The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 16

The run was a good thing. It gave Sorin a chance to get used to moving at his new base speed, which was about ten percent faster than he used to be. That wasn’t really enough to keep up with Lorvaine’s little toy, but he knew where they were going, and if she wasn’t worried about staying close to him, he wasn’t either. Every ten seconds or so, he pushed anima into Speed Burst to catch up some lost ground.

He could have kept up, if he’d really wanted to. It would have meant chaining Speed Burst constantly and probably left him almost completely drained by the time he got to the cave entrance, but he could have done it. That was foolish for a few different reasons, and while he trusted Lorvaine’s self-interest to keep him safe from her—at least until after they found the elemental font and cleared away whatever monsters were guarding it—there were plenty of other dangers out in the desert, too.

“Took you long enough,” Lorvaine groused after he finally caught up. “I’ve been waiting here for half an hour!”

She’d produced a large sun umbrella and a chair made out of some sort of woven fiber wrapped around a thin wooden frame and was lounging in the magically chilled shade, idly flipping through a book as he approached. That disappeared into a pocket, and she simply folded both the chair and umbrella up, causing them to vanish.

Just going by volume of what I’ve already seen her pack away, I’m betting she’s devoted more than half her soul space to a C-ranked spatial storage ability. Even if the rest is raw combat applications, she can’t be stronger than a rank 5 or 6. She’s confident enough to wander off alone, but not so much that she was willing to go digging for this earth font without help.

He was betting her true combat strength was probably closer to rank 2 or maybe 3 but that she’d supplement it with plenty of situationally useful trinkets. Having the perfect tool for every situation was the whole point of spatial storage. Still, that meant he had to take his job as a bodyguard for her seriously. If something popped out of the sand and surprised her, she might not react in time.

“Maybe if you’d had a two-person sled, it would have been different,” he said. “But since I had to run the whole way, it took me a bit longer. Sorry about that.”

“Hmmm… and I’m entrusting my life to you. You can’t even keep up with a personal transport vehicle, despite being ‘no ordinary’ rank 3.”

“It’s a little late to be taking a bargaining stance to drive the price down, don’t you think?”

They both knew damn well why he hadn’t gone all out and burned through his anima just to get here a little bit faster, but Sorin suspected Lorvaine was just being uncharitable because she was still upset about being outfoxed on the payment. That was an understandable attitude, but if she couldn’t be nice, he’d settle for silence instead.

They descended into the cave after a few more moments, Sorin in the lead and Lorvaine striding along ten feet back with a small paper lantern drifting along beside her. It threw his shadow out in front of him in stark contrast to the washed-out sand, which appeared white instead of golden yellow now.

“Smaller spiders pop out of the sand. Don’t wander too far away unless you want to deal with swarms,” Sorin warned.

Soon enough, the monsters started appearing. Still Winter unfolded around Sorin, chilling the air and laying down a frost coating for twenty feet in every direction. Lorvaine stepped into it without hesitation, but the spiders that entered quickly found themselves slowing to a stop, then icing over. It wasn’t as fast as Radiant Purge had been, but it got the job done.

More importantly, once he’d removed the aberrant portion of Radiant Purge that functioned as a hostile effect, it stopped triggering Counter Heal. Since that had been the original goal, he was happy with the results. Thermal Insulation was also protecting him better here than Heat Resistance had done previously, though that wasn’t necessarily a fair comparison since he’d lacked any sort of light resistance soulprint to protect against the majority of Radiant Purge’s damage.

“Ah, that’s nice to walk around in, though I wouldn’t want to use it on Floor 7. That place is already a frozen hell hole without you adding to it,” Lorvaine commented.

Sorin hadn’t learned much about the next few floors, so he mentally filed that tidbit away. “I’m sure I’ll have something better for handling a lot of small monsters at once by then,” he said. Ice crunched beneath his feet as he stepped on frozen spiders. “I might even buy it from you.”

“I’m never cutting you any deals again.”

“You say that now, but we’ll see how you feel once we’re done here.”

They made it past the sand-filled tunnels in short order, and from there things got harder. Despite Sorin’s worries, Lorvaine kept up easily, never hesitating when she needed to climb up or down some of the narrow, twisting shafts that connected the underground tunnel complex together. It wasn’t long before they’d reached the deeper caverns where Sorin had first found the massive stone spiders.

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Part of him hoped there’d be a few new ones to kill, but he recognized that it would be an objectively good thing if none had appeared yet. He wouldn’t be stopping at the first sign of resistance, and whatever was lurking near an elemental font was bound to be troublesome.

He knew his hopes were in vain the instant he reached the cavern. With Clear Eyes, the dark held no secrets from him. The broken bodies had vanished, and the webs he’d destroyed had all been rebuilt. There might not be five new stone spiders to replace the ones he’d killed, but there was at least one.

“Wait here,” he said quietly. “This is where I fought the first spiders last time, and it looks like they’ve rebuilt their webs.”

He free cast Slippery again and walked out onto the webs. There was no giant spider waiting at the top of the cavern this time, and now that he could actually see in the dark instead of just feeling everything out with Blind Sense, it was easy to spot not one, but four massive holes hidden among the stalactites overhead. Strands of webbing ran into each one, presumably anchored somewhere out of sight.

Something shifted, and Sorin quickly realized it was a leg, not a foot-thick web line. A moment later, an eight-foot-tall spider was squeezing through the hole, its legs delicately grabbing hold of the webbing to keep it from tumbling out into the open air. Blind Sense picked it up a few seconds after it entered the cavern, and Sorin drew his sword.

He could practically feel Lorvaine’s gaze lock onto the weapon with unnerving intensity. Where her attention had been rather languid before, casually surveying the cavern, she was motionless and focused now. He supposed it was a rather remarkable piece, but he didn’t think it deserved this kind of attention.

Does she know something about it I don’t? It wouldn’t surprise me to learn there’s more to it than I’ve figured out.

So far as he could tell, it was just a very nice, very sturdy, and very sharp sword. All things considered, he wouldn’t be terribly surprised if there was more to it—he expected there had to be—but it was a bit worrying that Lorvaine had apparently spotted something he’d missed.

Then the spider got close enough that he didn’t have any more time left to think. Just like all the other ones he’d killed, it was incredibly aggressive. Bigger monsters tended to be like that, especially ones that were well-armored either by biology or by magic. This one skittered down the web in a somewhat terrifying display of agility, seemingly intent on crashing into him directly with no attempt made at biting him or pinning him down with its legs.

They seemed to be able to tell that he wasn’t stuck in the webbing, and that fact was enraging. Normally, weavers remained motionless until something came along that did get stuck, and Sorin would have expected them to let him walk right through so long as he didn’t get snagged on the sticky webbing, but these things were apparently territorial enough that they went after everything that showed up.

He leaped to the next line over, some four feet away and a bit more steeply sloped. Slippery actually ended up hurting him a bit there, as with the magic negating the tacky texture of the web, he started to slide down slightly before he could recover his balance. The spider kicked out with a leg as it lumbered past, the movement so random that Sorin almost thought it was an accident.

Either way, he whipped his sword through the limb, slicing cleanly through the stone shell and severing it in a spray of vicious liquid. The spider hissed and twitched away, though at its size, a twitch was more like a full-body convulsion that took it back six feet and out of Sorin’s melee range.

A pair of crescent-shaped planes of kinetic energy appeared out of nowhere and flashed through the dark to strike the spider’s face, the work of Sorin’s replacement for Ice Blade. Force Edge cut deep, but even enhanced by the synergy of Blade Work sharpening them, they just didn’t have enough power to make it through the stone exoskeleton.

Eyes were fantastic vulnerabilities to exploit, though, and Sorin was more than accurate enough to target them. The spider lasted a solid fourteen seconds once it made contact, and by the time it realized it was outmatched and turned to flee, it was too late for it. With only five legs left at that point, it couldn’t escape fast enough.

It hit the ground below with an enormous, cavern-shaking crash that would have thrown Sorin off his feet if he hadn’t let go of Slippery for just a moment to anchor himself to the webbing. Anima flowed into Sorin, no longer feeling like a massive surge now that he’d gone up to rank 6. It was still a decent amount though, perhaps a twentieth of what he’d need to reach rank 7.

Too bad there won’t be twenty spiders like that in here. There probably aren’t even five of them yet. Hopefully there are other monsters deeper down that are worth just as much, though. That was significantly easier to kill than the ones I fought yesterday. Go figure, having the soulprints to compliment each other and complete a build makes a difference.

“There might be one or two more,” Sorin called down to Lorvaine, “but we don’t need to wait here for them. You know which way to go?”

“Mostly,” she replied, eyeing up the remains of the monster. “No soulprint. That’s disappointing, but I suppose to be expected. Now, I have a question for you.”

“Is it about my sword?” Sorin asked as he hopped a few strands and slid down to the tunnel mouth to meet her.

“In a way, yes. Are you a member of the Black Hellions?”

“I—What? Me?” Sorin sputtered, too surprised to formulate a response.

Lorvaine wasn’t laughing. She stared him dead in the eyes. “Yes. Are you?”

“No. I’ve killed quite a few of them, though. Why do you ask?”

“Because other than the fact that it’s blue instead of green, that sword looks a hell of a lot like their boss’s weapon.”

Sorin glanced down at the blade still held in his hands, at the perfect-tower-blue of the stone in the pommel, and remembered what Samael had told him during their one and only conversation. Samael had told him he was from the orange tower.

“Green, huh?” Sorin asked.

“Yes. Does the color have some significance?”

“Nothing important.”

That lying piece of shit. Does tower origin change something, or was it just habitual to obscure his past?

“Anyway, no, I’m not a Hellion. In fact, they don’t like me, and I’d go so far as to say their leader and I are going to try to kill each other some time in the not-too-distant future. I hope that’s not a problem for you.”

Lorvaine shrugged. “They buy and sell plenty of soulprints, but I can always find other customers if you do break up the organization.”

“Great. Now, unless you want to watch me kill another spider, we should get moving.”