The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 35

There was a trick to running on flowing water. It wasn’t necessarily hard, but anybody without experience with it was liable to find the transitions jarring. Water didn’t all flow at the same speed, which meant a savvy climber had to be prepared to find the liquid ground shifting with every step.

As a basic rule of thumb, it was fastest in the middle as long as the river was flowing straight. Otherwise, the fastest spot was the outside edge of the curve. Everything else was a gradient, but Sorin still found it best to keep his footfalls firmly in mind so he could compensate for the ‘ground’ sliding away under his feet with every step.

Adding Speed Burst to the whole thing was another layer of complication that would surely see any amateur climber skidding across the river’s surface to plant face-first into the bank if they were lucky, or to be swept along in its depths if their concentration lapsed. That was why it was good to practice in the shallows first.

Sorin would have liked to see that, but he’d left the rest of the group behind after a brief discussion about progressing across Floor 4. Yoru was leading an impromptu class on wielding the Water Walking soulprint’s power, which was kind of funny since he had no more experience with it than anyone else. Rue and Vendis were his only students, though the latter probably didn’t actually need the lesson.

A hundred yards away from them was a new seven-tower sign. They’d watched it for fifteen minutes to make sure nothing was going to jump out at them, then moved away from it so if something did show up later, they’d at least have some warning. And with the finest directions Yoru could provide, Sorin was now sprinting across flood plains and bogs, leaping small streams in single bounds, and hoping to reach the floor’s portal hub in the next few hours.

There was another trick to running on water that all aspiring climbers needed to be aware of. That one was simple, yet simultaneously important: look down. Just because Sorin’s feet wouldn’t sink below the surface of the river—as long as he held his concentration on free casting the soulprint, at least—did not mean there was an immutable barrier where water met air.

Sorin was reminded of that fact as a long-bodied fish with a bone spur resembling a spear lunged up out of the depths at him. Blind Sense didn’t do much for him here since it really struggled to penetrate the water at all, but that was why he had Clear Eyes, to help him see past all the dirt and silt swirling through the river.

He saw the fish monster coming about three seconds before it actually reached him, and just before it breached the surface, he slid downstream at more than twice his normal speed. His sword arm blurred with all the power of Warrior’s Vigilance and the gauntlet on his right hand behind it, and the fish was bisected cleanly in half. Both pieces splashed back into the river and were immediately carried away.

I don’t think there was a soulprint in that one, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to check, he thought as he watched the remains spin on the river’s current. Already, other fish were chasing after the free meal.

Sorin reached the far bank of the river and kept running without breaking stride. Moving across wet mud with Water Walking was an entirely different experience, and a strange one at that, but he managed it without any real loss of speed. A hundred feet farther out, the ground finally firmed up enough for him to release the soulprint from his mind.

The whole crossing had only taken half a minute, maybe less, but it had still eaten a tenth of his anima reserves. It really reinforced that, while free casting was fantastic to give him the flexibility of a thousand options, it was so much more expensive to use than actually having the soulprints that he couldn’t rely on it for survivability. The first time he landed on a true aquatic floor, one where he was actually under water the whole time instead of just traversing a swamp, he was going to run out of anima and drown.

That’s why we’re doing this, he reminded himself. Yoru’s family had a considerable armory, and Sorin wanted access. It wasn’t just for him, either. If the tower really was setting his team up, and it looked like it was, they’d all need the best they could get to survive against the voidlings. He’d caught the tail end of their very first fight against this enemy, and he could most generously describe the results as ‘adequate with room for improvement.’

One of the benefits of racing across the landscape with Speed Burst was that very few monsters were quick enough to get in Sorin’s way, especially with so many of them trapped in the water that made up their homes. Unless he ran directly into something, almost anything that spotted him quickly fell behind. That helped speed him along his way even further, since he wasn’t taking breaks or getting sidetracked.

Because of that, the miles that would likely have taken his group a good three days to cross even if they’d all had Water Walking disappeared in about six hours. When Sorin finally came to a stop, he was at the edge of a marsh. A short climb up a twenty-foot ridge got him on dry ground, and from there, he could see the portal hub a mile away up a gently sloping hill.

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This was as good a spot as any. Sorin took his knife to the closest tree and carved the seven-tower sign into its bark, then laid a hand on it and pushed through into liminal space. The connection he was looking for was only a few feet away, barely a second’s journey.

Six hours turned into six steps. If this were safe to use…

He hesitated, glancing back down the path toward that connection he’d made on Floor 3. Though he’d already checked it once and found no sign on voidlings, he was still concerned that they were there. Once the rest of his team was safe, he had plans to go back and thoroughly explore the area, but for the moment, it would have to wait.

Get everyone to the hub first, hunt for voidlings later.

* * *

Rue had never given much thought to the ripples the wind made on the surface of a pond, not until those ripples threatened to send her tumbling on her ass. It wasn’t even much of a motion, more like a gentle rumble underfoot, but for some reason, standing on water magnified it to the point where she struggled to keep her balance.

Nemari had it even worse right next to her. She had to actively focus on Water Bond instead of just channeling some anima into Water Walking, and it had taken less than a minute for her to become completely soaked as she’d failed to hold the magic and repeatedly dunked herself in the cold water.

There was a loud splash and a surprised yelp—again—followed by garbled cursing as Nemari climbed out of the water like it was a set of stairs. She got back up to the surface, still cursing, and said, “Okay, I need a break from this!”

Trudging back the ten feet to the edge of the water, she sat down on the damp ground and magically wrung the water out of her clothes. It looked more like watching them dry at super speed, the water literally wicking out of the fabric and flinging itself away from Nemari over the course of a minute or so until she was completely dry again. Her hair frizzed out in every direction, which she set about trying to fix with a brush produced from her pack.

“So, you think it’s all true?” Nemari asked.

Rue wobbled a bit, her arms going out to help her maintain her balance. “Huh?”

“The rank 100 stuff and other towers existing, I mean.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Deep words,” Nemari said dryly.

“I think that Sorin believes it’s true,” Rue told her. “And I can see why he wasn’t interested in sharing that when we first met up. All the weird shit we’ve dealt with proves something

is going on, but back then, we’d have just said he was cracked in the head and refused to work with him.”Her equilibrium restored, Rue returned to trying to walk in a loose circle. She’d seen Sorin take off a dead sprint across the water, and she knew he didn’t even have the soulprint for it, so it was definitely possible to move normally. It was just that practice wasn’t going that well.

It was a small consolation, but Yoru and Vendis weren’t doing much better than her thirty feet away where they were practicing. Sure, they’d moved on from just walking to some kind of slow-motion sparring, and sure, Yoru had managed to roll across the surface of the water and climb back to his feet when Vendis had thrown him, but that wasn’t that much farther ahead than where she was.

“I don’t understand how you can’t be more curious about this,” Nemari said. “This is like if someone told you they had proof God is real, and you just… You don’t care.”

Od started chuckling. “It’s because we never had the luxury of worrying about this kind of stuff growing up,” he explained.

“More important things to think about, like the next meal, or keeping ourselves safe from whatever gang was ruling the block this month,” Rue added.

She wondered how her parents were doing. The best protection they’d been able to offer was to stay away, to make the Black Hellions think there was nothing to be gained there. Hopefully, it had been good enough. God only knew what Mom and Dad were enduring if someone like Samael had decided to kidnap them anyway.

You’re already rank 4. Keep this up, and in three months you’ll be rank 10, she told herself. Not going to be too many people looking to push your family around then. Just focus on survival.

“I get not being interested in philosophical questions when there are important practical decisions sitting in front of you, but it’s not exactly philosophical at this point, is it? This isn’t ‘are there other versions of the tower?’ It’s ‘is Sorin telling the truth about there being other versions of the tower?’” Nemari said.

“Sure, but so what if he’s not? Does that make Samael’s interest in us any less threatening?”

“It matters,” Nemari insisted.

“Okay, fine. It matters,” Rue said with a shrug. “What do you think, then?”

Nemari stopped dragging the brush through her hair for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I think that we’re going to have to proceed as if he’s telling the truth, at least for now. It’s just… I don’t know… It feels like this should matter. It’s huge. It’s a mystery of the universe revealed to us. That should be important. It should have weight.”

“What’s the problem?” Od asked. “It doesn’t feel heavy enough?”

“No, it does. I don’t know what to do with it, though. Now I know this… this thing that people aren’t meant to know, and so what? What’s changed? Who do I tell? Does it matter if I tell anybody?”

“It matters,” Yoru said. He walked across the water, steady as dry land, much to Rue’s annoyance. “I haven’t sorted through the implications myself, but your teammates are right. We have more immediately pressing problems to handle first. There will be plenty of time to sort through the reveal of the underpinnings of reality later.

“For the moment, focus on your own survival. He’s back, and that means it’s time to move.”