The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 71

“Is anyone else bothered by the whole tower-within-a-tower aspect of this place?” Rue asked as they approached the Giant’s Finger.

“Bothered how?” Nemari asked.

“I don’t know. Isn’t it just kind of lazy design?”

“At least it follows basic architectural reality,” Nemari said. “The tower we’re actually climbing is a million times bigger on the inside. We don’t even know if all of this is even inside the building we see from Floor 0. The floors aren’t consistent in shape or size, so how are they stacked on top of each other? We move from one to the other via portals, so there’s really no direct proof.”

“I don’t know,” Rue said. “It’s just… It’s weird, is all.”

“I wouldn’t overthink it,” Sorin told her. “Just get yourself ready to fight some monsters.”

Sorin was sure that none of the floors he’d seen so far had been replicated in the blue tower, at least. Each and every one had been a distinct creation, even if they shared similar themes. Really, there wasn’t a lot of difference between the forest being in the west and the forest being in the east, with the river being thirty feet wide or fifty.

But they were differences, and more than that, they were consistent for everybody who’d ever climbed to that floor. To Sorin, that meant the interior layouts of the two towers were stable, which meant they had to be different places.

Now if only I knew what to do with that information, he thought to himself.

His team was about as ready to fend for themselves as he could possibly make them. They were all sporting at least F-rank soulprints to enhance strength, speed, stamina, durability, and recovery. Those that lacked some sort of sensory soulprint had been given copies of Acuity to help them become accustomed to the extra information without being overloaded by it.

For Rue, who’d already spent months developing her ability to process the sensory load of Aura Sense, Sorin requisitioned Blind Sense. Despite initial complaints that it was just overlapping what she could already sense, Rue quickly realized how beneficial it was to differentiate size, orientation, and individual limb movement rather than just being aware of an aura in a specific direction and maybe moving closer or farther away.

With the beetles behind them, she’d moved back to her original role of stabbing things with sharp pieces of metal and divided her training time between soulprint merging and sparring to get used to fighting with her new senses. That worked out for both Rue and Nemari, even if the latter found it somewhat humiliating to repeatedly lose in a sword fight to a girl who literally had her eyes closed.

No one besides Yoru had managed a successful merger yet. They’d tested it, with Nemari providing the heat and Sorin the cold, and Sorin suspected that some inefficiencies in the process were draining anima at a slightly elevated rate compared to his perfected version, but Yoru was happy with the results and was now excitedly working on his next set: the slightly-more-complicated Restful Slumber and Hard Worker match up to increase his stamina and decrease his downtime.

They operated on similar principles, but approached the problem from opposing directions. Neither was an optimal pick, and Sorin had been surprised to find such mundane choices in the scion of a high family’s build, but Yoru had confessed that the intention had always been to rip them out to replace them with a D-ranked Surging Vitality later.

He might still end up doing that, but if he could avoid the downtime recovering from soul mutilation, he was eager to put in the work merging his current picks into a unified whole. Sorin, no fan of suffering through a healing soulspace himself, was more than willing to give him some advice on making the process go smoothly.

The Giant’s Finger wasn’t complicated. Unlike the real tower, it was just a tall, skinny building with stairs going up from floor to floor. They were supposed to be various flavors of earth elementals, with the floor guardian at the top being a massive, vaguely ogre-shaped being made from a mound of floating stones.

Sorin had killed plenty of monsters like that and was well-versed in the trick to fighting them. Smashing each individual stone was tedious at best, dangerous at worst, and an option best left to the desperate who had no other choice. Locating the core stone and destroying that was the preferred strategy, though of course the monsters kept those well-guarded and hidden in clumps of other stones.

Unfortunately, Morlin still hadn’t come through with a copy of Aura Sense for Sorin, so they were relying on Rue to spot the core and share that information as best she could. It was a perpetually moving target, however, and Sorin wasn’t anticipating a smooth kill like they’d had on Floor 4.

A few hours later, after nearing the entrance and taking a break for lunch, the team crossed the doorway leading into the Giant’s Finger. It was a massive, empty archway twenty feet tall at its peak, and it led into what appeared at casual glance to be an empty stone room a few hundred feet wide. The ceiling was fifty feet overhead, supported by several rows of tree-trunk thick pillars that all lined up to point to a single enormous spiral staircase leading up to the next floor.

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None of them were foolish enough to believe it would be as simple as strolling over to the stairs and climbing them, of course. Even if they hadn’t already known what to expect, they wouldn’t have fallen for the benign appearance of the place.

Each and every single one of those support pillars housed at least five earth elementals. Their official name was bedrock elemental, and they were every bit as durable as the rock-borer beetles the team had spent all their time farming. No one was worried about cracking them open; they’d already developed and practiced those strategies a week ago.

“You’d think I’d see them hiding with Aura Sense, at least,” Rue said as they walked by the first set of pillars.

“They’re probably not here yet,” Sorin explained.

“Whoops, yep. You’re right. I can feel them coming up from below now. Why not just pop out of the floor, then? It’s still stone, just like the pillars.”

Sorin shrugged, having no good answer to explain that mystery. Elementals sometimes followed weird rules, like how water elementals couldn’t be formed out of acid or blood, or how an air elemental might explode if it was set on fire, or it might do nothing at all. Smarter men than him had tried to tease out explanations, but he’d never found anything but confusing and often contradictory reports.

The first of the bedrock elementals pulled itself free of the pillar, an action that reminded Sorin of a man climbing out of a vat of tar. It seemed to almost struggle to separate itself from the stone, with gooey strands connecting it to the building, each one breaking one at a time with a distinct pop. The whole process barely took three seconds before it was free, but that was enough to give the impression that it had to fight its way clear.

It was also enough time for Sorin to run up to it, study it for a second, then tap its stomach to soften it up. He promptly ran it through with its sword, releasing a small trickle of anima and causing its body to completely break down into a pile of rubble.

“They certainly don’t look impressive,” Yoru observed. “But I suppose I should try killing one or two myself before I make that judgment.”

“Well, don’t look now, but there’s about twenty or thirty volunteers coming out for us to experiment on,” Rue said. “And I don’t think they’re all just going to latch onto Sorin like those stupid beetles did.”

The two extra ranks proved their worth to everyone over the next few minutes. Some of the soulspace had gone to a few new abilities, but a lot of it was dedicated to simply ensuring the most important pieces of their current build were pushed up to E-rank. Penetrative damage was something of a weakness for the team, ironically enough, and they were compensating with overwhelming offense.

Well, most of them are. Rue is an almost perfect counter. Aura Sense is telling her where to strike. Pierce and the enchantments on her weapons are poking holes in the stone, and all the physical boosting soulprints are keeping her at maximum power. I think she’s beating everyone else twice-over.

Sorin stayed on overwatch while the rest of his team cleaned up. Rue ended up killing close to half the elementals on her own, with Yoru taking a distant second. Nemari was once again reminded of the dangers of being overly specialized, while Odric simply was too much like the elementals themselves—slower and durable—to lay down the hurt on them.

Vendis did very little to contribute, but with his offense being specialized in blood manipulation, nobody expected him to. Odric was shifting into a hybrid role, and by mutual agreement, Vendis would remain primarily focused on healing while using extremely anima-efficient offensive abilities if the situation allowed for it.

“I killed more than you,” Rue sing-songed to Sorin.

“Well… yes, obviously. I wasn’t—”

“Not even Sorin could keep up with me,” she said, turning to Nemari.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Nemari told her.

“Sure, sure. Easy to say he could beat me now that there’s no way to prove it.”

Sorin just rolled his eyes at the good-natured teasing and got the team moving toward the stairs. The monsters in the Giant’s Finger were notorious for never forming soulprints upon their deaths, which made a certain kind of sense. They were almost certainly all tower-forged, not natural born, and likely not more than a few weeks old.

But it did mean nobody wanted to stick around to farm them, so they didn’t waste time waiting to see if any stragglers would show up. Once the majority of the elemental host had been dispersed, they worked their way toward the stairs and then began climbing them. Sorin took the rear to dispatch any of the leftovers trying to follow them up, which he did mercilessly with honed applications of Force Edge.

“Damn stairs are too tall,” Odric grumbled halfway up. “The rate we’re going, Sorin’s going to beat Rue’s kill count before we get to the top.”

“Climb faster then!” Rue urged the group. “Come on, hurry up!”

“I don’t know. My legs are soooo tired,” Odric told her. “I think I might need to sit down and take five. Sorin, you okay with that?”

“Sure,” he said languidly. He paused to flick another Force Edge down the stairs, where it bisected an elemental right through its core. “I could do this all day if I had to. It’s real easy since every single one of them keeps the core in the same spot.”

“No, guys. Don’t be sore losers.”

“What, like you were a sore winner?” Yoru laughed.

“Okay, fine. I take it back. You were all equally valuable in defeating the elemental hordes of the Giant’s Finger,” Rue said. Then, almost too softly for anyone to hear, she added, “I was just more equal than anyone else.”

Teasing aside, the climb reached its inevitable conclusion. The second floor of the Giant’s Finger was supposed to be more elementals, only this time they’d attempt to ambush the team as they wound their way through a small maze looking for the next set of stairs. It probably would have worked better if the route through wasn’t so well documented.

“Right at the first intersection,” Sorin said, reclaiming the lead. “Don’t let yourself get separated. Rue, watch behind us for anything popping out of the floors or walls.”