novelraw Book 2, Chapter 56
Book 2, Chapter 56
As eager as everyone was to rush through the portal to Floor 5 and start farming anima to see if they could break their floor limit, there was one last thing to discuss while they still had a safe haven to do so. Sorin held up the brass key with its ivory teeth and lion-head ornamentation for them all to see.
“I’m sure this goes to something incredibly valuable if the tower is giving it out as an Antechamber reward,” Sorin said, “but I don’t have the first clue where to start looking for whatever door it opens up.”
“Is that a Lion’s Fang Key?” Yoru asked, his eyes widening in shock and his jaw dropping open.
“It has to be, doesn’t it?” Nemari added. “I mean, it’s not like we’re in a market on Floor 0 with some shady peddler trying to scam us. The Antechamber awarded it to him.”
“I’m going to need one of you to fill me in,” Sorin said. “Why is this key important?”
Yoru pointed a finger straight up. “Remember Floor 10?”
“The Citadel,” Sorin said.
Somewhat unusually, the entire floor was a single building of gargantuan proportions, many times bigger than the city that made up Floor 0. It was a labyrinth of convoluted intersecting hallways, secret passages, massive chambers, and hidden lairs, roughly divided into two dozen distinct areas. The tower rearranged the floor’s layout on occasion, defeating any attempts at truly mapping it.
It was the rare floor that got its own name rather than just being referred to by its number, but the Citadel qualified. It was also apparently the largest nexus of climber activity outside Floor 0 itself, with all the exclusivity that being on Floor 10 implied.
If the key went to some treasure vault buried in the depths of the Citadel, then just finding the door could be a real challenge. That wasn’t even getting into the traps and guardian monsters that could be lurking there. Sorin was less worried about those than he was about finding the door in the first place, though.
“Supposedly, the Lion’s Fang Key unlocks a sort of… pseudo floor, I guess you’d call it,” Nemari said. “It’s a savanna filled with powerful monsters of all sorts of varieties, who are all extremely likely to have soulprints to harvest. There are even caches of tower-forged loot in there. The guardian is a massive, golden-maned lion, and the exit is a miniature Antechamber that spits you back out at the Floor 10 portal hub.”
“Surprised it’s not a giant cow,” Sorin muttered.
“What? Why would it be—You know what, never mind. Doesn’t matter. It’s a lion,” Yoru said firmly.
“So the Antechamber gave us a… not useless, but not immediately useful reward here,” Sorin murmured. But maybe it’s giving me a way to get the slate I need for the sword image section of my mosaic. Could have just given me the slate instead of this key, though. If I’m being generous, I’ll assume there’s something else behind this door the tower wants me to get.
Tucking the key away, he glanced over at the Antechamber’s exit portal. “I guess we should go see where we’re landing on Floor 5 now.”
“Sorin,” Yoru said. “Do not show that key to anyone. Don’t mention it. Don’t even talk about the possibility of it existing in casual conversation. Do nothing to draw attention to the idea that you might have it. If you thought you had the wrong kind of people looking for you now, you have no idea how much worse it would be if word got out that a legitimate Lion’s Fang Key had been awarded to someone by the tower.”
Sorin nodded. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the consequences of human greed if it got out that such a lucrative treasure was in the hands of a team of rank 5s. He hated these lower floors where climbers still did shit like that. The ones that were so busy climbing over each other and trying to snap up any advantage never made it very far, but he supposed in a tower where Floor 24 had been the highest anyone could go for the better part of a decade made for a different environment.
“I’ll keep it to myself,” he promised. “Alright, if everyone’s ready, let’s get out there and see what the next challenge is.”
* * *
Floor 5 was actually more forgiving than the two floors that preceded it. While it wasn’t the temperate forest biome the first two floors boasted, it was easy enough to navigate. Everything was very flat, very open, and very large. Trees grew individually, hundreds or thousands of feet apart, and they did so to massive heights. It was hardly unusual for them to reach several hundred feet tall or have canopies that cast shade across whole acres.
There were no monsters waiting for them on the other side of the portal, which Sorin appreciated. That moment of vulnerability before the whole team reassembled on the other side of the portal was one of the most dangerous times on a new floor, and not being in a fight for his life the instant he stepped through was a relief.
The first order of business was spotting one of several possible landmarks that would tell them where they were in relation to the portal hub. No one had a Spider Climb soulprint—Yoru insisted he could make it up the massive trunks and into the branches if he had to, but he didn’t elaborate on the how of it—so Sorin free cast the soulprint and scurried up the rough bark.
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He was immediately set upon by a massive tree viper with camouflaging scales. Its motionless waiting was almost enough to fool Blind Sense, and without contact with the ground, Earth Warder was useless for detecting the monster, but Sorin just had too many sensory soulprints stacked on top of each other to truly be caught unaware. When the upper third of the snake’s body suddenly lunged forward, its jaws closed on only air.
Then Sorin came down on top of it, easily balanced on the two-foot-diameter body. His sword struck in a vicious chop that parted scales and tissue, hitched only for an instant on bone, and then passed clean through the monster. The head and about four feet of body tumbled through the branches to slam into the ground below, with the rest of the corpse draped lifeless across the branches it had twined around.
Eyeing the corpse critically in case it had a soulprint for him, Sorin wiped the blood off his blade and sheathed it. Bereft of life, its camouflaging magic flickered out, revealing better than a hundred foot of thick body so thoroughly entwined around the tree itself that Sorin wasn’t sure the snake could have left even if it had wanted to.
Hell of a welcoming committee. I knew everything on this floor was overgrown, but this is ridiculous. What did this thing even survive on before I showed up?
Tower ecology was a bit of a mystery. Experiments had been done to prove that monsters did indeed need food, most of the time at least. But the sheer number often precluded the idea that there was enough prey for them to survive. Popular theories were that they either ate each other, or they starved to death and were disposed of by the tower itself, only for a new copy to pop into existence later.
“Ack! What the fuck, Sorin!” someone yelled out below him. He glanced down to see Rue staring daggers up at the tree, her front covered in spattered serpent blood and the head of the monster on the ground right next to her.
“Sorry! Didn’t see it there until it tried to eat me,” he called back.
The rest of the climb was a lot more peaceful, though he did note a seemingly normal-sized eagle sizing him up as it winged by. Knowing the peculiarities of the floor, Sorin mentally compensated for what his eyes were telling him. It was probably a lot bigger and a lot farther away than it looked, but since it didn’t seem to be circling around in his direction, he dismissed it as a concern.
Once he made it to the top, he was able to get a better picture of where they were. The trees were spread out enough that while they did block the ground, they didn’t prevent Sorin from noting the landmarks he was looking for. Giant’s Finger was the most obvious one, being a massive tower of stone a thousand feet high.
That alone told him where he was, but the massive river that split the floor in half was also visible. Somewhere on that bank was the portal hub, every climber’s first goal on a new floor. His team would be no different, especially not since they needed to return to the Telpike estate and claim their upgrades for reaching rank 5, as well as resupply.
And see if Morlin’s going to honor our deal. The tower pretty much gave us perfect proof to convince my team, but it’s not exactly something we can show anyone else. I guess we’ll see if it does let them break the rank limit. That would be undeniable proof.
Reaching the ground again, Sorin pointed first to his left, then behind him, and said, “Giant’s Finger is that way, and the portal hub should be around there.”
“How far?” Nemari asked.
“Just a guess, because the size makes distance hard to judge, but I’d say not more than two hundred miles. If we push it, three or four days of travel.”
“That’s… pretty far,” Rue said.
“It’s all plains and grasslands. We’ll make good time.”
“This is going to involve chaining bursts of speed, isn’t it?”
“And running when you need time to recover anima,” Sorin confirmed.
Fortunately, Yoru and Vendis had already incorporated endurance-boosting soulprints into their build prior to joining up with Sorin’s team. They’d used some of the free space they’d gained from ranking up to 4 to add Speed Burst to their builds, though not without complaints. Yoru had been planning on a smaller increase his in speed that was always active, which Sorin was fine with admitting was important, but he wanted something that could cut travel times first.
Begrudgingly, everyone else had agreed. Their protests about the difficulty of using Speed Burst effectively were legitimate, but it was a skill issue they could and would overcome. They’re lucky, really. This is practically the perfect environment to practice using it. No more going easy on them like I did on Floor 4 when they needed to conserve anima for crossing the water.
“Say something if you get below half your reserves,” Sorin reminded them. That was a pretty standard rule of climbing. An exhausted climber often became a dead climber very quickly, and pushing themselves until they dropped just meant they were that much more likely to end up a meal for the local monsters.
Then they set off. It started as a concentrated barrage of Speed Bursts that more or less went in the same direction, but Yoru’s ended thirty feet farther ahead of anyone else’s, and Vendis was surprisingly trailing at the back. Things devolved from there until there was a good quarter mile between the front and the back of the line.
Sorin, who’d been keeping himself in the middle in order to best react no matter which direction trouble came from, called a halt after the first hour. He offered a few pointers on technique for those who were lagging and a few on matching their allies’ timing to those at the front.
“Don’t see why I should be deliberately slowing down,” Rue muttered. “I get far enough ahead, that gives me a minute to catch my breath.”
Sorin ignored the complaining. Rue knew as well as anyone that having their team spread out over such a large distance was a problem, and she knew exactly why. She just wanted to grumble about it.
“Let’s try it again. We’re shooting for two hundred feet per burst, ten seconds of running between each burst. I want half a mile each minute,” he said.
They took off again, and this time Yoru and Rue were a bit better about not getting so far ahead. Vendis was not any better about not falling behind, however, and Sorin ended up dropping back to coach him.
They didn’t make it to the portal hub in three days. They were barely halfway there at that point. But they were getting better, and they’d killed a few hundred monsters along the way. By the time they showed up part way through day five, everyone was at least holding respectable amounts of anima for a rank 4, which Sorin took as a win since he’d rushed his team through Floors 3 and 4. Soon, they’d have enough anima to act like the rank 5s they actually were.
Vendis still sucked at speed running, though.