The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 11

Rue sprinted across the sand, her eyes wide and full of reflected light from the fire heading her way. She dove into a roll and felt the heat pass over her body, then scrambled back upright and stabbed her sword down into the back of a spider that was a foot long without accounting for the legs. A flicker of incoming anima caressed her soulspace, confirming she’d killed the ugly thing.

Behind her, the auras of a few dozen smaller, palm-sized monsters all vanished within moments of each other. “A bit close there!” Rue yelled. “I think you singed my hair.”

“Sorry,” Nemari called back, already pivoting in place to send another blast of flame to her left. “I couldn’t let them get any closer.”

Rue had to give it to Sorin: he always found excellent spots for farming anima. A few days in these caves would completely max out her soulspace. Of course, there was also a very real risk of being injected with paralytic poisons, dragged off, and eaten, but that was just part of life for a climber. Still, the risk seemed a bit higher than usual.

Maybe it’s just that we’re on Floor 3 now. The monsters are a lot stronger than what we were fighting a week ago. Yeah… That’s probably it. Nothing to do with the lack of light and there being a few thousand ambush predators in this cave.

Her thoughts were cut off by a huge crash echoing through the tunnels, one so loud that even the monsters paused. “I guess he’s having fun, too,” Rue muttered after a moment.

Eventually, there were no more spiders. She had no idea how many they’d killed, only that she’d gained a lot of anima. Od had healed her a few times, including cleansing the venom that slowed down her movements from even a single bite. When Nemari had gotten bit, she’d practically locked up and fallen over, so Rue was once again thankful for Iron Body and Minor Regeneration helping to keep her safe and healthy.

About the time they finished up, the wall of sound from a second crash rolled over them. “What the hell is he doing down here? Causing cave-ins?” Nemari asked.

“That is kind of what it sounds like,” Od said.

“He might be, but I bet he crushed a thousand bugs in the process,” Rue added. “Probably going to come back up here at rank 6 and have three new soulprints.”

Nemari sat down on the sand and manipulated some water out of one of the skins she was carrying. Water Bond being unable to conjure up water for her on Floor 3 sharply limited the soulprint’s usefulness, but Sorin had assured them it was both a temporary weakness and significantly less of an issue on almost any other floor.

She cleaned the blood-caked sand off herself, then moved to help Rue. Od merely dusted off his clothes where necessary, having remained uninjured through judicious application of Stone Skin. “You’ve got some spider guts on your face,” Rue told him.

He gave an involuntary shudder at her words. “That thing tried to crawl into my eye,” he explained when she gave him a look. “You’d freak out, too.”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t,” she agreed, not bothering to tell him that no less than three of the monsters had jumped onto her face in the last ten minutes.

“I’ll get it, just give me—” Nemari started to say, only to be interrupted by another crash. “Seriously, what is he doing down there?”

“Another Sorin mystery to add to the pile,” Rue muttered.

“Think we might get him to answer a few? I still want to know what he meant when he said he was fifty-five years old. There’s no way he’s even thirty, but why lie about it?”

“Maybe he found a time-travel soulprint and got flung into his own past,” Rue speculated.

Nemari just rolled her eyes and went back to cleaning the guts and blood off Rue. As far as she knew, time could be sped up or slowed down by certain powerful soulprints—none of which she’d ever seen, of course, but the stories claimed they were real—but there was no skipping forward or backward.

On the other hand, it made about as much sense as any other explanation. Rue didn’t particularly care, not at this point. It was far too late to matter. But she wouldn’t deny that she was a bit curious, and making up wild guesses was a fun way to pass the time.

“Secretly trained by one of the high families,” Od said.

“No way. If that was the case, they’d have interfered with the Black Hellions,” Rue argued.

“The high families barely even exist on the lower floors,” Nemari pointed out. “Other than a handful of administrative peons and some retirees, they don’t waste their time down here.”

“Sure, not for you and me, but if Sorin was one of their number—”

“Then he’d already be rank 10 or higher by this point, and it still doesn’t explain why he claimed to be fifty-five.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Oooh, maybe it’s some sort of code, and if you know what it means, you’re part of his secret organization or whatever.”

The fourth crash echoed through the cave then, and with it came a wave of arachnid monsters. “Incoming,” Rue snapped, pointing toward a long, thin crack in the wall about ten feet up. The monsters were seconds away from pouring out, which made this the perfect time to drop the biggest, fattest firebolt Nemari could right there.

She didn’t hesitate to deliver it, either. Over the span of about three seconds, she generated a firebolt, then fed it with her secondary soulprints until it bloomed up to thirty times its standard size. It streaked off across the cave, bathing it in brilliant illumination for half a second, then splashed across the stone and killed probably a hundred spiders in an instant.

Rue even got a bit of the anima for it, probably for acting as the spotter. She doubted anyone really understood exactly how the tower figured out who got how much anima, and it wasn’t like there were precise ways to measure it anyway. She was just happy to be rewarded for contributing. Despite her killing most of the big ones, she was willing to bet Nemari had profited the most from this climb.

Well, maybe not compared to Sorin. Whatever he’s doing down there, I bet he harvests more anima than the rest of us combined. Maybe I should just pop down there and see if he needs any help.

Another crash boomed up from the tunnel, this one so loud that sand jumped off the ground.

Then again, maybe not.

* * *

“How many of these damn things are there?!” Sorin yelled out, mostly because the sound was bait to draw in another of the stone spiders. He’d expect just one. That was all he’d seen. Killing it had been a massive pain. He’d resorted to cutting anchor lines on the web until it had collapsed under the weight—all the while dodging the spider chasing him from strand to strand—and the monster had dropped a hundred feet into the crevice at the bottom of the cavern to break apart on the rocks.

He'd only accomplished that feat thanks to his recent growth, which allowed him to free cast a channeled soulprint called Slippery. Maintaining his concentration while fighting a massive spider that weighed several tons was… challenging… but he’d persevered. The monster was vanquished, he’d gotten a massive influx of anima, and unless he very much missed his guess, there was a soulprint waiting for him down below.

Of course, that was when a second stone spider had crawled out of some hole in the ceiling too far away for Sorin to pick up with Blind Sense. That one was even bigger

, and, worse, seemed to have some ability to ossify the remaining webbing, reinforcing it and making Sorin’s previous strategy nonviable.It also meant he could let go of Slippery, since the webs no longer stuck to him. Ice Blade was worthless, and his other soulprints were just keeping him ahead of the spider’s fangs. He’d needed something better, so he’d burned a solid portion of his anima free casting another soulprint called Soften.

It was an earth elemental spell that did exactly what it sounded like: it made things softer. That included the stone body of the spider, which he’d proved when he’d hacked off a giant leg that was thicker than he was. The spider, having seven spares, hadn’t been particularly worried until he’d done three more legs. Then it had joined the first one in the pit.

Now, five spiders later, his chest was heaving and most of the web was broken to pieces. He stood, precariously balanced on the edge of a stalagmite where a small lip of stone half the width of his boot just barely held him. There were at least three soulprints below, but it was going to be a job and a half excavating them, and he couldn’t get started until new monsters stopped appearing.

On the bright side, I’m thinking two or three more of those things would get me to rank 6. They’re worth a ton of anima, relative to my current rank. If I’d done this at the beginning of rank 3, I’d have already pushed up to 4 and be knocking on 5’s door.

When no new monster arrived to challenge him, Sorin let the tension drain out of his body. It was probably for the best, anyway. He was under half his anima reserves, and smart climbers didn’t let themselves get that low in the middle of a monster den, not if they had a choice. If another spider appeared, he’d have to kill it and retreat, with or without his prizes.

Slowly, he climbed down into the field of rubble and viscera. It was one part pulverized natural stone, one part the outer shells of the monsters, and probably four parts guts and fluids. Working quickly, he dug through until he found the tip of a fang the length of his forearm that had Paralytic Venom in it. Maybe Odric will want it to go with his manticore Venom Strike.

The next one he found was a piece of stone from a thorax. It was a slab a full two feet wide, but he only needed one corner, so he broke it down and discarded the extra. That one was Stone Shell, a passive reflexive soulprint that would trigger on its own to provide an extra layer of defense against attacks. The inability to control when it worked made it garbage on its own, but it was useful as parts to modify other, better soulprints.

The final soulprint was the hardest to get, mostly due to the other four spiders having crashed down on the first one as he’d killed them. It took a lot of digging, but eventually he retrieved a silk gland the size of his head and wrapped it in a piece of canvas since he didn’t have a jar big enough. It was Web Weaver, an F-ranked soulprint that mutated the user’s body to incorporate the glands needed to produce their own strands.

While it was useful for an enterprising tailor, or just someone looking to spin silk and sell it, it was too slow to have any sort of combat applications, not to mention having silk glands that released webbing was not the kind of change most people wanted in their body. Who in their right mind would want to shoot out lines of spider webs? How would you even use that in a fight?

Sorin just shook his head. Three soulprints was nothing to complain about, but none of them were that great. Considering the difficulty in killing the spiders, he’d expected better. He couldn’t complain too loudly, though, not when an hour’s work had resulted in him pushing to the brink of rank 6. Even if it took him another day, he was confident he’d rank up soon.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—a sixth spider did not appear. Rather than descend deeper looking for prey, he decided to head back up and check in with the rest of the team. They’d likely killed thousands of spiders compared to his five, and he was interested in seeing how they’d grown. Plus he didn’t want to carry around forty pounds worth of soulprints.

Too bad I can’t trust the liminal path well enough to leave a sign down here. That would have been convenient.

Fucking Samael making all this harder.