The Fractured Tower

The Antechamber always gave climbers something useful, often something that they needed. In this case, what they needed above all else was a new source of magical healing. A soulprint with the perfect healing spell to help Odric recover would work, though at this point, only Rue and maybe Sorin—depending on how expensive the spell was—had the reserves to cast C-rank magic. Failing that, there was the dubious option of a potion.

Alchemy had all sorts of drawbacks, at least when it came to imbibing the final product. More often than not, the side effects more than negated whatever benefits the potion provided, and it was the rare emergency indeed where that was the best option. Healing potions were by no means exempt from that rule and were rarely useful for anything besides triage to stop the bleeding. That might prevent a death on the field, but leave the user so direly poisoned that they died a few hours later anyway.

If there’d been a potion on one of those pedestals, Sorin probably would have tried it anyway. But he’d already glanced over, seen no potions or soulprints, and dismissed the rewards as a possible solution.

“Go see what the tower gave us,” he suggested. “I don’t think it’ll be helpful, but we should at least check.”

Come on. You’re strong enough to survive this, Sorin silently whispered to Odric.

A minute passed. Sorin kept an eye on the anima levels in his soulspace and tried to calculate how long it would be before he had enough to cast Restoration. Even holding back all the passives to help speed his recovery along, it wasn’t fast enough. If he was willing to drop down from C to D-rank, he could use Lesser Restoration right now. It would sink in deeper than what Nemari and the others had used, and that would certainly help, but he was afraid it wouldn’t be enough.

Odric had recovered slightly while they worked on him, but now that the anima was gone, he’d stalled out and started to backslide. His breathing was once again uneven and ragged. They were losing him.

“Anything?” he called out.

He didn’t even need to hear the words themselves. The frustration in Rue’s tone was enough of an answer for him. “It’s all equipment and gem stones!”

Equipment wouldn’t help now. Maybe if they’d had it before the fight, it could have made the difference, but unless something was enchanted with Regeneration, it was too late. Even if there was something like that, it probably wasn’t strong enough, but it was worth exploring.

“Bring it to me, especially anything enchanted,” he said.

Dutifully, Rue and Nemari carried each piece over. Sorin felt his attention pulled to a pair of black leather gloves and knew instinctively that those were his reward. They weren’t enchanted to heal, however, so he turned away to examine the other pieces.

Nothing.

The new gear was worthless, but it reminded Sorin of one important fact. Odric had both a brooch and a wristband that held emergency anima reservoirs. Those were useless right now—only Odric could spend the anima he’s stored in there—but Sorin had his own external reservoir in his sword. It had been impressively large when he’d first acquired it, but what was impressive on Floor 8 was rather mundane on Floor 22.

He drained it anyway. Eyeing his new supply critically, he decided it just might be enough, just barely, for a single Restoration spell. It wouldn’t cover a Remedy. If he’d had to pick between the two, that was what Sorin would have chosen, but that wasn’t the decision in front of him. It was Restoration or nothing.

The final option is still there if you’re not too much of a coward to do it, his guilty conscience hissed at him.

He’d done it before, but it was a lot easier in the heat of battle when his life was on the line. Here, he’d be maiming himself in cold blood to save someone else. Odric was a good man, and he didn’t deserve to die, but Sorin barely considered him a friend. Odric certainly wasn’t a loved one like he was to Rue. That made it harder to make the sacrifice.

It’s just pain and time, he told himself. Immediately, his mind supplied the counterargument: Time is the one thing you don’t have enough of.

Banishing that thought and his indecision, Sorin took a deep breath. There was no more stalling, no more room to hope Odric would pull through on his own. They’d exhausted every other option. If Odric could just wake up, he could tap into his own reserves to stabilize himself, but it was up to Sorin to get him there first.

Slowly, with deliberate intention, Sorin fell into his soulspace. He chose a section of blank wall far away from the many oil paintings that represented all the soulprints grafted onto him, and he reached up a hand to press against it. It felt like cool stone under his fingers, clean, solid, and reassuring.

Sorin dug a nail into it. It should have done nothing. A fingernail couldn’t carve stone, not on its own. But it wasn’t a real fingernail, and it wasn’t real stone. The gesture was more symbolic than anything. It represented his conscious decision to dig into his soulspace.

This content has been unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He waited for the anima to come pouring out, for the pain to rack him to his core. It would take only a moment, though the pain would linger for weeks while his soul slowly healed. It was important to bleed himself just enough to cast the magic he needed. Then he’d seal the wall back up.

Only the anima didn’t come. In fact, he felt nothing at all. What the hell? Why isn’t it working?

Sorin had done this many times, more so in his old life than his current one, but he’d also carved out a piece of his soulspace once here in the red tower. He knew what he was doing. He knew how it worked. And anima should have been pouring into his reservoir, converted from the very structure of his soul to the fuel needed to power his magic.

A soft glow coming from the mosaic to his right caught his attention. Sorin turned toward it, where the fourth image on the outer circle sat. His soulspace had stretched just enough to brush up against the soulprint in the middle. He still couldn’t tell what it was supposed to represent, though. His own image was clear enough in what was revealed, showing him with his hand stretched out toward something many times his size and glowing white.

What that thing was, he couldn’t tell. It was obscured both by the all-white glow covering it and by the fact that more than half the image was still beyond the edge of his soulspace. But what the soulprint itself did was obvious now: it gave him anima.

Is that the tower? he speculated as the anima welled up from the soulprint and seeped into his soulspace. Immediately, he could tell the difference. It wasn’t his anima. Holy shit, that’s definitely the tower! This is like having liquid soulprint floating in my soulspace.

That was as close to an accurate description as he could manage. When he merged two soulprints together, the leftover bits and pieces dissolved into something that felt similar to what was coming out of the mosaic. It wasn’t a perfect comparison, but articulating the differences was beyond him at the moment.

A new thought struck him. Is this what I was missing from Samael’s soulprint modification process, this... tower-anima? It’s what crystallizes into soulprints inside monsters, right? If I could control it in its raw form, could I make my own soulprints?

As fascinating as that idea was, as much as he wanted to think it through and design some experiments, there was a more important question looming over him. The tower-anima was a resource to be used, and he needed to figure out how to convert it from its current state into something he could free cast spells with.

Or do I even need to? All I’m doing with free casting is twisting my own anima into a pattern to mimic a soulprint’s. If this is what soulprints are made of, can I just manipulate it directly to cast the same spell? Isn’t that what every monster in the tower is doing all the time?

He didn’t know, but he was about to find out. Reaching out, Sorin grasped hold of the tower-anima and willed himself back up out of his soulspace. With the anima firmly under his control, he started shaping it into Remedy. There was a brief hitch as the spell finished where it tried to settle into an empty spot on the wall—Is it trying to form the soulprint inside me?!—but Sorin’s will overrode that behavior. He cast it outward, and the spell flashed into existence.

It sank into Odric, and Sorin held his breath. He was experimenting here, and just because he’d found a new source of anima didn’t mean the spell would remain stable. For all he knew, he was about to kill Odric with an injection of foreign anima directly into his soulspace.

He didn’t think that would happen. Nothing about the process suggested it would be an issue, and he had a lot of years of experience handling anima. But he didn’t know, so when the spell triggered, he watched Odric intently to see the results.

Unknowingly, he expelled air back out of his mouth. It worked. Odric’s chest started rising and falling in a steady rhythm—weak, but steady. Observer confirmed it. Remedy was the wrong tool for the job, but there was enough overlap that it could fix some of the damage. Sorin pulled on the tower-anima again, wincing as a sharp jab of pain rolled across his soulspace, and cast Remedy again.

The tiles near the new soulprint had started to crack as he demanded more tower-anima from it, and the soulprint itself seemed to be resisting the draw. It looked like it was going to give him however much anima it felt like, and his wants and needs weren’t a factor in that decision.

Two Remedies was still two more than he could have given Odric a minute ago, so Sorin couldn’t complain. If they were lucky, it was enough to give their healer a fighting chance. If not, Sorin would return to his original plan. The tower had blocked him from digging into his soulspace once, but if it didn’t want to give him more anima, he’d try again.

“What did you do?” Rue asked. “I thought you were tapped out.”

“I am,” Sorin said. “The tower... I mean, one of the soulprints in my mosaic. I guess the edge touched on it when I hit rank 28. I went to go pull anima out of my soulspace, out of the walls, I mean, and the soulprint activated on its own. It started feeding me a different kind of anima, and I used that to double cast Remedy, but now it doesn’t want to give me anymore, and the tiles around the soulprint are cracked.”

He realized he was babbling, but his mind was still struggling to put all the facts in order, to make the connections between observations and tease out the cause and effect of it all. In that moment, though, none of that mattered, because he felt Odric’s aura shift. It was so minute that he might have tricked himself into thinking he’d just imagined it, that he was seeing what he wanted to see instead of what actually was, but Rue’s sharp gasp convinced him that it had happened.

“He’s awake,” Sorin said softly. Rue made to rush past him, but Sorin’s hand snaked out to grab her arm. “Give him a second.”

It was no surprise that the first thing Odric did was cast Pain Suppression on himself, just like it was no surprise that the F-rank spell wasn’t nearly powerful enough to dull the agony he was no doubt in. Maybe it took the edge off, though, and either way, that was enough for him to open his eyes.

“I’m alive?” he croaked out in a harsh whisper. “How?”

“I’ll explain later,” Sorin told him. “Everyone who can cast a healing spell is completely tapped out. We’re safe for the moment, but we need you to do everything you can to heal yourself.”

Odric didn’t respond, but he started channeling anima through his soulprints. Still holding Rue back and noting that she had tears streaming down her cheeks now, Sorin watched their healer struggle to save himself.