The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 59

Even with the strength granted to him by Warrior’s Vigilance and the gauntlets he was wearing, even with the penetrating power Blade Work gave him, and even with Force Edge limning his blade to give it some extra oomph, even with Earth Warder working to break down the stone part of the composition of the beetle’s shell, Sorin just barely cut the beetle with his first attack.

Holy hell, they weren’t kidding about these things being tough to kill!

There would be no easy victory that way, but he had plenty of options left to exhaust. Of more concern was how exactly anyone else on his team was going to farm any anima from such a thick-shelled target. The first plan that sprang to mind was using a D-rank ability like Force Crush to crack them open so the rest of his team could take free shots, but that would quickly exhaust Sorin’s reserves while barely scratching the enemy’s numbers.

He needed a smarter, more efficient way to go about it, and fortunately for him, he had what he thought was a pretty good idea of where their weak points were. The problem with shells was that they couldn’t protect everywhere, especially where things like limbs poked out of them. The mouth was an obvious vulnerability, but it was both extremely low to the ground and actively leaking out acidic spittle.

The legs were a better option, except that they were even less convenient to reach. Inconvenient wasn’t the same thing as impossible, however, and Sorin already had the perfect ability in his build. Earth Warder wasn’t just a tool to sense movement in the ground. It was also the ideal soulprint for moving stuff around.

The beetle’s weight was going to be a problem, but Sorin had the raw power and enough basic knowledge of physics to overcome that. He reshaped the earth on one side of the beetle, bulling the ground away from its legs and causing it to start to tip over into the dip he created. At the same time, two pillars of stone jutted out to push it up on the other side.

That didn’t work as well as Sorin wanted, but considering the weight, he wasn’t terribly surprised. Pulling the ground away from the beetle was far more effective, but also the more costly half of the strategy. Either way, it accomplished his goal of revealing its vulnerable undercarriage.

Sorin had seconds at best before his window closed. The rock-borer beetle had its own earth manipulating abilities, and it wasn’t just going to sit there with its legs kicking in the air waiting for Sorin to kill it. Already, it was reshaping the slope of the terrain to sink completely underground, where it would no doubt easily right itself and return for another round.

Well that’s not going to happen.

Speed Burst saw him around the girth of the monster and his sword hacking through the lightly armored legs. There were far more than the standard six a beetle usually had, but considering what they were holding up, he wasn’t terribly surprised to find them. It just made more targets for Sorin, and he eagerly cut through them, then jabbed his sword deep into the holes in the shell they’d sprouted out of.

Channeling anima down the length of the blade and out through the tip digging its way through the beetle’s guts, Sorin let loose a free cast Force Drill, the same spell he had used to shred the Floor 4 portal guardian from the inside out. It was less visually impressive this time since the rock-borer shell contained the force inside itself, but that didn’t stop the magic from blending its guts.

The remaining legs convulsed and flailed, driving Sorin back a few feet to avoid being kicked, but the flow of anima entering his soulspace confirmed the kill. From start to finish, the whole fight had taken less than four seconds, but he’d used enough anima that he doubted he could kill another dozen or so monsters before he ran himself dry.

But I was right about the anima gains being absolutely fantastic, he thought to himself with no small amount of satisfaction. Now we just need a good way to get the rest of the team in on this. I wonder if Odric would contest control of that shell when it tries to regrow after being cracked. That material has to come from somewhere, and I’m betting it’s coming directly from the monster’s contact with the ground.

More beetles were already above ground, with dozens of reinforcements rapidly approaching behind them. Two more channels were also perilously close to reaching open air, at which point they’d have three different sources of monsters all converging on them.

“Alright, we’re going to back up a hundred feet and take care of what we’ve already attracted, then recover our anima and see about killing some more,” Sorin announced.

Once they were beyond the ruin’s boundary, the beetles that were still deep underground seemed to lose interest, but the ones on the surface weren’t so quick to scuttle away. They ended up with sixteen monsters to fight, though Sorin repeated his tactics from the first one and quickly cut their numbers in half.

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“Rue, you’re the tip of this spear. I want you cracking shells so that Yoru, Nemari, and Vendis can tear it apart from the inside out. Odric, your job is to contest the shell’s regeneration. It’s pulling material from the ground to rebuild itself, and Earth Shaping should allow you to at least slow that down, if not stop it outright. Pick one and focus fire on it. I’ll do my best to keep the rest under control,” he explained in between killing them.

“I could probably duplicate what you’re doing to tip them over,” Odric said.

“Try it,” Sorin offered. “It’s brute work, but if you’ve got the anima reserves, it’ll at least let you kill a few quickly.”

That plan, sadly, failed when the team was unable to produce enough penetrating power to get through the legs and inside the beetle’s shell. It did exactly what the first one had tried and simply disappeared underground, only to emerge teen feet away and resume its attack. The second time, they tried Sorin’s idea. That did a lot more damage, but Rue had to use Force Spear three more times to open its shell back up before they finally killed the monster.

In that way, they whittled the numbers down to just three beetles. Sorin was breathing hard by the time they got that far, having burned most of his own anima to kill half the pursuing monsters and spent the rest dodging streams of acidic spit that had a surprisingly impressive range. Thankfully, the beetles were no faster than an unaugmented human, and keeping so many monsters chasing after him without letting himself get caught wasn’t a terribly difficult feat.

“Alright, let’s try some full-group tactics now that we’re down to just a few targets,” he told them. “Odric, tip one over. I’ll cut the legs off and try to give you all a bit more time to kill it before it escapes. Start with that one on the right.”

That one was a good forty feet away from the other two, who were practically rubbing against each other as they glided across the dirt in an effort to chase Sorin down and crush him. Its speed had been slightly reduced by losing a few legs to Rue earlier in the fight during one of their early attempts to kill it, and as a result, it had lagged further and further behind the rest of the swarm.

By the time Odric had reshaped the earth to tip it, Sorin was already there. He cut the remaining legs as he passed by, then activated Earth Warder to contest the beetle’s control of the ground. Odric was already trying to hold it steady, so Sorin simply reinforced those efforts. The rest of the team unloaded on their target with practiced efficiency, and after about fifteen seconds, the monster gave up and died.

It was the least amount of anima Sorin had personally spent to kill one, but whether it was a viable strategy depended entirely on Odric’s ability to repeat his part. “How many times do you think you can do it?” Sorin asked.

“Few more. Enough to take care of these two,” the healer-turned-earth-mage replied through his panting.

“It’s too slow,” Yoru said. “It works, but only because you burnt yourself out thinning the numbers. Even then, we still had to retreat out of the ruin.”

“We knew it was going to be difficult going in,” Nemari reminded him. “But the anima gains have been amazing. This is at least as much as I gained the entire time we were traveling to the portal hub, and it’s only been a dozen monsters.”

“That’s true,” Yoru said with a smile. “My only concern is that, at the speed we’re working, the tower will simply create replacement monsters faster than we can kill them. We’ll never actually reach the ruin heart this way.”

Yoru wasn’t wrong, but there were solutions to that problem. The simplest one was to increase their rank. Then they’d have more reserves and could possibly refine a few soulprints to make things more efficient. Even if it turned out that they were still limited by the floor, a maxed-out rank 5 was stronger than a beginner rank 5.

Another viable option was collecting Earth Shaping from the monsters they’d already killed. Sorin had already spotted a soulprint in one of the beetles, and though he hadn’t stopped to figure out what it was mid-fight, he was betting it was Earth Shaping. If not, they’d just keep killing monsters until they found one that did have the soulprint they needed.

Then it was a simple matter of someone else absorbing it, and they’d have three people who could rotate tipping the monsters on their sides. Sorin suspected that the most efficient way to kill beetles would be to have two tippers while he himself pureed them with Force Drill, but that would leave part of the team out of the fight, and half the point of coming here was to fortify all of them.

Still. Options exist. We’ve got some time to experiment and get creative. If none of these end up being viable strategies, maybe Soften would work on their shells. Depending on how long it takes the beetles to fix it, I might just be able to go around hitting every monster with that while the rest of the team kills them. Hmm… There are still two left. Let’s find out.

“Going to try something different on this next one,” Sorin said. “I think I can weaken the shell itself so you can blast right through it. We’ll see how long it takes for them to repair the area.”

Soften required physical contact, which was a bit risky, but Sorin still had enough anima left to Speed Burst if he needed to get away in a hurry. He called his target, ran forward to meet it, and prepared to free cast Soften. Upon making contact, he vaulted over the beetle, slapped his hands down on the front of its shell, and cast the spell.

“Now!”

At his cue, the others unloaded on the spot Sorin had touched. Unlike prior attempts where Rue had cracked the shell with her new spear spell only for it to quickly heal over, this time everything tore through it like paper. The beetle spasmed, then simply stopped moving. Anima flowed out, a little bit to Sorin and the majority to the rest of his team.

“Oh, that’s perfect. I think we’ve got a viable kill strategy,” he said. “Let’s repeat it on this last one just to make sure it wasn’t a one-off, then we’ll catch our breath and get to work.”

The final beetle died in much the same way the previous one had. It left Sorin getting the least amount of anima, but he was already far ahead of everyone else, and he was more than confident that he could kill a hundred of the monsters before he had to rest now that he’d figured out the best way to get through their defenses.

But first, it was time to go digging for soulprints.