The Fractured Tower

Rue wanted to complain about the food being cold—either of the men could have run it from anywhere in the city to the kitchen table in a matter of minutes or less—but the blood all over Yoru’s side and the almost haunted look in his eyes discouraged her from saying anything. Some weird shit had obviously gone down, and the fact that he didn’t want to talk about it was probably not a good sign.

He’ll open up when he’s ready. If it was anything we needed to worry about as a team, Sorin either already addressed it or he’ll tell us soon.

She was probably being uncharitable about the whole thing, but this visit from her parents had turned out to be a disaster. She’d only gone to fetch them because Od had insisted, but even he was starting to see what a bad idea that had been. Of course, the bastard had simply closed his eyes and gone back to bed, leaving her to deal with them.

Once they’ve gotten over the initial hump of concern for Od’s health, they’d started in on the lecturing. Climbing was dangerous. They were strong enough. They could sell off their gear and retire. It was pointless to keep risking their lives. Rue understood that they were afraid for their children, and that seeing Od covered in mottled scar tissue had amplified those fears, but her parents were working her last nerve now.

Thankfully, they were happily stuffing their faces, an activity which precluded nagging Rue for the next few minutes. The fact that the food was cold in no way hindered their enjoyment of it, and just thinking that made Rue remember all the times growing up when even a cold meal would have beaten what she’d actually got. Most days, it had been a toss-up between rotting food or nothing at all.

Regrettably, the meal came to an end. Nemari’s cousin or whatever excused herself and fled before Rue’s parents could start up again, and the not-twins found their own excuse to leave for a bit, leaving Rue without much in the way of allies to shield her from their attention.

It came as no surprise when Sorin announced bare minutes later—right in the middle of her father trying to lay out the math on how she could survive the rest of her life on a mere thousand danirs if she was frugal—that he had his own errand to attend to, and that he’d return in the morning.

“Take me with you!” she mouthed urgently, her head turned so her mother wouldn’t see her lips move. She knew he’d catch the desperate plea even without a direct line of sight, but he just paused, gave her a mocking smile, and strode out the door.

Rue turned pleading eyes on Nemari, but they both knew there was nothing she could do to rescue Rue. Od, that son of a bitch, was pretending to be asleep. This was your fault! You were the one who wanted me to bring Mom and Dad here! she silently screamed at him, pushing the emotion through their telepathic bond.

“Oh, I think he’s waking up!” Dad said as he noticed Od’s flinch.

Good, serves you right.

But Od just shifted slightly and did his best to keep his breathing shallow but even. The ingrate didn’t even try to take some of the attention off her! After a moment of watching him, their mother turned back to Rue and said, “Do you remember that boy from two doors down the street?”

“Oh God,” Rue muttered.

“It turns out he also started climbing. Really, it’s a very sensible way to earn money if you’re smart about it. He got up to rank 5, then went back down to do harvesting jobs on Floor 2.”

Rue remembered. There was no way she’d forget. The guy was a jerk, and he’d endlessly rubbed it in her face for months after he’d managed to tag along on a climb with a relatively new team looking for a free porter. That was actually what had inspired Od to do the same thing, only he’d barely survived his experience.

“It’s good money with almost no risk,” her mother continued, completely unaware of how much Rue resented the topic of the conversation. “He’s actually been looking to start a family. How about that, huh?”

Okay, no.

“Not even a little bit interested in that jackass,” Rue said firmly. “And I feel sorry for whatever woman he tricks into his bed.”

“Oh, come on. He’s not that bad. Just the other day...”

Rue groaned and buried her face in her hands.

* * *

The one thing that bugged Sorin about this whole polar wyrm hunt was that the creatures he thought of as polar wyrms were not something he expected to see on such a low floor. There were two possible explanations that came to mind. First, it might just be as simple as there were two different monsters with the same name. Second, it could be the same monster at different stages of the life cycle, like how that juvenile kraken had gotten down to Floor 9 somehow.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Either way, Sorin wasn’t too worried about killing one. It was the finding part that was giving him trouble. Knowing that polar wyrms liked mountains and ice wasn’t too helpful when that was the whole damn floor. Floor 21 was locked in a constant, unending blizzard, which made both navigation and survival difficult.

Still better than stewing in the awkwardness that was that house, he thought to himself as he walked atop ten feet of loose snow that had no business holding his weight. It was a deceptive field, seeming flat but in reality covering a treacherous slope. A single misstep could send an unwary climber careening into a freefall that ended in their death. And there were a thousand ways to make that misstep.

Sorin’s solution was to just not fight his way through the snow. Walking on top of it was a drain on his anima, but he could go for hours before his reservoir got low enough that he had to worry about it. Getting an actual Snow Strider soulprint would make it even easier, but he’d hold off on those kinds of utility powers until after he was done with the Void Wall.

While he walked, his mind drifted. The day had been... eventful, in a word. It was perhaps slightly insulting how much Yoru had felt the need to hide from him in a misguided attempt to protect his father, though Sorin supposed he understood why. Truthfully, he should have taken a detour back to the Telpike estate to have a conversation about it, but the damage was already done. He’d leave that issue in Yoru’s hands.

Odric and Rue’s parents were intense and somewhat discomforting. Sorin hadn’t had much in the way of parental affection growing up, so at first he’d thought it was just him not being equipped to process it. It didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t just Rue who was uncomfortable around them, but every other person in the house, as well.

That was a shame. Sorin knew both Rue and Odric had been holding back money from their cut of the funds to send to their parents, and he would have expected them to show a bit more gratitude. At first, he’d thought whatever arrangements they’d made had fallen through, that someone had been scamming the pair. That would have been pretty much in line with how the rest of the day had gone and explained the behavior.

But no, that wasn’t it. Neither Rue or Odric seemed surprised at all. They’d fully expected their parents to act that way, so Sorin had held off suggesting anything. He made a mental note to delicately feel out one of them—Okay, it’s going to be Odric for sure—just to get their take on the idea that someone might be skimming from the money they were sending home, but he wasn’t expecting it to lead anywhere.

Of everyone on the team, Nemari seemed to have the least amount of issues despite the fact that she arguably had the greatest financial burden. The Sildfalls were a fallen family, and their branch family was struggling to pick up the slack. A significant portion of Nemari’s own income had gone into supporting them in their efforts to retain the family property and fend off debtors.

Her meeting had been one part financial overview and one part catching up on how the many children of the family were faring. They’d been held captive and used as leverage in her uncle’s hunt for her, and that had left them all somewhat worse for wear. From what Sorin had overheard, they were mostly recovered from the ordeal now.

Considering that Sorin himself had been the one to kill off pretty much all of the main Sildfall family’s active climbers, he’d felt most keenly responsible for Nemari’s predicament. She’d adamantly refused any and all offers to help, however, so he’d left her to do whatever it was she was going to do. He was just glad to see that things were moving in something approaching the right direction.

That just left Azlo and Heldigar, and there honestly wasn’t much to say about them. If they had any other family, neither mentioned anyone. Their conversation had actually been the easiest for Sorin to involve himself in, consisting almost entirely of climbing stories and tips about upcoming floors. Even that had gotten old quickly, though, and he’d retreated to his own busywork after half an hour.

His musings were interrupted by a disruption in the snow underfoot. It wasn’t coming toward him, at least not directly, but it was passing by close enough that he felt it would be prudent to keep an eye on the monster until it left the range of Observer.

I wonder if that’s what they call a polar wyrm in the red tower, he reflected, noting its general snake-like proportions. It was probably two hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, though Observer struggled to get fine details under the snow, and Veins of the World did practically nothing here since it wasn’t actually in the ground.

It was close, though, close enough that it was using its legs to grab hold of the mountain stone and pull itself forward through the snow. Wyrms generally didn’t have legs, which meant that this was more of a nuisance and a distraction than his goal.

Sorin held perfectly still, hoping that his luck would hold out. It wasn’t that he was scared. He just wasn’t interested in time wasters, and that was what this encounter promised to be. It was probably some sort of centipede-shaped ice elemental, anyway.

Guess I’m about to find out, he thought with an audible sigh. The monster had shifted direction, and the front legs were leaving contact with the ground as it dug toward the surface. Maybe it’ll have a good soulprint or something.

Escape was still possible, but it would cost him more anima than it was worth. There was a reason he was walking on top of the snow instead of flying between mountain peaks. The occasional fight generally didn’t last long enough or consume enough anima to be worth taking to the air just to avoid it, and he knew from painful experience that assuming a monster couldn’t reach him just because he left the ground was a good way to get hit.

The already almost blinding snow flurries quickly turned into a total whiteout as the monster erupted into the open air. It had coiled around him prior to breaking the surface, and its strategy was a simple one: to either crush him in its coils or slice him with its dozens of ice-blade legs.

Sorin snapped off the closest row with an application of Force Weaver, then leveled a blow against its body that cracked the segment of ice in two, almost completely splitting the monster into pieces. Only its magical regeneration helped it hold itself together, and it quickly found itself pushing the absolute limits of that ability.

Sorin walked away two minutes later, grumpy at the lack of soulprints and wasted time. The ice elemental was in a hundred glittering pieces behind him, and the snow storm howled on, uncaring of the battlefield it swallowed up.