The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 33

The one and only time Nemari had seen a voidling in action had been during the Floor 1 portal guardian battle, and she’d had plenty to occupy her attention at the time. Sorin had handled both voidlings while she and the rest of the team focused on the guardian itself, and her overall impression had been that they were simple-minded creatures that could easily be manipulated.

They were fast, but not outrageously so. They didn’t have any sort of long-range abilities she needed to worry about. Getting touched by one didn’t seem to actually cause any wounds, though Sorin insisted that the shock of having anima ripped out of their soulspace could be fatal. Even being near one for an extended period of time was a problem.

Rue was probably their best fighter to handle this challenge. She was agile enough to dodge the voidling’s grasping claws and quick enough to carve it to pieces with her twin swords. Nemari barely knew the first thing about fighting with a blade, but since voidlings were immune to magic, that was her only real method of offense.

God bless that stubborn man for insisting on giving us those basic lessons back on Floor 2, she thought grimly as she pulled the sword out of its scabbard.

Odric had lost that club somewhere on Floor 3, which meant he was essentially worthless. Vendis had a small flail coiled up and hanging from his waist, but Nemari had never seen him so much as touch it, so she had no idea how handy he was with it. She knew it wasn’t an easy weapon to master, however, and this wasn’t the ideal scenario to test his proficiency.

The voidling finished forming in a handful of seconds and leaped toward Vendis, who was the closest person to the rock. He blanched and jumped back, trying to keep his distance, but the voidling flowed forward almost deceptively fast. The limbs are more for show than function, Nemari realized. The voidling moved almost independent of its legs touching the ground.

The flail came out, and Vendis proved his skill right there. With a single, masterful flick of his wrist, the spiked weight swooped through the air to smash into the voidling’s head. It tore through the inky darkness like there was nothing there, scattering small flecks of black as it passed out the other side.

“Rue!” Nemari yelled as she chased after the voidling. She knew she wasn’t positioned properly to put her weight into a swing and that her aim was terrible, but none of that mattered. It was about carving off chunk after chunk to dissipate the voidling into little splatters that were too small to reconstitute themselves into a threat.

Vendis tagged it twice more before Nemari could reach the… not a monster, if Sorin was to be believed… but the distinction seemed irrelevant in the moment. She caught up to the monster, swung the long, thin blade in a wide slash designed to skim an inch of void off the top of its back, and stumbled backward when the thing switched direction to come at her.

It didn’t even turn around! It’s just running backward!

The voidling fell on her, its lanky black limbs thrown wide in a way that made it obvious its supposed joints were just for decoration. More by instinct than anything else, a wave of fire swept out of her to strike the monster. She might as well have saved herself the effort. Instead of scorching the black skin, the fire winked out of existence a few inches away from it.

The voidling would have caught her then and there if Rue hadn’t interfered. She appeared at a run, then jumped over the monster, both swords sweeping out beneath her as she turned completely upside down and cut large chunks across what Nemari would tentatively have called the ass-end of the thing, except it didn’t have any real anatomy.

More importantly, it distracted the voidling from falling on Nemari. Even then, it passed so close to her that it felt like a layer of ice had crawled across her skin. A moment later, the painful sensation vanished, and she scrambled back to her feet.

Vendis and Rue were holding the voidling’s attention for the moment, but their attacks weren’t reducing its size the way Sorin’s had. It was obvious what they were doing wrong. Hacking into it like a living monster wasn’t the answer. They needed to scrape layers of void away, but that was a lot easier to say than do.

Nemari swept the sword down into the voidling’s arm, or maybe its leg. It was hard to tell. She didn’t bother targeting the joint where it connected to the main body, having already seen Rue do that more than once. Those attacks flashed through the darkness and came out the other side with a sliver of shadow flickering across the edge of the blade, but the limbs didn’t separate.

That was why she targeted the end of the limb, like cutting off the monster’s toes, and snarled in satisfaction when she saw a half-inch of void cleanly separate and unravel into nothing. Making headway is about precision, which means Vendis can’t serve as anything more than a distraction. That’s still more than Odric is contributing right now, though.

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Their healer wielded his staff like a club and was approaching the battle, but it was obvious the weapon wasn’t going to be helpful. It was perhaps two inches thick and maybe five feet long, which was respectable for leaving a good bruise on a rank 0, but not great for defeating an entity made out of a substance that devoured reality.

They were holding their own for the moment, but even after just a minute, Rue was already moving slower. While Vendis’s arm was steady, his weapon was ineffectual, and Odric was most helpful just staying out of the way. His Stone Skin wasn’t going to protect him in this fight.

No, we can kill this thing. We just need to keep whittling it down. Nemari glanced back at the seven-tower sign, just to make sure a second voidling wasn’t about to jump them. But I wouldn’t complain if you showed back up now, Sorin!

* * *

The strangest part about walking down the liminal pathway with Yoru was that Sorin physically couldn’t remove his hand from the other man’s shoulder. They were fused together by whatever magic had facilitated the transfer, and while it made sense that they’d pop back apart once they exited, he had no assurances of that fact.

He’d decided to guide Yoru toward the camp atop the cliffs back on Floor 2, assuming it was still safe there. The arrogant man had been hard to get moving initially, which was fair enough. Sorin was only a few weeks removed from his own first impressions of the place, and he’d had decades of experience over Yoru to help him contextualize it all.

But eventually, Yoru had allowed himself to be pulled along, and the pair walked the trail of silver dust cutting through the void. They approached the nub and paused to wait for the tower on the other side to become clear. Sorin studied it in silence, his eyes digging into the shadows, looking for climbers that might be lurking nearby.

Finally satisfied that there was nothing, he nodded to Yoru, and the two stepped forward together. Floor 2 appeared around them, and Sorin’s senses unfolded to confirm what he’d gambled on—there was no one else there.

Are you sloppy or starved for manpower? Sorin wondered. No doubt certain exits were high enough priority to keep eyes on them, but if Samael didn’t have enough bodies to watch them all, then it made sense to ignore this one.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Yoru snarled, slapping Sorin’s hand away. “Why would you just grab me like that with no warning?”

“Because words weren’t working. You needed to see it for yourself,” Sorin said. “Feel free to poke around. This is Floor 2, so I doubt you’ll find much to threaten you here. When you’re ready, we’ll go back.”

“Back… through there,” Yoru said, paling slightly as he looked past Sorin to the symbol carved into a nearby tree. “Right. Yes. Let me just examine the area first.”

There was no need for that. Sorin could tell Yoru was convinced, but he could also tell that the young man needed a minute to come to terms with their casual stroll through the void. They weren’t in a hurry, so he just nodded along and let Yoru pretend to confirm things.

Probably shouldn’t take too long, though. The longer the others are standing near that symbol by themselves, the greater the chances Samael comes along and finds them. Hopefully he’s busy right now. God, just let me keep ahead of him for another six weeks. If I can get Yoru’s family sponsoring us, I can put on another ten ranks by then at least. It might not be enough to win, but I’d bet I could hold him back at that point.

He had to remind himself that Samael wasn’t going to be the same as the other Hellion goons he’d killed. He’d know every trick and likely have a lexicon of hundreds of soulprints memorized to free cast, not to mention having a decade in the red tower to head up a massive criminal organization and equip himself with the best possible gear the locals could produce.

For all Sorin knew, Samael might have had extensive crafting experience himself and produced pieces that no one locked to rank 24 with a limited selection of supporting soulprints could ever hope to compete with. It was important to remember that he wasn’t going against some inexperienced neophyte climber, but one who presumably rivaled him in sheer skill and had a substantial head start.

Or I could work with him, Sorin thought with a mental chuckle. That’d go swimmingly right up until he stabbed me in the back, I’m sure.

Even if he’d been willing to risk it, the Black Hellions as an organization were exactly the kind of people he despised. Sorin was by no means an altruistic bleeding heart, but he liked to think his presence in his home tower had made things better for everybody. At the least, he was sure he hadn’t made society worse.

Yoru wandered a few hundred feet away, far enough that Sorin had to follow him a bit to keep him in range of Blind Sense, but other than that, he left his fellow climber alone. After a few minutes, though, he decided that Yoru could work through things once they were back with the rest of the team, and he wandered over to find him.

“Ready to go back?” he asked, causing Yoru to flinch.

“I suppose we must. Tell me, though, where do the rest of the passages go?”

“Wherever I want to carve the sign,” Sorin said. “I’ve got them on every floor I’ve been to now, including Floor 0. The problem is that Samael knows about them, so there’s no telling what I’d walk into. It doesn’t look like he’s willing to devote the staff to sitting on all of them, but I can’t imagine him leaving the one going back to the city unguarded.”

“That’s something we could work on,” Yoru said. “Perhaps a sign in a fortified room in my family’s estate would be beneficial to all of us. It would certainly relieve quite a few logistics issues.”

“Oh? You’re interested then?”

Yoru scowled at him. “Don’t be ungracious.”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s just nice to be taken at my word after how long we spent getting to this point.”

“I suppose we should get heading back,” Yoru said. “Vendis is probably having a conniption by now.”

Sorin winced. “Ah… Right. That’s my fault. Yes, let’s be quick about it before Nemari burns everything down holding him off.”