The Fractured Tower

The portal guardian’s arena was a quarter-mile-wide cauldron of churning magma. There was a thin, uneven ledge circling the south half maybe twenty or so feet above the magma, and a few, spindly bridges arced through the open air, but those were so fragile that they looked like they’d crumble the moment anyone put any weight on them.

Sorin entered through a hole in the ceiling and stood upside down as he studied the cavern. If there were any other exits, they were submerged beneath the magma flows, and despite his growing power, they were beyond his ability to access. Even with Living Earth and Magma Conductor successfully merged into the C-rank Veins of the World, the raw power wasn’t enough to hold tons and tons of liquid stone at bay.

It was a bit arrogant to think it, but Sorin was sure that if he couldn’t descend any deeper, then no team of actual rank 19s was going to do better. That meant this was the low point of the floor, and the portal guardian would be lurking in the magma. It was another wyrm, of which he’d found and killed five already, but this one was supposed to be several sizes larger than average.

Observer could pierce the concealing magma to a certain depth, which wasn’t enough to track down the wyrm but did serve to give him warning when it was about to surface. The surest way to make that happen was to lure it out, which Sorin was well-equipped to do. Magma wyrms didn’t eat meat; they couldn’t, considering their habitats. Instead, they survived off some sort of process similar to plants, except with heat instead of light.

They were extremely and aggressively territorial, of course. So the best way to bait one out was to make it aware that there was something nearby, and the quickest and easiest way to get its attention was to start messing with the temperature.

First, he needed a safe place for the rest of his team. Those narrow, crooked ledges were as good as it got, but that wasn’t enough for Sorin. So he set to work with Veins of the World, not so much excavating a shallow cave as melting it. Magma spilled over the ledge and plopped down to join the molten rock below as he hollowed out a rounded chamber for his team to stand in.

Next, he rebuilt a thin shell of stone between the cave and the magma cauldron to block the heat somewhat, then he spent ten minutes just standing there and pumping out Still Winter until the temperature got down to something that Heat Resistance or Thermal Insulation could tolerate. It was only after the prep work was finished that he stepped through Liminal Gateway.

He was a day early for the meetup, but Observer had good range, and he knew roughly where the rest of his team was supposed to be. It took him an hour to find them, still fifty miles or so from the portal hub but actively traveling in that direction. Rue was at the front, a hundred or so feet ahead and serving as their scout while Azlo and Odric flanked Yoru and Nemari in the center of their formation.

Sorin was pleased to be spotted almost immediately. He’d done nothing to try to hide, but it at least showed Rue was taking things seriously and paying attention. The instant she noticed him, both blades appeared in her hands, but a few seconds later, she realized who he was and straightened out of her wary crouch.

“Sorin’s back,” she called out, prompting the rest of the team to move forward to join them.

They still weren’t truly rank 19, though it felt like it would only be a few more days before they reached that point. In all likelihood, he could have left them alone for another month before they reached the peak of rank 19 and had to break through to the next rank, though Azlo lacked the ability to exceed the floor cap and would have been left behind if they did that.

Won’t be a problem, though. He’ll just push up to rank 20 the normal way once we kill that magma wyrm.

“Sorry, I know I’m early, but I’ve run out of stuff to do on Floor 19. I’d like to put the guardian down and move up to Floor 20 now. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.”

“I was hoping to get a few hours to pick up some supplies on Floor 0 before we engage the guardian,” Yoru said. “A heat sink, if nothing else, would be welcome.”

That wasn’t a terrible idea. Though it would be expensive and probably only last a few minutes before it was overloaded, such a device would be a lot more effective than Sorin’s attempts at giving them an environment they could survive. Some sort of breathing filter would also help, though that was a bit more complicated than just sucking the heat out of the air.

“I think you’re all tough enough to stand there for a few minutes, but if you want to spend the money on it, I’m not going to fight you. We shouldn’t take too long, though, because I had to make alterations to the arena to give you a safe place to stand, and the tower could undo those before we get there if we wait.”

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“I think I can get what we need in under half an hour if you can take me to Floor 0,” Yoru said.

Sorin nodded. “Let’s get going then. We’ll meet the rest of you back at the portal hub here.”

* * *

He had to admit, logistics aside, Yoru’s willingness to spend money meant this whole scenario was a lot more tolerable. The heat sink wasn’t exactly portable, and it was single-use, but it worked much, much better than what Sorin had originally been planning.

They hadn’t gotten anything for the toxic air, but Odric had magic for cleansing them, and they all had a bevy of soulprints making them physically hardy, so they’d survive an hour or two of exposure. All that was left was to make the actual kill and retreat through the Antechamber portal.

Sorin stood on one of the flimsy bridges a few hundred feet away from the rest of the team, who’d lined up near the ledge and were preparing to take shots at the magma wyrm the second it showed itself. Between his hands floated what looked like a glossy, black stone the size of his head. It was actually Still Winter condensed into ice so infused with magic that it had become completely opaque.

He let it fall into the magma below, where it flashed apart and instantly cooled a ten-foot circle of magma into solid rock. That would only last seconds without more magic to reinforce it, but Sorin hadn’t made it as a place to stand. It was merely bait.

And the magma wyrm took it. Molten stone erupted in a fountain that splashed against the ceiling a hundred feet overhead as the portal guardian ascended from the depths of the cauldron. It was a living tube of magma, held together by nothing but magic and crusted over with black plates of stone trailing down its back. There were no eyes on its head, nothing at all beyond a ridge of more stone that narrowed to a point and jaws filled with obsidian teeth.

The team opened up on it, blasting it with every sort of ranged attack they had. It ignored all of them in favor of focusing on Sorin. Magma wyrms weren’t stupid. It knew who’d violated its sanctuary with that bomb of magical ice. While it no doubt planned to kill everyone there, it wanted to start the process with the most egregious offender.

Veins of the World and Observer both showed him its attack at the same time. A jet of magma burst up at an angle, several tons of material that no doubt lost a thousand pounds to what fell loose back into the magma just in the short time it was airborne. It was aimed not just at Sorin, but at the whole bridge he was balanced on.

Sorin let himself drop off the bridge backwards and turned a flip in the air as he descended, only stopping when he was level with the wyrm’s face. Then he charged forward through the hot, empty air and unleashed Still Winter. That and Veins of the World kept him safe from the wyrm’s incinerating flesh as he struck it.

The key to defeating such monsters was in depriving them of their heat, which was notoriously difficult to do when they were more than half submerged in a giant tub of magma. Difficult didn’t mean impossible, however. It just meant he had to get creative, which was why his strategy was to slice off large chunks of the wyrm’s body and hurl them away to splatter against distant walls, where he fired off more orbs of pure cold to freeze them in place when they seeped down to the ledges.

It took about five minutes to dismantle the boss, and most of the delay was from it diving deep into the magma once it realized it was losing the fight. But its territorial nature wouldn’t let it retreat with intruders in its lair, especially not once Sorin started bombing the surface with more frozen orbs.

Things got dicey near the end when it switched from trying to eliminate him to attacking the other members of the team, but Nemari and Odric pulled off an impressive combination of magic that rapidly cooled the flying magma bath and redirected the stone away from them.

“That might have been the most difficult floor guardian yet,” Sorin commented.

“In the sense that it was the most powerful and the environment worked against us, I suppose,” Yoru replied. “Though I think Floor 9 holds the record if we measure by how much we struggled.”

“That wasn’t the guardian that made that fight hard,” Rue pointed out. “It was all the other shit going wrong while we were there.”

They never had quite figured out how monsters from higher floors had ended up on Floor 9, but it had made the aquatic battles—already a struggle in their own right—far more difficult than they would otherwise have been. Outside the savanna locked behind the Lion’s Fang Key on Floor 10, Sorin couldn’t think of a time he’d faced a greater challenge in the red tower.

In fact, he’d gained so much anima from that experience that everything else had been trivially easy for the next nine floors. It wasn’t something he was willing to complain about, not when the stakes of the game the tower and its climbers played was death.

They were already playing loose enough with the rest of the team not being able to keep parity with each floor that they needed any advantage they could get. If everything went according to plan, he was hoping they’d at least be the equivalent of rank 20 when they started fighting together again on Floor 22. That would be their big push to catch back up.

“Can we talk about this later?” Azlo asked. “Not to butt in on this reminiscing of shared experiences you guys all had, but if I don’t get out of this heat soon, my armor’s going to melt into my skin.”

“Imagine how much worse it’d be without the heat sink,” Yoru said.

Sorin glanced over at the formerly clear shard of quartz. It floated in the air, but now it had turned bright red, lightening to white near the outside edges. Considering it weighed close to two hundred pounds and was a foot and a half cube, he would have expected it to take longer before it burned itself up, but it was already starting to fail.

“Fair enough,” Sorin said. “Let’s get through the portal and we’ll see if the tower feels like inducting Azlo into our little club.”

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