The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 61

Sorin wasn’t counting how many rock-borer beetles they’d killed. It was more than twenty, less than thirty, but the corpses looked pretty similar to the live ones unless he happened to be coming at them from the angle that revealed the spot they’d blasted through.

The exact number wasn’t important so much as the fact that Blind Sense hadn’t missed Yoru freezing in place with the last kill. Even without the other climber’s warning, Sorin knew what it meant.

“I ranked up!” Yoru announced in a wavering voice.

There was no time to stop and congratulate him, not with a new beetle appearing on the battlefield every second or two. Yoru curled over, his hands braced on his knees and swaying in place as the rank up process swept through him. It didn’t take long, but in the middle of a fight, it was long enough.

Normally, Sorin hit the target with Soften and then got the hell out of the way, but without Yoru contributing, he wasn’t confident they’d be able to kill it in time. They got most targets on the first try, but occasionally even all five of them couldn’t lay down quite enough hurt to get the job done. So, Sorin did it himself.

“I’ll take the next two,” he told the team.

Then he softened up the closest beetle’s shell, stabbed his sword deep into its body, and unloaded a Force Drill. Ignoring the twinge of weariness that accompanied the magic, he leaped to his second target and repeated the process. Both beetles died quickly, and it was gratifying to take the full share of anima for himself for once.

Then Yoru was back upright and ready to fight, so they resumed their original pattern. A few minutes later, they had to repeat the alteration when Vendis also ranked up, and then a third time after that for Nemari.

At that point, their reserves were low enough that they would normally have retreated, but by unanimous decision, they decided to push just a few more minutes to try to get Rue and Odric past the threshold. Neither of them managed it in the next five minutes, and Sorin called for them to pull back.

There were better than twenty beetles still on the field, but they were coming a lot slower now than they’d been at the beginning of the day. The tower would create more overnight, of course, and their numbers would be thicker in the morning. Still, Sorin was convinced they were making progress. When they started back up, there wouldn’t be as many as had arrived to challenge his team at the beginning.

It was really more of a question of how quickly they could get ahead of the numbers. Anima was great, but they could get that anywhere. The whole point of coming to the ruin was to reach the end and claim the cache, which would hopefully include the slate he needed to activate the second image in his mosaic.

God, if the tower cheaps out on me and doesn’t give me the damn slate… Sorin left that thought unfinished, if only because he knew there was nothing he could do but be mad about it. It was better the possibility was left ignored until it actually came to pass.

Everyone started to pull back on his signal, but Sorin himself stopped halfway out. He’d landed on the body of that beetle with the soulprint he’d sensed. Now that he was here, he could tell it was in the shell itself. With Blind Sense assuring him that he had perhaps two seconds until the closest monster reached him, he made a decision.

Slapping one hand down to use Soften on the shell, he leveraged his sword to make two quick, rounded cuts. They formed a sort of tapered oval with the soulprint in the middle, where the shell was unaffected by his magic. Then, using Earth Warder, he ripped the segment free.

It was the size of his torso and better than a hundred pounds, but he carried his prize with him as he poured anima into Speed Burst to escape. Hurling the stone toward Odric once he passed the boundary of the ruin, he yelled, “Catch!”

Surprised, Odric barely got his hands up in time to encircle the stone slab as it slammed into his chest. He grunted and took a step back to steady himself, but managed to keep hold of the stone without breaking it.

Setting it gently on the ground behind him, he joined the rest of the team in cleaning up the remaining beetles. With their numbers being relatively small, it was a quick process. Perhaps this batch had all been recently birthed by the tower, because the climbers found no soulprints among their ranks.

Rue triggered her own rank up on the very last beetle, leaving just Odric at rank 5. He didn’t seem bothered by that, but everyone else certainly was. “How many more?” Rue asked him.

“I don’t know. Five or six?”

They all turned pleading gazes on Sorin, who just laughed. “Alright, alright! Let’s take ten, then we’ll go get just five or six.”

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“I’ll assume this is our wayward soulprint from earlier,” Yoru said, gesturing to the slab of stone Sorin had liberated.

“It’s lucky I landed on it while we were leaving,” Sorin told them. “And that I realized I wasn’t going to need to go digging deep in the body to grab it. Here, let me see it. I tried to cut wide so as not to damage the soulprint itself, but it was a rush job.”

Sorin’s work was good, and the soulprint was intact. If anything, he’d been overly conservative and brought out an extra fifty pounds of shell he could have left on the body. He wasn’t going to complain about the extra work, though, not when the prize itself was so interesting.

“You know, I was expecting something like Stone Skin,” he said, growing more excited as he examined it. “I mean, those beetles are definitely doing something to reinforce their shells, not to mention actively regenerating them once something does get through. I figured this would be related to that.”

“I take it from your tone that it’s not that,” Yoru said.

“Definitely something way better,” Rue added. “Come on, tell us what it is.”

“This is something I was hoping to find, but which wasn’t even on the list of options Yoru’s father gave us,” Sorin said. “I suppose these things are such a pain to farm that no one’s ever gotten one before, or least if they did, they never bothered to share where it came from.”

“Stop dragging it out and just tell us,” Nemari demanded.

“This is a support soulprint that enhances soulprints that control earth. It’s called Stone’s Bounty, and it’s potent enough on its own that if Odric claimed it, I’m reasonably certain he could stop a beetle from regenerating its shell with Earth Shaping once it’s been cracked open.”

“And if you took it?” Odric asked. They all knew he had Earth Warder at this point, which was immensely more potent than Earth Shaping, not to mention the difference in sheer skill between the two climbers. Odric was, if nothing else, practical about his own abilities and wouldn’t take offense at coming off as the lesser of the two in that comparison.

“It would function much the same way for me on its own, but I would merge it with Earth Warder and push that up to D-rank. This would be on par with Still Winter in terms of damage potential, and the utility would go much further. It’s a strong step toward gaining the ability to not just control dirt and stone, but to transmute it.”

“All that at D-rank?” Yoru asked.

Shaking his head, Sorin answered, “No, just a big step in that direction. I’d need at least two more soulprints and to push it up to C-rank before I can turn stone into metal. For now, it would be a tremendous boost in range and fidelity of my ability to sense what’s in the ground, and a solid increase in raw strength when it comes to manipulating it. I could probably raise stone houses for us to camp in and bore tunnels where needed.”

“Then you should take it,” Odric said. “It’ll be useful in the long run, not to mention how much easier it’ll be to progress farther into the ravine tomorrow.”

“This is… very valuable. It’s not really fair,” Sorin said.

“Take it,” Nemari told him. “We’ll just keep all the tower-forged loot for ourselves.”

“Except the slate,” Rue pointed out.

“Nah, that too. Who knows, I might need one for my own mosaic soon.”

That broke the lingering tension with a shared laugh. Sorin knew Odric and Yoru both wanted it, though Yoru hadn’t bothered speaking up. His only claim to earth magic was an F-ranked basic elemental damage soulprint, while Odric had four soulprints that revolved around manipulating earth and stone.

By rights, it should have gone to Odric. Sorin himself was only considering claiming it because he’d lucked into Earth Warder, which was ridiculously overpowered for an E-rank soulprint. He knew that, unless he committed to improving this particular soulprint long-term, that the power boost Stone’s Bounty gave him would end up being wasted by Floor 20.

“Just take it,” Odric said, as if he were reading Sorin’s mind. “If you feel that bad about it, we’ll just hang around killing these things until we get a second one.”

“Alright, alright. Keep an eye out for me for a few minutes, please.”

After absorbing the soulprint out of the shell fragment, Sorin sat down and dove into his soulspace to see the new oil painting that represented it. It was a simple one, showing various types of stone and dirt floating in compressed balls or jagged shards, with him sitting in the middle. Lines of green light connected Sorin to them, indicating his control over the objects. Those lines were the most detailed part, seeming almost alive despite being motionless in the painting.

The one part of merging soulprints together that Sorin regretted was the loss of the art itself. He knew it was silly and sentimental, but he appreciated the gallery he’d made of his soulspace, and losing pieces, especially ones he’d barely got the chance to appreciate at all, bothered him. Practicality won out over sentiment, though, and he set about combining the two soulprints together.

On the bright side, he thought to himself once he was done, the end result is always spectacular.

The D-ranked soulprint, now titled Living Earth, sprawled across the wall of black stone. It rivaled Still Winter in size, but was much warmer in content. Earth Warder had shown him controlling the earth, and Stone’s Bounty had emphasized reinforcing his connection, but Living Earth took those aspects to the next level.

To an outsider who’d managed to peer into Sorin’s soul, they would have seen merely a portrait of a man standing in an empty field. But Sorin could see everything below the surface. He could pick out the layers of stratification, where soil turned to clay, and clay turned to bedrock. He knew where every stone was, and even how many there were without bothering to count them.

At his whim, those stones could be ripped free of the earth and reshaped to his desires. If he wanted a chair to sit on, he could simply will it to rise up beneath him. If he needed a blade to fight with, all he had to do was draw the stone out of the ground and wield it in his hand. And if he needed a deadly missile to strike a passing bird, the land was more than happy to provide him with the raw materials.

Exhaling slowly, Sorin opened his eyes. “It’s a good thing Odric needs a few more beetles to rank up,” he said, “because I just have to give this a try before we call it a night.”