The Fractured Tower

Though the notes just called the monster a living statue and left it at that, Sorin could read between the lines. He’d made some assumptions and taken some guesses because, given the nature of the entire floor, he thought it was much more likely that the statues were actually just that: chunks of carved, lifeless rock.

Much like the sand elemental spirits on Floor 3, the material itself was meaningless other than as a medium for the spirit to work its power through. That was an important distinction because there was a huge difference between an earth elemental and an elemental spirit that manipulated stone. Primarily, the difference was whether the monster had a core that could be destroyed.

Elementals generally weren’t content to just sit around, unmoving for months or years while they waited for someone to come along. Elemental spirits, on the other hand, would happily rush to possess a statue that had been completely lifeless up to that point. That was what Sorin saw here. There’d been no aura surrounding that statue until it had ‘woken up.’

Unfortunately, that did mean he was faced with the more difficult of the two options. An elemental with a core had a weakness to target. A spirit could only be driven out by obliterating the medium it was possessing. In this case, that meant reducing the statue to rubble.

Sorin didn’t believe in fair play. As soon as the statue blinked, he was already channeling Force Weaver into a dozen hammer blows that struck the stone from every possible angle. Normal rock couldn’t have held up under the power of his magic, but one reinforced by an elemental spirit was far stronger.

Chips of stone went flying, and a few, thin cracks spread out across its limbs, but for the most part, the statue survived the first few seconds of the beating unscathed. Undeterred, Sorin simply shifted to less frequent and stronger strikes. Streams of force merged together and smashed down on the statue, this time hitting hard enough that finger-sized chunks of stone blasted out in every direction.

Then the statue was moving, and it proved to be every bit as fast as a ruin guardian was supposed to be. The battle turned into something of a dance from there, with Sorin dodging its straightforward attacks while the statue pursued him around the room. It tried to drive him into a corner with clever spear work, but Sorin shifted his focus to the stone shaft and shattered it to give himself an exit.

It wasn’t an easy fight, but neither was it all that threatening. In the span of a few minutes, the statue was nothing more than a screen of pebbles scattered across the floor. The spirit itself fled, though Sorin knew that he’d see it again when it took over the twin of the statue he’d just destroyed in the final battle.

The next four battles were similar. Their weapons and tactics changed, but Sorin was so far beyond what Floor 19 considered challenging that it barely qualified as effort to destroy each animated statue. He went around the rooms, following the circular hall from one to the next, until he ended the fifth one and a previously hidden staircase in the original room revealed itself.

Though he wasn’t the best judge, Sorin was reasonably certain that the statues hadn’t been notably powerful compared to the average monster on the floor. They were a little bit stronger, sure, but nothing a competent team of rank 19s couldn’t handle. He suspected that was deliberate, a trick of the tower designed to lull the unwary into a false sense of security.

The base of the staircase opened into an arena bigger than the other five rooms combined, and its centerpiece was a set of five statues all posed as a group. They didn’t wait for Sorin to approach before coming to life this time, and the entrance sealed itself closed behind him. He probably could have battered it open or dug around it with Living Earth, but he knew the ruin would unbar the way once he defeated the guardian.

Dodging a single opponent, especially one that was slower than him, was easy. Dodging two at the same time was much more than twice as hard. Three was less about dodging and more about engaging in a running battle where he tried to snipe someone while keeping them from closing around him.

Four or five enemies at once wasn’t really worth considering, especially not enemies that he couldn’t destroy in a single hit. This was the part of the ruin where he really wished he’d come with a full team, because then they could have split up, probably with two people holding two statues each and leaving the rest of his side to focus down the remaining enemy.

Without that option, Sorin’s strategy was a lot more aggressive and correspondingly riskier. He didn’t flee from the statues. The moment they started moving, he chose the one with the longest range—the spear holder he’d fought first in the ring above—and unloaded everything he had on it. What had taken him almost three minutes to do the first time needed to be accomplished in ten seconds if he was going to eliminate an enemy before the rest reached him.

That was impossible, so Sorin didn’t try. Instead, he went for the crippling blows. An elemental spirit didn’t feel pain, but it still needed its host reasonably intact in order to function. Knocking off a leg wouldn’t stop it, but it would slow it down, and that was something Sorin could accomplish in the small window he had available to him.

All five statues sprinted at him now, with three swinging wide to cut off his retreat and two coming straight in. Luck was with him, though; the spear wielder was one of the three that didn’t engage him directly. Force Weaver smashed one of its legs at the knee, and it was forced to hop on one foot just to stay up right.

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

With its mobility sharply reduced, Sorin took the opening it left to flee around it. The remaining four statues immediately adjusted their formation, closing ranks to account for the damaged statue’s inability to keep up with the fight. Sorin had bought himself a few seconds, at best.

He started working on the next closest statue. This one held a massive war hammer—appropriately sized for a twelve-foot-tall person—over its head as it charged forward. Despite its appearance, it was anything but slow, and Sorin poured his effort into repeating the tactic that had crippled the first one.

If nothing else, he slowed the monster down. The leg didn’t shatter at the knee like he wanted, but the hammer blows of raw force magic were enough to keep it stumbling. The sword wielder actually passed it by and reached Sorin first, but now that there were only three, it was harder for them to keep their quarry trapped between them.

Sorin worked hard to keep ahead of them while he chipped away at his chosen target, but the statues weren’t stupid. They herded him toward their damaged companion in an effort to limit his options even further, and it was only by flying up toward the ceiling and parrying a powerful spear strike that he escaped that trap.

Finally, a resounding crack echoed through the arena. The war hammer statue’s leg shattered mid-step, sending it into a sprawl and forcing the statue with a half-moon axe to detour around it. Though Sorin hadn’t been able to predict the exact blow that would finally break through, he’d known he was close and was prepared to take advantage of the opportunity it presented him.

He dropped all attempts at slowing the remaining three statues in order to pressure the sword wielder. That hampered it enough that he only had to flee from two statues while circling around his victim, and it only took half a minute to finish up with that.

Now that there were only two fully mobile enemies left in the arena, it was a lot easier to handle things. Sorin took his time picking them apart, but he was careful not to let down his guard. Three statues with limited mobility and excellent coordination weren’t a threat he could afford to ignore. Still, it was a foregone conclusion at this point.

Time for phase two, he thought with some satisfaction as he finished smashing the last of the statues to pieces. Observer let him see the exact instant the elemental spirits abandoned their broken vessels—not that any of them had tried to fake an early exit to catch him off guard—so he wasn’t surprised when all the shattered remnants came to life and started rolling across the floor.

What came out of that was a four-armed monstrosity that was only vaguely humanoid in shape. It held clubs that more resembled pillars than weapons in each hand, all of them longer than Sorin was tall. That made sense, since the ruin guardian was more than three times his height now. Every step it took shook the floor, and it still moved just as fast as any of the smaller statues.

In a delicious twist of irony, what was meant to be the ultimate hurdle ended up being the easiest fight. There were so many cracks and seams in the amalgamation that it was trivial to wedge blades of force into them, and from there it was only a small twist of the magic to make the force expand and blow open chunks of stone flesh. The massive elemental fell apart almost as fast as it formed, and the five spirits cooperatively inhabiting it couldn’t keep up with the damage.

Still, easy was not the same as simple. Sorin’s strategy didn’t require precision, but it was a lot of brute-force labor. If he’d been a true rank 19, he’d have run himself dry probably before he’d even finished with the five-on-one battle. By the time the ruin guardian crumbled to pieces, he had a bare fraction of his anima reserves remaining.

And nobody had ever accused the tower of being fair. The guardian was destroyed, and the stairway leading back up to the temple’s upper ring reopened. What Sorin didn’t see was the ruin heart. That remained stubbornly hidden, if only from his physical eyes. Sorin had already determined it was in the ceiling above the center of the arena.

He’d only killed the guardians for the anima gains. In a little under an hour, he’d grown at least three times as much as he had spending eight hours fighting those hive mind bees. Admittedly, they were poor monsters to farm in the first place, but he felt the stark difference illustrated his point rather well.

Besides, now that the guardians are all dead, I don’t need to worry about them interfering when I excavate the ruin heart and shatter it.

It took him about ten minutes to carve a path through the solid stone, but eventually he revealed the ruin heart in all its glory. A simple force bolt broke it open, and Sorin eagerly looted the trove.

There was a slate, as expected. Even though he’d need another three or four ranks at minimum to even approach being able to use it, it was still nice to check it off the list. He only needed one more to complete all six outer sections of the mosaic, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it would expand again or if that was the whole thing.

There was also a burning-hot rock that contained the Magma Conductor soulprint, which functioned similarly to other elemental control abilities. It worked equally well on both magma and lava—Sorin had never understood the need for two words for the same thing—and synergized well with Living Earth. He absorbed it immediately with plans to integrate it into the existing soulprint.

The final two rewards were a lantern made of bronze and a sword of obsidian with hair-thin cracks running through its length. An orange glow came from inside the sword, and it was wrapped in enchantments that he thought were designed to help the wielder conduct earth and fire magic. The only part he knew he could identify was the self-repair effect, but he was confident in his guess.

The lantern, though, was a mystery. It had something to do with ghosts, but beyond that, he could only speculate. It was hardly the first time he’d gotten a tower cache from a ruin and couldn’t figure out what he was looking at, so he happily stowed it away for someone else to figure out.

While he was reviewing his inventory, though, he noticed something else that had been sitting forgotten. A slim dagger, blue and made of the same metal as his sword, had been unidentifiable even to the experts back on Floor 0. Sorin had trusted the tower would point him in the right direction when the time came, but that had never happened.

Sorin pulled the dagger out and held it up. “Maybe it’s time I do some experiments with you, huh? I’m sure that whatever secrets you’re hiding would be helpful to know.”

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!