Broken Lands

Chapter 339 – The Climb

The expedition slowly moved up the Tower of Aura Weight. They didn’t spend a minute on each step, but Sophia was certain that would start soon; no one had hit their limit yet.

Sophia pulled her aura closer to herself. There was no reason she should bear the weight of people who were near her if they weren’t her friends; they ought to be able to manage on their own. They were at a higher upgrade, after all. She couldn’t cover very many people and still support the weight well, anyway. Spreading her aura in a flat circle was exactly the opposite of what she needed to do to resist the pressure, no matter where it was coming from.

The first thing she needed to do was figure out how the weight was being imposed. A single downwards force was different from many pushes coming from all angles, and something trying to pull her aura apart was different from both, even though they would all feel more or less the same if you didn’t know what you were feeling. Sophia needed to know which one she faced.

Sophia was able to dismiss the idea of a single weight from above fairly quickly; this was definitely not the Judgement of the Sky as she climbed upwards, for all that the Sky’s Judgement would easily match the description of each higher step being worse than the one before it. It felt more like a pull from below, but even that didn’t seem quite right.

Sophia moved and shifted her aura as she climbed through the first tier of steps, trying to figure out what she was dealing with. It felt like everyone around her was minimizing their presence or just enduring the pressure if they didn’t have enough control to pull their aura back inside themselves. That was probably a good place to start, but it was unlikely to be perfect. It was a decent defense against aura effects if you couldn’t do anything else, but Sophia was trained in using her aura to cast spells. She could do more.

It was almost like it was pulling down, but she felt weirdly off balance when she tried to set her aura up to brace against it. It got worse every time she took a step, then seemed to stabilize a little when she stood still and waited for Meadow to move so that she could move forward too. 

Sophia was on the last step before the first landing when she realized what she was doing wrong: it wasn’t pulling down, it was pulling towards the middle of the building. That was still partly down, but a lot more of it was sideways than she first assumed. The reason she felt a little off balance every time she moved was that it became a little closer to down each time she took a step up.

If she wanted to brace herself against the aura’s pull, she needed to shape her own aura into a dome. The bottom of the dome ought to be perpendicular to the actual direction she was being pulled, which would take some trial and error. 

A couple of steps later, Sophia felt the relief as her dome caught and redistributed the stress. The perfect angle wasn’t quite the same as the slope of the stairs, but it was close, and when she was close enough, it seemed to snap into place. She spread her aura out a little; oddly enough, that made it even easier to bear, even though she was helping both Meadow and Dav bear the weight.

Sophia passed her findings along to the rest of her team across Dav’s mindlink. She’d worked with Dav and Xin’ri the most, but Ci’an and Jax listened in enough to sort of be able to follow her directions to set up an interlocking, self-reinforcing structure of aura. It wasn’t clean or pretty, but it was enough to help all of them.

Well, all of them except for Cliff and Taika. Neither of them felt the pressure from the Tower of Aura Weight at all. Sophia envied them, but it confused her. Cliff’s immunity made sense; he shared her aura. Taika had his own, so it was weird he wasn’t feeling anything. She clearly didn’t know as much about the Tower of Aura Weight as she’d like to know, or even as much as she’d assumed she did know.

“Is the doorway open?” Arak’s voice was faintly audible from one of the shadows as Sophia neared the second landing. He was clearly not talking to Sophia.

One of the three people standing on the second landing, away from the steps, shook his head. “Not yet. It still just looks like a darker spot on the wall.

“Probably when everyone is past the second landing, then, though it might not open until everyone’s given up,” Arak concluded. “You might as well wait until we’re all ready to enter at the third landing; there will be a few more that join you down there.”

“What are you talking about? Join them?” Sophia couldn’t help but ask.

Arak chuckled. This time, the sound came from Sophia’s own shadow. “There are two ways to leave this tower. Well, three, if you can make it to the top, but very few people do. One of them is to head to the bottom of the tower and take the path in the other direction. That’s what we’ll do if we’re able to return through this zone; it won’t lead to the link we came from, but it’s likely to be closer to the Maze’s outer wall than the exit at the top of the tower. The last way is to travel through the Tower. You’re burdened by the weight of the landing, but if there are monsters, so are they. The difficulty doesn’t rise once you’re inside, even as you climb to the top. That way, everyone can leave through the same exit.”

Sophia nodded along to his words. That made some sense. “So what if there aren’t monsters? Are there puzzles?”

“It varies,” Arak admitted. “Most of the time, it’s either a maze of a structure you have to find your way through or a series of rooms with monsters. They both have advantages and disadvantages, with secrets you can find in the way of aurichalc and mana-infused materials, but in the end the real reward is the Wisps.”

Sophia flipped open her Status. She wasn’t sure how many Wisps she had; she hadn’t checked since the beginning of the expedition; she didn’t expect the number to have changed. It didn’t change inside a Hollow or Challenge, after all.

It had changed. She had over six hundred Wisps, far more than she remembered having. “You get Wisps while you’re still in the Maze?”

“After every zone,” Arak confirmed. “Zones are like Challenges, while links are essentially outside even though they’re still in the Maze. I’m surprised you didn’t notice; most people realize it after the first zone.”

Sophia groaned. She didn’t need someone else getting on her case about not checking her Status often enough. It wasn’t like anything changed other than the available number of Wisps most of the time, so there really wasn’t a reason to obsessively watch it the way Ci’an did.

Wait.

Sophia turned towards Ci’an. “Why didn’t you tell me we were getting Wisps after every zone?”

“Uh,” Ci’an looked startled. “We are?”

Sophia had to laugh at that. For once, she wasn’t the only one who forgot to check her Status!

“Ehh, can you guys stop being distracting? I need to concentrate here.” Jace didn’t bother to turn to look at them, but the strain in his voice was clear. 

Sophia stifled her laughter. For a moment, there was an odd feeling in her throat like the beginning of a hiccup, but a second hiccup didn’t happen. She must have swallowed some air or something.

The climb wasn’t physically difficult, but it quickly became obvious that it was much harder for some people than for others. Jace was the first member of team Rockfist to drop out; he made it about halfway from the second landing to the third before he was wavering on his feet and stopped on a step for a minute to make sure his score was locked in before he made his way down to the second landing to join the five people who also failed to reach the third landing.

The next person to give up from their pair of teams was Ci’an. Even with Sophia’s help, she only made it two steps past the third landing. Xin’ri, Jax, and Meadow made it another four steps before they decided to retreat; it was obvious they wouldn’t reach the top and they figured it was better to give up a little early than risk failing and losing progress above the landing.

Rockfist made it two more steps before he had to catch someone who did just that. He took that as the sign that he, too, was done and picked up the semiconscious but fortunately not badly injured man. “Don’t go too high,” he advised Sophia as he headed down the stairs. “Falling hurts.”

Sophia nodded, but she didn’t intend to stop here. She was pretty sure she could handle this much pressure even without reshaping her aura deliberately. You could train your aura just like you could train anything else, and resisting weight was useful when learning to accurately move mana with the aura; you had to be able to do it in all sorts of difficult conditions, and it was better to practice when it was both difficult and safe. “It’s not too bad yet, but I’ll keep that in mind.”

Dav climbed three more steps before he stopped, shook his head, and spoke in a slightly strained voice. “I’m afraid this is it for me. I thought I could make it, it’s only another few steps, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

It was actually six more steps, but Sophia couldn’t argue with him. The last few steps really had been worse than the ones before them, and he didn’t have her training. She’d tried as much as she could, but she simply didn’t have the time or aura control to cover everything. They’d been in the Broken Lands only a little over a year, after all; that seemed like a long time, but compared to how long it took to learn spellcasting, it was no time at all.

Sophia felt it when Dav left. The weight that pulled her towards the ground was noticeably heavier without his presence. That had to be why the last few steps felt worse, as well; they were with only Dav’s help instead of Dav and Xin’ri. She didn’t notice a change after Ci’an gave up, but Ci’an and Jax weren’t very good with their auras. If they were helping at all, it probably wasn’t much.

Four steps later, Sophia really felt the pressure. It felt like she was carrying her own bodyweight twice over in weights. Each step hurt, and she was beginning to think she should turn around when Arak spoke from ahead of her. “If you can make one more step, you can make two. You only have to spend a minute with the weight.”

Sophia blinked and focused on the scene in front of her. She’d noticed that there really wasn’t anyone in her way for a few steps now, since even before Dav gave up, but she hadn’t really paid attention to it. There was no one on the step above hers and there were only three people on the landing.

No, that wasn’t a landing. It was the top of the tower. 

Sophia nodded slowly. She could manage two more steps if that was all it took.

The next step up hurt, but she kept moving. If she stopped, she wasn’t sure she’d start again.

A step forward to close the distance, then shuffle a little because her stride was too short this time, then another step up. Her eyes were on her feet as she swayed slightly, overburdened but managing. Her aura-dome felt off center and she realized that was part of the problem; the angle of the pull changed to almost perfectly downwards when she stepped onto the peak and she hadn’t adjusted it yet. It was a little easier to stand still once she had.

No, wait, It was a little easier to stand still because the pressure was easing. It dropped slowly but still faster than it rose as she climbed those last few steps. “It’s over?”