The Fractured Tower

Sorin woke on a bed made out of a cloak and covered with a blanket made out of another. He was next to a hissing, spitting fire full of soggy, green wood that belched out a line of thick smoke. Rain drizzled down from an overcast sky, cold like it always seemed to be on this floor. His sword lay beside him, the onyx in its hilt now faded to matte black and small veins of gray running up the white of the blade.

Blind Sense unfolded around him, revealing his rescuers. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it looked like Rue and Odric had lurked around the edge of the battle and waded through the field of ash to haul his comatose body out of there once it was over. The younger of the siblings was standing not thirty feet away, staring out into the fog that had sprung up while he was unconscious.

Odric himself was nowhere to be found, but Sorin was sure the healer-turned-brawler was nearby. He’d never leave his sister behind, being far too loyal for that, which likely meant he was within sight, just not inside the range of Blind Sense.

Groaning with pain as his muscles protested his orders, he dragged himself into an upright position to look around. As expected, Odric was a few hundred feet away, using a small camp hatchet for splitting firewood to attack a spruce and harvest a few more branches. How exactly they’d managed to even start a fire with wood that green while it was raining was a mystery, but it looked like they were intent on keeping it going.

“Still alive, huh?” Rue said without looking back at him. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch, you know that? Any sane climber would have run.”

“You can’t just run away from something like that,” Sorin said. “Or you can, but it doesn’t go away. When you see the void, you kill it, or it keeps eating, keeps growing.”

“Sure. I see a little voidling that comes up to my waist, I’ll handle it,” Rue told him. “Might not do it as smooth as you, but I know I can kill that. Something the size of a God-damn city block is a bit much for one person. Well, one normal person.”

“It all worked out in the end,” he said.

“Gotta think that’s more your sword than you.”

He couldn’t exactly argue with that notion. The behemoth had stopped growing once it had finished eating all the monsters in the area, but if Sorin had fled, it would have simply wandered off in search of its next meal. The fact that it saw him as a viable candidate for snacking on was the only reason it had stayed. Thankfully, they didn’t get much smarter as they got bigger, and it never occurred to the thing that one measly human wasn’t worth its time.

Then again, as a rank 7 measly human, I probably stood out against the background of Floor 4’s local fauna. It might have chased after me even if I had tried to run away.

“That was a disaster,” he said. “We’re lucky it turned out as well as it did for us, and I am extremely concerned about what happened on the other side. It was close enough to the portal hub that it probably drew a lot of attention. If a void behemoth showed up there, who knows how many people it killed.”

“You think it got Nemari and the others?” Rue asked.

“It’s possible. If they were smart, they fled through the portal before it spread all the way up there. We’re going to have a hell of a time tracking them down now.”

Odric returned then, an armful of branches weighing him down. “You’re awake. Good. I tried to heal up your body as best I could, but it seemed to… resist the attempt, I guess.”

“Anima saturation from my own abilities in my muscles and bones,” Sorin explained. “I went at full speed for too long. How long was I asleep for?”

“Six hours, maybe. Hard to tell with the sun always hidden behind these clouds.”

Might be long enough for the void to have settled down, but the only way to know for sure is to carve another sign and see what pops out.

He could do that. In the worst case, he would simply destroy the sign the instant void started to appear and maybe have to kill a small voidling. Just the thought of getting up and fighting sent a scream of protest through his whole body, though.

He slumped back down with a pained sigh. “Any monsters nearby?”

“Nothing I’ve found,” Rue said.

“We’ve got food and essential supplies?”

“Yep.”

“Fantastic,” Sorin muttered. “Either of you have any objections with me resting for another few hours before we start figuring out how to get the hell out of this mess?”

“That depends on whether we’re safe now,” Odric said slowly.

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“From the void? Yeah. We’re good. I destroyed all of it. Maybe some other void creature might appear, but that one’s gone.” Sorin didn’t miss the siblings exchanging glances, but neither seemed to want to speak up. “What’s the concern?”

“It’s just that we’ve been trying to avoid notice from certain people for weeks now, and this was a very attention-getting event. We’re less than a mile away from where that thing ate through the damn ground,” Rue said.

“And you think we need to get some more distance before we settle down to rest for real.”

“Only if you feel up to moving,” Odric hurried to say.

He didn’t, not at all, but he could acknowledge the wisdom of not hanging around the site of a disaster waiting for someone of a much higher rank to show up and ask them questions about what happened.

“No, you’re right. We’re probably too far out from the portal hub for anyone to notice this, but it’s better not to take chances,” Sorin said. He pushed himself upright again and started gathering his things. “We’ll walk for an hour or two and see where we are.”

“Well, the good news is that the void basically ate that river,” Rue said. “We should be able to cross easily now.”

“That’s a start,” Sorin acknowledged.

“It’s still there,” Odric said, “but now it’s twice as wide, and the water looks sluggish.”

That would be easy enough for Sorin and Rue to cross. If the water was flowing slowly now, Sorin could probably build up enough of an ice raft for Odric to stand on and be towed, too. The thought of channeling more anima through his body made him cringe inwardly, but climbers who couldn’t fight at a moment’s notice ended up dead more often than not. He’d force his body to do whatever needed done.

They quickly broke down camp and skirted the outside edge of the disaster area. Even from half a mile away, Sorin could see where the river’s course had been diverted and broken up by the behemoth ripping through the landscape. Only by knowing what it had looked like yesterday could Sorin even tell where the river was supposed to be. In its place was a wide, placid stream that they easily crossed.

No reason to get excited, he thought to himself as they reached the far bank. There’s about forty more rivers the void didn’t chew up still in our way.

* * *

Samael glowered at the field of dense, gray ash just outside the Floor 4 portal hub. He hadn’t seen a void incursion of this size below Floor 25 in years, not since he’d figured out all the little details of Liminal Gateway. There was no doubt in his mind that the new transmigrator was to blame for this.

Samael had thought he’d firmly dissuaded Sorin from using Liminal Gateway by making it clear that he himself had access to the path Sorin was forging. Any competent climber would have recognized the danger there, but apparently circumstances had either become dire enough to necessitate use of the soulprint anyway, or Sorin was an extraordinarily reckless and arrogant climber.

Arrogant, maybe. It does take a healthy degree of self-confidence to reach Floor 100. The reckless usually get themselves killed long before then, though.

He’d hoped to avoid being forced to deal with an incident like this, but here he was. Fortunately, the void had spit out something of a runt as far as behemoths went. Samael had arrived within minutes of its appearance, and it had taken him only ten minutes to contain the incursion. Less than a minute later, he’d located a gate and destroyed it to prevent more void from leaking out.

He extended his senses out in every direction, searching for his counterpart amidst the crowd of climbers at the portal hub. Annoyingly, Sorin was nowhere to be found. While Samael wanted him to progress without oversight, if he was going to be this reckless, it would be better for everyone to just end this charade that he couldn’t catch Sorin and his companions whenever he wanted.

Either Sorin had fled through the portal to another floor, or he’d been killed by the void behemoth he’d inadvertently unleashed. Samael wasn’t concerned. While a second transmigrator to help with the infestation that had overtaken Floor 25 would be useful, his own plans had been in motion for years. The Death Corps was slowly advancing, and he’d ramped up production of their numbers by this point to where they continued to grow month by month.

One way or another, it was only a matter of time until the siege broke and Samael could climb the rest of this accursed tower. If Sorin lived, maybe he’d get there a year or two faster. If not, he’d just continue on with his original plan.

What he didn’t want was to deal with another outbreak like this. Assuming Sorin was alive, Samael obviously needed to bring the man to heel before his actions caused more problems. Lifting himself higher into the air with a free cast Flight spell, he surveyed the area again.

No one at rank 4 could hide themselves from Samael, and he didn’t believe Sorin had progressed higher than rank 6 by now. There were few spots that offered enough readily available anima to progress by leaps and bounds. Even if Sorin had grown as high as rank 10, that still wasn’t enough to access anything better than D-ranked abilities, nothing that could hide him from Samael.

And yet, he was nowhere to be found.

“How vexing,” Samael muttered. The odds of Sorin being dead seemed low. Through the portal then. I’ll have to wait for the void to calm down on the other side of the gate, then go check the path he’s made to make sure he hasn’t caused additional messes out in the middle of some other floor.

The temptation to dive in now was strong. With Void Walker, he could probably manage it while escaping the void’s notice, but the truth was that he’d been called away from other business to handle this disaster, and he needed to get back to that.

Annoyed more than was reasonable, Samael flew back to the portal hub and approached the ugly red circle. Green was a much more natural color for something like this, and despite having a decade to get used to it, he still wasn’t enamored with the trappings of his new home.

Samael passed through the portal and emerged back on Floor 24, where something like two hundred climbers he’d personally outfitted and spent considerable time using mental compulsion to mold into the fighting force he needed waited for him.

“Sir,” one of the squad leaders said as he approached.

“Containment was successful,” Samael said. “Resume the advance.”

At his command, a dozen squads leaped forward to tear into the writhing field of void that spilled out of the font that had once been the floor guardian’s arena. They wouldn’t reclaim it today, not at this rate, and probably not before every single climber in the field now was dead. But the next generation might. If not them, then the one that came after.

All in the name of progress, he thought dispassionately as beings that barely resembled the men and women they’d once been sacrificed themselves tearing into an enemy that felt neither pain nor fear.