The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 17

It took another two hours of walking, plus a few extra minutes to kill some monsters here and there, before they finally reached their destination. The worst of it was that they had to dig their way through sand several times where the stone walls had been pulverized or otherwise removed. That meant Sorin needed a precisely controlled application of Still Winter to freeze a layer of sand to form new walls without also making it impossible to remove the stuff that was in the way.

It was tricky work, but Lorvaine had a whole bag of toys to help with. That significantly reduced the amount of time Sorin would have spent shoveling, which he was grateful for. Conversely, they hit a few spots where the tunnel narrowed so much that they couldn’t squeeze through. Free casting Soften helped reshape those gaps, which thankfully were only pinch points that went on for a foot or two, not fifty-foot-long crevices.

The only highlight of the trip was a single soulprint, obtained in the shape of the antenna of a nine-foot centipede that spat acid at Sorin. It contained Tremor Sense, the same ability he’d picked up on Floor 1 from the ruin guardian. It was a good thing Sorin didn’t need it—though he would have taken it for Rue, if nothing else—because Lorvaine immediately claimed it as a prize for her half of the deal.

Finally, they reached a massive cavern that had to be half a mile wide and a few hundred feet tall. Even lacking the ability to see or feel magic, Sorin could tell they’d reached the elemental font. Sand filled the air, gently drifting around on wind currents that didn’t exist. Small, winged, scaled snapping creatures darted around in clouds, fighting each other as much as looking for other prey. Several lumbering creatures made of hard-packed living sand circled the font endlessly.

And there in the middle, looking something like a bubbling pit of liquid sand, was the source of it all. Each bubble that reached the surface and popped released another handful of golden, glittering sand, most of which floated away. What little remained drifted down to the surface of the font, where it was swept aside on ethereal currents.

Even as Sorin studied the scene, two of the turtle-like sand elementals crashed into each other. The impact seemed to be an accident, as far as he could tell. The creatures looked blind, or maybe they were simply too enthralled with chasing the anima-charged elemental sand. Either way, they didn’t seem to be aware of what they were doing, instead just blindly smashing heavy limbs into each other and creating explosions of sand.

“Not too friendly, are they?” Lorvaine remarked.

“Strong, though. Those things have got to weigh well over a thousand pounds, and look how much they rock back each time the other one hits them.”

Sorin did a quick survey and came up with fourteen of the sand elementals. The little draconic flyers were too numerous to count, probably in the hundreds, but Sorin hoped they wouldn’t be an issue. If the monsters didn’t care about the elementals crawling around below, there was no reason they’d care about a pair of humans.

God, if only it was that easy. No, I’ll end up dealing with them for one reason or another, guaranteed. Maybe I can pull them back into the tunnel and just shred their whole formation with waves of kinetic magic. They look pretty fragile. If that doesn’t work, Still Winter will make short work of them, but I don’t want to risk setting off the font by catching it in another element’s domain.

The two elementals eventually pounded each other to the point where they’d lost enough mass to disentangle. Each of them eagerly scooted around, grabbing up as much of the loose sand as possible while their fellows passed them by. After a few circular laps around the mess, where it seemed the two elementals missed colliding again more by accident than anything else, they eventually resumed circling the font.

“So they’re eating whatever loose sand settles on the edge of the font,” Lorvaine observed. “That’s interesting. With such a… modular… body, I wonder if they can retain soulprints.”

Sorin knew they could, but educating Lorvaine wasn’t part of the deal, and they’d be a huge pain to harvest if any such soulprints did exist. It was better for everyone if she thought they were a waste of time to fight and didn’t insist on him destroying all of them.

Then again, once she starts her own harvesting, they might very well go berserk. I might have to destroy them anyway just so she can do whatever she’s planning on doing.

“What’s the plan?” Sorin asked. “I assume you need direct access to that font.”

“For a prolonged length of time. Do you suspect those monsters will ignore us if we approach?”

“Probably not. Monsters aren’t known for ignoring climbers.”

“Then the plan is for you to pacify this room and keep it that way for the next hour.”

Sorin nodded slowly. He glanced up at the miniature dragon flocks. “I can do that. Any idea what happens if elemental ice comes in contact with the font?”

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Lorvaine shuddered. “Let’s not find out. Most likely, it won’t work and the font remains unharmed. Possibly, they react badly and things go sideways.”

That more or less matched up with what Sorin expected from his own past experiences with these kinds of phenomena, which took his most potent tool off the table. He studied the sand clouds, mostly looking for air currents on them, but also to get the exact range they drifted from the font. That gave him a rough idea of the radius of its influence.

The sand elementals were well inside it and probably couldn’t be coerced into abandoning their position there, but he thought his initial idea for the dragons was a good one. “I’m going to fling some force edges up into those swarms. We’ll see if I can’t pull them away from the font and back into these tunnels where I can put them down. They don’t look smart, but you never know.”

Lorvaine backed down the tunnel to give Sorin room. He gauged the distance, eyed a pack that was swooping in a direction generally approaching him, and sent six blades of kinetic energy slicing through their formation.

Dragons were always difficult foes in the same way that climbers were difficult foes. There was no telling what abilities they might have, only that they’d have lots of them. And just because something was ostensibly an earth dragon or fire dragon did not mean it was limited to that theme. Unpredictability was the biggest killer of climbers in the tower, and Sorin wasn’t so arrogant as to believe he was untouchable just because he’d managed to climb to Floor 100 once before.

The swarm took all six blades without faltering—not to say that they didn’t draw blood, just that it wasn’t enough to kill anything. Sorin wasn’t surprised. It was still an F-ranked soulprint being used against monsters on Floor 3 who kept company with things that could have hung out on Floor 5 or 6. Clean kills would have been nice, but he’d tossed the magic out to draw attention. In that respect, he was perfectly successful.

It also turned out the tiny dragons were significantly faster than he’d expected. That was almost certainly some sort of speed-enhancing ability, but Sorin had his own to counteract their advantage. He activated Speed Burst just as the first dragon reached him. Its mouth was open, though that was more akin to a bird’s hooked beak with teeth than any human mouth, and Sorin could see the first grains of an earth spike coming together in that empty space.

He spun to the left, his sword whistling with the movement. It came up an instant before the monster could unleash its attack, severing a wing and cutting cleanly through its torso to bisect the little thing into two even smaller pieces. He didn’t stop there—couldn’t, in fact, stop there—not with eight more of the same monster about to impact him.

Speed Burst got him out of the way, and he killed another dragon as he shifted past the cloud of flapping wings and what appeared to be some sort of scouring sand breath. By the time the ability ended and he returned to normal speed, he’d killed the rest of them.

The fight had taken about six seconds from the time he threw the force edges to when the last bit of anima entered his soulspace. At that rate, he’d have the flying enemies cleared out in a few minutes. Of course, that was assuming no surprises, which was a notion Blind Sense proceeded to disabuse him of before he could even look up.

All of the little dragons were coming at him now. Every last one of them had turned to fly directly out of the dust storm. Sorin prepared himself for an extremely hectic few minutes of fighting, but before the first one could arrive, he realized the truth. They weren’t coming for him. They were fleeing the font.

He let Still Winter unfold around him, careful to keep the edge from spilling into the chamber. The dragons were slowed as they entered his domain, making it easy for him to dodge around their flapping wings. His sword flashed out, killing a few dozen monsters over ten seconds, and then the cloud was past him. Lorvaine yelled something behind Sorin, but other than confirming with Blind Sense that she was unharmed, he ignored her.

A thing was climbing out of the font. Somehow, Sorin had awakened the true guardian, which evidently wasn’t the little dragons or the bulky sand elementals. The bubbling liquid sand had stopped moving, and all the sand in the air was raining down to the ground, where it gathered in rivulets and drained back into the pit.

An arm reached clear of the sand, ten feet long and covered in scales. Four clawed fingers emerged from the hand, and when it slammed down onto the ground, it crushed one of the elementals without seeming to realize or care. Another hand emerged and did the same thing on the other side. Then, as if pushing itself up, the monster dragged its slender body free.

Considering that the whole point of coming down here was to find fossilized basilisk eggs for Lorvaine, Sorin wasn’t especially surprised when the ugly, fang-filled lizard head of an adult basilisk rose out of the pit. Sand poured off its body, running down between the spines on its back and off its stubby snout. And still it kept dragging its body out.

A second set of arms appeared five feet down its torso, then a third, fourth, and fifth. Only then did its tail finally become visible. Sorin estimated it was at least fifty feet long, maybe a bit more, and strong enough to crush the ground it walked on. All of that was completely within expectations and entirely manageable, but it wasn’t often a basilisk popped out of a font of pure elemental earth.

There was no way it didn’t have some powerful abilities to complement its prodigious size and strength. And he was going to fight it underground, right next to the source of its power. That was going to be quite the challenge.

“Sorry, Lorvaine, but I think you’re going to have to accept some ice contamination in the font,” Sorin said.

Her response was a strangled, choking sound as the basilisk rose to its full height, nostrils flaring. Sorin took that as permission and stepped forward to drop into the main chamber. This was a fight that was going to require some space, though he planned to keep as far from the font as possible so that it would hopefully remain pure.

“Are you insane!” Lorvaine snapped out. “Get back up here! We need to run.”

“Not a chance. This was the deal,” Sorin said, not taking his gaze off the basilisk. “I’m killing this thing.”

Then its eyes opened. They were blank for a moment before focusing on Sorin, and crashing waves of power slammed down on him.