Book 3, Chapter 50

Besides being a fraction of the size and proportionately weaker in every way, polar wyrms in the red tower looked mostly the same as the blue tower variant Sorin was familiar with. After confirming that he’d found the right monster with Urd via the simple expedience of producing the decapitated head of one for the Hellion to examine, Sorin threw himself into his work.

The biggest practical difference was that these polar wyrms had a crown of swept-back horns jutting out of their skull in a half ring, each one around three feet long and more than strong enough to gouge furrows into solid stone if the wyrm started thrashing. That made them a bit trickier to deal with, but the rank advantage was so great that it mostly just amounted to a bit of experimentation to find the best way to compensate for the extra feature.

He had it down to a science now, though. The main problem was finding the next batch. Perhaps it was a consequence of being smaller, but these wyrms were far less territorial than normal. They didn’t exactly chum around, but it was generally easy enough to hop from one kill to the next without a lot of searching. That kept Sorin feeling like he was making progress, even if none of the three soulprints he’d found so far were what he needed.

The first one he’d absorbed for himself. It was called Snow Blind, and its primary purpose was to make it easier to hide in snowy terrain. It also provided a minor buff to being aware of what other creatures were doing in snow, which was the part Sorin actually cared about. He scrapped the stealth portion of the soulprint immediately and added the sensory component to Observer.

It wasn’t much of a modification. In fact, it was so small, Sorin was hesitant to even decide the base soulprint wasn’t still Observer. Mostly, it just helped penetrate the snow better, which made it significantly easier for him to navigate the floor.

The other two were junk, as far as he was concerned. One was mutagenic and caused the user to grow horns. The other was a defensive modifier for abilities like Iron Body or Bark Skin that increased their effectiveness against the cold. That was slightly more useful, but a waste of limited soulspace for anyone still weak enough to need it. Since merging soulprints wasn’t something the average F-rank user could do, that left it in a niche no one wanted filled.

Every four hours, he took a break to check on the team and Odric. They were making steady progress, with everyone in good health if not good cheer, and Odric had found a balance in spending anima to heal himself without using so much that it left him weak.

The cycle continued for about two days before he had to take everyone back to Floor 0. Without a dedicated healer, there was no way around the reality that they needed more frequent breaks, both to recover anima spent on healing and because climbing tired had the obvious side effect of producing more mistakes in the first place.

It was only a matter of time until something went wrong, but that had basically been the story of Sorin’s life for months now. Every decision he made was weighed on the scale of progress versus time spent as he tried to find the quickest and most efficient route to Floor 24 that didn’t result in losing someone. Even getting them to the point where they were strong enough to help was more of a bonus than a necessity at this point.

It'd be nice if they weren’t useless, though. I kind of went through a ton of extra effort to bring them along under the assumption that I’d have a full team of six to tackle this since it’s pretty apparent that Samael’s plan isn’t working out.

That brought him back to polar wyrm hunting, which he was only devoting his extremely valuable time toward under the assumption that it would get his team’s healer back on his feet. The more monsters he killed, however, the more despondent he grew.

He slammed his sword down on the snout of a polar wyrm that shot out of a wall like it was made of water instead of thirty feet of solid ice. “Ah, there you are. No wonder I was having trouble figuring out where you went,” he told the dazed monster.

The analytical part of his brain couldn’t help but fixate on the fact that he was working based on what amounted to an educated guess with no concrete proof that his objective even existed. In the blue tower, yes, he knew for a fact that Burning Light was a soulprint that could be found on polar wyrms, but the red tower version wasn’t even really the same monster.

It had been easy to dismiss that little fact yesterday, but now he was a couple hundred kills in, and every time he added another tally mark to the board, the niggling doubt grew stronger. He ruthlessly pushed it down under the reasoning that they’d found no better lead despite going to extraordinary measures, but the lack of other solutions did not guarantee this one existed.

He drove his sword through the wyrm’s eye before it could start moving again, scrambling its brains. With most monsters, that’d be enough to finish it off, but these damn things had a secondary and tertiary brain located farther down their bodies, so all he really accomplished was shutting down its higher reasoning and driving it to act on instincts.

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That wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t victory either. Worse, in this case it resulted in the wyrm losing control of the magic that let it swim through solid ice. It would have been comical to watch it flop around wearing a couple tons of ice as pants if not for the fact that it was so damn strong that it was ripping the ice free.

Nope. Do not want to get smacked by that.

Sorin went straight up. Even twenty feet was enough distance that his eyes lost the wyrm in the snow, but Observer helped him keep track of the front portion and the block of ice that contained the rest of it. He actually hoped the wyrm broke itself free, else he’d end up wasting anima having to cut through the ice to take out the other two brains.

Shouldn’t have hit it until more of it was in the open, he chided himself.

Something in one of the secondary brains finally clicked into place, and the wyrm flew out of its icy prison so smoothly that it almost completely passed Sorin by before he could descend to finish it off. He must have knocked something loose, though, because the normally aggressive wyrm looked like it was trying to run away.

It did not get very far before succumbing to Force Weaver, though it was fast enough that it forced Sorin to chase after it to keep it in range. After a heart-pumping thirty second pursuit, it collapsed on the spot, and its corpse immediately sank halfway to the stone. Without its magic to keep it aloft, the weight alone was enough to compact fifty feet of snow.

That was annoying but expected, so Sorin just let out a put-upon sigh and dove down after it. He worked his way up from the tail end, not bothering to harvest anything. Sweeping the length of the corpse for a soulprint was easy enough, and he was pleased to see one form about a third of the way down its body from the head.

First time I’ve seen one there. Kind of middle-ish, too. This could be it.

He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but if he could put an end to this task, he’d offer up a prayer of thanks to the tower, God, or both. Working more swiftly than perhaps was wise for such a delicate task, he peeled back the layer of scaled skin and started carving through the muscle beneath. That was another good sign; the soulprint was down in the organs.

By the time he got to it, he was literally standing inside the corpse. In a small act of mercy, the tower actually helped mitigate just how gross that was. It was so cold that the blood had frozen, and Sorin was more than happy to trade not having to clean up for a bit of extra work hacking through the body.

What he finally pulled out looked less like a fleshy organ and more like a glass orb the size of his head that glowed a warm, friendly orange. It was incredibly out of place, all things considered, but Sorin didn’t care about that. The only thing that mattered was that this was undoubtedly Burning Light, and with it, his time on Floor 21 was complete.

Sorin burrowed deeper down to access the mountain buried beneath the snow. Despite not needing to carve a physical sigil these days, he still needed proximity to a solid, immovable surface to make it work, and there were no trees on Floor 21 to use. That left the ground, but the magic didn’t work on loose dirt or snow.

Once he reached it, though, it was the work of a moment to set up a gateway and pass through it. Liminal space stretched out on the other side, all silvery dust and empty, roiling black beyond it. Every time Sorin passed through, he was reminded uncomfortably of the void. With his recently improved understanding of voidlings as discrete pieces of a single entity, he was even more sure that he was right.

Eldritch Tongue didn’t work out in liminal space like it did in the tower, though, or if it did, it didn’t work on a large enough scale. Maybe all the void I see is just one single massive entity. Maybe if I were to go into liminal space outside a different tower, that would be another void creature. God, the scale, though. What would you even call a voidling the size of the tower itself?

Sorin knew part of his deal, if he could even call it that, was taking care of void infestations within the tower itself. He couldn’t imagine how powerful he’d need to be to fight an entire tower’s worth of void at once, but he suspected that was exactly what the tower was doing, what it had been doing for generations. Whatever dregs managed to get inside were Sorin’s responsibility.

He could have made the walk back to the Floor 0 exit faster, but Sorin was wary of using anima while in liminal space. More than once, he’d drawn voidlings to him, and if his caution was edging into paranoia, he didn’t see a problem there. He didn’t loiter, but neither did he go out of his way to draw any attention to himself.

Odric was awake when he entered the house, which could have been another small stroke of luck except for the fact that there were no less than six other people also there. Heldigar was standing in the doorway, his face covered in blood from a nasty gash on his scalp and his chest heaving as he struggled to control his breathing.

Opposite him was a rank 11 decked out in an assortment of knives and daggers, no two of which looked alike. Flanking him, but apparently just watching the fight, were four more climbers all around the same rank. Though none of them wore the insignias openly, Sorin recognized three of them as Galdyrin vassals. It was probably safe to assume the other two were more of the same.

“Ah,” he said softly. “I suppose this is my fault. I knew there was some leftover friction there, and I didn’t go out of my way to deal with it before I left. I apologize for that, Heldigar. This is above and beyond the scope of what I pictured you dealing with.”

“Hey... No... sweat,” he said. “Glad... you’re here... though.”

“Where’d you come from?” one of the vassals demanded as half of them turned to face Sorin.

“It’s him! Never mind how he got in. Just get him!”

Sorin’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Though he was actually rank 28, anyone could sense the appearance of a rank 23. Even that was more than enough to deal with this group, and he couldn’t believe a group of retainers for a high family weren’t smart enough to realize they were outmatched.

I wonder what the trick is going to be, he idly thought as he reached for Force Weaver to immobilize the lot of them.