The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 19

Rank 7 gave Sorin back the space to free cast any E-ranked ability he wanted, which was great, because passively regenerating all the tissue petrified by the basilisk wasn’t in the cards. Fighting that way was a considerable handicap, and Counter Heal had been useless for fixing the damage. What he needed was a specialized ability called Excise.

It had all sorts of uses, though Sorin had primarily used it to cut out necrotized flesh. Really, anything that spread from an infection point was likely a good target for Excise, and if depetrifying himself wasn’t the typical use case, it would still work just fine.

More practically, it was only E-rank, unlike Remedy or Panacea. That meant he could actually use it, though it was going to be painful enough that he took the effort to free cast Pain Suppression along with it.

“What are you doing?” Lorvaine asked once the remaining monsters were dead and Sorin had retreated out of the main chamber.

“Fixing the damage.”

Petrification started with the bones, or at least the kind the basilisk had used on him did. Bones were easy targets, so unless the monster was deliberately targeting elsewhere, it was reasonable to assume those would be the first to go. Fixing that, on the other hand, was a slow and painful process.

Excise scooped out stone bone. Counter Heal triggered to fill it back in. Sorin repeated over and over. His teeth were clenched against the pain that not even magic could completely erase. His recovery speed was limited almost entirely by how much anima he could devote to the process, but Lorvaine was taking her time, so he didn’t push himself too hard.

His organs were the next most likely to be suffering, but those were ironically easier to regenerate. Healing magic was a lot better at repairing tissue damage, even to vital organs like the heart, than it was at replacing ossified bone. Fortunately for him, he hadn’t actually spent enough time under the basilisk’s glare for his petrification to progress deeply into his chest cavity, and healing was easy there.

By the time he was done, his anima was basically gone, but he was breathing and moving easily again. Lorvaine kept sneaking glances at him and frowning whenever she thought he wasn’t looking, apparently still not having realized he didn’t need to see her with his eyes to know what was going on around him.

She’d butchered the basilisk as best she could, claiming a great deal of its hide, its heart, both eyes, and dozens of its back spines. The soulprint was in its rearmost left foot, which Sorin hadn’t taken the time to identify yet. He’d had other concerns at the time, and now it was tucked away in whatever spatial storage Lorvaine was using.

She’d also gotten a few dozen samples of liquid sand from the font, obtained by dipping a jar held with some sort of special stick into the pit. That kept her as far away from the font itself as was possible, which was probably a smart call. She’d also gotten samples from the sand in the air and a few of the elementals’ remains after Sorin killed them, though she’d scoffed at the ones he’d frozen solid and shattered.

“I got a few extra samples for you,” she told him as he walked over to join her. He noted a pair of goggles with black lenses covered her eyes now. “More wealth here than I can carry away. No point in being greedy about it. Also… I know the soulprints are supposed to be mine, but this… this thing was way beyond what I expected to find down here. The foot is yours if you want it. If not, I’ll find you something useful from my specialty stock.”

“Heh. What was it? I never checked.”

“Earth Warder.”

Sorin’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. “Really? That’s… incredibly valuable.”

“You earned it. Really. I know I gave you shit over that trick you pulled, but I wouldn’t have hired you to bring me down here if I’d known there was something like this down here. This is something I would expect to see on Floor 10, not Floor 3. Honestly, I’m not sure how you’re still alive, let alone walking around like it’s nothing.”

Would have been a lot easier with a team, though not mine. They’re way too weak to be anything but a liability in this situation. It might be time to sit them down somewhere they can sustain themselves and nobody will find them so I can focus on killing Samael and dismantling his gang.

Earth Warder was similar to Nemari’s Water Bond, except for a different element. Sorin wouldn’t hesitate to claim it as a utility soulprint now that he finally had room, though he was planning on throttling back his soulprint acquisition for another rank or two so that he could start free casting D-ranked abilities.

At the rate he was going, that would be a matter of days, though now that he was climbing from rank 7 to 8, things had slowed down tremendously. Even as powerful as the monsters down here were, Sorin was starting to hit the point of diminishing returns. He needed to go up to Floor 4 or even 5 where everything was worth as much anima as the rare spiders here were.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“There is one thing, though. I still want those eggs, but my best guess is…” Lorvaine trailed off and gave the font a meaningful glance.

“That is where the basilisk crawled out of. It makes sense the eggs would be there, if anywhere. But there’s no guarantee that they’re there, or that they’ve been fossilized if they are,” Sorin said. “I’m willing to try fishing them up, though.”

She produced the soulprint and handed it over. The foot was almost as big as his chest, which made him glad he wasn’t going to have to haul it back out. After carefully observing it to ensure it was in fact Earth Warder, and the version he was familiar with, he absorbed it into his soulspace.

So much for getting enough room to free cast D-ranks next rank up. Well, maybe. I’ve definitely got way more soulprints in my soulspace than I should be able to hold right now.

An almost instinctual awareness of the world around him unfolded in Sorin’s mind, far superior to Blind Sense, but also far more limited. In some ways, the two soulprints almost perfectly complimented each other, one allowing Sorin to see the cavern itself, the other showing him everything moving in it. Of course, Earth Warder didn’t stop there. It would take anima, but he could move the stone and sand merely by willing it.

That was the theory, anyway. The truth of the matter was that dirt, stone, and sand were heavy, and an E-ranked soulprint had a strict upper limit. He doubted he could even duplicate the shale trick the basilisk had pulled on him, but then again, he hadn’t spent months or years submerged in a pool of elemental earth mutating his body, so maybe that was only fair.

Now that he could feel stone, though, it was obvious that he’d missed a few spots. Thin lines of petrified muscle tissue were scattered across his body, mostly in the larger muscles that could still function with the extra resistance. Those would be easy enough to fix, now that he knew about them. He was pleased to find that there were no ossified bones anywhere in his body, though he did notice the beginnings of a few spots in Lorvaine.

She must have gotten caught at the edge of the basilisk’s eyes when she was retreating. Well, I can fix that, but it’s going to hurt. She might be better off paying an actual healer to do it.

More important for their immediate purposes, he was pretty sure he’d found the eggs. They were sunk into the font, just like Lorvaine had expected, fifty feet below the surface. There were a dozen of them that he could feel, but not all of them were petrified all the way through. There was a whole range, some eggs being spotted with stone, others possessing a whole shell but being hollow inside. There were probably eggs that had no stone on them at all.

Once he thought about that, he realized there were also egg-shaped voids in the liquid sand, which he took as confirmation of the theory. Those were probably worth something, but they’d be significantly harder to get, so he didn’t bother trying.

Instead, he selected the three eggs that were most fully stone. Whatever embryos had lived in there once were gone now, and they were easy to grab hold of with Earth Warder. One at a time, he pulled them free of the font and placed them in front of Lorvaine while her eyes sparkled with greed.

“Those were the only ones that were fossilized all the way through. There are some partials down there, too, but I suspect half an egg isn’t worth as much.”

“Not at all,” Lorvaine agreed.

She held up a hand to try to shield her face from the sand whipping around the chamber. If Sorin had been relying on his eyes to see, he’d have said it was blinding, and even with Iron Bulwark protecting his exposed skin, it was mildly painful just standing there.

“I think I’m satisfied with this expedition,” she said. “Get me back to the portal hub, and we’ll call this deal concluded.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Sorin said, though he desperately wanted to mark a seven-tower sign nearby. It would be worth coming back here again in a month or two to see what new guardian had claimed the font and whether it was worth it to kill it for another powerful soulprint.

Even if he’d held confidence that his liminal space was safe, he still wouldn’t have wanted to carve the sign in front of Lorvaine. Though now that he thought about it, Earth Warder would let him do it without ever physically touching the stone. Maybe I’ll leave one in some random spot in the warren where there’s nothing to see just in case Samael pops through for a look.

They took their time climbing back out, if only to let Sorin recover more of his anima. Thankfully, there were almost no threats on the way out. Sorin went through with his plan to leave a seven-tower sign in an inconspicuous corner, carving it from a hundred feet away after he and Lorvaine had already passed by. With Earth Warder, it took less than ten seconds to make the symbol, which was easily disguised as hesitating at an intersection.

Once they made it back to the surface, Lorvaine pulled out her sled again. Hesitating for a moment, she asked, “Do you want to ride with me?”

“Was that an option the first time?” he asked.

Seeming almost embarrassed, she shrugged. “I was pissed at you then, but you really came through for me. The sled isn’t really designed for two people, you know? It’d be a tight fit. But that’s fine.”

Lorvaine stepped onto the sled, then beckoned Sorin over. Getting his feet onto the vehicle left him basically pressed against Lorvaine’s back. He tried to give her at least a few inches of space, but when she leaned back into him, he got the message.

“You’d better hang onto me. I wouldn’t want you falling off,” she told him.

He laughed. “Don’t trust my balance after all that?”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Sorin wrapped an arm around her. “Maybe you’re right.”

With a mental command, the sled took over. It skimmed across the sand, leaving a spray in its wake. Sorin noticed it was going a lot slower this time and wondered if that was the additional weight, or something Lorvaine had done on purpose.

He was wise enough not to voice that question.