The Fractured Tower

“That’s been debated by scholars forever,” Yoru pointed out. “There’s about a million theories, but no one can prove any of them.”

“If anyone had insider knowledge, though, it’d be Sorin,” Rue said.

The whole table was looking at him expectantly now, which struck Sorin as such a dramatic change from a few months ago that he struggled not to laugh. Initially, everything had been doubted, and he’d struggled to get them to believe him. It was only after the evidence kept building up into a mountain that they’d started taking what he said at face value.

“It’s because the tower is a living creature with its own anima, and it uses that to make... Well... Probably everything, but definitely the monsters. It’s loaning us the anima we collect. In theory, if we had the power and knowledge it does, we could crystallize our own anima into soulprints instead of relying on it.”

“That’s why the anima we use to cast spells from the soulprints regenerates,” Yoru said, “and the anima we collect is static. It’s the tower’s anima, and it’s also regenerating, just not inside us.”

“Got it in one,” Sorin told him. “We’re basically carrying around a bunch of enchantments the tower made inside our souls, which are constantly expanding as we climb higher. Free casting is just making our own temporary copies.”

Those climbers who learned to craft soulprints were essentially doing the same thing, except they were using the tower anima stored in the raw materials to craft the soulprint and their own regenerating anima to power the process. All of that implied that anything the tower could do with souls, humans should be able to replicate.

Theory and reality didn’t always intersect, however, and it was entirely possible that the scale was just too different. It could be that a rank 100 climber still didn’t have the anima to make a permanent F-rank soulprint out of nothing, not even in their own soulspace. Meanwhile, the tower held an entire reality—seven realities, really—full of monsters, animals, plants, and dirt. And it did it while holding back a void infestation so bad that it had claimed an entire incarnation of the tower.

“I guess my team was actually the third one to reach the top of a tower. The tower made a mistake trying to graft on the void-killing abilities with the first team. They all died. Samael had a team, but he himself killed them at the top of Floor 100 so that he didn’t have to share whatever he thought the reward waiting for was himself was.

“And then my team went through the process, which reset us to rank 0 and used all the progress we’d made as fuel for the change. I volunteered to take the red tower to help clean up Samael’s mess. Floor 25 is just a minor infestation, by the way. The real reason we’re doing all this is that there are seven total towers, and one of them has been completely taken over by the void. Once we’re grown strong enough, my old team and I are all meeting up and going to that tower to clear it out.”

That declaration was met with silence. Food was untouched, forgotten on the plates. Algial sat, frozen, a fork loaded with a square of meat halfway to his mouth. Yoru and Nemari were engaging in some sort of silent communication based entirely on eyebrow placement, and Rue just kind of alternated looking back and forth between Sorin and her brother, who looked equally confused.

“Sooooo... Questions?”

“Just a few,” Nemari told him. “First, what the hell are you talking about?”

“I... told you about the other towers? I came from the blue one. Samael climbed the green tower. This is familiar, yes?” Taking their dubious nods as agreement, Sorin said, “There are seven in total. As far as I know, five of them are fine. The red one has this miniature disaster on one floor caused by Samael, and the indigo one is just completely fucked from top to bottom. That’s what our ancestors way back when agreed to fix, but I guess the tower is bad at calibrating challenges. Also it’s eating the souls of literally everyone who dies inside its ‘reality,’ which includes Floor 0, to sustain itself while it waits for us to help drive out the void.”

This is going to take a little while for them to wrap their heads around all this, isn’t it?

It was Algial who broke the silence this time. “No offense, guys. I like you and all, but I really don’t think I’m cut out for handling these kinds of problems.”

“And you think the rest of us are?” Nemari asked him.

“No,” Sorin said firmly. “Your job is to get Floor 25 fixed up. What comes after is for the climbers who reached rank 100. No offense, but you’re all a long way from being ready to handle what the tower wants us to do.”

“What happens after Floor 25 then?” Rue asked.

“I don’t know. Whatever you guys want. You’ll basically be the strongest climbers in the tower. Keep climbing. Retire. Reform society. Your call, really.”

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The red tower wasn’t Sorin’s home, and as much as he disliked so many aspects of its society, he had other prerogatives to focus on. His current team was fine—he liked them well enough, even if it had taken a month or two for them to grow on him—but he couldn’t take them with him.

Even if he’d wanted to, he didn’t think they’d survive the journey to another tower. Their partial mosaics only let them tag along with him when he entered liminal space, and they were decidedly inferior when it came to how powerful they were. If Samael couldn’t make the trip from the red tower to the yellow one by himself at full strength, Sorin couldn’t begin to guess how much stronger the rest of his own team would need to be to accomplish that feat.

Their dinner party was significantly more subdued after that. Sorin answered questions as they came and asked his own to get caught up on what had happened while he was trapped. They discussed the updates everyone had made to their builds—not ideal decisions as they’d been limited without Morlin’s support, but not anything terrible.

They were still hard at work merging soulprints. None of them had managed anything complex yet, but they’d had a few more successes and were slowly working their way up to working with E-ranks. At some point, Algial and Yoru stepped out to have a word. Sorin indulged in the polite fiction that he couldn’t hear them discussing the substitute front-liner’s future with the team.

There was no point in pretending his treatment of the patriarch that Algial ultimately owed his loyalty to wasn’t a factor. Now that it was over, Sorin could admit that he’d lost his temper. It was partly because of his general state coming out of the trial, but mostly it was that he was sick of Morlin’s shit. Finding out Rue had lost an arm and their supposed benefactor was too cheap to have it regenerated without Sorin there to force him into it had been what pushed him over the edge.

Letting the house burn might have been petty of me, but Morlin started the fires. Who am I to argue if he wants to burn his own stuff? I guess it did screw up my plans, though. Now I don’t have access to the resources I was expecting to use.

“I need a high rank appraiser for some of the loot I pulled out of the trial,” Sorin said.

“Since when do you need someone else’s opinion?” Rue asked.

“Look, for low-level stuff, I’m fine. If it’s not too complicated, I can puzzle it out quick enough. But this stuff... it’s complicated, and it’s tower-forged. It’s not so easy.”

He reached down to where his pack sat at his feet. He hadn’t given it much thought before, but now that it was contrasted by an immaculate background, he could see exactly how rough a shape it was in. Much like himself, it was in dire need of some upkeep. Or maybe I should just replace it.

Ignoring that thought for the moment, he pulled out the belt buckle and the shard of bark. The daggers were still attached to his belt, but he drew them from their sheathes and set them on the table. “These are the three I’m not sure about.”

“That’s all you got?” Nemari asked. She craned her neck over to look at the over-stuffed pack.

“Nah. That’s what I got that I don’t know about. Pretty much everything else in there is soulprints and the slate. I’m pretty sure this one fits with the sword section of my mosaic, too.”

“Yoru probably knows someone,” Odric said. “Ask him when he gets back.”

That conversation was wrapping up and it looked like Algial wouldn’t be staying on, which was too bad because he seemed like a nice guy. Admittedly, he was a decade older than everyone else, but that just meant he had plenty of experience as a climber. He’d probably climbed each floor the slow and safe way, and there was nothing wrong with that.

“The daggers are a set,” Rue said. “I mean, obviously they are, but the enchantment links them. See the way the aura blends between them? Don’t separate them too far or you might ruin them.”

Sorin had, in fact, noticed that, but he just nodded and thanked Rue. A few minutes later, Yoru and Algial returned, though the latter only stayed long enough to finish his meal before leaving. There were mixed reactions to his departure, though it surprised Sorin to see that Odric was the most upset to lose him.

“He was a good guy stuck with a hard choice,” Odric said. “Plus he liked to cook. We made some good meals together.”

“Nothing saying you can’t still be friends with him. We won’t be climbing forever, and now that Samael’s gone, we can afford to take some time to rest.”

“There is still the matter of the remaining Hellions,” Yoru pointed out. “The gang splintered, but they’re still a threat.”

“The bigger problem is that they’re pulling the climbers who were fighting on the Void Wall back down to Floor 0,” Nemari said. “We’ve been worried about what we’re going to find up there for weeks now.”

“Is it disruptive enough that we need to address it immediately?” Sorin asked.

“Address it how?”

“I’ve always been partial to killing problematic climbers.”

That brought the whole table up short. It was Rue who broke the silence. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time we killed some Hellions.”

“Yeah, the ones who went after us! Not the whole gang.”

“I’m not saying the whole gang,” Sorin said. “I’m just talking about the leadership—people rank 15 and up, maybe. The ones that are running around unchecked right now. The problem causers.”

“It... might not be a bad idea,” Yoru admitted. “You’re probably the only person in the whole tower in a position to actually do something about them right now. God, that’s weird to say. I knew you were strong, but not rank 25 strong.”

“The real question is how long it would take to do it,” Nemari said.

“Right, because if the Hellions are abandoning their positions at the Void Wall, then nobody’s holding it back. It’s going to grow, and it’ll grow fast. We could spare a few weeks, sure, but it could be the work of months to find them all.”

Sorin thought back to that soulprint he’d gotten from the tower cache. If he absorbed it now, he’d lose the ability to free cast C-rank spells, and it was likely to be a few floors before he ranked up again. But with it, he could definitely hunt down anyone in the city quickly enough.

I’d still be able to do E and D-rank. It wouldn’t be a total loss of flexibility, but it’d definitely slow me down.

“You guys know the situation better than me. Think about how necessary it is and get back to me tomorrow. I’m going to get a full night’s uninterrupted sleep for once.”

And so saying that, he dropped Morlin’s purse on the table in front of Yoru, scooped up his bag and the tower loot off the table, and strode out of the dining room.

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