The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 74

Rue was actually disappointed for a second to see the familiar pedestal and chest combination. It meant they weren’t getting any special treatment from the tower, at least not anything beyond the normal, custom-tailored rewards any climber got in an Antechamber.

It’ll still be a good reward. Nothing to complain about, she scolded herself. Don’t be ungrateful.

Her eyes instinctively went to the box on the far right pedestal. That one was hers. She couldn’t explain how she knew. She just did. It was like if someone plucked an old toy out of her childhood room, then put it in a lineup of similar toys. Of course she was going to recognize which one belonged to her.

Everyone else was drawn to their own chests, and for a moment, nobody spoke. It was almost an effort to keep herself from rushing over on the spot to throw back the lid and see what was inside, but she managed to restrain herself.

Then Nemari spoke up from the back of the group. “Oh, God damnit. There are only five.”

That broke Rue out of her spell. She was still getting used to Blind Sense—and she very much regretted insisting she could handle it when Sorin had cautioned her about absorbing it—but it was easy enough to count the number of people with her. Of course there were five people for five chests, which meant Sorin was missing again.

“Second time he’s done this,” she said. “I guess that slate wasn’t as useless as he thought it would be.”

“It’s not unusual for him?” Yoru asked. “That’s a bit of a relief. So many strange things happen around that man that it’s sometimes too difficult to know what needs to be addressed and what can be ignored.”

“I don’t know about ‘unusual,’ but this happened in the Floor 1 antechamber, too. He had a slate we found in that first ruin then. It was what turned into Liminal Gateway,” Nemari explained.

“I wonder what crazy new ability he’ll come out with this time,” Od said. “Extra anima from killing monsters? Guaranteed soulprints on everything he kills? Skip to any floor he wants?”

“None of that would surprise me,” Nemari said dryly.

Fun as it was to speculate, Rue thought they were all thinking too small. Sorin had already told them that the void was a problem, and he thought the tower wanted him to take care of it. Whatever he got was more likely to be a tool to help with that than anything else. Then there was the image on the slate itself, which looked like it linked the other towers together somehow.

Maybe it’ll let him go back home. Maybe we’ll never see him again. I wonder if Samael would even care about us enough to have us killed if Sorin just disappeared.

Being rank 7, or she supposed technically rank 6 but with the power of a rank 7, not even two months after she started climbing was a pretty amazing start. If the tower let her keep the mosaic, that was even better. Climbing was much easier when she was a few ranks ahead of the floor.

“Let’s go see what the tower is giving us. We can meet Sorin on the other side of the portal,” Od said.

Not needing to be told twice, Rue strode over to her chest and threw back the lid. “Huh?”

There was nothing in there. Thinking that it was something small that was just tucked into a corner, she craned her neck and tilted the chest forward. Still empty. What the hell?

It was only when she stuck her hand in there and gingerly patted around to see if there was something invisible waiting for her that she found her first clue. Her fingers passed through the empty space in the middle, and it felt like brushing aside cobwebs. Frowning, she waved her hand back and forth. Only this one spot has any sensation.

“What’s wrong?” Od asked, peering over her shoulder. He was fastening a wristband made of red leather onto his arm.

“I don’t know. It’s empty, but… not empty? It feels like there’s an invisible cobweb floating in there.”

“Oh, it’s a storage item,” he said. “Like that spear Sorin gave me. You’re feeling the anchor point. Try to cup it in your hand and will it to bind.”

“Good thing you know what this is. I’m not sure how long we’d have been stuck here if I had to figure it out myself.”

Following her brother’s instructions, Rue attached the anchor to her hand. That made her pause, though, because she could still feel the invisible web in there. Grinning in sudden realization, she reached her other hand in and repeated the process. After confirming the chest was now empty, she took a few steps off to the side.

“Just will them to appear, right?” she asked.

“Yep.”

In less time than it took her to blink, she was holding two single-edged swords. Each blade was roughly two feet long, a bit more than she was used to, but not enough to cause issues. The metal was something she’d never seen before, an almost rust-red that faded to white as it neared the edge. There was a thumb-sized shard of black stone in the cross guard.

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“That kind of looks like…” she trailed off.

The color was wrong. The swords’ design was completely different. It really wasn’t the same at all, except for that black gemstone. That was the exact same as the one on Sorin’s sword. And he’d killed a void behemoth with his sword. She’d seen him cut through solid stone with it. It was practically indestructible.

And now I’ve got two of them. Holy crap. I bet I could slaughter a voidling with these things.

Her eyes snapped up from the blades to the wristband Od had put on. That is the exact same shade of red. I bet it whitens on the inside. Does that have something to do with fighting voidlings, too?

“What does your reward do?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry.

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I don’t feel any different. I guess we’ll find out, huh?”

“Yeah…”

What did everyone else get? Are we all equipped to kill void creatures now?

Nemari was tucking a metal wand away. It was the same rust-red with white highlights as Rue’s swords except for the black onyx capping one end of it. Whatever Yoru’s reward was, he’d already stashed it, and she wasn’t entirely certain, but she thought the pendant on Vendis’s chest was new. Most of his jewelry was red already anyway, but this piece was less crimson and more rust.

The color scheme isn’t a coincidence. This is tower red, just like Sorin’s sword is his tower blue.

* * *

No matter how much he stared at the display, Sorin couldn’t see any void contamination in the red tower. The indigo one had a fine net of dark lines draped over it, the same as before. And there were little bits of what he assumed was void flecking the other towers like tiny, nigh-invisible shadows.

But the red tower was supposed to have an entire floor that was lost to the void. Surely that was something that would be visible, even as scaled out as the model was. Either someone was lying to him about Floor 25, or the problem in the indigo tower was a hundred times worse than the one in the red tower.

“Why can’t you just show me the red tower?” he asked. “I don’t care about the other six right now.”

Unexpectedly, the display shifted to do exactly that. Once there was nothing but the red tower, or at least a representation of it that was obviously not done to scale, he could see the void in it. There were little black pinpricks all over it, probably hundreds of them. They were scattered here and there—three on Floor 6, one on Floor 12, a whopping nine on Floor 16.

They’d always suspected the tower itself somehow took care of voidlings, either through its own power or through its monsters tearing the voidlings apart in the same manner climbers did. After all, even back home, the top fifty floors weren’t exactly overflowing with eager climbers who would find problem spots and fix them.

So why is it that Floor 25 is screwed up here? Sorin wondered.

Once he was able to see inside the tower itself, it was impossible to ignore the problem. Fortunately, it wasn’t the whole floor like he’d been led to believe. Unfortunately, it very much was a good quarter of it with what Sorin guessed was the portal hub in the center. It might as well have been the full thing, though. There would be thousands of voidlings in that space, maybe more. Cutting through that as a normal climber was impossible.

Maybe a few hundred of them working as a coordinated assault force that was completely willing to take extraordinary casualties could make some headway, but voidling infestations weren’t something that could be tackled piecemeal. They had to be torn out at the root all in one go, otherwise whatever was left would just attract more.

And that is exactly what Samael is trying to do with his mutagenic soulprint climber army. I bet he’s fielding just enough of his climbers to hold the portal while he builds up his numbers. Once he’s ready, he’ll unleash everything in a flood that hopefully wipes out the infestation. Even if it doesn’t manage that, as long as it causes enough havoc for him to slip through, that’d probably be enough.

This was exactly the kind of shit that powerful climbers above rank 50 were supposed to come back down and handle. There were plenty of retirees on Floor 0 who’d climbed prior to the Void Wall’s existence. They had to know people who could have taken care of this, which begged the question of what exactly had happened to those climbers.

One problem at a time. Get to the other side of Floor 25 and then worry about the hundreds of climbers who should be there. If nothing else, at least I know this is the only void infestation that’s problematic.

“Can you show me the blue tower?” he asked, unsure of who exactly he was even talking to but hoping it would work anyway.

The display pulled back to show all seven towers again, but didn’t rush into the blue like it had with the red. Sorin tried a few other sentences, but the only commands that changed anything were the ones related to inspecting the red tower.

Maybe it’s limited to whatever tower I’m in.

That was unfortunate, both because he was curious about his original tower and because he’d been hoping to get a much better look at the inside of the indigo tower. It would not surprise him the smallest bit if that ended up being the end goal for whatever game the tower was playing. It almost couldn’t be anything else, not unless Sorin was missing a lot more information than he thought.

In all fairness, I could be. I still don’t know what happened at the top of my own tower that landed me here in this one.

Once he was done, the image of the seven towers vanished. Much like the first time he’d done this, there was only the empty pillar left. Just as quickly as the towers disappeared, small balls of colored light that matched them took their place. Lines shot out from them, perfectly replicating the image on his new slate.

“Guess it’s time to see if this does something,” he said, pulling the disc out of his pack and aligning it with the pattern on the pedestal. He’d barely gotten it facing the right direction when it shot out from between his fingers and landed in place.

Everything went blindingly white again, a fact which sparked a brief hope that the repeating process meant the slate wasn’t as worthless as he’d feared. When he could see again, he was back in his soulspace. Immediately, he looked over to where the image of his sword was beautifully rendered in tile.

The hole in the center was still empty.

“Oh come on. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

With a tired, defeated sigh, Sorin looked in the other direction, to where something was glinting just beyond the edge of his soulspace. It waited for him to reach it, but he couldn’t go that far. He couldn’t even really tell what that image was supposed to be, since the edge he had revealed was mostly black void with a few thin, silver lines cutting through it.

At least I know which direction to push the next time I rank up.