The Fractured Tower

Eating uncooked monster meat wasn’t a good idea. Beyond the simple fact that most monsters tasted terrible, they also generally weren’t safe to consume. That was why Sorin had been so annoyed that he couldn’t get a Ghoul Tongue soulprint. But his food supplies had long since run out, not that he’d had much to start with since Odric carried most of that in his bag.

Cooking monster meat, as it turned out, also wasn’t a good idea. For some reason, starting a fire attracted a lot of attention, even when Sorin took steps to keep the light hidden in a deep pit. Constructing one wasn’t hard with Living Earth; it was just a hole with a few arm-thick tunnels leading to the bottom to feed it air.

It didn’t matter. If he started a fire, something was bound to come investigate. And that was fine. Sorin just killed whatever monsters showed up. If that had been the whole of it, he could have persevered. Unfortunately, the fire itself was only the start of the problems when it came to acquiring a meal that was palatable. Actually placing a skewer of meat above the flames seemed to drive the whole savanna wild and resulted in dozens of monsters descending on him in a rampaging horde.

As a result, he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks. His diet, when he even got the chance to eat, consisted of finely diced cubes of monster meat flash-fried with a burst of magical fire that left them all charred and dry. They were of questionable value, nutritionally speaking, but better than nothing.

On the bright side, he’d figured out that by igniting the savanna’s grass, he could slaughter monsters by the thousands, then extinguish the flames when he was done. After cleaning up whatever was left in the area, he could actually get an hour or more of uninterrupted rest.

Water, at least, was easy enough to take care of. Still Winter conjured up ice, and there were no concerns about the purity of that. If he’d been forced to drink from the watering holes dotting the savanna, he’d no doubt have picked up dozens of parasite species that had him burning anima trying to kill them inside his own body. And he knew what that resulted in.

No, thank you. It’s already hard enough to find time to take care of business when I can’t go ten minutes without something trying to eat me.

In many ways, the trial was a grueling endurance contest more than anything else. It came at him relentlessly, and while he couldn’t deny the massive gains he’d made in only a few short weeks, he was also more than ready to put the place behind him. At this point, he was just waiting for the next rain storm so that he could take half an hour to work on his soulspace uninterrupted, then push to rank 25. He hoped that would be enough to challenge the guardian.

His plans were completely derailed when a bloodthirsty little creature called a soul tick latched onto his leg. There were plenty of pests in the grasses of the savanna, and with Sorin’s one pant leg completely shredded from the wyrm attack, he had to rely on Iron Bulwark to keep them from piercing his skin. Normally, that was enough for him to ignore those kinds of issues, but a soul tick was different.

It didn’t feed on blood like a normal tick, but on anima itself. Sorin didn’t even notice it at first, but then he felt a slight tug on his anima and caught the little monster. Much like regular ticks, they had to be carefully removed. Otherwise they’d tear open a soulspace and cause an anima leak that could take days to heal.

Extracting it whole wasn’t an issue for Sorin, but what really excited him was the opportunity the little monster presented. Barely the size of a freckle, it could nonetheless hold a soulprint in its body when it died. Sorin flash froze it in a block of ice and stored it away in a tiny vial for a few days, long enough to starve the monster and leave its corpse intact.

Even though the chances were slim—perhaps one monster in five hundred had a soulprint on the savanna, which made it roughly ten times more likely than average—he couldn’t help but hope. In fact, Sorin became so obsessed with the idea that he started scouring the grass for more of the soul ticks. Two days went by without him making any measurable progress, but he finally uncovered a second one. Once he knew where to look, finding dozens more wasn’t hard.

And one of you is my ticket out of here. I just need to get a little bit lucky, he thought as he examined his collection of frozen soul ticks.

The odds being what they were, he didn’t stop at twenty or thirty. He kept hunting them, even going so far as to sit in mile-long swathes of grass and deliberately leak anima out to entice the monsters in for a meal. Horizon Walker didn’t miss them very often, and when they did, all that happened was they latched onto his soulspace and had to be extracted.

It was on the fourth day that he got lucky. After just over two hundred soul ticks, one of them yielded the soulprint he desired. Viel Piercer allowed him to see inside soulspaces, which was invaluable for fighting against other climbers on its own. More importantly, it was the main component to Watcher of Doors, the soulprint that allowed him to retain awareness of the world around him while he was inside his own soulspace.

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Making it now would be beyond wasteful. With just two more soulprints that he didn’t have but knew he could get once he returned to Floor 0, he could build Watcher of Doors. But if he didn’t mind throwing away ninety percent of what went into six other soulprints that he already had access to, he could make it right now.

Well, not right now. I need someplace safe to work, and there’s no such place. But... I could do it piecemeal, a few minutes at a time. Risky, but worth it.

Sorin started by setting up his firepit bait to draw in absolutely everything from miles away, then proceeded to slaughter well in excess of a thousand monsters over the next few hours. Very rarely did anything approach on its own; most fights were as many as ten monsters attacking at the same time, with ten more less than a minute out, and all of them coming in from different directions.

Only once the flow of monsters slowed down did he finally extinguish the fire—the meat had long since been ruined—and dig into the ground a quarter mile away. Scent-trackers would still be able to find him, but no defense was perfect.

Then he got to work, extracting visual and aural boosts from two soulprints, the extrasensory radius component from a Tremor Sense, the full-body reach from a stamina booster, and two other random soulprints that had the connecting pieces he needed to make it all fit together.

He worked in spurts, absorbing a soulprint and incorporating it into the whole, then coming back out to ensure nothing was nearby. Once he was as assured as he could be of his safety, he added the next soulprint and repeated. Finally, he had Sensory Boost, the necessary component to link to Veil Piercer that would serve to give him feedback about the world around him while he was in his soulspace.

Merging them all revealed a painting of himself, sitting in a dark room while the world went on around him. Far from being disconnected to it, the painting gave a sense that he was aware of every single thing happening out there even if he couldn’t witness it himself.

And, true to the painting’s promise, Watcher of Doors did exactly that. Sorin could see the savanna spread out around him, perhaps not at as great a distance as normal, but more than well enough to give him the warning he needed.

That didn’t mean his work became risk-free. Having to emerge from his soulspace mid-merger could result in soul damage and the loss of two or more soulprints, but that was still better than getting his head taken off by a hungry hyena or his guts ripped out by a wyrm.

Sorin used his new freedom to upgrade Warrior’s Vigilance and Blood of the Mountain to C-rank first, those being the easiest and most straightforward changes he could make. Multitask and Lesser Aspect of Grace were his next two picks, and with seven C-rank soulprints in his soulspace now, he had very little room left for more.

Horizon Watcher next, he promised himself. As soon as I get to rank 25.

He could also, for the first time, loiter in his soulspace to examine his mosaic. It had grown considerably, completely revealing the image of him walking through liminal space in what he considered the eastern section. The northwest picture showed his sword severing tendrils of void, but it still had an empty spot in the middle where a slate from a tower-forged cache of gear would go. It was his hope that he’d find the piece he needed at the end of his current trial.

The remaining four images were slowly revealing themselves. While none were complete as of yet, there was enough showing for him to make some guesses. The southwest image showed him standing near a luminescent being, more a prism with the colors of the towers passing through it than an actual person. He could only guess that it was some sort of information feed from the tower itself.

West of center was hazier. The image was him holding his hand out toward something that hadn’t been revealed yet. Lines of light flickered through the darkness, connecting his hand to whatever it was. As was so often the way with images in his soulspace, the lines seemed to move despite being still.

The northeast image was clear enough. It showed a voidling being cast into a hole not unlike Liminal Gateway, and it was the most complete of the still fragmented pieces of his mosaic. Sorin had let the mosaic grow as it would under the assumption that the tower would give him the corresponding slate in the correct order, and his hope was to see the soulprint for either his sword or the one where he threw the void into the darkness next.

It was the final image, the one that he could make practically nothing out of, that concerned him. What he could see was dark, void black, with just the hint of a person at the edges of it. It lacked any of the light or silver pathways of the other images that dealt with the void, and he could only hope that when more of the mosaic was revealed, he’d understand what it meant.

His thoughts were gleaned over hours of study that were frequently interrupted by roaming monsters. Several times, he’d barely set foot into his soulspace before he had to jump right back out again when a new threat appeared. Even his attempts to cull an area just to give himself a bit of peace ultimately failed.

He didn’t try the fire trick again, though. It was exhausting in a way that regular hunting wasn’t, and he didn’t need to be tiring himself out even worse than he already was for no good reason. He just snatched what few minutes he could between battles, and eventually he put together what he could.

Then, at around the three-week mark, he hit the milestone he’d been striving for. The rank up pain washed over him mid-fight, severe enough to daze him completely for a second and allow the knotback warthog he was fighting to slam its skull into his chest, knock him to the ground, and trample him.

Should have killed them both at the same time, he lamented. It did not like me stabbing its mate.

With a groan, he leaped back to his feet and pivoted to face the monster, which had already turned around and was charging back in. After he finished it off, he took the time to rank up Horizon Watcher, then turned to face the northern end of the savanna.

A stone bluff dominated that direction, miles wide even if it was only a few hundred feet tall. Right in the middle of it was the lion’s den, discovered weeks ago but carefully avoided until Sorin was ready.

A few hours of sleep was really the only thing he could ask for, but there was no telling when another storm would strike. He’d been trapped in the trial long enough. It was time to end things.

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