The Fractured Tower

“How do you think Sorin’s doing?” Nemari asked Yoru.

The pair were standing close together, alternating hurling magic at a whole flock of gurdkas. The disgusting monsters were vaguely shaped like a bird the size of a person, except they had two sets of wings and two heads on long, graceful necks. To make matters worse, their feathers were more like steel scales, easily durable enough to repel a casual attack. Each one had a six-foot-long tail trailing behind it, fully prehensile and with a small mouth full of tiny little needle-like teeth on the end.

This wasn’t the first time they’d fought such monsters. Gurdkas were everywhere on the floor, flying in great flocks of a hundred or more in search of prey. At pretty much any given moment, anywhere from three to ten of the monsters might peel off the main flock to swoop down on whatever meaty target they’d spotted, only to rejoin their brethren a minute or two later after savagely ripping their meal to shreds.

Azlo and Odric were doing an admirable job of keeping the four monsters that had attacked them contained, and Yoru was providing air support by skewering anything that tried to fly out of reach with an empowered spike of stone capable of putting a hole right through the birds. It was Rue and Nemari that were doing the real damage though.

The bird had no real defense against fire. If anything, something about the oil in their feathers made it cling to them even after she released the magic. Of course, having a whole flock of immolated birds was counterproductive to the front line’s efforts, so she limited herself to igniting one at a time.

“Probably better than we are,” Yoru responded as he raised a pole of stone out of the ground to smack into a bird that was diving at Rue’s back. He needn’t have bothered, but Nemari had noticed a certain protectiveness in Yoru since Vendis’s death, so she didn’t point it out.

“No, I meant his progress.”

“Who can say for certain? If he didn’t get lost, he’s probably on track. If he did, he’ll still meet us in a few days. If he finishes up early, I wouldn’t be surprised if he finds some way to track us down.”

“Oh fuck,” Rue suddenly swore.

Nemari’s eyes snapped to where she was dodging under a gurdka’s talons. Rue parried the tail almost without thinking, leaving a thin line of blood where metal met flesh. That can’t be the problem. What did she sh—oh fuck.

“Void beast coming in from the west,” she announced. “Fifteen seconds to contact.”

There was no way they were going to finish off the gurdkas before the void monster reached them, which meant they were going to have to switch up their strategy. None of them were interested in fighting such a creature solo, but it might be necessary.

“I can keep it distracted for a minute or two,” Rue announced, “but I’m going to need help killing it.”

She broke away from the main fight, trusting Azlo far more than Nemari was comfortable with in the process. Dutifully, he grabbed hold of the bird Rue had been cutting strips off of each time it swept by for another pass, or rather, a metal hand extended from his shield and clamped down on one of the monster’s wings. Pivoting, he flung the bird straight into the one that he’d already been dealing with.

“Can you go help her?” Nemari asked.

“On it,” Yoru said. He uncoiled the blade whip the tower had given him and raced after Rue.

What had been easy confidence rapidly transformed into barely-contained tension as Nemari, Odric, and Azlo worked to take down the four birds quickly. One of them fell thirty seconds later, the fire finally eating away enough of its muscles that it could no longer fly. Odric crushed one of its heads beneath a stone-clad boot, which wasn’t enough to kill it outright, but would keep it out of the fight. It’d probably die on its own in the next minute or two anyway.

At the same time, Rue was trying her luck with a creature that Nemari wasn’t at all confident she could handle. They’d all seen Sorin kill a void beast, and he’d lectured them on what to expect, but knowing how it was done and actually doing it were two different things. Voidlings were easier to handle because they didn’t have enough mass to shoot tentacles twenty feet away. They could barely even form four limbs to move on, really.

Void beasts were bipedal, at least most of the time, and they were taller than the average person. Rue barely came up to this one’s chest. There were no less than four tentacles growing out of its torso on the front and back, and two more had erupted out of the ground behind Rue. Yoru made quick work of those while Rue focused on dodging the chest appendages.

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That’s not right. There’s no way he could—

Nemari had to cut that thought short in order to dodge a gurdka that got away from the main group and had decided she looked like easier pickings. Since it had volunteered itself by coming her way, she made it her next target. Fire bloomed in the air around it, scorching the monster and igniting its feathers.

A flash of light distracted her again. This time, she caught it in time to see what looked like hundreds of tiny strands coming off Yoru’s blade whip. When he swung it, it didn’t just slash against the void tendril he’d aimed it at. It looped around three times, and the light started chewing through the void.

That’s new, she thought, so stupefied by the unexpected behavior of Yoru’s weapon that she almost forgot the two hundred pounds of flaming, pissed-off bird circling back around.

With a start, she dove forward into a roll. At the same time, a fist made of earth surged out of the ground directly in the path of the bird’s dive. It shattered against one of the monster’s beaks, but the mass and momentum was enough to throw it into the dirt. Not one to miss a prime opportunity, Nemari swapped her wand for her sword, raised it overhead with both hands, and brought it down as hard as she could on one of the long, swan-like necks.

It was like striking a boulder. If nothing else, she would have expected some give, but the bird monster actually flexed into the blade. She creased some feathers, maybe drew a speck of blood that burned up instantly, and otherwise failed to accomplish anything beyond smacking the bird’s beak back into the dirt.

Okay, let’s try that again!

Ripping open the cap to her waterskin, she activated Water Bond and brought the sword back down. This time, magic made up the difference where muscle had failed her. With hydrokinesis assisting her in giving a keen cutting edge, the blade bit deep enough to get hooked on bone. Nemari savagely ripped it back out, and a small fountain of blood chased the steel on its way up.

She snapped a barrier into place just in time to soak up the power of a wing strike, but even boosted to rank E, the soulprint was too weak to do more than that. The magic shattered instantly, its power spent to give her the half a second she needed to dodge out of the way.

Odric rushed past her and dropped a flying elbow onto the bird’s back. His whole body was gray, and just judging by the deep impressions his footprints left in the dirt, he’d more than tripled his weight. The gurdka let out a dual-throated squawk of pain and flailed weakly in an attempt to escape.

Nemari pointed a single finger at its wide-open beak and unleashed a line of flames down its gullet. She held the fire steady through its struggles, and once Odric grabbed hold of it by the neck right beneath the skull, it got even easier to cook the monster from the inside out.

The trickle of anima into her soulspace was her signal to refocus her efforts elsewhere. With only two gurdkas left, she decided Azlo and Odric could keep them occupied while she helped with the more dangerous foe. Drawing the rust-red tower wand from her belt sheath again, she took aim and tried to channel a spell through it.

Though Sorin had insisted magic didn’t work on void creatures—a fact she’d proven to herself multiple times—they all knew the tower had given them weapons to hurt its nemesis. A wand was only useful when spells were channeled through it, so she did just that. To her surprise, instead of the expected bolt of fire spewing out to cling weakly to the void beast, a brilliant line of light cut through the air.

It was a good thing Rue was so short. Nemari had aimed at the void beast’s head, and while she took care to avoid friendly fire, the unexpected form her spell had taken made it unsuitable to be shot through openings while Rue dodged around.

The line didn’t fade. It stretched from the tip of the wand to the void beast’s head like a blazing iridescent string. Anima started draining from Nemari’s soulspace, more than she’d planned to spend on a single spell, and the string thickened in response. At the same time, the top half of the void beast’s empty face flashed away into nothingness.

Between the three of them, they carved the creature to pieces in a matter of seconds. Rue’s swords were no less effective, each slash she left on its body depositing a trail of white light that burnt through the void beast’s body, consuming matter until it shrank too much to even rightfully be called a void beast.

With that threat disposed of, it was simple work to mop up the remaining two gurdkas. The team ended the fight and regrouped quickly, where Azlo broke open the topic with an excited, “Holy crap! You guys melted that void thing! Where can I get a weapon like that?”

“Keep climbing with us and the tower might give you one,” Yoru said as he slowly and carefully coiled the blade whip back up. It showed no signs of the glowing strands now, but it was still a length of sharp, flexible metal segments.

“That would be amazing. If we had stuff like that on the Wall, we’d have pushed it back years ago.”

“I guess we know what those upgrades from the last Antechamber did,” Rue said. After a pause, she added, “All except Od’s.”

“I’ll figure it out next time we see a voidling,” he assured her.

It was said lightly, but they all knew the grim reality of the situation. Void creatures were supposed to be rarer than rare, but more and more kept showing up. Most teams weren’t equipped to handle them, and Nemari had to wonder how many climbers were dying from unexpected voidling attacks.

“That might be sooner than we’d like,” Yoru said, unknowingly echoing Nemari’s thoughts. He looked to Rue and asked, “Any soul damage from getting so close?”

“Maybe a little,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow. It’s not going to slow me down or anything.”

That was good, because things were likely to keep getting worse. None of them needed it spelled out that increased void sightings meant that humanity was losing ground up on Floor 24. And none of them needed a reminder of what lurked beyond the walls of Floor 0, where their families lived. If the void broke through in any numbers, hundreds of people would die at minimum.

There was nothing they could do about that except hope and pray it didn’t happen. Nothing we can do now, but if we can climb high enough, fast enough, maybe we can cut the problem off at the source.

Time spent standing still was time wasted. “Everyone ready to keep going?”

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