faced at the same time. Chunks of obsidian the size of his torso ripped themselves free and tumbled away, oftentimes shattering into razor-sharp shards when they crashed into other stone.

Six feet of digging later, Sorin pried open a hive that was just slightly bigger than he was. That prompted an even greater wave of bee elementals, these ones bigger than his thumb and quite a bit more resilient than their smaller cousins. They actually forced Sorin to stop digging and defend himself properly.

But at the end of the day, he was still far, far more powerful than a rank 19 climber was supposed to be, and the monster couldn’t overcome that fact. Sorin killed everything, then cracked open the hive itself to examine it.

No soulprint, he thought with a resigned sigh. It wasn’t that he’d been expecting to get it on the first try, but it sure would have been nice. Fortunately, there were plenty of ore veins in the area, and that meant plenty more chances to collect the prize he was looking for.

It took him eight hours and fifty-six hives before he finally extracted what resembled a petrified honeycomb. Grinning to himself, Sorin absorbed it immediately. It was the work of another five minutes to assemble the pieces from three different soulprints together, but when he was done, he finally had Second Mind in his build.

The difference was immediate. A dozen tiny things that sapped his concentration suddenly felt light as a feather. Even passive soulprints created small mental strains, hardly worth noting individually. He’d added to that burden one new ability at a time, and the incremental increase hadn’t been noticeable until Second Mind had taken over all of it at once.

None of this was a surprise to Sorin, intellectually. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing to himself and why he’d been working toward building this solution. But he still found himself amazed at the difference. It felt like his head was clear for the first time in months.

“I really shouldn’t have put off doing this for so long,” he said out loud, just to hear himself talk.

Second Mind wasn’t his ideal mental augmentation, but since he was still thirty or so ranks shy of having a soulspace capable of holding anything S-rank, it would do for now. He’d be on the lookout for other soulprints over the next few floors that could complement Second Mind, and hopefully he’d see good results now that C-ranks were becoming more commonplace.

After a few minutes to get used to the sensation, most of which were spent acclimating to finally being able to use Lesser Aspect of Grace at full power, he was finally ready to set off again. Most of the next hour was spent backtracking to get back on the trail he wanted, and he feared he’d gotten himself lost for a few minutes in the middle before he came across a familiar magma-filled cavern. Eventually, he was back on the trail, however, and he started his journey to the next destination.

Much like his detour to the hives, the second stop on Floor 19 wasn’t part of the guidebook’s path. Instead, it presented what was likely to be one of his last opportunities to clear a ruin before reaching the Void Wall. He didn’t see his mosaic expanding enough to make a difference, but he wanted the option to be there just in case. If they really couldn’t overcome the void, he could always back down a floor and just farm anima until he pushed enough ranks to make things work.

The ruin was in the form of a temple. It had five rooms arranged in a circle, and each one was supposed to hold a guardian statue that came to life, much like the portal guardian on Floor 0. They would be a thousand times stronger, of course, but that didn’t concern Sorin. After killing all five of them, he would gain access to a central chamber that had duplicates of the miniature ruin guardians.

That part was a two-phase fight. First, he’d face them five-on-one, and then again merged together into one massive statue. Why the tower did stuff like that was a mystery to Sorin, but he’d encountered that same setup with only minor variations dozens of times during his first climb up the blue tower. He supposed originality wasn’t a high priority for the tower.

Just getting there was likely to be the true challenge, and that was made even more complicated by an ongoing battle he stumbled into. Six voidlings filled a tunnel ahead of him, utterly silent as they mauled each other. Void-on-void action wasn’t unusual, though no one had ever been able to determine exactly why the creatures sometimes attacked each other and sometimes cooperated.

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There were theories, of course. The scholars had endless theories, and there was always room for another one. As far as Sorin and most other climbers were concerned, there was no practical difference. If void creatures were going to fight each other, they would. If they were going to attack climbers, they would. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what scenario the unlucky climber had stumbled into.

It was far more likely to find voidlings cooperating, but that was probably just because the ones that were inclined to fight took care of each other long before any climber came along. There was no telling how many lone voidlings a climber had encountered that had started as part of a pack hours or days earlier.

Even then, tower monsters themselves also fought with voidlings, which led those self-same scholars to further speculate that the rate climbers encountered voidlings and the rate at which voidlings actually appeared in the tower were two drastically different figures. Once again, Sorin found the difference to be relatively academic and unimportant.

At least, I did before it became my job to hunt down and exterminate them. I guess it’s pretty damn relevant now, isn’t it?

Even as he hung back and watched—his plan was to let them pick each other apart, then swoop in to finish off the survivors—he noticed something strange. Void creatures all looked more or less the same. The big difference was size. Or rather, no two void creatures looked exactly the same, as their limbs were constantly shifting places, growing, shrinking, or disappearing according to whatever bizarre logic guided them.

There was no telling them apart because they constantly shifted appearance. That was why the simple classification was voidling, followed by void beast for man-sized creatures, then giant, behemoth, colossus, and titan. The first two were easy enough to kill, even at low rank, but nobody took out anything stronger without sustaining serious soul damage, no matter how strong they were.

What was weird was that Sorin was almost positive he could tell these voidlings apart. It should have been impossible when their means of combat was mostly to cling to whatever they were trying to devour, with results that looked a lot like a big, black ball with twenty or thirty writhing tentacles rising out of it, only to slap back down in a hug around its own form and quickly disappear back into the darkness. Now that Sorin thought about it, the roiling void in the liminal space looked pretty similar, only on an infinitely grander scale.

In front of him, however, were six voidlings that he could clearly make distinctions between. He wasn’t even sure how he knew, but he did. More than that, he could tell that there were actually two teams, one of four and the other being just two. It was as obvious as if they’d been color-coded to him. No matter how much they writhed around each other, latching onto, breaking away, or being pried off, he could easily keep track of the participants.

It had to be something from the tower, an ability inherent to his mosaic, but he couldn’t be sure which one. Eldritch Tongue was the most likely candidate, if only because it was the newest addition. He’d thought its purpose was to guide him toward voidlings, and maybe it was, but before, there’d only been a single voidling at a time.

Does this mean there are multiple... I don’t even know... factions? Multiple factions of voidlings fighting against each other for control of the tower? If so, how many? Or are they more like the hive mind, all extensions of one body? This could be two hands, one with four fingers and one just two, grappling with each other.

He wondered if he would have come up with that idea if he hadn’t just spent hours dealing with those bees. It was hard to say which was more likely, or even if either was true, but once again, he left such thoughts for the scholars and limited himself to the practical issues. The voidlings spent half an hour tearing each other apart, ending the battle with a predictable pair from the larger team remaining.

Both were bigger than any of the individual ones had been when he’d first come across them. It was well known that voidlings ate anima, and that the more they ate, the larger they grew. Sorin wasn’t sure how prevalent the knowledge was that they also ate each other for anima, but it wasn’t a new theory to him. So he wasn’t terribly surprised by the end result, and he still counted it as a win. Two slightly larger than average voidlings was an easier fight than six normal-sized ones.

Sorin rushed in, his feet barely seeming to touch the floor thanks to Second Mind helping him control his many soulprints. The voidlings turned on him in unison, but they were slow and clumsy compared to what he was capable of now. Even at rank 1, it would have only been a challenging fight, not an impossible one. Now, so much faster and stronger, armed with a weapon designed to consume void flesh, and augmented by a bevy of soulprints and abilities uniquely gifted to him by the tower itself, it wasn’t even fair to call it a fight.

Probably could have saved myself some time just killing all six of them from the start, he admitted to himself after he finished dispersing the void into nothingness. But... Eh. Less risk this way, and soul damage is still a real danger. No need to be impatient and stupid.

Three hours and one surprise magma wyrm later, Sorin stepped out of a rough tunnel and into a large, square-cut room with intricate carvings filling the walls. They were done in panels, each one depicting a different figure in some sort of quasi-religious garb and pose. In a way, the artwork almost reminded Sorin of the paintings in his own soulspace, though the subject matter was obviously different.

There were two doorways facing each other from opposite sides of the room, and between them was a twelve-foot-tall statue of a man balanced on one foot, the other leg raised up to hip height and bent at the knee. He held a spear balanced on an open palm in front of him, held in place despite the severe angle dictating that it should fall.

“I guess you’re the first challenge,” Sorin told the statue.

It rumbled in response, the sound of stone grating on stone, and its eyes opened.

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