Book 3, Chapter 34

Sorin might have said he was fine with Nemari’s build, but she thought that was more of ‘he’d given up caring’ than actual approval of all her decisions. If he’d had his way, she’d probably fight very similarly to how Rue did.

It wasn’t that Nemari disagreed with his logic. It was more that it felt like he was trying to prepare them to make it to Floor 100, and she had no interest in going that high. Already, she was satisfied with her strength and could have retired from climbing if not for the threat of the Void Wall.

But sometimes, every now and then, they came up against a monster that reminded her exactly why Sorin was so dead set against specialization, and the rot shambler was the perfect example. Fire did no more damage to it than it would to a pile of wet mulch. She hadn’t expected it to go up in flames like those birds with the flammable oil coating on their feathers, but the end result of her fire blast was a few wisps of steam rising from the monster’s hunched back.

If fire doesn’t work, there’s always water.

That, too, failed to make an appreciable impact, though for a different reason. It seemed water was some sort of integral component to a rot shambler’s physiology, and when she slugged it with a heavy bolt of pressurized water, the magic didn’t tear into flesh like it should have. Instead, it lost cohesion and washed over the shambler’s body, only to be soaked up without doing any sort of harm.

With fire doing basically nothing and water performing even worse, Nemari’s remaining options were some weak wind attacks or to rely on her sword. Normally, she would simply say that this wasn’t the monster for her, that this was why they worked in teams to begin with. That didn’t work today, though, because the whole point was for the team to gain anima as quickly as possible.

If she couldn’t contribute, she wouldn’t grow from the fights. That meant she needed to find some way to be useful, which meant she had one last trick to try. Everyone had worked hard to master merging, but it wasn’t as easy as Sorin made it sound.

There were foundational techniques that they’d studied and practiced, but even once those were mastered, each individual merge was a unique work of art. That meant solving the puzzle over and over again every time they wanted to merge more soulprints together, which was time consuming and offered dubious rewards. Merged soulprints took up less space, but often resulted in something that was weaker than its component parts.

So Nemari had turned to a different skill instead. In many ways, they were related abilities, and in her opinion, it was the more valuable of the two. Instead of channeling her anima into a soulprint, or even into multiple soulprints like she sometimes did to mix wind and fire spells together, she went to that empty spot in her soulspace where her anima sat, waiting to be assigned to the next soulprint she gained.

And she wove it together the way she’d practiced a thousand times already, not into any spell she already had, but into something new. It wasn’t instantaneous. It wasn’t even particularly fast. Four seconds was as quick as she could manage, which made it worthless in most fights. But it gave her options, and if Sorin was right about anything, it was that climbers with options were far more likely to survive the tower when it surprised them.

A lance of raw force formed in the air, eight feet long and pointed directly at the rot shambler. Sorin, Azlo, and Rue had already closed into melee range to engage it, but pin-point accuracy was a skill all magic-focused climbers mastered as soon as possible. The lance surged forward, tracing the line she’d mentally strung from its tip to the monster’s hulking shoulder.

It blew a hole in the rot shambler the size of her fist, sending a vile cloud of fungal matter, wood splinters, dead wither moths, and unidentifiable black gunk into the air. Despite the damage, the shambler didn’t even seem to notice. It didn’t flinch. It didn’t turn its attention to her. It had all the reaction of a refuse pile being scattered across the street.

Doesn’t matter. Still hurt it. I might not get a ton of anima from the fight, but I’ll still get something.

The others weren’t standing still, of course. Sorin and Azlo were keeping it in place, one through eye-searingly fast movements and the other through being an unbreakable wall that the shambler kept trying and failing to engulf within its body. Rue, despite not being nearly as fast as Sorin, was actually the hardest person to account for. She was practically a ghost, half-there and prone to disappearing, only to pop up again a second later on the other side of the monster.

The rambler took an incredible amount of punishment without slowing down, and by the time Nemari launched her second force lance, the hole from the first one had already shrunk down to half its original size. It was pulling in replacement rot from the ground, but it was too big to get it up in the air. Their only choice was to break it down faster than it could regenerate.

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That was what they did. Sorin was definitely holding back, but everyone else tore into the rot shambler with everything they had. Despite that, it still took over a minute for them to wear it down, and Nemari wasn’t convinced even that would have been enough if Sorin hadn’t reached into its trunk and detonated some sort of force blast that ripped the monster into five pieces.

Black sludge coated everything in a thirty-foot radius—it took a tremendous amount of willpower to keep from gagging at the revolting smell—but the flood of anima pouring into her soulspace was unlike anything she’d ever felt. The only things that even came close were the portal guardians from the last two floors, but the majority of those kills went to Sorin alone. This time, she got a decent cut of the anima.

“Holy crap, that’s a lot,” Rue said.

“Yeah,” Azlo agreed, looking slightly dazed.

Or maybe sick? Rue should probably take a step back before he ruins her boots.

But the armored giant mastered his stomach with a few shallow breaths, then turned a plaintive look on Nemari. “Clean up time?”

She couldn’t help but agree. Azlo had gotten the worst of it, but all of them were speckled with bits of filth. The explosion should have coated Sorin, but he’d somehow deflected or dodged most of it. Given the smell, it wasn’t unreasonable to want the muck and grime wiped away.

“Don’t bother,” Sorin said. “There’s another shambler about five hundred feet away. We’re just going to get covered in rot again.”

“This is going to be a long month, isn’t it?” Nemari groaned. Azlo let out an almost puppy-like whine of agreement.

* * *

“You’ve been working on free casting,” Sorin said when they stopped for a break six hours later.

“I agreed with you that I needed to broaden my repertoire.”

“What can you do so far?” he asked.

Nemari thought about it for a second. Unlike her soulprints, she couldn’t just instantly call up a list. “Force Lance and Earth Spike to round out my offensive range. Some utility stuff like Heat Shield, Stabilize, Alarm Ward, and Levitation. Odric helped me figure out Soothing Touch, but I’m not confident enough in that one to use it yet.”

“That’s a good start,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “Why should you be the only one who gets to surprise everybody all the time?”

He rolled his eyes with a laugh. “Alright, that’s fair. Are you fast enough with any of them to free cast effectively in a fight yet?”

“Not yet,” Nemari said. “Though if we keep going like this, I’m going to be weaving Force Lance in my sleep.”

“I know the feeling. I remember... I think it was Floor 49, there were these spiders made out of crystals. I had nothing that could hurt the damn things. Fire did nothing. Physical blows did nothing. I couldn’t dehydrate them. They were too heavy for any sort of telekinetic attack, and too durable to care about being smashed into rocks anyway.

“Shatter was what I finally found—sonic vibrations that required a touch-based attack to transmit the frequency through their bodies. Of course, they blew up into a shrapnel cloud when I used it, but at least they died. I must have free cast that spell a thousand times a day for two weeks. By the time I left that area, I could throw out a Shatter faster than some of the spells I had actual soulprints for.”

“Let’s hope I don’t need to cast it quite that many times,” Nemari said.

“Agreed. If you want my advice, the two big challenges are forming the spell quickly and without wasting excess anima. I’d focus on anima efficiency first, even if you have to go slow.”

That was all well and good in theory, but Nemari wasn’t in danger of running low on anima, and if she threw fewer force lances, she got less anima from the kill. It wasn’t exactly a waste since it would just be going to the rest of the team instead, but if she fell behind, that was its own issue.

Perhaps reading her thoughts, Sorin said, “Trust me. Do it efficiently first. If you don’t, you’ll ingrain the sloppy forms, and it’ll be that much harder to fix them later. We’re going to be here for a month. You’ve got time to practice.”

“I’ll fall behind.”

“We’ll figure it out if it comes to that.”

She couldn’t really come up with a good argument to that reasoning, but she still wasn’t happy about it. With a resigned sigh, she nodded. “What about free casting through my wand?”

“Possible, but more difficult. Normally, I’d say not to worry about it, but with the wand being able to hurt void creatures with magic, it might be something worth focusing on.”

Their conversation was interrupted then. Wither moths descended in a cloud from the rotting hollow of a tree that hadn’t quite succumbed to its own weight yet. Nemari sent a scorching wave of flames into the air, accompanied by Sorin and Yoru, though the latter’s efforts were lackluster compared to the other two’s. Yoru had barely started branching out into the discipline, and it showed.

His flame lance caught the hollowed-out tree on fire, killing a few of the moths in the process but also creating a new danger for them to deal with. Immediately realizing his mistake, he switched back to earth magic. A hand of soil and stone jutted out of the ground, shoving the tree away from the team and letting it topple to the ground with a tremendous crash.

The moths, undeterred, continued their descent on the team. Though the dust primarily affected plant life, humans weren’t immune to rotting. Usually, they had to be dead first, but hard and fast rules tended to fail in the face of magic. The dust wasn’t as effective against climbers, but it could still hurt.

It could, that was, if not for the dome of flames spreading over their heads. By the time anything got through it, there was nothing but ash left. Tiny little flickers of anima flashed into Nemari’s soulspace from the moths she killed, barely enough to even notice it happening.

The fight was over in less than ten seconds. As nice as it had been to be in her element, the anima gains were practically non-existent. They wouldn’t go hunting wither moths in the future, which meant Nemari needed to rely more on free casting to contribute to the monster kills they were aiming for.

“So,” she said, turning back to Sorin. “Any other tips?”