The Fractured Tower

Unlike the massive field of gray ash they’d left behind when Sorin had slain the void behemoth, they found the one outside the portal hub to be rather dainty. It was only a hundred feet across, and the edges were already filling in. The behemoth that had formed on the other side of the liminal path had either been significantly smaller, or it had been killed much faster—or both.

However things had gone down, it had broken apart the ridge separating marshland from the hill, and there was now a wide avenue leading directly down to the water’s edge. That meant, of course, there was a road for monsters crawling out of the marsh to reach the portal hub, and there was plenty of evidence that they’d been doing exactly that over the five days it had taken Sorin’s team to reach there.

Initially, he’d planned to stick his head back into liminal space after a day or two, but the others had objected quite strenuously to that idea. Sorin knew he’d have to poke at it eventually, but it was hard to argue with them when the aching sensation in his own body had hardly begun to fade.

Without Void Resistance, I’d be dead, so I can’t really complain about still being sore a week later.

It was a compelling argument to keep his nose clean, though, so he’d resigned himself to a long trip. They’d built ice rafts for Odric, which Rue had tugged along while Sorin defended the duo from attack where necessary. It had been a slow process that had twice resulted in all three of them ending up underwater, but they’d made it in the end.

“Looks like something came out this side, too,” Rue said. “Do you think it got Nemari and the others?”

“Not if they were quick enough to run away,” Sorin said. “If I were them, I’d have sprinted straight for the portal and gone literally anywhere else.”

“How do we find them?” Odric asked.

Designated meet up points were standard procedure for climbers. Theirs was a dangerous profession, and unforeseen issues were bound to crop up eventually. No one, not even Sorin, could predict it all, so instead teams created contingency plans that could be used to address a wide variety of situations, and that included the event that the team got split up.

The ultimate fallback point was usually the portal hub, though that came with its own set of issues—issues like having to march back across miles of monster-infested terrain at partial strength. That was why Sorin had been willing to risk so much to return to Odric and Rue in the first place; he didn’t think they’d survive the trek on their own.

Nothing they’d encountered over the last few days had convinced him he’d been wrong, either. There were at least a dozen instances where, even if Odric had also somehow obtained Water Walking and could have traversed the environment unhindered, Sorin was sure the monsters would have killed both of them. There were even a few fights where he didn’t think he could have won alone, not in his current condition.

“We’ll start at the portal hub,” he decided. “If we’re really lucky, they’ll be there. If we’re not, we’ll expand to the Floor 3 hub. After that, it gets trickier.”

It wouldn’t take long to check those hubs. Neither was a quarter the size of the bigger hubs on Floors 1 and 2. It was more a concern of who else might be there right now, specifically any local representatives of the Black Hellions Samael had sent to keep an eye on the area after the void infestation would have drawn his attention to it.

Sorin had lost a bit of anima from the fight, though far less than he would have otherwise expected, but he was still rank 7. He could handle any climber twice his rank if it came down to it. If they waited another few days for him to fully recover, he’d put even odds on himself taking on someone even stronger than that.

The three of them approached the hub as a group, the hoods of their cloaks up and pulled low over their faces. Sorin and Rue didn’t need their eyes to see anyway, and while the cloak did little to mask Odric’s size, every little bit of anonymity helped. If things went according to plan, they’d be facing far worse scrutiny soon enough, anyway.

The hub only had six buildings, all of them crude things made from unprocessed and locally sourced lumber. One was a rough inn, if it could even be called that. It boasted a common room, and that was it. Another was a butcher’s shop, eager to buy monster corpses and sell processed cuts.

A general store rounded out the economic side of Floor 4’s portal hub, staffed by a set of twins in their late fifties. They had a selection of what Sorin considered to be standard climber’s equipment, slightly tailored for the environment by offering a diverse set of water-sealed boots and cloaks. One rack boasted weapons enchanted to never rust.

The other three buildings had clearly been added separately. One had a middle-aged couple living in it, both rank 6 by the feel of it, and was stuffed to the brim with herbs in various states of process. Drying lines criss-crossed each other overhead, and stations lined the walls, each one representing the tools of their trade.

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The others were some sort of guard shacks, by the looks of it. A woodsman was asleep in one of them, and the other had two men in uniforms that reminded Sorin of the tax collectors back on Floor 0. He didn’t get a good look at them, or anyone else, for that matter, because while Blind Sense was useful, it didn’t show him things like color or fine detail.

The inn was their first stop after a quick lap around the hub to cross off the chance of finding the other half of their team in one of the buildings. Unfortunately, but completely expectedly, they weren’t so lucky. So they turned to a woman tending a heavy iron cauldron full of rich stew for information instead.

“Three,” Sorin said as they sat at one of the two tables in the single-room building.

“Nine danirs,” she said without bothering to look over at them. She collected three bowls from a rack next to a sink, ladled a portion of stew from the cauldron into each one, and tossed them onto a wooden tray. She deftly swept up the pile of coins from the table and slid the tray between the trio in a single motion. “Enjoy.”

“Thanks,” Sorin said. “What happened south of the hub?”

“Voidling,” the innkeeper explained, the word clipped. “Damn big voidling.”

“Shit. Those things,” he said. “Anyone hurt?”

“Most everyone ran for the portal. Then one of the big, high-ranked climbers showed up a few minutes later and killed it.”

The woman wasn’t as chatty as Sorin had hoped for, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. If she wasn’t feeling friendly, there were still other ways to get some information out of her. He stacked up five more danirs, each coin clinking distinctly as he added it to the stack.

“Got separated from the other half of our group. We were supposed to meet here. Don’t suppose you’ve seen them?” he asked, one finger still on the coins.

“What do they look like?” she asked, her eyes narrowed.

Sorin rattled off a brief description, just a few broad details that didn’t mean much individually. The innkeeper nodded. “Yeah, saw them for a minute when the trouble started.”

Sorin took his hand off the pile. “They go running for the portal?”

The coins vanished, almost as if by magic, but he heard the clink of them joining what she’d already placed into a pocket in her apron. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Tall, skinny boy, moved like he had a steel rod shoved all the way up his ass. Guy in his mid-twenties chasing after them, and a girl about your age. They came straight at the hub from when the voidling showed up and went into the portal without so much as slowing down.”

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

That was more or less what Sorin had expected them to do. It was what he would have done in their place. That did, unfortunately, leave them with four potential floors they could have fled to and the better part of a week to keep running in any direction they liked, which meant the chances of randomly bumping into them were non-existent.

His hope was that they were on Floor 3. His fear was that Yoru had gone all the way back home to Floor 0, a place Sorin couldn’t reasonably search at all, never mind the Black Hellions who would already be there.

“Where do you think they went?” Rue asked softly after the innkeeper had retreated back to the other side of the room.

Sorin didn’t want any curious ears overhearing them. “Not here. We’ll eat and head through the portal, then take it from there.”

The stew was fine for what it was, but Sorin ate mechanically without really tasting it. He was more concerned about the second void behemoth that had shown up by the portal hub and who had killed it—almost certainly Samael if it was just one person.

I am definitely missing some pieces here. Samael is playing some sort of game with me, and if I don’t figure out the rules soon, it’s going to bite me in the ass. What do I know about his goals and his resources?

The big thing was that Samael definitely had the capability to hunt down and capture Sorin if he really wanted to. Instead, he was ramping up the pressure and limiting Sorin’s options. It was like he was just trying to slow Sorin down, but not stop him completely.

Maybe what he’s really after is time. Though considering the blow up using Liminal Gateway caused, I’m starting to wonder if he was fucking with me there just to keep me from using it. Samael obviously knows more than I do about the mechanics of all of this.

It was impossible to say for sure, and eventually Sorin shoved those thoughts aside. Everyone finished their meals, and together, they headed for the portal. “We’ll start on Floor 3 and see what it looks like from there,” he said.

* * *

Nemari’s feet pounded across the sand as a jet of flame shot over her head. She ducked into a roll and hurled her own firebolt back, not that it would do much good.

“Just hold still!” the man chasing her yelled. “Why are you making this so difficult?”

“Fuck off, Dant!” she yelled back.

A second later, something hard and heavy smacked into her back, sending her sprawling. She was back on her feet immediately, but if she didn’t make it the last few hundred feet before her cousins caught up to her, it wasn’t going to matter.

A blur of motion in the corner of her eye grabbed her attention, and she didn’t hesitate to whip her sword through it. Cuizo, one of her second cousins from another branch family, cried out in pain as blood flew through the air.

Take that, you arrogant bastard.

They’d thought they could just stroll up and capture her, that she wouldn’t fight back because they outnumbered her four to one. Well, they’d learned better. She’d left two of them bleeding on the ground back at the portal hub, but Dant was undoubtedly the toughest of the group, and Cuizo was surprisingly quick.

Water flashed through the air, the last of what she’d been carrying in her skin, and smacked into Dant’s face, hard. He cried out, but his voice was garbled through the layer of water. She’d used the same trick twice already, and unfortunately, he’d figured out how to defeat it.

Hands blazing with fire, he reached up and grabbed his own face. The water boiled away into steam, but the distraction had given Nemari the lead again. The oasis came into view, partially tucked away behind a ring of bare stone spires, and with it came all the ammunition she needed.

A strand of water rose out of the small lake, one Nemari directed into Cuizo’s speeding form. The weight struck his chest hard enough that his feet flew out from beneath him, and he slammed into the sand. Laying on his back and groaning, he feebly clutched at the air.

“That mud puddle won’t save you from me,” Dant roared at her. He started picking up speed again, but now Nemari had what she needed to fight back.

“Come on, then! You’re so confident. Let’s find out.”