The Fractured Tower

For about three seconds, Yoru’s entire world was blinding, white pain. He stood rigid, letting it wash over him and knowing that his allies needed him back in the fight. They’d known he was close to ranking up, though, so he’d taken more of a support role for the last few battles. The absence of his contributions for a few seconds wouldn’t endanger anyone.

Then the tower snapped back into focus, and the remainder of the swarm was still there. Algial was being slowly pushed back, his raw power overwhelmed by numbers and rendered useless. It was Nemari who was holding the line with her pyrokinetic magic, but the effort was quickly exhausting her.

D-rank soulprints just didn’t have the spread to handle swarms like this, with fire-based magic being the notable exception. Unfortunately, no one else had any, and there were still at least fifty of the mangy-looking dogs left.

Dogs isn’t the right word for something that ugly.

They were some form of undead, like a zombie made out of an animal, except also imbued with earth elemental abilities that made them excellent diggers. Despite Algial’s best efforts, he couldn’t keep himself between the monsters and the rest of the team. That was why Rue and Odric were holding the mid-line, though she was far less effective than usual. Losing an arm had shattered her entire combat style, and now that they’d lost Sorin, the partnership with Yoru’s father had collapsed, so they’d been unable to regrow it.

That, in turn, had led to multiple arguments over whether Yoru could continue to work with the rest of the team. Now that he was a high-enough rank, there were plenty of retainers he could climb with, and his father was vehemently against the idea of him continuing to ‘prop up’ the ‘lower-class’ climbers that had just been clinging to Sorin anyway.

Yoru’s thoughts on the whole thing was that they were competent and, more importantly, loyal. After the betrayal of his last band of mercenaries, he wasn’t eager to work with strangers again. Sure, his current team had a bit of roughness to smooth out, but considering they’d all risen up to rank 15 in barely five months, it was hard to blame them for not having perfect control of their new strength.

“I’m back,” he announced. “Open up my firing lane again.”

Algial shifted a step to the right and slammed his mace down on the head of a digger that was in the middle of bursting out of the dirt right next to him. Bone crunched and brain matter splattered everywhere, which did very little to actually slow the monster down. It was more the force of the impact knocking it back to the dirt that kept it from going for Algial’s throat.

After the somewhat disastrous Citadel run that had cost them Sorin, they’d all decided that they needed to diversify their builds a bit more. He’d had them running very similar baselines, and Yoru couldn’t argue against the logic of most of his choices, but without the supreme flexibility Sorin’s ability to free cast had brought to the team, they’d struggled to overcome the sheer variety of challenges the tower offered them.

That was why Yoru had stepped into Sorin’s role as the primary force caster. Force and fire were his family’s specialties anyway, and he’d probably pick up a few weak F-rank soulprints that synergized well to add some variety to his options now that he’d reached rank 16, but he didn’t have them on him, so he defaulted to the soulprint he’d been relying on heavily throughout Floor 13.

“Incoming force storm,” he announced.

Sorin had made it look so effortless, but hurling out ten or more blades at once was anything but. Not even factoring in the strain on his anima, it was impossible to actually aim that many projectiles at the same time. Yoru was cheating by rapid-firing out salvos of three blades, but even with that, more than half of them missed hitting anything at all.

The rest, however, diced through the zombified dogs. They didn’t die, but losing a few limbs slowed their progress on the west flank of the battlefield to a literal crawl. That in turn allowed Nemari to focus on a single area, and Algial finally managed to finish forming Steel Wall and driving it three feet down. It was nothing the dogs couldn’t dig under, but they weren’t smart enough to try.

They were down to the drags when they switched to swords and axes to finish things up. Yoru’s bladewhip actually worked quite well against these kinds of monsters, the ones that had basically no defense at all, but unfortunately, it was also far slower than a dozen blades of force every second.

A telepathic sending brought him up short. ‘Return home immediately. Emergency priority.’

What?

His own sending crystal needed the enchantments refreshed on it—something his father had refused to do so long as he continued working with the ‘useless baggage’ climbers, so he wasn’t able to respond. With no further details coming, he could only guess what the emergency was. Things had gone to hell on Floor 0 lately, with no less than three different Black Hellion officers fracturing the gang and attempting to take control of the rival factions.

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That rarely spilled over to the high family district, though. And the few times it did, loyal vassals quickly displayed the difference between a rank 10 and a rank 2. Unless a squadron of high-rankers had attacked the family estate, nothing the gangs did was important enough for an emergency telepathic summon.

Worried now, Yoru said, “I just received an emergency priority request to return back to Floor 0. I won’t ask you all to come with me, but I can’t stay.”

“What’s the emergency?” Algial asked. As a Telpike retainer, he had his own family living on the estate.

“It didn’t say.”

“We’ll all go,” Nemari said. “If it’s this important, we probably don’t have the time to run back to the portal hub. Recall stones?”

“That would be for the best,” Yoru said. “Was there anything worth looting on the dogs?”

“Nothing,” Rue told him. “We might as well go immediately.”

* * *

They’d pay for blowing through the checkpoint on Floor 0 later, but as a member of a high family, Yoru was uniquely suited to get away with it. The others rushed after him, ignoring the calls of protest from the guards by virtue of moving so fast that no one there could hope to stop them.

They might have followed the rules—it would only take a few minutes, after all—except that there was very clearly smoke rising into the sky from the direction of his family’s estate. That served as excellent punctuation for the emergency summons, and nobody argued with his decision to speed by the guards.

It was a matter of minutes before they reached the gates. Yoru froze on the street in front of it, his mouth hanging open. “That’s... a lot of fire,” he said with a gulp.

Maybe the Hellions did attack, after all. What could they even be after?

The main building had flames rolling out of practically every window on the top floor. Part of the roof was gone, and the east wall had completely collapsed. People were streaming out the doors, which was to be expected in part. A rank 0 cook or gardener wasn’t going to be able to do much to help. What shocked Yoru was that the rank 5 guards were also fleeing with equal abandon. He even caught two of the rank 12 elites vaulting over the outer wall.

“Wait!” Yoru called out. “What’s happening?”

One of the elites looked back, did a double take when he recognized Yoru, and yelled back, “It’s a demon of a climber! Stay away if you value your life!”

“Samael?” Nemari asked, having only just caught up.

“God save us if it is,” Yoru whispered. “Father, are you still alive?”

“He is,” Rue said. “Top floor, with the intruder.”

“What rank?” Yoru asked.

“I don’t know. 25? 30? He’s fucking powerful, with an aura like that.”

“It has to be Samael, then. No one else is that strong,” Nemari said.

Rue didn’t answer, but Yoru saw the corner of her lip twitch up. What do you know? he wondered. What do you see that the rest of us can’t? Unless... But that makes no sense! Sorin couldn’t have survived that confrontation with Samael, and even if he did, why would he come back now just to destroy my home?

Except, once he thought about it, Yoru realized that there were a lot of people running down the streets, so many that he wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a single dead body in the house. Samael was well-known for his callousness. If he’d attacked the Telpike Estate, blood would have been flowing in rivers.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked Rue. “He’s really back.”

“I think so,” she said. “I think he won.”

“Then why is he doing...” Yoru trailed off and mutely gestured at the burning building.

“Wouldn’t be the first time he got into a fight with your dad,” Rue said.

Unable to argue that point, Yoru switched tracks. “And you’re sure he’s above rank 25? It’s not like we’ve been slacking off, and we’re only up three ranks. How’d he manage ten?”

“Good question. Let’s go ask him.”

Without waiting for the others, Rue approached the gate. Someone had broken it during the panicked flight, and one side hung at an angle on a single hinge. She gave it a push aside and slipped past. By the time anyone thought to follow, she’d already Speed Bursted through the wide-open front door of the main building.

The rest of the team raced after all, all except Algial, who wasn’t nearly as practiced at this method of travel as they were. He trundled along at a swift but not exceptional pace, and they immediately left him behind.

Rue wasn’t as familiar with the interior layout of the main building as Yoru, which made sense when he considered that she’d only been inside it once. She made up for that fact by knowing exactly where Sorin was and being willing to break things that were in her way. By the time he caught up to her, they’d reached his father’s audience hall on the top floor.

Sitting there, on that ugly, pretentious golden throne of a chair his father had commissioned back when Yoru was still a child, was a man Yoru honestly hadn’t expected to ever see alive again. After Samael had appeared and caved in the tunnel leading to the Lion’s Fang Door, everyone had expected either both of them to show up again or, more likely, just Samael. And then weeks had gone by with no sign of either.

Everything had started to fall apart, and they’d dared to hope Sorin had somehow done the impossible, trading his life for Samael’s. It meant there was no one to destroy the Void Wall, though, which was why Yoru had pushed so hard to remain with his current team. Their unique gift of Void Resistance was humanity’s only real hope of making progress.

None of that mattered now. Somehow, impossibly, not only had Sorin clawed his way back out of Hell, he’d grown impossibly strong in the time it had taken him to make his way back.

He looked different now—primal, somehow. He shouldn’t have, not with his rags for clothes. The feather steel breastplate he’d been wearing was gone, and the lifecatcher hung openly from his neck. The strings had been severed and its magic expended. Going strictly by his gear, Sorin should have looked as wrung out as an old dishrag.

Somehow, none of that mattered. Yoru didn’t believe for a second that Sorin even needed gear anymore, and he didn’t need Rue’s ability to see auras to recognize the truth of the matter.

So striking was Sorin’s appearance that, for a single moment, Yoru didn’t register the rest of the scene. It wasn’t until a broken sob snapped Yoru out of his trance that he realized what he was looking at. Sorin sat on the Telpike throne, surrounded by burning tapestries that filled the room with a haze of smoke, and there, sprawled out on the carpet, curled into a ball and clutching an extremely broken arm, was Yoru’s father.

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