The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 54

Rue was not looking forward to meeting the guardian. There were soulprints to help with fighting underwater, but she didn’t have any. In fact, excluding Nemari’s Water Bond, none of them had anything useful.

The portal guardian, appropriately enough for the floor, was a big fucking fish in a giant lake, which was the next best thing to completely out of reach for Rue. Despite Sorin’s assurances that he’d make sure everybody went into the Antechamber together, she just didn’t see how she’d be contributing much of anything to the fight.

When she brought that up, he just shrugged and said, “You might not. That’s fine. It happens. There have been plenty of fights where Odric didn’t do much. Did that bother you?”

“Well, no. He’s a healer. His job is to patch us up afterwards, not knock skulls.”

“There you go then. Your job is to get up in monsters’ faces and stab them. This isn’t a battle that’s well-suited to your build. No one’s going to hold it against you.”

What he didn’t say was that he would do all the work anyway. Being carried like that irked her. She hadn’t liked it when they’d killed the Floor 3 guardian, and she didn’t like it now. It made her feel useless, and she’d become a climber specifically because she hated that feeling.

The lake itself, which was half a mile wide, had a single small island in the middle. That was where the Antechamber portal was supposed to open once the fish guardian was dead. Of course, that didn’t mean they’d be safe. There were plenty of other monsters in the water.

As a group, they advanced out past the thin strip of sand bordering the water. With various levels of skill—Sorin was aggravatingly stable, while Od kept sinking an inch or two into the water with each step—they left dry land behind. Rue’s job was to give advance warning since her ability to sense auras wasn’t limited by water like Sorin’s sensory soulprints.

“There’s got to be a hundred or more auras down there,” she reported, “but… maybe not any monsters? Just regular fish?”

“I’m sure you’ll know it when the portal guardian gets in range,” Nemari assured her.

While they waited, they moved closer to the portal island. Supposedly, the water was shallower there, which would help limit the guardian’s angles of attack. It was aggressive enough that it wouldn’t care, making it predictable and easy to counter.

Would not want to be part of the team that had to figure all that out. This fight is pure nightmare fuel.

“Maybe we should do something to get its attention,” Yoru offered.

“Once we’re closer to the island,” Sorin said. Despite having no good way to see underwater—at least not anything Rue knew about—he was constantly looking down as if he could see into the depths.

It took twice as long to walk across the surface of the lake as the same distance on dry land, and it was ten times as exhausting. But they made it without being attacked by anything. Only once was there any indication that anything at all was moving out there when a massive fin taller than Rue herself broke the surface a few hundred feet away.

“Too far away,” she said in response to the inquisitive looks. “I fucking hope that was the guardian though. If it’s not, I can’t imagine how big the actual guardian is.”

“It is,” Sorin said, his eyes locked on the dark water. “Get moving before it circles back around. We don’t want to fight it here.”

A few minutes later, they were standing on water less than five feet deep and staring out at the relatively calm surface of the lake. Sorin activated that absurdly powerful cold aura of his, freezing a thin layer of ice across the water. More ice started forming in the air around him, pale crystals that hung from nothing.

As one, they shot off into the water, skewering fish and filling the lake with blood. “That should draw its attention,” he muttered. “Get ready.”

Nemari stirred the bloody water, spreading it out farther and farther into the lake. Soon enough, the first monster showed up, but it was too small to be the portal guardian. “Some sort of fish monsters, I think,” Rue dutifully reported. “They’re not what we’re look—Holy shit! That’s big!”

Sorin advanced out onto the open lake, fifty feet or more from the island. Then he just stood there, more ice crystals forming in the air around him and his sword held loosely in his hand while he stared at his feet.

“Incoming,” Rue called out the instant the big monster switched directions to head for Sorin.

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Fuck, I do not want to be out there on that water with him. Maybe Nemari can beach the damn thing, and we can all take turns poking it with a stick.

Despite being able to get a feel for its size and position, Rue was still shocked by the sheer fury of erupting water, flashing scales, and slicing teeth that came up from below Sorin. There was no way he could have survived being caught in that, but he’d timed it perfectly and was already fifty feet away.

The portal guardian, or at least the first fifteen feet of it, breached the surface of the lake directly into the cold field Sorin had left behind. Blood streamed out of it in a thousand different places as it rammed into the ice still hanging there. Each and every shard sliced deep into scales as the monster pushed through them, and a roar that sounded like boulders grinding against each other echoed across the lake.

Earth spikes erupted from Od and Yoru, and someone—Vendis, she assumed—leashed the guardian’s own blood into long, spike-covered whips to flay it with. Nemari’s flames were conspicuously absent, but that was only because she was busy pushing at the guardian by controlling the water around it.

Which just leaves me to make sure I’m a part of this, Rue thought to herself. It was too bad she hadn’t picked up a ranged soulprint yet. All she had was a few throwing knives that she kind of sucked with. She might hit the fish from this distance, maybe, but she definitely wouldn’t hurt it. If she wanted to do some damage, she needed to join Sorin out there, preferably before the guardian broke out of Nemari’s grip and swam off.

Sorin made Speed Burst look easy to use; Rue had found it to be anything but. A single day to practice wasn’t nearly enough for her to get used to moving at dizzying speeds for half a second at a time, though Sorin had promised some soulprints to help correct for that were slated into her build once she was rank 5 and had room for them. That didn’t help her today.

I can do a straight line. That’s just one foot in front of another. Easy.

She triggered the soulprint, lurched into motion, and in the time it took her to blink, covered the distance. Her straight lunge ended with a sword in the fish monster’s side, though she barely kept her grip on it as it wrenched itself away from her and descended back into the water. The fresh blood coating the blade was all the confirmation she needed that she’d struck the portal guardian.

If not for the chunks of ice still floating in the water, she would have dunked herself when she lost concentration on Water Walking. Even then, she got lucky that a loose piece was bobbing back up to the surface after being pulled down with the guardian, and that it just so happened to be positioned right under her feet.

It was such a coincidence, in fact, that she suspected either Nemari or Sorin of making it happen. There was no time to verify that, though. The ice was already sinking under her weight, which meant she had a fraction of a second to get anima moving through Water Walking again unless she wanted to be fully in the water with a monster fish big enough to swallow her whole.

And it was coming right back around for her. Rue honestly couldn’t have said whether it was a benefit that Aura Sense let her know that or a curse that the soulprint forced her to see it coming. The fish was fast—faster than she was on dry land by far. There was no getting out of the way of that.

“Speed Burst again,” Sorin ordered her, jolting her brain out of its shocked and panicked state.

Ensuring that she kept Water Walking up this time, Rue threw herself to the left. When the fish broke the surface, it didn’t bother with a leaping lunge. Its prey was already gone. They barely saw the tip of its back fin before it dove back down out of her range again.

“Okay, I think we’re good to proceed,” Sorin called out. “Anyone feel like they need to do more to ensure the tower credits their participation in this kill?”

“I barely feel like I did anything at all,” Od said.

“Did you hit it?” Sorin asked.

“I got a few smacks in. I just don’t think it hurt the guardian at all. Are we sure it’ll count?”

“It will,” Yoru assured him. “But if you’re concerned, make sure you get a few more good shots in next time it surfaces.”

“Which should be in a few seconds,” Sorin said. “Rue, you might want to get back to that island. You don’t want to be on the water when the rank up hits you.”

While he had an excellent point, she found herself with a simmering mixture of annoyance and jealousy bubbling up. It did not escape her notice that he wasn’t worried about losing his focus and accidentally drowning himself. But at the same time, there were other monsters in the lake, and she didn’t trust herself to hold Water Walking when the pain hit, especially since it kept getting worse with each floor.

Bastard always has to be right, she thought with a scowl as she raced back toward the island.

She got her first good look at the fish when it surfaced the second time, the whole front half of its body coming out of the water as it cruised forward with its mouth gaping wide open to swallow Sorin.

Something twisted through the air in a spiral motion, something as big as Sorin was tall. It hit the portal guardian and ripped the monster into a spin, completely rotating it belly up for just a second before the whole thing started to come apart. Blood, scales, and bone blew out of it in every direction, striking the lake like raindrops.

“What the fuck was that?” Yoru whispered, his eyes wide.

“Some sort of force spell, I believe,” Vendis answered him.

Then the pain of ranking up hit. Rue wasn’t really sure how the tower managed to keep making it worse, but it was indeed even more awful than last time. Every single time it happened, it was the worst pain she’d ever felt in her life, and this time was no exception.

The only saving grace was that it only lasted a few seconds. She came back to herself on her hands and knees, panting and feeling like blood should be leaking out of her pores. Of course, the pain was just pain. She wasn’t actually hurt. She wasn’t even sore after those few seconds. It was a bad memory now, nothing more.

“Fuuuuuuuuuck,” Nemari said, which about summed things up perfectly for all of them.

Sorin, of course, was walking calmly toward the island like nothing had happened. How does he do that? Rue wondered. If he’s got some pain-dampening trick that works on rank ups and isn’t sharing it with us, I’ll kill him myself.