The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 62

The enhanced range was the most immediate change. Living Earth let Sorin see three times farther into the ground than Earth Warder had, which was how Sorin realized that he’d been fooling himself thinking they were making good headway against the rock-borer beetles. There were thousands of them left.

Objectively, that was a good thing. They could camp at the ruin for the next two weeks and farm at max speed without running out of targets. The beetles were worth a good amount of anima, and there were just so damn many of them that he was sure everyone could push up to at least rank 8. He might hit rank 11 or even 12 if he got a little bit greedy.

When viewed from the lens of obtaining a cache of tower-forged loot, however, it was a big problem. Even if the tower didn’t create a single new beetle and they worked twenty hours a day, it would still take three or four days to kill everything already there. And that didn’t account for whatever other monsters were lurking in the ruin, or the fact that Living Earth’s range still wasn’t long enough for him to see the far end of the ravine.

But on the bright side, the higher they rank up, the stronger they’ll get. We’ll kill more monsters in less time, so forecasting the next week based on how we did today is a mistake. Even if we double our kill speed, though, this is still going to be a hell of a grind.

Sorin crossed the invisible boundary that separated the ruin from the rest of Floor 5. There was no discernable change in the air from one step to the next, but it was easy to tell simply because the nearest beetles started heading toward him. One second, they were doing whatever it was beetles did with their time—it seemed to be a lot of pointless tunnels going nowhere to Sorin’s admittedly inexperienced eye—and the next they’d all changed direction in unison.

What was interesting was that before, he’d known intellectually that they were using a combination of Earth Shaping and their mouth acid to shift dirt and melt stone when it got in the way, but now he could feel the way the magic radiated out of them. It didn’t just part the earth in front of them; it actively grabbed the sides of their shells and propelled them upward.

They were almost faster when they were digging than they were above ground, something Sorin had simply written off as a side effect of their magic. Now, he understood the mechanics behind it. Moreover, he was certain that he could replicate it if he needed to. Even above ground, Living Earth would help him move the same way it did the beetles.

Sorin didn’t really need that help, but it did open up the idea of using the soulprint to hinder an enemy’s movement. It wasn’t worth using here, not if he had to fight the beetles for control over the domain, but most people didn’t specialize as earth mages. Having the ground pull itself out from beneath them would be a nasty surprise for any bounty hunters that attacked Sorin.

Everyone got into position, their formation well-rehearsed and easily assumed by this point. The first of the rock-borer beetles emerged a few seconds later, and Sorin tagged it with Soften. At the same time, he pulsed Living Earth through the free cast spell. Rather than leave a spot half a foot wide as the target, the beetle’s whole shell started to slough off it like wet mud.

The anima cost was prohibitive, unfortunately. For this ruin, it always came back to resource management. Having new, inventive ways to kill the same old monster was an interesting thought exercise, but it wasn’t as efficient as what they’d already come up with. That didn’t mean it was useless, just that it was overkill. When they finally reached the ruin guardian, Sorin was betting they’d have plenty of ways to kill it.

Around the time the sixth beetle crawled out of the dirt, Sorin switched tactics. The problem with this fight was the unending stream of reinforcements, but if he collapsed the tunnels the lead monsters had dug, it would slow down everything following them. Actively contesting their control over the earth drastically reduced the speed at which new beetles arrived, though it was once again too inefficient to maintain.

For the moment, however, it was perfect. They only wanted ten or so targets, just enough to guarantee Odric’s advancement to rank 6. Once the required amount had surfaced, Sorin simply called for the retreat and fought to push down everything else. They passed beyond the edge of the ruins, leading a small cluster of beetles with them.

Normally, that would have been the end of it. Every time before this one, anything that wasn’t a second or two away from breaching just kind of gave up and turned around once they crossed outside the ruin. Apparently, actively fighting them for control of the tunnels they were boring was a mistake.

“Uh, I think I pissed them off,” Sorin said. “We should kill these quickly because there are a lot more still coming.”

“What did you do?” Nemari asked.

“We’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s put a few hundred more feet between us and them and prepare for at least twenty or thirty more.”

It wasn’t necessarily a disaster. They could probably kill a hundred of the giant bugs before exhaustion truly set in, but it would leave them dangerously vulnerable to monsters who weren’t confined to the ruin. Sorin could only hope that by releasing all attempts at controlling the ground, they’d only grab whatever beetles had been caught in that area and were offended by his presumption and not the hundreds more of them he could still sense deeper underground.

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New holes opened up as the current crop ascended to the surface. Before they could finish off the ten they’d started with—Sorin noted Odric dropping out of combat for a few seconds when he hit his rank up—a dozen more were coming their way. By the time those monsters reached the edge of the ruin, there were another two dozen coming up behind them.

“I’ve got close to forty more still coming for us,” Sorin informed the rest of his team. “And the ones that are deeper underground aren’t calming down. We might need to put a few miles between us and this ruin tonight.”

“Did we piss off the tower playing games with the boundary?” Rue asked.

That was as valid a theory as any. Sometimes, climbers tried to abuse the rules as they understood them, and then the tower did something to remind them why a lot of people believed it was a sentient, thinking being. This could certainly be one of those occasions, though Sorin wasn’t willing to rule out the idea that his use of Living Earth had just angered the beetles enough to continue chasing down a threat even after it left their territory.

“Figure it out later,” Yoru said. “Survive now.”

Their retreat was slow and controlled, with Sorin darting back and forth to slap a Soften—not enhanced by Living Earth—on the lead beetle, then getting out of the way so the rest of the team could blast it into oblivion. They’d retreat back another twenty or thirty feet and repeat while the gap gradually grew smaller.

Once the beetles were close enough, they’d trigger Speed Burst in an all-out flight to gain some distance, then repeat on another four or five targets. They killed fifty of them and were over a mile away, but the beetles still showed no signs of stopping. There had to be at least two hundred of them strung out in a line, all following the train of their fellow monsters toward their target.

“Okay, new plan,” Sorin said. “I think they’re after me. I’m going one way. You’re all going another. We’ll see which way the monsters turn. If it’s me they want, you get another mile or so of distance and set up camp. I’m going to try to lose them and hope they just turn around and go home once I’m too far away for them to track.”

“That seems like a bad idea,” Odric said.

“I’m open to better ones.” No one came up with anything in the next few seconds, however, so Sorin said, “Going with mine then. You keep going straight back away from the ruin, I’m taking a hard left at the next tree.”

A few minutes later, Sorin was running at a decent clip and keeping an eye on the beetles chasing him. The line wasn’t following his exact path, and the ones that had formerly been charging straight south were now moving at an angle to intercept him, which just proved his theory. They were specifically targeting him, not the rest of the team.

Shame I don’t have the reserves left to handle them. This would have been a great opportunity to get up to rank 10. I bet there’s enough here to do it since I’m not sharing them. Well… Living Earth is helping me to refine Soften and make it a bit cheaper to use. If I put a hole in the right spot, I could probably kill one with my sword. Huh… how viable is this idea?

It was easy enough to test. Beetles didn’t have blood—the name for what they did have escaped him at the moment, but the important part was that blood-based attack vectors rarely worked on insectoid monsters—but they did have brains. Even better, they had them in relatively predictable locations.

Sorin hadn’t been targeting them because there was a secondary layer under the stone shell that he would have needed to soften up for the rest of his team to penetrate. He was reasonably certain that he could punch through the skull without any special efforts, though. And if that was the case, that meant a single Soften and a very precise sword thrust would be enough to scramble some brains.

That was the theory, at least. It had some unknowns, specifically whether he could actually reach the brain and destroy it, and whether that would actually kill the bug if he did. But those were easy enough to test out. The closest beetle was only a few hundred feet behind him.

Sorin stopped running, turned, and gave himself a few seconds to just breathe while he waited. The beetle closed in, an unstoppable juggernaut of mass and speed set to turn him into a streak of blood across the dirt. Behind it, a hundred more were mindlessly chasing after it to make sure the job got done right.

Rather than slap his hand on the shell, Sorin had to hit its head. That brought up another complication: the head was recessed, and it had acidic spit as a secondary line of defense. Fortunately, Soften’s requirement of touch-contact did not mean skin-to-shell. He was just as capable of channeling it through his boot as through his gloves, so he started his experiment by kicking the monster in what was essentially a forehead ridge of protective stone.

Bending low to get his sword lined up took a bit of coordination, but the biggest obstacle to overcome was that the beetle didn’t stop trying to smash into him. His blade flicked forward, dug through the softened shell at a downward angle, punching through it easily, then hitting resistance on the skull itself. The blade threatened to slide sideways for the barest fraction of a second before biting into the skull. It slipped through, hit that relatively tiny lump of tissue that functioned as a brain, then retracted.

At almost the exact same time, Sorin jumped sideways to clear the beetle’s path. It continued on through sheer momentum another ten feet, but the anima rush coming from it was all the confirmation Sorin needed. It required extreme precision and excellent timing, but it was possible for him to kill a rock-borer beetle using nothing more than a single Soften’s worth of anima.

And Soften was an E-rank soulprint. At rank 9, he could toss out a hundred of them easily. Of course, already being more than half-drained from the day’s work sharply reduced that number, but it was still enough for him to clean up some of this line.

The only issue is that it’s high risk. If I screw up the timing on this, I’m going to be hurting. I might not get back up in time to save myself from being swarmed, and there is nobody here to rescue me. But the anima is so good. High risk; high reward.

Sorin started calculating the angle he’d hit the next closest beetle at.