The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 63

It was important for successful climbers to be able to admit their mistakes. That was the first step to learning from those mistakes, which led to not repeating them. Climbers who repeated mistakes quickly found themselves dead. Even the ones who didn’t make any in the first place didn’t have a spectacularly high survival rate, so it was especially important to minimize the odds of being killed by random happenstance.

About an hour into his new strategy, Sorin was more than willing to say he’d made a mistake. He was miles away from the ruin. He’d figured that at some point there would be the last beetle in the line, even if he didn’t have enough anima left to kill his way there.

He knew how fast they were. He knew he could get away when he needed time to rest. He had even factored in the possibility of running into some other monster while he was retreating and made sure to leave himself a reserve to handle an emergency situation. When he’d started killing the pursuing monsters, he’d done his best to account for every possible outcome to make sure he had a way to handle it.

I got greedy, and greedy leads to stupid. I should have focused on breaking away the moment I hit rank 10.

The one thing he hadn’t accounted for was, in retrospect, glaringly obvious. He’d already noticed that the beetles didn’t follow the same path he did. They were like a string stretching from the ruin to his current position. If he’d kept running in a straight line directly south, they would have simply followed his trail because that was the quickest route to him.

But he’d gone left, and the line had swung with him. Presumably—though he couldn’t see it—there were hundreds of beetles still coming directly at him. And they were apparently trampling over the territories of some other monsters in the process. If he’d had any sort of luck, that would have worked in his favor.

It hadn’t.

In addition to the infinite supply of heavily-fortified anima-on-legs that he was in no way prepared to harvest, there were also a few dozen living constrictor vines tangled around the beetles. Those did not attempt to distinguish between the shells they were failing to crush and Sorin when one of the carrier monsters got close to him, which made killing the plant elementals all the more difficult.

They’d also acquired a handful of massive tiger spiders, so named for the black-and-orange striped coloring they sported. The spiders, much like everything else, had failed completely in their attempts to jab their fangs into the beetles’ shells. They’d been carried along from God only knew where until Sorin had finally killed enough of the front of the line to come within sight of them.

At that point, they’d demonstrated the other reason they were called tiger spiders and leaped free of the beetles to run at speeds better than five times faster than their impromptu mounts could—reminding Sorin where exactly it was that Speed Burst soulprints came from in the wild.

Other than a single specimen that laughably got itself tangled up in a constrictor vine, the rest of them had closed on him in a matter of seconds, prompting a short-lived but high-speed battle that had only ended in Sorin’s favor because he had Still Winter to slow them down enough to cut them to pieces before they could pile onto him.

Now, miles away from his allies and ready to collapse where he stood, Sorin still had rock-borer beetles coming his way as far as the eye could see, with the lead ones sporting a writhing halo of ridged vines sharp enough to score stone. It would have little difficulty tearing him into pieces if he let himself get caught.

At least I can say I died at rank 10, not rank 9. Made it to double digits. Woooo.

For all his pessimism about the situation, he wasn’t truly that concerned, not yet. He still had his emergency evacuation soulprint, but he was loath to use it. Once he stepped through Liminal Gateway, he didn’t know what would happen with the beetles. If he was lucky, they’d just return to the ruin. More likely, they would scatter in random directions where they’d eventually be worn down and killed by other monsters in the area.

His fear was that, before that happened, a handful would stumble across the rest of his team. They were in no condition to fight at the moment, certainly not without Sorin there to break down the beetles’ stone shells. One or two would be a challenge for the team to wear down and eventually kill. More would be a death sentence.

Sorin didn’t have much choice. He needed a break. Even an hour would see him recovered enough anima to keep fighting, but as it stood at the moment, he was about three Speed Bursts away from running completely empty. At that point, all the passives that were augmenting his endurance would fail, and Sorin would immediately drop where he stood.

One Speed Burst got him to the closest tree, about five hundred feet away from the leading edge of the beetle line. It changed direction slightly to realign itself with his new position. That was about thirty seconds before it reached him again. Plenty of time to carve the seven-tower sign, he thought wearily as he reached for his knife.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

He dragged the blade through the bark, digging the tip into the living wood below. In a single, smooth motion, the outer circle was complete. It was nearly perfectly round, more than good enough for his purposes. The beetles had covered a quarter of the distance in the time it took him to do that.

Next came the horizontal lines, one after another in parallel. Those were even quicker to carve. He had just finished the fourth one and lifted the knife when Blind Sense caught movement above him. Something came hurtling down, all feathers and a long, needle-like beak aimed directly at his neck. Other than to say that it was some sort of bird, Blind Sense couldn’t pick up the details through the blur of its sheer speed.

Sorin threw himself backwards. A streak of red and gray about the size of his chest zipped past him, disappearing as fast as it had arrived. Was that a God damn humming bird bigger than my entire torso?

His best guess was that it was a blood drinker, though they were normally no bigger than a human adult’s head. Like every other monster species here, it had been enlarged by the unique aspect of Floor 5. Rather than pierce his jugular to feed, it was more likely to rip his throat completely open if it caught him.

Trusting Blind Sense to warn him when it came back around and unwilling to spend the time or anima to deal with it, Sorin carved the next line in the seven-tower sign. He finished the entire symbol half a second before the blood drinker made another pass, then scrambled to slap his hand against it. The nearest beetle was seconds away from smashing into him, an action which would pin him between monster and tree and no doubt result in his immediate transformation from climber to exploding flesh balloon.

Sorin slipped through the sign and stumbled forward two steps in his haste to get clear of it. By the time he spun around to see the node he’d created, it was already breaking to pieces. Yep, damn thing destroyed the sign when it impacted the tree. If that fucking bird hadn’t interfered, I could have gotten through quick enough that I bet it would have slowed down before it got there. Now I’ve got no quick way back.

He still had the sign near the Floor 3 portal hub active, which was as close to Floor 5 as he could get. Sorin took a few seconds to catch his breath, but he wasn’t interested in hanging around liminal space longer than he had to. The last thing he needed was to deal with a couple of void beasts attracted by his loitering.

There was no one around when he passed through the exit node, which was a good thing, because if anything had attacked him, his only option would have been to go right back through the gate. Instead, he found a decent perch to sit on and watched the sun slowly set over the desert for the next half an hour.

He was rank 10 now, so in that respect, it was mission accomplished. The price hadn’t been worth it, but he’d made the best of a bad situation. Knowing what he knew now, he’d have carved a sign a hundred feet outside the ruin and left immediately once he realized the beetles had abandoned their former behavioral patterns.

The real concern was that he still wasn’t entirely sure what change had prompted the response. It was likely his attempt to close their tunnels, but really, it could be the enhanced range of his perception for all he knew. The monsters were far more attuned with their element than he was. His best guess was that something he’d done had demonstrated increased capabilities in some way that they found threatening enough that they wouldn’t stop until they eliminated him.

Sorin didn’t know enough about rock-borer beetles to say whether they’d remember him when he got back. If they did, the most likely scenario was the exact same thing happening again. That was manageable, since he could simply carve a seven-tower sign beforehand and escape immediately, but it would turn an already challenging ruin into something impossible to overcome.

If they didn’t remember him, then he needed to figure out what had set the beetles off so he could make sure not to do it again. The last thing they needed was another event like that happening when they were a mile deep in the ravine with no way to flee.

It might be better to just write this ruin off and wait to challenge a different one on another floor. I need a slate, but it doesn’t have to come from here.

He still needed to return at least once to collect the rest of his team, so he resolved to do a little testing just to see if the ruin was beatable. They’d decide as a team once they had more information. It was too bad things had turned out the way they had, though, because everyone had been growing quickly and relatively safely until the end. If nothing else, Sorin wanted a few more days to farm anima.

Feeling better once he’d recovered enough anima to solidify his reserves, Sorin stood up and made his way down to the portal. It was easy enough to find just by walking toward the glowing red disc that stood out like a beacon in the dark. He passed through and casually glanced around at the Floor 5 hub as he did.

There was no one around, or rather, nobody close enough that he imagined they’d notice him. Living Earth felt a handful of people asleep in the semi-permanent huts they’d claimed. A pavilion with some tables and lights a hundred feet to Sorin’s right had the most activity, but those people were focused on each other and on whatever it was they were drinking.

The urge to walk over and join them hit Sorin suddenly. He was by no means abstinent, but he didn’t like to drink when he was climbing. Since he’d done little else after arriving in the red tower, that meant he hadn’t really gotten a chance to indulge. Part of him reasoned that the best thing to do was have a few drinks, rest at the hub for the night, and set out again when he was fresh in the morning.

The other part of him pictured a horde of beetles descending on his team in an unknown location. It wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen. Yoru would take charge. He’d probably implement one of their earlier strategies with some minor modifications, something like having Rue crack the shells and Odric hold them open while he, Nemari, and Vendis tried to kill the monster.

It might even work a few times before they were overwhelmed by numbers. There’d be no seven-tower sign for them to retreat through. They’d just suffer the fate of so many other climbers: death. And it would be Sorin’s fault.

“God, I am so fucking tired,” he muttered as he cast one last longing look at the pavilion.

Then he triggered Speed Burst and started running through the dark.