Chapter 285 Book 3, Chapter 72

All of reality shifted in a now-familiar lurch as the rift snapped closed. A somewhat ragged cheer went up, but everyone was too exhausted to commit anything stronger to it. Even with a secondary team pressuring Rift A and Rift B dealing with the bladewind elementals, there’d been a marked quantitative difference in the amount of reinforcements coming in.

That had meant more void beasts and giants, of course, which had caused the fight to drag and drag. An entire team had ended up dead when a quintet of void beasts had spontaneously collapsed into one spot, forming the smallest giant Sorin had ever seen. It had been big enough to get the job done, and by the time the elites had arrived to deal with it, there were six new corpses on the field.

“One down, two to go,” Galdred told him.

“Two to go,” Sorin echoed. I don’t know if I can do two. I don’t even know if I can do one.

He kept that thought to himself. It helped nobody. With any luck, the other two rifts would be weakened from sending so many voidlings to this one. Combined with having extra numbers once the two assault teams merged back into one, Sorin hoped to be able to take it easy and conserve his strength for closing the actual rifts.

“Status update!” Zindra demanded, her voice carrying across the empty, black plain.

“Bladewind event still ongoing at Rift B,” someone reported.

“Some casualties at Rift A, void forces depleted by thirty percent,” another climber added. “We’re being pushed back and will likely have to abandon the field before reinforcements arrive.”

Shit. So much for taking it easy.

The frontrunners would go ahead of the main assault force to bail out the team already on site, and Sorin was included in that number. Far from conserving his energy, the fighting was likely to be even more frenetic around Rift A. The only thing that had gone right was that Rift B was still preoccupied dealing with the tower, but even that left an uneasy feeling in Sorin’s gut.

The last time an elemental had savaged a batch of voidlings, what had finally come out of it was stronger than anyone had predicted. If half a dozen of the massive elementals still hadn’t chewed through the void gathered there—and the storm hadn’t dispersed on its own, its anima drained—that meant something big and nasty was brewing there.

There was nothing they could do about it, either. It was suicide to walk onto that field. They’d known that was a possibility though, which was why their plans had a provision for falling back after closing the other two rifts. It wasn’t ideal, but if they could walk away to recover with only a single remaining active rift, they figured they could get back in the fight before it had time to spawn more than one new one.

In fact, none of the rifts had spawned anything new, which Sorin found suspicious. They obviously had the capability; most of them had two linked locations before Sorin’s team had arrived and upset the balance. The fact that none of them had opened another rift in all the freshly reclaimed territory in all the months that had been an option meant there was some external factor at work preventing it.

He could only hope that said external factor was the tower blocking it somehow, because if it was something else, Sorin had no doubt it’d be a problem for him to take care of somewhere down the line. Unfortunately, there was still no communication with the tower itself, so he couldn’t ask.

“Frontrunner team to the Rift A site,” Zindra yelled. “If you can run, go! Everyone who can will be following behind you.”

“Two to go,” Galdred said again. “I’ll see you there.”

Sorin just nodded back. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

* * *

Closing the second rift was even harder than the first one. They had less people, and though there were also less voidlings to deal with, everyone was exhausted and hurting from the first fight. They got the job done, though, at the cost of seven more climbers. All of them had fallen more due to their own weariness than anything.

The survivors—those that still thought they could fight, at least—hurried toward Rift B to join the battle, but when they got there, they found fifty people milling about on the plain, a mile away from the outside edge of the rift’s domain. The void storm still roiled in the distance, now a massive column of darkness and steel over a hundred feet tall.

Sorin found his team waiting for them, though only Odric looked over at his approach. He lifted a hand in greeting. “You look like hell,” he said.

“What a coincidence. That’s about what I feel like, too. What’s going on here?”

“More elementals started showing up,” Yoru said, his eyes not leaving the cloud. “For a minute, we thought they might overwhelm the void presence for us, but then it started flowing out of the rift. Communications confirmed it wasn’t coming from either of the sister rifts, so we’re not sure what to make of that.”

“Doesn’t matter right now,” Nemari added. “What’s important is that there’s still a rift somewhere in the middle of that. We can’t get close until the tower and the void finish their fight, so everyone’s taking the time to rest. Won’t do much for the soul damage, but at least you can catch your breath from all the fighting and running.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Sorin muttered.

He was cursed with no such luck, however. Even as the stragglers trickled in, the void cloud started to contract. They all watched as it visibly shrunk in size over the next two minutes, the blackness congealing from a mist into solid form while the ribbons of steel gray elemental twined around and through it dissolved into nothing.

This text was taken from where the author publishes the story without permission; reading the chapter on that page supports their work.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Sorin said halfway through. He was counting legs and had come to a disturbing conclusion.

“We can handle four giants,” one of the climbers argued.

“It’s not giants. See the mass growing in the center?”

“Some sort of void arachnid?” Rue asked.

“In a way. More like an octopus, I guess. There are no bones or joints in there. That’s a colossus.”

Though no classification of void creature truly stuck to a single shape, giants were generally bipedal and behemoths were quadrupedal. The tendrils coming off them didn’t count, of course. Those disappeared as quickly as they formed, and whether there were ten or a hundred was entirely dependent on how much anima was nearby.

Colossi had roughly the same amount of central mass as behemoths, but were characterized by the multitude of static leg formations that were hundreds of feet long and doubled the total amount of void-stuff making up their bodies. They were a lot faster than their lesser cousins, too, which made them even more dangerous to fight than usual.

The tactic he’d developed with his team in his old tower involved a lot of flying circles around the top mass, strafing runs that carved it away piece by piece. It was a slow process, one that could take hours with only a single team working on it. And it was by no means safe just because they were above the legs. Every void creature’s body was morphable enough that it was a bad idea to assume it couldn’t reach something just because it wasn’t currently facing the right direction.

In a matter of moments, the colossus was fully formed. The last vestiges of bladewind elemental vanished, and the massive void creature rose to its full height, some three hundred feet tall. That was small, as far as this classification went, which was about the only good thing Sorin could think of in regards to the situation.

Then it started walking forward. Exclamations of surprise went up from the gathered climbers—no one had expected it to abandon the rift—and they were soon pointing out that it had no tether. Rapid speculation filled the air, with the most likely theory being not that the guardian was absent, but that it was somehow hidden inside the rift, ready to erupt out at an opportune moment.

“One problem at a time,” Zindra ordered. “If that thing’s willing to walk away, we’ll let it. Pull it a few thousand feet from the rift. We’ll kill it out in the open, and if any reinforcements show up, we’ll have time to intercept them before they reach the battle.”

Thanks to Sorin’s expertise, they all knew the strategy and tactics for battling a colossus. None of them had expected to need that knowledge, but they weren’t so foolish that they hadn’t prepared for an encounter with one.

Sorin was content to let the rest of the assault force divide themselves into teams. He would be in the air along with the dozen or so climbers who had the capability to join him, and it would fall on them to do the bulk of the work. Everyone else would just be chipping away at the legs when they could, but the majority of their time would be spent dodging limbs of void-stuff and handling the lesser void-spawn that fell off the creature’s belly.

He leaped into the air as the colossus approached, quickly followed by a few others. His course wasn’t a straight shot for the void creature, but instead at a sharp angle off to the left and slightly back to the battlefield they’d chosen. It didn’t turn immediately to lumber after him, but once the ground forces started moving, it obediently changed direction.

Contact was everything Sorin expected it to be. The main mass was a sixty-foot oblong sphere of writhing darkness covered in hair-like tendrils, if hair had been scaled up to size. Each one was four or five inches in diameter at the base and perhaps two feet long, though that estimate varied wildly from second to second. As the climbers approached for their initial run, the tendrils reached toward them, and the colossus’s true attack began.

Bits of void-stuff were flung through the air at blindingly fast speeds. Avoiding a shot was more a matter of predicting trajectory than it was dodging out of the way, which wasn’t outside Sorin’s capabilities at all. He could have avoided individual blasts all day long.

The colossus wasn’t content to fling one shot at a time. It spat out hundreds of them, all clustered together so that there was no dodging around them. The only options were to get out of the way entirely or take the hits, and even in retreat, gravity couldn’t get a human being out of the way fast enough.

Some of them tried that. It was a predictable dodging technique for aerial combat, and not one an experienced climber used against a smart monster. Void creatures generally showed no real intelligence, though, so Sorin could see why his allies might have considered it a safe bet.

It didn’t work this time. Hundreds more bolts of void-stuff rocketed out of the colossus’s main mass, chasing the falling climbers’ angle of descent and smacking into them. The only real surprise was that the bolts didn’t dissipate; they formed what had to be the tiniest voidlings Sorin had ever seen.

Barely eight inches tall, the miniature voidlings clung to their victims in massive numbers. Sorin half-expected them to start linking together and forming into regular-sized creatures, but they did nothing of the sort.

That’s a sure sign this fight is going to be abnormal. What other tricks do you have, and how many of us are going to die trying to figure them out?

“Ground yourselves and get help cleaning them off you!” Sorin yelled. “Swarm clearing tactics!”

Thankfully, a few of them had already had the right idea, and the rest quickly followed after. There were four climbers like him who’d opted for distance over dodging, and who’d used their weapons to deflect as many of the shots as they could, and they quickly formed back up once the opening salvo of mini-voidlings ended.

“Did it lose any mass at all from that?” one of them asked.

“Not enough to make a difference,” another shouted back.

And it should have. Even at that size, that’s a lot of void-stuff to throw away. If it were a guardian, I’d—

A miniature rift split open the air directly in front of Sorin. It was only a few feet tall and half a foot wide, barely a crack compared to the fully formed rifts he’d been dealing with all year. But it was the first time he’d ever seen one form, and the positioning couldn’t be a coincidence.

“New rift!” he bellowed, veering to the side in a frantic attempt to avoid whatever was about to spill out.

A stiff tentacle lanced past him, shooting a hundred feet into the open air before it started to curl around in pursuit. By that point, Sorin was already near the rift. He slashed his sword through the tentacle with a slow, lazy swipe, relying on the consuming properties of the weapon to sever the appendage without giving it the opportunity to reseal itself back together in the wake of his blade.

The rift sealed itself back up and vanished while the tentacle shrunk down on itself, transitioning from long limb to something void-beast-sized. By the time it crashed into the ground, it was just one more voidling among hundreds that had fallen free of the colossus’s body in the opening moments of the battle.

And this thing isn’t a hair smaller. If anything, it might be a bit bigger. If it can create tiny, temporary rifts with combat applications, then... Sorin glanced back at the main rift. There was no tether, but maybe it didn’t need one. This is the guardian, and there’s no weak spot for me to cut it off from its power source.