novelraw Book 2, Chapter 60
Book 2, Chapter 60
“Acid Shot,” Sorin muttered darkly.
“What’s wrong with Acid Shot?” Rue asked.
“Yeah, that’s a valuable soulprint,” Nemari added.
“Nothing.” Sorin sighed. “I was just hoping it would be Earth Shaping. That would have been more useful to us.”
Good thing I don’t gamble. I’d be homeless inside a day.
The others were right though. There was nothing wrong with Acid Shot. It had been a bit tricky to extract the gland from inside the beetle’s jaw, and they had to take the standard preventative measures to keep it stable, but that was no big deal. He was just being grouchy because he’d guessed wrong on what it was.
“This is probably useful, too,” Vendis pointed out. He rarely offered suggestions, so everyone turned to look at him in surprise. “I’m just saying, the beetles use this to weaken stone so they can manipulate it. It must be an efficient soulprint if they’re constantly channeling it as they move around. We have two people who can manipulate earth on this team already, and we’re assaulting a ruin where that’s very useful to have.”
That was all true, but Vendis had missed one important detail. “It’s E-rank, and not a small one, either,” Sorin said. “Can any of you even fit an E-rank in your soulspace?”
“Ehhh… Maybe? I’d have to try,” Nemari offered.
“That’s about where I’m at, too,” Rue agreed.
“Definitely not,” was all Odric said.
“I could, but it doesn’t work with my build at all,” Yoru said.
Vendis sighed. “No room. Perhaps Sorin could take it.”
“Not a chance in hell,” Sorin told them all firmly. “Don’t build to specialize in overcoming a specific challenge. In a week, we’re never going to see this place again. And sure, we could be wasteful, absorb it, then rip it out, but an E-rank is going to take weeks to heal. There’s no good reason to do so, especially since Acid Shot is very much a slow damage attack. I don’t think anyone here has aspirations for that kind of build.”
The closest was probably Odric with his Venom Strike, but that didn’t see much action when they had so much firepower already. It requiring him to physically touch an open wound to inflict was also rather limiting, not to mention that it didn’t even work against the beetles. They lacked the circulatory system humans and most monsters possessed to spread the poison around once it was introduced into their bodies.
“Keep it in a jar then,” Yoru said with a shrug. “We’ve already got our method of killing these things worked out anyway.”
“I’ll admit that I’m still a bit worried about how viable it’ll be,” Sorin confessed. “The chokepoint in the strategy is that it requires me to touch each and every monster to use it. Then I have to keep them pointed in the right direction long enough for the rest of you to kill it. That’s fine when it’s one or two of them, but they’re not all coming out of a single spot.”
“Keeping up with how fast they show up was always going to be the hard part no matter how we go about it,” Yoru said. “It’s one of the big reasons climbers don’t like this ruin. It’s practically impossible to do. The only reason we even have a chance is because you’re a walking soulprint encyclopedia with the ability to free cast practically anything between F- and D-rank. You don’t get that kind of flexibility in a rank 5 team.”
“I guess we won’t know until we try. Alright, let’s take an hour to recover, then we’ll go at it again,” Sorin said. “While we wait, feel free to keep working on merging your resistance soulprints together.”
“Slave driver,” Rue muttered under her breath, but not quietly enough that Sorin missed it.
“You want to be the best? This is the price you pay,” he told her mercilessly.
* * *
There were a few hiccups as the team adjusted their strategy to compensate for having literally thirty or more enemies on the field at once with reinforcements arriving every few seconds, but overall, Sorin was quite happy with how well things worked. They held their position for almost ten minutes before he called for the retreat, and in that time, they killed better than a hundred of the beetles.
Clean up was hectic with so many of the monsters willing to pursue them, but it was also the most lucrative part of the process. They collected another Acid Shot from the final kill, and Sorin was delighted to find the anticipated Earth Shaping on a particularly large specimen that he’d deliberately left alive until it was time to flee under the assumption that its size indicated value.
Sadly, there was a third soulprint in one of the carcasses still inside the ruin, but they had no way to relocate it, and none of them thought it likely that they could successfully harvest the soulprint inside its shell before more beetles showed up to complicate the process. With some regret, they all turned away from the ruin and settled down to recover.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“It’ll still be there as long as we keep an eye on it,” Rue offered. “Once you’ve got some anima back, maybe you and Od can drag it out together.”
“Maybe,” Sorin said, unconvinced. “The problem is the damn things weigh so much that I think it would drain us both dry just shifting it that far. Plus I suspect that using magic past the boundary line of the ruin might also trigger some sort of retaliation from the beetles. Probably the only way we’re going to get it is to kill enough of them that they stop coming.”
“Whatever it is probably isn’t that valuable anyway,” Nemari offered. “We’re here for the tower-forged loot and the anima, which, by the way, I think I’m close to capping my soulspace again.”
Everyone else agreed with that. Yoru and Vendis were the closest, with Nemari not far behind. Rue and Odric were trailing, which made sense since Rue’s ranged attack was so expensive that she couldn’t get in on every kill like the rest of them, and Odric had simply been the farthest behind to begin with.
Sorin’s own progress wasn’t negligible, but he was less than a quarter of the way to rank 10. If he’d been killing beetles solo, he’d have already been there and then some, but he reminded himself once again that the rest of the team was an investment into a future where he didn’t have to kill an entire floor of voidlings by himself. Patience was the key to success, assuming Samael ignored them that long.
“We’ve got time for one more round before it gets dark,” Sorin said. “Once our break is done, we’ll see about you all reaching the cap and whether you can break through it. Be aware that it’s still going to hurt just as much as it always does. This is a running battle, so call out when you push past the edge so we can compensate for you being incapacitated for a few seconds, alright?”
Sorin expected there to be some differences between his own mosaic and the others’, and he wasn’t sure where the edge of theirs would be. For the moment, none of them had reached the border, but once they did, there was no guarantee there’d be another set of pictures circling the first one. None of them knew what that would mean, either.
If they can rank up again, it might mean there’s another cap, that they can only exceed the floor limit by four or five ranks. Or maybe they’ll have more images and more abilities, and this speculation is all pointless. I wish there was some way to know, but it’s not like it’s the first time I’ve had to figure out the unknown as I encounter it. That was basically the last forty floors of my old life.
“Hey, got a question for you,” Rue said.
“What’s that?” Sorin asked.
“So, I think I’ve got Heat Resistance mapped out, and I’m working on Cold Resistance now. I’ve found a spot that’s… I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s the same, but… uh… backward? Or inverted? Except it’s not. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do. What do you think it is?”
“The part that determines whether the resistance is to fire or ice, or whatever. Hot and cold, like you said. Same thing.”
“You’re right in what it is, but it is important to understand the difference between fire and heat, Rue. If it was simply resistance to fire, it wouldn’t dull the environment on Floor 3, right?”
Rue nodded. “Sure. That’s not what I wanted to ask about, though. What I want to know is how do you get both of these parts to fit in one soulprint. They’re taking up the same space in the framework, and they’re identical, so it’s not like you can interlock them.”
The others were listening closely now, some with curiosity on their faces, and Yoru with a naked smirk. Sorin could only assume he was farther ahead than Rue and had already figured out the solution to this little puzzle. For the rest of them, they’d undoubtedly understand when they got there.
“The problem is that it’s not backward or inverted,” Sorin said. “It is the exact same, only mirrored. Yes, I realize that sounds like I’m saying the same thing using a different word. Mirroring as a word means something specific in the context of soulprint merging, though.
“The formation is almost completely identical, and the reason you can’t find the difference even though you can tell it’s supposed to have one is that you need to trace the flow farther out. You’ll see what changes if you expand your view. That’s the part you’ll have to figure out, how to integrate both variations into one soulprint to properly merge them.
“Once you do that, you’ll need to take the parts you identified and integrate them by—you guessed it—mirroring them to each other, with mirrored flow outputs that lead to both heat and cold conductivity at the same time. We’ll discuss what that structure looks like once you figure out the rest of the pieces.”
By the slight widening in Yoru’s eyes, Sorin knew he’d inadvertently explained whatever part of the process Yoru himself was stuck on. The Telpike scion immediately produced a piece of paper and a charcoal stick from his pack and started sketching out a design. Thankfully, for whatever reason, the notation used was the same between the red and blue tower, so Sorin was easily able to follow what Yoru was creating.
“This,” he said proudly, holding the sketch up. “This is what Thermal Insulation looks like.”
The design showed both Heat Resistance and Cold Resistance broken into their component parts, with directions showing how each part hooked together and flags for which parts of the soulprint were duplicates and could be discarded, including which of the donors would contribute which parts.
It was a functional design and would work as a soulprint that helped a climber resist both hot and cold temperatures, but it was inefficient. Sorin marked a few spots on the structure to be modified for smoother anima flow, then handed it back to Yoru. “Try again with these modifications,” he offered. “What you made works, but you’ll probably use about thirty percent more anima than is necessary that way. You want your passives to be as efficient as possible, especially the ones that are always on.”
“Ah, I see. Yes, I suppose that part is a bit redundant, now that you’ve pointed it out.”
Yoru pulled out a second sheet and started working on a larger version of the final soulprint, stopping and starting several times as he considered his design. The original draft was left discarded at his feet, or at least it was until Rue stealthily picked it up. She was more interested in Yoru’s breakdown of the donor soulprints than his idea for the final result, and it seemed there was something in there that sparked an idea in her head.
It's too bad I don’t have the manuals I learned from to teach them. There’s so much base knowledge they’re missing that I’m not a good enough teacher to explain. And the people in this tower are so damn greedy that they don’t want to share anything. Hundreds of books in Morlin’s library, and not a single one on soulprint merging.
Sorin interrupted their practice half an hour later. “Time to do the last run for the day and see what these mosaics can really do.”