The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 37

Sorin could say with absolute confidence that he’d been correct when he’d guessed that the tower had somehow reinforced his anima to resist void degradation. If he’d been wrong, he’d likely already be dead, because the liminal pathway on that last trip was falling apart. He didn’t think he’d have been able to reach any other exit besides this one.

The fact that void was probably spilling out of the other seven-tower signs he’d left behind was not lost on Sorin, but at the moment, he had other concerns. After practically swimming through the darkness, he’d burst out through Liminal Gateway and quickly destroyed the sign so that it couldn’t leak more void into the tower, leaving only enough to kill him a hundred times over.

Rue and Odric were running for their lives, so that was one thing that had gone right, at least. As to the rest, it didn’t take long to assess his situation. Forget voidlings or void beasts, this is a behemoth class. There’s got to be at least two hundred feet of void around me in every direction.

Speed Burst helped get Sorin clear, though it wasn’t a straightforward process. The void itself ate away at the anima cycling through the ability, making it weaker and more expensive to use—that was how Sorin knew Void Resistance was a thing, because otherwise it would have outright failed. Then the physical manifestations became obstacles in the form of reaching, grasping tentacles, hands, and maws that tried to snap closed around him.

Escaping the void behemoth’s clutches amounted to the most chaotic three minutes of Sorin’s life. Even once it was over, he couldn’t say exactly how he’d managed it, just that it had involved absolute focus, trigger reflexes, and pushing himself beyond the peak of human physicality. Without the soulprints reinforcing his body, he wouldn’t have made it.

The void coagulated into a physical shape even as Sorin made good on his escape from it. Limbs thicker around than tree trunks lifted its bulk off the ground, dozens of them made solid. The only saving grace was that the behemoth didn’t seem to be paying any attention to Sorin now. When void monstrosities got to that size, they started to focus more on attacking the tower’s landscape itself. They killed monsters by the dozens and devastated whole ecosystems.

Sorin absolutely was not ready to take down a void creature this size. Even if it broke down into a dozen void beasts, he still wasn’t confident in his abilities. Two or three was a possibility. Four or five was stretching things. This was an unmitigated disaster.

And yet, if he did nothing, if he just ran for his life, the void might repeat what it had done to Floor 25 here on Floor 4. Humanity couldn’t survive if it was trapped so low in the tower. Sooner or later, the void would seep down to Floor 0, and they’d have no way to fight back. I need to find some way to kill this thing. And then I need to figure out if the other entrances to liminal space also spewed out a behemoth.

He drew his sword and saw the shard of black onyx in the crossguard pulsing dully. Light flickered in its depths, so subtle that he almost could have missed it if not for a massive slab of void contrasting it in the background. Sorin thought about that new section of mosaic lining the floor of his soulspace, about how it depicted the very sword he held in his hands.

It would have been nice to have gained another few ranks and revealed what sort of soulprint, if any, it had, but he’d just have to play the cards he’d been dealt. The sword was made for him, given to him by the tower, and all signs indicated that the tower was building him into a weapon to fight back against the void.

Time to have a little faith, I guess.

Sorin didn’t so much approach the void behemoth as he simply stopped moving away from it and let it catch up to him. His sword flashed through the darkness, a blue arc carving away a sliver of void. He watched it closely, hoping against hope to see the sword had some sort of power hidden away in it.

It functioned just like a normal sword, at least in regards to how it handled the void. Solid, sharpened steel neatly sliced through the darkness, which promptly pushed outward to fill the gap he’d made. The inch or so of void-stuff he’d carved off broke into tiny wisps of black smoke, then vanished. If there was anything special at all about the sword, it wasn’t revealed here.

What it did do was get the behemoth’s attention. It was hard to tell since it looked like nothing so much as a forty-foot-tall blob of oblong darkness with a few dozen legs lancing out of its center mass into the ground. It had no feet, either. In fact, there was nothing at all at the bottom of its tree-trunk legs, just the void eating away at dirt, grass, and water.

Sorin watched thin tendrils stretch out of the leg perhaps six feet up from its base where it had landed in a river. They snatched a passing fish out of the water, pulling it into the darkness, where it was broken down into nothingness. The behemoth gave no indication that it cared about that fish or that it had even noticed it.

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No, the behemoth didn’t care about what it fed on. What it did do was reorient its oblong body to point toward the leg Sorin had cut into. With great, ponderous speed, it rushed forward, a waterfall of absolute black about to pour down on Sorin’s head. He leaped backward, Speed Burst propelling him away from the impact site, and found himself twisting off course to avoid new tendrils of void that erupted out of the ground around him.

The void behemoth had spread below the surface, eating away at the soil and rock beneath Sorin’s feet. Evidence of this tactic was everywhere as the landscape around each leg slowly collapsed on itself, consumed from below. When its main body crashed to the ground, it didn’t merely splash away. It dug in deep and started to spread, and it did so far, far faster than where its legs were.

Sorin hacked through the relatively thin tendrils of void that tried to cling to him, separating them from the main body and dispersing them into the air. There was always another one coming, no matter how many he destroyed, and his blade flashed through the darkness as he cut in practically every direction at once.

His progress was more sideways than forward, but he broke free of the main mass again. The leviathan didn’t pursue him, nor did it begin roaming across the floor. Instead, it hunkered down in place, simply spreading and consuming anima from the monsters caught in its grip.

Despite the damage Sorin had done, it had not shrunk. If anything, it was growing faster than he could cut it back down. There were too many sources of anima for it to eat here, and the river currents were bringing it constant supplies of new food. It didn’t help things that it was so large, it was easily perched on two separate flows of incoming monsters.

Odric and Rue were relatively safe, about a thousand feet or so away. They’d encountered some sort of amphibious monster and were putting it down, but there was only one, and it appeared to be split between trying to attack them and fleeing from the behemoth.

Part of Sorin wanted to retreat. He could catch up with them easily enough, and the three of them could flee the behemoth’s radius. It wouldn’t chase after them, not when the very nature of Floor 4 allowed it to squat in place and let monsters deliver themselves to it.

But if they did that, the behemoth would only continue to grow bigger and bigger. He needed to find a way to destroy it now, and that meant leveraging his newfound resistance to the void and putting his faith in a sword the tower had granted him, even if he couldn’t tell exactly what it was doing yet.

He slashed and he cut as he danced around the void, speeding himself up when he couldn’t escape fast enough and relying on the relentless strength of Blood of the Mountain flowing through his body to keep him moving. The void behemoth certainly noticed him, and sometimes it reacted, but sometimes it was too preoccupied gorging itself on tower anima to retaliate.

The whole time, the chip of onyx in the sword kept flickering, growing brighter by tiny, unnoticeable increments. Sorin was five minutes into what he considered to be a quest in futility when he first noticed the flickering. A few minutes after that, he felt something stirring in the blade and realized the truth: far from merely cutting through the void creature’s physical form, it was drinking up darkness.

It’s a void eater.

Yes, the behemoth was still growing, but that was due to the nature of the floor more than anything. And though Sorin didn’t know enough of the variables to even attempt the math, he was willing to bet he’d slowed its growth considerably with his attack.

At the twenty-minute mark, he noticed that the tree-trunk leg nearest to him was no longer spreading. It was still half-again as wide as when it had started, but it had run out of resources to consume. The only thing left in the area was Sorin himself, and no matter how many new limbs it sprouted to catch him, he remained a step ahead of it.

The sword fairly pulsed in Sorin’s hand now. Every strike not only split away slivers of void to dissipate into the tower, it consumed a swath of darkness several inches wide. This was so effective that Sorin abandoned trying to carve off small segments and adopted a strategy of massive, speedy strikes right through the center of the behemoth’s mass.

Slowly, the void creature started to react to him. Its pursuit grew more dogged as other sources of anima dried up. Multiple limbs collapsed into the same space, chasing after him while he wove through its body. The main mass slammed down into the ground multiple times, each time missing him as he dodged away.

Even with the power of Blood of the Mountain and Warrior’s Vigilance keeping him upright, Sorin’s chest was heaving with exertion now. Half an hour of non-stop combat had taken its toll, and that wasn’t even considering the mental drain of dodging reaching limbs coming at him from every direction at once.

But the behemoth was shrinking. If he could just keep up the pressure, he could contain this outbreak here and now. The monsters were gone. His team was gone. It was just a field of gray, lifeless ash, the monumental writhing mass of darkness, and him.

And the sword, he reminded himself, feeling it buck in his hands like a living thing as it greedily ate more and more voidstuff.

By the time the behemoth had shrunk down to a reasonable level, to something that Sorin could see without having to turn his head to take it all in, his muscles quivered with exhaustion. The sword was heavier than any sword he could ever remember, and he honestly wasn’t sure if that was his own weariness or if the damn thing was actually getting heavier from all the void it had eaten.

He was just glad that he’d been right about it being a weapon designed to destroy the void. The behemoth took its last steps roughly forty minutes after it had first emerged from the liminal space, and Sorin passed out thirty seconds later. His final thoughts were to wonder if the void had exploded out of the other side where Nemari and the others waited.