Book 3, Chapter 35

As one week turned into two, the team grew in strength and skill. Rot shamblers no longer posed any sort of threat, even if Sorin didn’t help at all. Everyone pushed up to rank 21, and Sorin himself finally reached rank 28, though it made little difference. The gulf between a C-rank and a B-rank soulprint was so vast that he was comfortably floating in the middle. Adding a few weaker soulprints to his build wouldn’t affect his ability to free cast, but neither would gaining another rank or two allow him access to B-rank abilities.

As planned, they spent an entire month on Floor 22. For four days, they worked non-stop. With increased endurance and resilience, breaks were short and infrequent, and their progress was astounding. On the fifth day, Sorin took them all back to Floor 0 to rest. Then the cycle repeated itself. Other than some occasional voidlings popping up, there were no disruptions.

They all reached rank 22, though that only put them at the point they should have been when they first set foot on the floor. It would be at least another week’s worth of work if they wanted to reach the peak of power there. The farming was relatively safe and easy, voidlings and wither moths aside, but, as always, the passing of time weighed heavily on Sorin’s mind.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea,” he said while they waded through the rotting muck the moths had turned this part of an ever-growing jungle into. “Just that we’ve run into void creatures multiple times a week since we got here. The void is spreading, and the longer we delay, the worse it’s going to be once we actually get up to Floor 24.”

“At the same time, this is our last chance to really increase our strength,” Yoru pointed out. “We’re doing alright against voidlings now, but I suspect things will be different at the Void Wall. It’s not going to be one or two, or even four or five. It’s going to be hundreds of them at once.”

It would probably be worse than that. Void infestations that got out of hand warped the floor itself, and his team lacked the powerful travel soulprints that would let them fly over holes in reality or survive environments without air or warmth. Those kinds of abilities were actually what he was pushing for everyone to acquire with the expanded room in their soulspaces.

“There’s also the mosaics to consider,” Rue added. “We never grew enough to reveal the final soulprint images. We’ve just got Passenger and Soul Tether, and neither of those are all that useful directly.”

“And Candle,” Yoru said. “But, truthfully, these are all just ways to help Sorin keep track of us in a void environment. There’s no reason to suspect any future abilities will be different.”

“At least you don’t need to clear ruins to get slates just to activate them,” Sorin muttered. But it was a small price to pay for access to abilities that were inarguably more powerful than what the others had available. None of their abilities even did anything on their own.

Sorin himself was still missing his last slate, but there were no ruins on Floor 22, at least not that anyone had discovered. Floor 23 was his last chance to clear one, but they’d decided not to take the Antechamber leading to Floor 24. For once, not knowing where the tower would dump them was too dangerous to risk. If they fell into a pit full of void, it would be the end of them before they even got started.

“We still have a week left, at minimum,” Odric pointed out. “Sorin still has to clear Floor 23, plus however long it takes to reach the portal guardian here. We could get close to the top of rank 22 in that time.”

“Let’s put this off for now,” Sorin said as they all considered that. “There’s no point in making plans when we don’t know how far into the rank you’ll all get. When it’s time to take out the Floor 23 guardian, we can look at how close you are to ranking up again. If it’s only a day or two, we’ll do it. If you’re not even close, we’ll move forward.”

The whole time they’d been talking, he’d been steering them closer to a pair of rot shamblers. Now, the monsters were only a few hundred feet away. They were too close together to fight separately, which meant the team needed to split up to handle them. Sorin stayed out of it; he was leaving soon anyway, so this was probably his final chance to see how they did on their own.

Azlo and Yoru took the smaller one while Rue, Odric, and Nemari focused on the larger of the two. Odric himself kept the rot shambler’s attention, a role he slipped into without complaint despite the fact that Sorin and Azlo had been alternating it normally.

It’s a bit messy, Sorin thought to himself, but I think they’re going to do fine. If they had to fight three, that would be too much. But the trio will wear down and destroy their target, then they’ll all gang up on the smaller one.

It all played out exactly like Sorin expected it to. Nobody was hurt—the worst of it was detoxifying Rue after an unexpected rot surge climbed up her arm and onto her face—and the battle lasted only slightly longer than two individual fights would have taken.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“It still tastes like dirt and mushrooms,” Rue complained once Odric was done working on her.

“You’re welcome,” he said, rolling his eyes at the same time.

The others just regarded the mild bickering with exasperated amusement, though Azlo was still new enough to the dynamic that he didn’t appear to have picked up on what was going on. Sorin wondered if anyone had told the man that they were siblings, or if they’d all just assumed he’d figure it out for himself.

The rest of the day was more of the same. As night fell, Sorin returned them all to Floor 0 for the final rest period. Once they went back to Floor 22, he abandoned them to do their work and set out to find the portal guardian.

That was an experience in and of itself. Outside the wither moth nesting grounds, the floor was alive in a way that made it obnoxious to navigate and overwhelming to Observer. Everything moved, all the time. Plants grew so fast that all he had to do was stand still and watch for a few minutes to see a noticeable difference in size.

It didn’t help that at least a third of them also wanted to eat Sorin. If it wasn’t some bush that had leaves for teeth, it was a pliable branch trying to loop itself under his chin, lift him off the ground, and hang him. When the plants failed, the monsters took over. Insects bigger than his head were plentiful, both the flying and burrowing type. Once, an entire colony of ants that had to weigh four or five pounds each boiled up out of the ground, forming a living carpet that stretched half a mile in every direction.

Sorin killed them with lots and lots of fire. That just resulted in the colony’s elites getting involved once the fire spread far enough through the tunnels to threaten the queen, and those were powerful enough that Sorin was required to use force magic to crack their exoskeletons open before he could actually hurt them.

The queen herself didn’t appear, and Sorin didn’t go digging for her. She absolutely wasn’t worth the effort, not for the minuscule anima gains each ant granted. Since he wasn’t looking for any particular soulprint, he just killed what was convenient and then went on his way.

Even with all his speed and power, it still took him four grueling days of non-stop fighting to cross the floor. Every step was paid for with sweat and effort, and he left a trail of sap and ichor in his wake. The tower cleaned up nicely, of course. If anything, Floor 22 absorbed damage and reverted changes faster than normal.

Finally, after six hours of walking a grid pattern and growing increasingly certain that he was in the wrong area, Sorin stumbled across what he was looking for some time in the middle of the night. It was a wide bowl of stone, visible only because of what looked like repeated lightning strikes. The stone was black with scorch marks, and what little vegetation had managed to make any headway in claiming the bowl ended in burns and shattered tips.

The cause stood motionless in the center of the bowl. It appeared to be a statue of a small child, maybe eight or nine years old. It was naked and sexless, and its body was carved with jagged, forking lines. Samael’s notes called it a lightning doll and warned that it was an exceptionally lethal portal guardian.

Even as Sorin studied it, a cloud of bugs—normal insects, not the monsters that infested the jungle—flitted out from between the trees. Instantly, an arc of electric energy jumped from the statue to the bugs. It was there and gone in a blink, leaving nothing behind but a brief crackling sound and the smell of a fresh lightning strike. Of the bugs themselves, not even ash remained.

Instantaneous reaction to anything entering its arena. Probably capable of multi-targeting, but the monster itself is stationary. I bet anything that the second I drop lightning rods to block its attacks, it starts moving, though. The only question is how fast it actually is. Lightning elementals aren’t known for being slow, but stone elementals aren’t known for being quick. What an odd combination.

Sorin continued to study the portal guardian for another half an hour, taking care not to move from his perch the whole time. He had plenty of opportunities to watch it work in that time, as it wasn’t in the jungle’s nature to leave a space unclaimed. It was continuously intruding on the arena from every direction, and every single attempt was met with an obliterating blast of lightning that originated from the doll in the center.

Flying monsters fared no better. Even birds a hundred feet or higher off the ground were disposed of, though the bigger monsters at least left a corpse behind. The lightning doll’s response was a simple one. It kept blasting the bodies until they disintegrated to nothing. It was no wonder the whole bowl was covered in black scorch marks.

As a test, he threw out a pair of lightning rods to flank the portal guardian. It didn’t react to them, not at first, but within a minute, a new intruder wandered into the arena. Lightning arced between the doll and Sorin’s magic, and when the monster wasn’t instantly vaporized, the output increased. It took a bare handful of seconds to overwhelm the magic, at which point the doll’s lightning descended upon the monster with unbridled fury.

What it didn’t do was turn on Sorin. He’d been expecting that. A normal guardian wouldn’t have been stopped by the fact that the climber interfering with it just so happened to technically be outside the bounds of the arena. This one ignored anything that didn’t set foot inside the sloping walls of that stone bowl.

I think we’ve got our strategy, Sorin thought with a grin. He’d go in to deal with the lightning doll directly, drawing its powerful attacks and keeping its attention focused on him. The rest of the team could take to the trees and hurl down punishment on an unmoving target.

It was more or less what Samael’s notes recommended, though it didn’t assume access to Lightning Rod as an ability, so there were a lot of notes about insulating equipment and reactionary healing soulprints. Now that Sorin had tested its accuracy himself, he was confident they could either defeat the lightning doll on the first try or easily retreat if it became necessary.

Still smiling, he left the arena to go fetch the rest of his team.