novelraw Book 2, Chapter 6
Book 2, Chapter 6
If he were honest with himself, Sorin could admit to some mixed feelings. He was happy to see his team was alive, and, if not thriving, at least they weren’t any worse off. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of the speed he needed to move at and how little chance they had of keeping up. And he meant that both literally and metaphorically.
Between his soulprint-fortified endurance keeping him going at full tilt for long hours and Speed Burst letting him travel many times faster than anyone else on his team, trying to work as part of the group was going to be an enormous handicap. But if he abandoned them, there was every chance that they’d die. Even if Floor 3 didn’t claim their lives—a distinct possibility if they couldn’t access the portal hub—all it would take was a single Hellion above rank 8 or so to kill all three of them together.
“Are you for real?” Rue asked, breaking him out of his thoughts. “Rank 5? You were rank 4 a week ago.”
“Did you think I was just going to laze around while I waited to recover?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s what recovery is.”
“Not for a soulspace injury,” he said. “What you physically do has no bearing on it. As long as I avoided channeling a lot of anima or making modifications to my soulspace, I could do whatever I wanted.”
Of course, fighting monsters without spending anima to power his soulprints was difficult, and there’d been a few fights he’d been forced to burn a bit of anima to cinch the victory, but it had been worth it. He could probably skip right past Floor 3 if he wanted to, but that assumed no one was watching this portal guardian like they’d been last time.
Better to prepare. I’ve got an updated list of tools and supplies for Bradford. The team can add whatever they think they need, and then we’ll discuss how to proceed.
He was thinking of establishing a sort of base camp, one which they’d range out from to find monsters to hunt. He’d go by himself, and the trio could head in a different direction. Once a week or so, they could meet back up there to get more supplies. He figured another two weeks to reach rank 6, maybe three if he got unlucky with the monster density. That was a real problem in the desert.
That would give the rest of his team time to fill and expand their soulprints. They had the room to advance a few of the weaker ones to E, though the smart move was to broaden their skill set. He’d given up trying to convince them, though. Rue was the only one who’d even partially listened. Theirs was a team destined to either retire or die around Floor 10.
After combining their supplies—and Sorin refilling their water stock by creating ice blades to melt in the waterskins—they sat down to discuss their next steps. There were a few soulprints for Sorin to identify for them, most of which weren’t terribly useful. Nemari and Odric’s Antechamber rewards were relevant, of course, but it seemed the soulprints climbers actually found in the desert were of questionable quality.
Nemari quickly absorbed Flame Shaper, which gave her greater control over any uncontested source of flame. Sorin wasn’t so sure he’d have done the same, since accuracy could be achieved with skill rather than a soulprint to help her aim, but he kept his opinion on the subject to himself.
Odric, meanwhile, got a peculiar soulprint called Knife Strike. It allowed him to deliver blows with his bare hands that could split skin, which made it an ideal partner for Venom Strike. He’d conveniently lost the makeshift cudgel Sorin had forced on him back on Floor 2 and had reverted back to punching everything while employing a layer of stone skin over his fists. Sorin just hoped the man never encountered a voidling on his own, but once again, he bit his tongue.
Once he’d helped them figure out what they’d managed to collect in their time apart, he laid out his plan to establish a base camp and then climb separately, sharing security at night and furnishing supplies for the team by using Liminal Gateway. He was expecting some pushback to the idea and was surprised to see Nemari agree to it immediately.
“He’s got a point,” she said. “Look at these sand elementals. He took three-quarters of them, almost instantly. If he holds himself back so that we can evenly split everything, then he’s not growing like he should be, and we need Sorin as strong as possible as quickly as possible.”
“There’s the safety issue to consider, as well,” Odric argued. “We didn’t want to climb with three people to begin with, and we’ve only been doing it out of necessity. Now that Sorin’s caught up, we don’t need to be taking that kind of risk. Besides, it’s not like he’s limited to rank 3 like we are. He’s just… whatever it is, regrowing to his former rank I guess. If he takes ninety percent of the anima and we split the rest, it’s still not going to waste.”
That was true, from a technical standpoint. But there was a time factor there Odric wasn’t considering. Sorin was planning to get one more rank before leaving Floor 3. It wasn’t hospitable and the monster density wasn’t that great. If the team had been maxed out on anima, he’d go to the portal guardian right now.
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Hell, maybe we should do it anyway. If we’re quick enough, there might not be anyone there waiting for us. Who knows how often that team at the Floor 2 guardian was supposed to check in. Or maybe it won’t matter at all and there’s been a second team sitting on this floor for weeks before we even got here. There’s no way to tell.
“We need to know what the Black Hellions are doing,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “It’s impossible to know the right move if we have no idea what we’re fighting against. If there’s no one waiting for us at the portal guardian, we’ll go there right now, and I’ll beat it down for us just to get off this shitty floor. If they are there…”
“Then we need to be as strong as possible because it won’t just be the portal guardian, it’ll be a full team of climbers who are all higher ranked than us,” Rue finished.
“But on the other hand, being at the top of rank 3 or the bottom won’t make a difference against a team of rank 15s,” Nemari said. “So if they’re not already there, the correct move is to get ahead of them before they close the window. Which brings us back to what Sorin was saying. We need information, but how do we get it without exposing ourselves?”
“Simple. We get someone else to go snooping for us,” Sorin said. “We’ve already got him in retainer; we might as well pay him a bit more to see what he can dig up.”
* * *
It was the first time Sorin had used Liminal Gateway since coming to Floor 3, and more importantly, the first time since reaching rank 5. Unlike his other soulprints, the one embedded into the tile mosaic in the floor of his soulspace wouldn’t accept anima from monster kills. It only seemed to grow when his rank did, and he’d been getting the feeling that he would be able to bring a passenger with him soon.
That time had finally come. He could feel it now as he dove into his soulspace to activate the gateway. It had been getting… wider… for lack of a better term, since rank 3. Now there was enough space for a partner. Just because he could, however, didn’t mean he wanted to. He wasn’t going to be communicating with anyone there. The only errand was to walk a few blocks with the loot they wanted to sell, pick up whatever Bradford had managed to acquire, and leave him updated instructions for what to prioritize.
It didn’t take two people, so he wasn’t going to be using that new function today. However, if things got bad on Floor 3, he might ferry them back down to Floor 2. With them all being a rank over for the floor, they’d be able to survive easily without him. Making a mental note to discuss that option once he came back, he let himself get pulled through the gateway in his soulspace.
Liminal space was just as it always was. Black, rolling nothingness pressed in on all sides, held at bay only by the soft shimmer of gray light rising from a pathway seemingly made of star dust. It wound its way through the void, longer now than the last time he’d seen it. Every time he climbed to another floor and added the seven-tower sign to someplace new, the path grew.
But this time there was something more. Normally, the far end had a gap of space, only a few feet wide, separating it from another path. Sorin had bridged that gap once already when he’d reached Floor 2, and he’d expected his ascension now to extend to what had become the new section of liminal space he could see but not reach.
Instead, for the first time, the path branched out. Three separate trails speared out into the darkness before him, each one a winding, curling thing that seemed to meander into nowhere. Presumably, the ends of them would lead him to places he’d never been, where some other climber had left their own seven-tower signs for him to find.
Some other climber probably means Samael. Am I tapping into his network? Sorin wondered. Then, with some alarm, he realized something else. Can he get into mine?!
Suddenly, exploring those new branches was a top priority. He was supposed to only be gone for ten minutes to make the switch, but he needed to at least take the time to walk each path and see where it ended. If he saw a Black Hellion hideout at the end of one of them, he’d have to take drastic action. What that action was going to be, he hadn’t figured out yet. Destroying the sign seemed like a good start, but he had no idea how he’d accomplish that.
Shrugging off the bags, Sorin turned deeper down the liminal path until he came to the branching trails. The first one was only fifty feet long, maybe less, so he started there. At the end, he saw a spot in the tower. Floor 3, unless there’s a desert somewhere else. Looks like a shallow cave bordering an oasis. That would be an excellent base camp if it was isolated enough from common hunting grounds.
Nothing about it suggested an affiliation with Samael, but then, it could simply be a spot he’d used during his own climb up the ranks and then abandoned once he had no more need of Floor 3. Sorin would otherwise consider it his new top contender for where to hunt in the desert, assuming he could confirm Samael wouldn’t pop out of the wall one day. At minimum, he’d want to deface the seven-tower sign and create his own, and even that might not be enough.
Backtracking, he took the middle of the three branching paths, then paused in confusion when he got to the end. While the exits from the liminal path didn’t strictly line up with their physical positions in the tower, there was always at least some trend. The deeper Sorin went, the higher up the tower the exit was. He was firmly past the Floor 1 or 2 portions of the path at this point.
Which means this is Floor 4. I could use this to skip the portal guardian, and I can take people with me. This could be a game changer.
That raised the question of what exactly happened when someone who wasn’t attuned to a floor entered it. As far as he was aware, it was an impossibility. But the opportunity to find out was right there, in an old, moss-covered boulder perched at the back end of a thick grotto with a trickling creek running through it. All he had to do was go grab someone and bring them back. If they could step through, then they finally had a real opportunity to slip Samael’s reach.
Or maybe not. If this does work, then he undoubtedly already knows about it. Damn it. Well, no point in getting ahead of myself. One step at a time, and the next step is to find out where the third branch leads.
Sorin swiftly returned to the intersection and took the final path. It was a short walk to the end, but he pulled up short the second he got there. A cold shiver right down his spine as he stared out from the liminal path into the tower. A natural stone bluff greeted him, but someone had taken the time to carve words into the wall.