The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 12

Nemari was the first out of the cave, with Odric and Rue close behind. Sorin brought up the rear, not that anything had chased them down after they’d decided to leave. It was dark and cold up on the surface, lit only by the pinpricks of starlight overhead and a sliver of moon low near the northern horizon.

“It was good growth, but I think I’d be fine with taking an extra day or two and going somewhere else to finish off this floor,” Nemari said.

Rue and Odric seemed to share that sentiment, just judging by the expressions on their faces. Sorin hadn’t thought it was that bad, personally, but he supposed his gradient for how horrible the tower could get went just a little bit darker than theirs. These spiders weren’t even invisible or intangible. They barely even hid and were completely detectable with the most basic extrasensory soulprint.

“I think I’m going to go looking for a few more of the giant spiders deeper in once we set up a camp for you guys. I’ll find you in the morning.”

“Seriously?” Rue asked. “You want more of that place?”

“I got three soulprints from five kills and almost completely climbed from rank 5 to 6,” he said. “I’ll stay down there until I can’t find anything left to kill.”

It wasn’t that simple, of course. If he found another web as crowded as the first one, exhaustion was likely to drive him back before anything else. Otherwise, he’d have to retreat just to get some sleep eventually, though probably not for a full day or two. He also wanted a few new soulprints, specifically some more passives to help with his base strength and speed. His new sword was fantastic, and he definitely wasn’t getting all he could out of it.

“Before I do that, however, I promised Odric some lessons,” Sorin said.

“You did?”

“Yes, to merge Stone Skin and Earth Spike together. You’re rank 3 now; you should have plenty of anima built up. Assuming you haven’t already poured it into your soulprints, you can practice with it. I’ll show you a few exercises, and once you’ve got those mastered, we’ll move onto the actual merging.”

“That… would be good, I suppose. I didn’t save a ton of anima, but I think I’ve got enough,” Odric said slowly. “I’ve been pouring a lot of it into Stone Skin since it’s my offense and defense.”

“That reminds me, I’ve got a Paralytic Venom soulprint to compliment your Venom Strike. I’m not sure you should take it, since you don’t have a ton of room for overlap right now and ranking up some of your current soulprints is probably a bigger priority, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it in reserve for the next floor.”

They continued to plan while they walked, eventually setting up camp in a small, shallow cave that was mostly free of sand. The layer coating the ground was level, and the ceiling had enough clearance to stand up in it, which was good enough for them. True to his promise, Sorin started Odric on anima control exercises. Rue and Nemari also listened in, though Rue lacked the free anima Odric had to play with.

When he was done, Sorin left the heavy soulprints with the rest of his team, then used Speed Burst to run back to the spider cave in less than a quarter of the time it had taken to leave. He descended back into the dark, navigating by a mixture of Blind Sense and a channeled Glimmer Lamp he willed into existence. It was a simple F-ranked soulprint, and copying it didn’t strain his reserves or his concentration.

New spider swarms attacked him, but Radiant Purge killed them whenever they got close, though that reminded him that he still needed to figure out why it was trying to trigger Counter Heal. In a small fit of irony, he’d been so focused on helping Odric improve his soulspace that Sorin had forgotten to look into his own.

The massive stone spiders truly were the elites of Floor 3. Many of them were even bigger than the armored scorpions that rarely appeared on the surface—supposedly, though he’d seen more than one in the matter of a few days, which made him wonder exactly how rare they actually were—and having to fight them in the dark, underground, on a web that tried to hold him in place only made the battles more difficult.

There weren’t any new ones in the first webbed cavern he reached, which was no surprise to Sorin. The bodies of the last batch he’d killed hadn’t even disappeared yet. That did not mean he was stuck waiting, of course. It simply meant he had to go deeper.

It was no wonder the spiders had set up shop in this particular cavern. There were no less than three tunnels connecting to it that he could see, and he was willing to bet that if he made the effort to climb up to the top of the cavern, he’d find some even larger ones that the spiders themselves used. Tempting as it was to explore up there, the idea of fighting one of them in the tight confines of a cave where it could simply squish him with its bulk didn’t appeal to him.

He went down one of the side tunnels instead, choosing the smallest one under the rationale that a stone spider couldn’t chase him into it if he had to retreat, and anything smaller he might run into would be easy to dispatch.

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Must have used up all my luck the first time, he thought to himself when he finally found another spider. Instead of a vast cavern, it had gunked up a knot of intersecting tunnels, making it almost impassible. Sorin cut his way through a few feet, which was enough to get the spider’s attention, but when it arrived, it was only a fraction of the size of the other ones.

It took nothing more than the strength in his arms and two bursts of anima-enhanced speed to kill the monster. Then Sorin had to decide if he wanted to keep trying to cut his way through or circle around and go a different direction. Technically, he was looking for anima, and weak monsters still provided that, so as long as more spiders kept showing up, he was accomplishing his goals.

That wasn’t what happened, sadly. After another five minutes of hacking his way through webs, not only did none of the big stone spiders show up to stop him, he didn’t even spot any of the tiny ones that occasionally skittered around. Forced to give it up as a bad job, he made his way back to the first cavern and started down a different tunnel.

His second attempt met with similar results, though this time he got two of the sorta-big spiders. There were no soulprints again this time, either. Annoyed now, he made his way back again, but this time with an eye toward the ceiling. There had to be a hole up there, and all the big spiders had come through it. If that was where he needed to go to find it, then so be it.

The problem was getting there. He was going to need to cling to the ceiling for at least part of the climb, and that was a bad spot to be in if he got ambushed. He could fake a temporary Spider Climb soulprint, but that would still require at least three limbs when he was hanging from the ceiling. He’d be slow, an easy target with practically no way to stop a multi-ton spider made of living stone from killing him.

Let’s try one more of these tunnels first.

The tower bestowed a small measure of luck on him this time, or maybe it was just trying to kill him. One tended to resemble the other where climbers were concerned. He didn’t find another of the big spiders, but he did kill four of the smaller, half-ton monsters. That didn’t result in him acquiring any new soulprints, of course. Just finding the spiders was more than he’d been expecting at that point.

It did finally gain him enough anima to finish that breakthrough to rank 6, which marked probably the fastest rank up he’d ever achieved at barely three days. Even if he ignored prep time and counted just the weeks spent maxing out his anima on a floor, he’d still never cleared one that quickly.

Being two ranks over the floor, not to mention having access to advanced techniques like soulprint merging and free casting, really makes a difference. I bet I could go back down to Floor 2 and slaughter those witches now. Well, maybe not. I need to start getting a full suite of defensive soulprints, especially something to protect my mind.

Those kinds of soulprints were significantly more common at D-rank and up, and acquiring what he needed would likely be one of the bigger stumbling blocks that held him back from rapidly advancing. Heat Resistance and its opposite, Cold Resistance, were the only two he could expect to find right now, and he doubted there was a monster on a desert floor that could possibly possess the latter.

Satisfied with his progress for the night, if not really excited about how it had ended, Sorin began the lengthy climb back up to the surface. He would have liked to come back in a week or two, even if he was already on another floor by then, to kill some more of the big ones, but with Liminal Gateway compromised, it wasn’t worth the effort to trek all the way back down again.

The rest of his team required another few days to fully fill their soulspaces, but they could manage that without him. What they did need was someone to clear away hostile elements so that they could reach the portal guardian, leaving him with no choice but to wait on them.

Sorin wasn’t ready to take Samael on in a head-on battle, not yet, but he was more than prepared to hit a team of rank 10s and tear them to pieces. As long as he didn’t absorb any new soulprints, he was confident he could free cast most D-rank abilities now, which meant his adaptability was at an all-time high. There really weren’t any challenges he could reasonably expect the tower to throw at him that he’d struggle to overcome, not on Floor 3.

He was met by Rue near the edge of the camp, who took one look at him and started laughing. “I should have insisted we put some money on it.”

“I couldn’t find any more of the huge ones,” he told her. “I had to settle for some smaller spiders that were barely taller than me. It got the job done, though.”

The others were asleep, which was fine by Sorin. He was ready to catch a few hours himself, but before that, he had to try to figure out the issue with Counter Heal. After letting Rue know he’d be in his soulspace for a bit, he sat down near his stuff and closed his eyes.

The soulprint hung on the wall, an E-rank portrait of him taking a vicious hit that sent blood spatters covering half the painting. Looking closely revealed a small glow of anima emanating from a wound that was already closing back up.

Everything looks normal so far.

He dove deeper, seeing past the painting to the anima structure it represented. There were elements of both the donor soulprints in there, perfectly blended together to make something new. As far as he could tell, it was flawless and should have worked.

Maybe it’s something in Radiant Purge, then.

Sorin turned his attention to the other soulprint. He’d bought this one, and it had come directly from a monster, so it should have been perfect by virtue of no one ever having a chance to mess with it. He wasn’t expecting to find anything wrong with it; he just hoped looking at it would inspire some kind of idea what the issue was.

Then he noticed something weird about the pattern. Admittedly, it had been a long time since he’d examined a weak E-rank soulprint, but he still knew what Radiant Purge looked like, and this wasn’t it. It was almost identical—ninety-five percent perfect, probably—but not quite.

His first thought was that it was a difference from blue to red tower again, but if so, it was the first time he’d noticed one in the soulprints themselves. Working quickly, he checked over everything else in his soulspace. All of it was exactly as he expected it to be, everything except Radiant Purge.

Okay, what does this change do? And how did it happen?