The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 79

Vendis was a lifesaver for the group. Sorin had been busy renegotiating with Yoru’s father, leaving Vendis to gather all the needed supplies. That included the most important one: strips of black fabric that covered everyone’s eyes to protect them from the Sol Pillar. They reached their destination after a single day of sweaty and still-too-bright travel, though that included no less than six attacks from packs of roaming light elementals.

Those were taken care of, if not easily, at least efficiently. Their speed and the intense heat of the light beams they fought with were the big problems, but conversely, their bodies were fragile constructions of spun glass. Even a weak attack could shatter one, so long as it hit.

Sorin didn’t even try to keep up with their strafing sweeps, where twenty or thirty elementals would fly by at speeds that would have been difficult to track even if their bodies weren’t transparent and backed by a sun that filled up half the sky. When the first beams hit, he simply poured anima into Still Winter, then fired off salvos of a hundred small ice crystals moving at high speeds in the general direction of the monsters.

He didn’t get all of them, or even half of them, probably. But he did enough damage that the rest fled rather than make a second run. Unfortunately, they didn’t communicate with other packs that some targets were better left alone, so Sorin had to repeat the tactic several more times.

Eventually, they were far enough north to turn their backs on the Sol Pillar and retreat out of the light elementals’ territory. The attacks stopped at that point, and they got to run with the ‘sun’ at their backs for the first time since reaching Floor 8.

They set their camp in the shadow of another sideways forest and got a few hours of rest before scaling the side of the mesa. There was a path, sort of, but without someone to smooth out the rough spots with some type of earth manipulation, it would have been near impossible to actually climb unassisted.

The mesa itself was a few miles across, but that really just made it a wide, flat slab of land preceding the mountains looming up behind it. Fortunately, it was densely populated with about a million trees, and damn near every last one had at least a single harpy nesting in it. They were a menace to the whole region, and the only reason the team hadn’t been attacked yet was that they’d approached from the sunward side.

That changed the instant Sorin climbed over the edge of the mesa. He wasn’t even all the way over when the first harpy spotted him and unleashed a twisting torrent of anima in his direction. Wind strong enough to rip a man off his feet and hurl him out into open air struck Sorin, and the only reason that it failed to do just that was that he’d preemptively free cast Spider Climb to reinforce his grip.

“You okay?” Nemari asked right below him.

“Just fine. Everything’s going as expected. Give me a five count before you follow me up.”

Sorin was over the ledge and on his feet a moment later, and if an arm and a head was enough to catch one harpy’s attention, his whole body made the rest sit up and take notice. Within seconds, there were no less than twenty in the air and bearing down on him.

I might need to bring Force Edge up to D-rank just to keep this efficient.

Unlike the Floor 1 counterparts he’d farmed back when he was starting out, these ones were neither slow nor fragile. Still stupid, though. They rocketed forward, their predictable flights sped up by wind magic as they descended with outstretched talons to tear him to pieces.

Blades of force flashed out in every direction, specifically targeting the powerful shoulder muscles that kept their wings beating. A third of the harpies crashed into the ground, and another third or so were clipped somewhere that at least slowed them down, but the last third either dodged around the attacks or simply lucked out with Sorin’s bad aim. The mental augmenting soulprints he needed to aim twenty shots at once were C-rank at minimum, and he wasn’t ready to absorb one even if he’d had the option.

Still Winter took care of the first wave, slowing all six harpies enough to give Sorin another second before impact. Another smaller wave of force hit them, and this time they all went down. He launched a third volley at the next wave, then picked off the stragglers individually.

The whole fight had taken less than five seconds to this point, and while he seemed to be winning, the truth was that all he’d accomplished so far was to ground the enemy. Admittedly, that was an excellent opening move, but it wouldn’t end things in his favor on its own.

That was what the sword was for. Living Earth went to work grabbing limbs to hold the harpies in place, and Sorin danced between the wind slashes, wind walls, and wind sweeps as he killed. The harpies had nothing but F-ranked abilities, and he was far too strong and quick to be defeated by that.

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Nemari made it over the lip of the mesa in time to see Sorin’s killing spree. By the time Yoru followed her, the last harpy was dead. Twenty kills of rank 8 monsters, even weak ones like these, easily exceeded what Sorin had claimed from the powerful spiders on Floor 3 or even the rock-borer beetles on Floor 5.

And this is why I insisted on pushing up higher. There are thousands of harpies up here, and that means we’ll gain anima ten times faster.

The sound of the fight, brief though it had been, had already attracted even more harpies. Sorin defended the team while everyone got up, then they pushed deeper in, circling the wall of vegetation on the south side of the mesa to get away from the edge. A simple wind sweep could knock someone off the mesa and drop them to their death, a fact they were all acutely aware of.

They quickly fell into a rhythm, rotating in and out of combat to conserve and recover anima. Most of the fighting consisted of trading ranged spells back and forth since the harpies couldn’t close the distance fast enough before being brought down, which unfortunately cut down the amount of anima Rue and Odric could collect. Neither were especially strong with their long-range soulprints, and Rue’s in particular was an anima hog.

“Don’t worry about it too much,” Sorin assured them. “Once we get inside the trees, you’ll get plenty of time to practice your blade work.”

* * *

Sorin didn’t even try to keep track of how many harpies they’d killed. It wasn’t enough to push anyone to the max of rank 8, not with only a single day or work. The advantage of the area was the quantity, not the quality of monsters. They did collect a handful of F-ranked soulprints, none of which were particularly valuable, but which they had no reason to leave behind.

“It’s insane that we slaughtered at least a thousand of these things, and yet there’s still no end in sight,” Rue said once they settled down near the mesa’s western edge. They were still about a thousand feet away, just at the canopy wall. Empty harpy nests dotted the sideways-bent trees at every level, their former occupants lying dead in droves on the forest floor.

“What’s insane is how wiped out I am,” Nemari said. “Sixteen hours of straight killing, by my estimate.”

“Good thing you’ve got a soulprint for extra stamina, huh?”

“I need a better one.”

“Better practice your merging, then,” Sorin told her. “Save yourself the pain and recovery time of tearing that F-ranked one out.”

“This doesn’t feel like the place to do that,” Nemari said. She gestured to the harpies flitting through branches a quarter mile to the east. Though the fighting had slowed down, they still couldn’t go more than a few minutes without being attacked.

Rather than retreat completely—only an option because of Liminal Gateway and Passenger Through the Void—they’d decided to rotate in two groups. One group consisted of Sorin and Vendis, who’d held up surprisingly well throughout the rigorous day. The other group was the remaining four members of the team. Their logic was simple: Sorin would be gone for several hours soon, and they’d use that time to take a real break.

The up-team continued to actively seek out and kill harpies, though at a slightly more leisurely pace since they weren’t pushing deeper toward the center of the mesa. The down-team made a camp and took turns resting. No one was getting a good night’s sleep on Floor 8, not with the Sol Pillar keeping the whole floor bright as a noon-day sun, but they still appreciated the chance to sit down and relax.

Then, a few hours later, they switched, allowing Sorin and Vendis to rest their own weary, aching muscles and finally recover their spent anima reservoirs. Sorin’s own endurance soulprints were merged E- and D-rank, which meant that he required far less down time than anyone else, so after two hours, he rejoined the up-team. Vendis elected to simply follow along for safety, but not participate while he finished recovering.

Sorin had a simple goal, though it wasn’t one he shared. He was closing in on rank 13, and with it he hoped the ability to free cast a C-rank spell. Alternatively, he could sacrifice the flexibility and bring almost everything in his current build up to D-rank, which would arguably make him more powerful. Either way, he needed to harvest the rest of the anima before he made a decision.

That moment finally came about six hours later. Sorin was in the middle of killing a flock of six harpies attacking from the north while the rest of his team dealt with another twenty coming in from the east when the rank up hit him. He grunted in pain, loud enough that it caught everyone else’s attention, but otherwise ignored it to finish the fight.

“Sorin, are you hurt?” Odric asked after.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Already healed it? You should really save your anima for—”

“I didn’t get hurt,” he said.

“We all heard you,” Rue pointed out.

“That was just the rank up.”

That shut everyone up, but only for a moment. Nemari eventually said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you react to that before.”

“It gets worse the higher you go,” Sorin reminded her. “Not particularly fun when you’re in the middle of a fight.”

In truth, he was worried about the rank up knocking him on his ass mid-battle when he was on a high floor. Something like that could be fatal. It had never been a concern since it only happened after slaying a floor guardian normally, but now that he could rank up anywhere, from any monster, it was something to concern himself with.

“Fucking bad enough at rank 8,” Rue muttered. “You’re… what? 13?”

“I am now.”

“Not looking forward to that.”

“It stops some climbers,” Sorin said. “Especially the jump after the first thirty floors. Lots of climbers back home retired at rank 31. They weren’t willing to go through the process again.”

Some of the team outright shuddered at the thought. Others looked vaguely sick. Sorin couldn’t blame them. He remembered his own youth, thinking it would be fine, that rank 29 hadn’t been that much worse than rank 28, and that even if it was that bad, he’d grit his teeth and bear it because there was no way he was stopping.

Well, I was right about the not stopping part. And looking back on it now, the rank 30 jump was nothing compared to the rank 50 one. And the less said about all of the nineties, the better.

“Come on. Plenty of harpies left up here. Let’s see if any of you can hit rank 9 before I have to leave.”