Broken Lands

Chapter 338 – The Tower of Aura Weight

The scouts did not return.

After an hour of waiting, Arak started sending everyone through the link-gate in groups. Sophia’s team was still paired with team Rockfist, but this time they were near the back of the group. When they finally did step through the link-gate, they were met by a crowd waiting on the other side.

They stood on a winding paved path that led through a seemingly peaceful tree farm. Sophia wanted to call it a forest, but she really couldn’t; it was far too manicured and well kept. There was very little undergrowth and all of the trees were evenly spaced out to form a windbreak on either side of the path. They had clearly been trimmed away from the path, as well; no limbs actually hung over the pathway. A few leaves were scattered across the ground, but Sophia was certain they had to be cleaned up as well; there were only a few.

Sophia turned to look at the entrance behind them, only to find out that there was no entrance behind them. There was only a rip in the air that appeared when someone stepped through the link-gate from the other side. 

“It is your first time in the Maze, isn’t it?” Meadow asked with a grin. “I remember my first locked zone. I expected a literal locked door, not no way out. Once in a while you do get that, but this is more common. If it’s a locked door, there’s usually a key hidden somewhere nearby; if you have time, it’s good to find it in case you run into something you can’t handle. If you’re scouting for an expedition and see a locked gate, that’s what you do while you wait for the rest of the expedition. If there’s nowhere to use a key, scout but don’t go too far; some locked zones have a distance trigger. You don’t want to start something intended for an expedition when you only have two teams, and you don’t want to block the rest of the expedition from coming in.”

Sophia frowned. “How far is too far?”

Meadow shrugged. “I’d like to give a distance, but it varies. If there’s a clear delineated area around the entrance, don’t go past it. That’s usually a good rule. I know you’ll want to scout it for monsters; don’t.”

That was clear enough, and it was the best she was going to get. Sophia nodded.

“All right, we’re all here.” Arak spoke in a conversational tone from Sophia’s shadow. She was sure everyone else heard him the same way; it really was his favorite way to talk to everyone. “As you all know, this is a locked zone. For those of you who are new to the Maze, the lack of an entrance means we have to find an exit. For some zones, that means literally finding the way out; that is the primary task in some zones.”

Sophia had the feeling that he was talking about the Waypoint zone type when he said that. A zone based around finding directions that didn’t have an exit at the entrance sounded a lot like what he thought that zone was going to be.

“This is a zone with a clear pathway,” Arak continued. “Nine times out of ten, that means the path leads to an exit and the zone is about something else. This zone has a path that leads in two directions. That likely means two exits, possibly with different problems. Those of you at the back won’t be able to see it through the trees, but the path forward leads to steps going up a large, man-made structure. That could be several different types of zone. The two most common are exploration and assault, but this is not an assault zone; we would already have seen the defenders if it were. We would probably not start this close to the structure, either, and there is usually a clear area around the building. We will know what it actually is soon.”

Arak was obviously talking to people who hadn’t been to the Maze that often. The Flying Stars were one of only three teams that had never been on an expedition before and were the only team that had never been in the Maze, but about half of the teams in the expedition only entered rarely, whether on their own or with an expedition.

Sophia wasn’t sure how often “rarely” was, but she did know that team Rockfist never went past the first few zones unless they had a large expedition. They simply weren’t up to handling parts of the Maze that had more than one third upgrade monster, at least not one after another. Most of what they did when they did enter wasn’t fight, it was supporting Meadow as she gathered valuable plants. Most of the plants near the entrance were relatively weak, but “relatively weak” in the standards of the Maze was still easily as powerful as any Hollow nearby. There were also a lot of varieties available in the Maze that couldn’t easily be found outside.

Arak led the group forward. A few minutes after they started forward, Sophia rounded a curve and could finally see the building he talked about. It was tall but far wider than it needed to be, with steps that went up the sides cut into larger blocks of stone that reminded Sophia of a step pyramid. Oddly, each step seemed to be about eight feet wide, two feet deep, and six or seven inches high. It was almost like they were made for someone with really big feet but short legs. 

No, that didn’t make sense. Maybe they were made for people to stand on, like in a line? Sophia knew she’d seen steps like that outside public buildings, but those steps usually led up to a grand entrance or something. These went all the way to the top, with a series of wider landings spaced out at roughly ten or twelve feet up. There were darker areas like shadows on either side of the steps on those landings, too, which made Sophia think that there might be entrances to the building there.

The first team made it all the way to the first landing before Arak spoke again. “This is a Tower of Aura Weight.”

“Fucking hell,” Jace spat on the trail. “Aura weight? Who picked this zone again?”

Meadow snorted. “Just because you suck at it doesn’t make it a bad zone.”

“Yes, it does,” Jace countered.

“While many of you will never have seen a Tower of Aura Weight, most of you will have heard of them. They are one of the rarest and most valued zones. This one is a little deeper than I prefer, but I will likely be leading an expedition directly to this zone once we return, as long as a mazestorm hasn’t blocked the route.” Arak’s words rolled right over Meadow’s retort to Jace. “That expedition will consist only of people well into the third upgrade so that we can perform a zone rush.”

Sophia had never heard of a Tower of Aura Weight; for some reason, it wasn’t listed in Registry Master Jessamine’s notes, even though they’d listed something like most of the zones they’d seen. The other one that was notably missing was the Night Market. It was an odd combination of misses; had the Registry Master just not bothered to talk about zones that didn’t require fighting?

She could guess what it probably meant, just from the name; the tower probably pushed on your aura to get you to collapse. It was a trick Sophia learned about from her father, because it was often controlled by a ward. If you could bypass the ward, you could avoid the entire thing. If you couldn’t do that … well, it all depended on exactly how the tower was going to add “weight.” If it just pushed against her aura like someone with a stronger aura, Sophia knew how to handle it. If it was anything else, she’d have to see if she could figure it out.

That was fine, she could make it work. What she couldn’t figure out was why it was worth a hurried expedition with a “zone rush.”

Sophia realized she’d asked the question out loud when Arak answered it. “The reason the Tower of Aura Weight is valued is that it is one of the handful of zones that directly awards Wisps to everyone who challenges it, as long as you reach at least the landing associated with your upgrade. It is significant, especially for those who are well into the third upgrade. No one is certain why it works that way; most of the guesses I’ve heard think it has something to do with the fourth upgrade, but no one has ever achieved that.”

Sophia knew that wasn’t entirely accurate. People had achieved the fourth upgrade before the Tower fell. She clearly remembered Bai talking about people who achieved the fourth upgrade in the Tower, but she also remembered that it was rare. It seemed like the sort of difference that might separate the Patrons from everyone else, though only being one upgrade higher didn’t really seem like enough somehow. Bai didn’t know what the difference was; he didn’t have any information about anything above the third upgrade other than the fact that it was possible.

That didn’t make Arak wrong. He was probably completely correct that no one in the Broken Lands had ever achieved the fourth upgrade. It might well not be possible without the Tower.

Arak moved from explanation to directions while Sophia thought. “Climb as high as you can, but do not collapse. Take as long as you need. Your final result is whatever step you reach and stay at for at least a minute. Once you’ve done that, you can descend to the next landing to declare that your climb is over without losing your achievement. If you collapse, your score is reduced to the last landing you passed. This can be a significant number of Wisps, so judge carefully. We could call this the Tower of Good Judgement as easily as the Tower of Aura Weight and it might be more accurate. Every expedition, there’s someone who fails and falls. I once saw someone fall all the way to the first landing and not gain any Wisps at all. Don’t be that person.”

Sophia started to feel something from the tower before she reached it, a slight pressure that bore down on her through her aura. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on; she was feeling a portion of the pressure from the people ahead of her who carried her feathers and were within her aura range. It was interesting to feel the pressure ahead of time, even as minor as it was, but that wasn’t the reason she had her aura extended. She was looking for any sign of a ward or control mechanism that she could easily fool.

She didn’t find one. It was probably buried deep inside the building they were climbing, too far for her aura to reach. All she could feel was the pressure it generated. She kept looking as she slowly drew closer to the tower, but nothing came into range.

When she stepped on the first step, she felt a change. The weight seemed to focus on her aura, as if it had just realized she was there. That gave her the thread of mana she needed and connected the weight to an enchantment embedded within the stone steps themselves. 

No, that wasn’t right. The enchantment she felt wasn’t what made the weight; that seemed to be inherent in the building. The enchantment she felt was all about time and location, not aura or weight. If it interacted with the aura at all, it was simply to know who was climbing the tower. That was disappointing; while she probably could mess with the enchantment, she couldn’t just remove the weight from herself or others, and that seemed to be the real problem here. 

She could probably fool the enchantment into thinking she was on a different step than she was or that she’d stood there longer than she had, but she needed time to figure it out. She was unlikely to have enough time; this was a lot more complicated than the locked box she’d opened for Xin’ri, and that lock took hours to decipher. If she didn’t take the time she needed to understand the enchantment, she was as likely to tell it she was still at the beginning as at the top, and there was no point in that.