The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 66

“Okay, no, it doesn’t work,” Sorin said twenty minutes later.

It turned out that stretching the dampening area to cover six people made it very, very noticeable to the monsters. Even the bubble he wrapped around the whole area to cut one off from talking to the rest of the swarm was quickly noticed. He’d just proceeded to the next stage of his test too quickly the first time to see that.

Given about fifteen to twenty seconds, the sentry he’d isolated would inevitably start digging toward the dampening bubble—usually in the direction of where it knew its closest ally was. Sorin was forced to dismiss his own dampening at that point, announcing his presence and sending the beetle into a murderous rage. That had the benefit of preventing it from spreading information to the rest of the hive, but it did complicate his plan.

“So, you can keep it from noticing you, but not the whole team,” Nemari said. “And you can keep it from talking to other beetles, but not from noticing that it’s been cut off. It sounds like we’re done here, then.”

“Well… yes and no. You’re all done and can retreat. I can still walk in by myself without them knowing I’m there.”

They’d proved that part, at least. On his own, or with one or two other people at most—and only if they stepped at the exact same time—none of the beetles seemed to realize he was there. He’d stood on top of one for a full minute, then walked away without provoking it. Odric had served as a backup monitor to make sure it wasn’t sending any new vibrations through the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Rue said. “Are you proposing that you… I don’t know… Just walk through the ruin by yourself? You’re just going to stroll up to the end, take the loot, and head back out? Just taking a trip up to the store on the corner to get a snack, back in five minutes?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“Oh. Okay. As long as we’re all on the same page, it’s fine then.”

“We’re not even in the same library,” Nemari snapped, in no mood for Rue’s flippant comments. “This is a stupid idea.”

“Only if it doesn’t work,” Sorin said.

“If it doesn’t work, they’ll kill you.”

“Wish for good things for me then,” he told Nemari. “If I end up dead, at least you still have your own mosaics. I think you’re overly worried, though. If everything goes wrong, I’ll go straight up the wall.”

“The top—” Yoru started to say.

“I know. I won’t go up to the top. I’ll just walk along the wall until I get back out of the ravine, then return to ground level.”

Perhaps wanting to ensure that its dangers weren’t circumvented, the ruin also encompassed the top of the ravine. Industrious climbers had attempted to simply scale the sides and come down from the back, bypassing the ruin completely. They’d found a spider’s web of fissures all over the top, and every single crack leaked toxic, even acidic fumes.

Merely standing in them was enough to melt a person down to their bones, and those would probably dissolve as well if the tower didn’t reclaim them first. It would take far more powerful soulprints than any rank 5 had to disperse the fumes and walk across that ground. The records indicated that attempts had been made, only for the fumes to simply ignore wind spells and continue to spill out into the open air.

“What about the other monsters?” Odric asked. “Even if you can hide from the rock-borer beetles, there are still the mantises and the ruin guardian.”

Supposedly, those twisted pseudo-buildings clinging to the sides of the ravine were nests for powerful metal-shaping insects known as steel arm mantises. They weren’t as outrageously big as the rock-borer beetles, but they were significantly faster and had the advantage of being able to fly.

Sorin had killed plenty of them in his original tower. He knew how to handle them and wasn’t worried about them attacking, no matter how many there were. The only possible complication was the fight drawing a beetle’s attention. If it came up topside to investigate, it might not matter that Sorin had a dampening layer under his feet.

“I can kill a mantis or twenty if I have to,” he said. “They’re not nearly as durable as the beetles. But I’d bet they don’t even come out of their nests as long as I stay on the ground. As far as the ruin guardian goes, well… I can do a lot of damage when I’m not worried about being efficient. I think I can take it.”

“There’s no talking you out of this?” Yoru asked.

Sorin shook his head. “I’m going to try. If something goes wrong, I’ll retreat, and we’ll leave.”

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“Why are you being so stubborn about this?” Nemari asked, clearly frustrated. “It’s such an unnecessary risk. There are other ruins. We don’t have to smash our heads against the wall here.”

“I’ve got a feeling. The tower is meddling. If we were a normal climbing team, then yes, we’d have cleared out of here. I think it wants us working on this, though. Greater challenges lead to greater rewards, right? Think of how much more challenging this is now that the beetles aren’t mindlessly aggressive. They’re communicating. They’re watching for us. If we can get through anyway—If I can get through alone—that’d be worth a hell of a prize.”

“I didn’t take you as a tower worshiper,” Yoru said.

“Hell no. I don’t think it’s God or anything like that. But anyone who’s made it past Floor 1 knows the tower is alive. And it’s a vindictive little shit. For whatever reason, voidlings or maybe something else, the tower is preparing us. It wants to give us the advantages we need to win, but it’s making us earn them.”

“I think you’re cracked in the head,” Rue told him. “This is dumber than a harpy fresh out of the egg. But you’re not going to take no for an answer, so I’ll be somewhere over there while you give it a try.”

That pretty much settled the debate. The rest of the team moved back to where they’d established their camp last night, and Sorin stood alone a few hundred feet from the edge of the ruin. Is it still the edge? Has the ruin expanded now that the beetles are all over out here? It’s kind of hard to tell without the wall.

Brushing away those inane thoughts, he fixed the dampening layer back into place, then started walking. There were four beetles within range of Living Earth. He could feel them both by the void in the dirt where they’d settled into place and by the curve of their stone-infused shells. None so much as shifted in place as he moved.

Then he was past what he’d have called the boundary yesterday. Dozens of beetles lurked near the surface, scattered seemingly randomly. In one spot, four of them were clustered so close together that their shells touched. In another, a lone monster was more than fifty feet from the next closest one. Twenty or so were motionless, much like the sentries outside the ruin. The rest moved slowly, burrowing through the dirt at a leisurely pace.

Sorin walked a hundred feet. None of them reacted. He kept going for a minute, then stopped to assess things. No sign they’ve noticed me. Good. Getting close to the mantis nests, though. And they’re definitely in there. Barely any movement, though. Hard to spot with Blind Sense. If they’re going to react to me, I’ll know in about fifty more feet.

When nothing happened, he let out a small sigh of relief. He hadn’t been nearly as confident in the plan working as he’d made it sound. This was more of a last-ditch effort because he was out of good ideas, and even then, he was only attempting it because he was confident that he could escape if something did spot him.

But nothing like that happened. After all the struggles he’d had fighting everything and its damn brother in this ruin, it was aggravating to so easily walk right by. He could have done this yesterday and saved everyone a lot of grief. They wouldn’t have all gone up a rank, though, so there was no use complaining about it.

He quickly reached the bend in the ravine that prevented climbers from seeing the goal. As promised, there was a little shack made of stone slabs that seemed to have grown out of the ground. The waist-high well sat near it, just to the left of the front door. If what he’d read was to be believed, he’d go straight down that well into a large cavern, kill the equally large guardian that was rumored to be some kind of super beetle, and the dungeon heart would be right there waiting for him.

He'd have to kill the guardian quickly, because he was almost certain the fight would attract the regular beetles. ‘Kill, loot, flee’ was his plan, simple as could be. At least, it was in theory. It could prove more difficult in practice. He’d have been a lot more concerned about the final part if not for the fact that he had Living Earth now.

Everything was going according to plan until he was about thirty feet away. Then something crawled out of a window hole from one of the house nests overhead. It was two feet long with a dark, metallic green exoskeleton and long, multi-jointed arms edged in what looked like steel blades. It was easy to see how the steel arm mantis had gotten its name.

Twin bulbous eyes bulged out of its head, seemingly plated the same green as the rest of its body except for two gray pinpricks in the middle. Of more concern to Sorin was the twitching set of antennae farther up its skull. Those were as sensitive to air currents as the beetles below were to vibrations in the dirt.

And Sorin didn’t have an air elemental mastery to disguise himself. The best he could do was pull his Cloak of Blending tight and tug the hood up. The mantis already knew something was nearby, but if he held still, it might not find him. With any luck, it would crawl back inside its nest or, even better, fly off somewhere else in search of a meal.

For a minute, he thought he might actually get away with it. The mantis’s head swung back and forth as it peered into the ravine, upside down and clinging to the outside of its nest. Those eyes passed by Sorin twice without giving any indication that it had noticed him.

Then, so suddenly that Sorin probably would have missed it if he hadn’t been watching specifically for it, one of its arms lashed out. Anima swirled behind it, and a blade of sharpened wind shot out at blindingly fast speed. The target, of course, was Sorin.

Triggering his own speed burst, he drew his blade and cut through the wind slash. The magic dispersed, leaving a strong gust of normal wind that set Sorin’s cloak to billowing around him. At the same time, he returned fire with a trio of overcharged force edges that cut clean through the mantis and bit deep into its nest.

He felt the anima leave it, confirming the kill. More importantly, he saw it fall to pieces and those pieces then descend toward the ground. If they hit, there was no way the beetles would fail to notice. Despite being almost to the very end of the ruin, there were still hundreds of them within Sorin’s range.

He did the only thing he could think to do. He leaped forward and pushed a thick dampening layer at his landing point, right where the mantis would hit. Without Speed Burst, he wouldn’t have made it there in time. Even with it, it would have taken someone with an advanced timing soulprint to count the fractions of a second he had left.

The body hit the ground just as the dampening field spread out. Sorin was almost sure he’d caught all of it in time. Holding his breath and keeping absolutely still, he waited to see if the beetles would react.