Chapter 335: Soap Bubbles

Crack.

The sound of distant thunder drew Will’s attention away from the beating heart and to his surroundings.

The kaleidoscope of colors resolved into hundreds of gem-like faceted pockets of space slowly drifting by his island, bending light as they spun, sending beams of light scurrying across Will’s eyes.

I’m on an island? Will thought consulting his map and wincing at how brightly the miasmatic structures glowed. His first impression had been that the sky above was empty, but that wasn’t entirely true. There was some kind of engulfing darkness that swallowed the distant gems above him. According to his map, they were up there, just invisible.

Where’s the light even coming from? Will wondered, squinting up at the black sky, his eyes watering as he felt the sun burn into his retina, even though he couldn’t see it.

So there’s a sun up there, I just can’t see it.How strange. What does that mean? Visible light is being bent away, but higher frequency light isn’t? Is that what’s causing the world to glow like that?

Will had been paying attention to his studies, but even having an inkling of what was happening didn’t really answer any of his deeper questions.

He turned his attention back to the heart that seemed to be magically linked to his own.

What’s the deal with this thing, anyway? Will mused, studying the heart’s Miasmatic structures, keen on understanding it as quickly as possible, because it seemed critical to surviving this Floo-

The sound of thunder, much closer than before, brought Will’s attention back to the edges of his own faceted prison.

The thunderclap was the sound of the two massive gem-like spaces impacting against each other, creating a reverberation through the air itself that echoed from end to end of the twisted space.

This is so odd.

Will spotted the others coming through their portals, each arriving in their own personal isohedron island.

BOOM!

Will jumped in place as the isohedron of twisted space that had bumped up against his own suddenly matched facets with his.

As the facets aligned, there was a loud rumble that sent a shockwave through the air and an instant later, the barrier between the two facets disappeared, revealing a horde of insectoid monsters.

In a glance, Will understood how this Floor was going to try to kill him.

“Oh shit, Beth needs help.” Will muttered as the swarm began to flood into his isohedron of twisted space, following the glowing path laid out for them on the ground.

Straight towards Will. More specifically, straight towards the giant beating heart directly behind him.

Will didn’t have much time to make a decision with the creatures bearing down on him, so he ran a simple experiment: He lifted himself up to eye level with the giant heart on its pedestal.

And he poked it.

There was a sudden, deeply uncomfortable flutter in Will’s chest as something brushed against his heart, nearly causing it to stutter. His chest tightened and breath seized in his lungs.

Okay, so it’s linked to my heart. How?

Will turned an eye back to the flood of insectoid monsters. They were about eight feet long apiece, six gangly legs, vicious mammalian jaws with serrated teeth and armored hides.

They were about six seconds out.

I imagine Jorn will do well against these things, Will thought, turning the armor on one Phantom Hand into a long blade while the other shot towards Jorn’s position. An instant later, the Phantom Hand rebounded off the wall separating the inside of the isohedron from the outside.

Damn, I can’t back them up.

“Hey, how are things going over there?” Will asked through the map, fitting the manifested earpiece in while his Phantom Hands shredded the approaching horde.

“Will? Where are you?” Jorn’s voice echoed through his map straight into his ear.

“I’m on a different island. Do you have a giant heart behind you?” Will asked, summoning his

“Yeah, should I-“

“Don’t touch it.” Will said, quickly repeating those instructions to the others, smiling when he spotted that Loth was already weaving protective magic around the heart.

“The heart is magically bound to your own. If it’s destroyed, you will die. Loth and I are going to work on severing the connection to the hearts. The rest of you stay where you are and don’t die.”

Will summoned his fae and butlers, as many as he could at once.

Charge 1139->1049

Seven fae in a chevron with eighteen butlers behind them manifested, kneeling in front of him.

“What is your command, my lord?” Jakome asked. The fae ghost was the leader of the seven, and quite the shifty fellow, now that Will had gotten the opportunity to spend more time around them.

“Defend the heart. I need to be able to focus on other things.

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“Yes my lord.”

Will manifested Hammer of God and imbued it into Stevie, and then gave the Dimensional Coiled Serpent amulet to Billy-Bob.

That brought his two head butlers up above the level of the fae ghosts, because they’d been with him much longer and he trusted them a lot further.

To their credit, the fae didn’t complain at being upstaged by the lesser spirits, just doing as he asked and forming a defensive perimeter around the heart and fending off any monsters who came down the glowing paths leading to it.

Can I leave the island? Will thought, flying towards one of the triangular faces of the warped space he was trapped in.

He slammed into it foot-first, the shock travelling straight up his legs into his spine.

Ow. The Abyss? Will thought, stamping his foot on it and inspecting the face with every sense he possessed.

It seemed as though any force he put into it was transmitted directly back into him, as though his feet had impacted…his own feet.

Will swiveled around and brought his face up to the featureless panel of dimensional energy.

As his eye was less than a millimeter away from the force-field, Will suddenly saw his own iris staring back at him.

Ah, crap, it’s bending spacetime back as matter tries to pass through the face of the isohedron.

“Loth, I’m going to try to figure out how to navigate the Floor, would you mind figuring out how to unlink our hearts from the pedestal in the center of the island?” Will asked.

“Already working on it. The center of the pedestal has some seriously suspicious miasmatic structures, much more complex than your magic missile targeting scheme.” Loth replied, the sound of dying monsters leaking in around her voice.

Will turned his attention to Beth and Sammohan and saw that other isohedrons had already begun drifting towards theirs, seemingly attracted to the island with the activated pedestal.

Damn, I wonder…

This Floor is designed to isolate us, artificially create a massive weak point and then wear us down defending it until we die. It seems to have rules that it plays by, but if we follow them, at the very least Sammohan and Beth will die.

To the Abyss with that. Will had no intention of playing by the rules of this weird-ass Floor.

And to do that, he needed to do two things:

Number one: Figure out how to disable the magical heart link.

Loth was already working on that, and Will was sure she would finish fast enough.

Number two: figure out how to traverse across the spacial boundary between different glowing islands. And if there was any Class that was good at figuring out how to ‘traverse’ from point A to point B, it was the World Traveler.

That was why Will had assigned the role of breaking out of these cages to himself.

Now, how to do it. Can I counter the dimensional strands? Will thought, scanning the barrier forming the isohedron of isolated space. The dimensional strands were only at the seamlines between faces of the figures, and more irritatingly, they were on the outside, so Will would have to figure out how to get around them before he could disable them.

Titan’s Grasp is usable outside the barrier using Map. Will was currently using it to transfer sound vibrations to his team, but he could just as easily use the Ability through Map to manipulate Miasmatic structures.

Just looking at them gave Will a bad feeling.

They were ropes of charged dimensional Miasma the width of a man’s arm, humming with energy. The structures were eerily similar to his Magic Missile spell that slammed together and made dimensional ripples that tore apart the target.

So if I disable these haphazardly, there’s a good chance I get torn to bits by ripples in spacetime.

After accidentally cutting himself in half the first time, Will had a lot more respect for freeform miasma handling.

Instead of destroying them, maybe I can add an extra strand of miasma to the midpoint to create an opening in the center of the face? Will mused, inspecting the thick rope of thrumming miasma.

I would need some kind of example for how to make a panel open on it’s own to-

Will slapped his forehead and flew up to where his island’s boundaries had matched up against the boundaries of the monster-filled one, looking for a clue for how to unravel them and pass through.

The two arm-sized ropes of thick miasma had suctioned together through some kind of pressure differential in the magic around them, creating an empty pocket between them that disabled the matching faces of the isodhedron.

Will had some rough idea of how it worked, but to make a clever workaround from scratch would take time he didn’t have, and creating an entire matching rope of miasma to disable the entire barrier at once took more power than he could currently muster.

I need a simpler, faster solution. Wait…

Will extended his hand through the gate between his island and the other island.

There was nothing preventing him from moving to the next island, save for the heart connected to his own preventing him from leaving it. Even now, more islands were drifting in, aiming to connect to his and flood his island with monsters eager to maul his heart.

Who says I have to get outside these barriers? All he really needed to do was connect his island to everyone else’s islands. Will this work? One way to find out.

Titan’s Grasp

Passive: Space and gravity warp around objects the user wants to hold, allowing them to handle objects larger or smaller than they might’ve otherwise been able to handle, whether that be from cumbersome size or weight.

Will wanted to grasp the islands themselves.

The islands themselves weren’t that big, only the size of a small stadium, without anything in the way of buildings, just a narrow platform surrounded by a multifaceted dimensional barrier.

Will heaved a breath of relief as the other’s islands began slowly drifting towards his own. The sigh quickly turned into a cold sweat as an island drifting towards Jorn’s island missed because of Will’s intervention. The sudden acceleration of the close call sent the isohedron barreling towards Beth’s at a speed Will hadn’t accounted for.

With a sound of distant thunder, Beth’s island joined together with another monster-filled platform. The creatures began trampelling down the glowing path towards the young priestess and the rapidly beating heart behind her.

Damnit.

The monster-island currently attached to Will’s platform was currently between them, and Will had been trying to guide hers around in order to have her dock directly with his own.

But that was no longer an option.

“Hang on just a few seconds.” Will said through the map, diverting her course towards the side of the monster-bearing platform.

“Madelhari, Tassos, Keeney. Five butlers.” Will said.

The requested troops arrived beside him in the blink of an eye.

“As soon as the path is open, defend Beth and her heart.”

“Yes, milord.” They said.

BOOM!

The thunder of a connection washed over them and the eight ghosts flickered forward.

“There’s too many of them!” Beth’s shout sounded through Will’s earpiece, but he was already shifting his attention to Sammohan.

DAMN!

Sammohan had been surrounded by two waves of monsters coming from two platforms that had joined his own.

He had turned his body into liquid metal and had wrapped himself around the heart, sending blades out to kill the monsters.

He was strong, for a miner his specialty was surviving hazardous environments and refining ores, it was not slaughtering monsters, and that was reflected by his slow speed at killing the flood of monsters, allowing them to crowd in around him.

They were chewing away at his metal form and his ability to reform was getting slower and slower.

I swear to the gods, this Floor is obviously man-made, and if I find the one who made it, I’ll give him a good slapping.

Will focused on the task at hand, diverting Jorn’s cluster of islands towards Sammohan.

Jorn was purpose-built for erasing large waves of monsters, and true to form, his undead creations were pushing the monsters back into their holes and wiping them out, creating a large safe-zone.

Come on, come on…

“Jorn, send a group through the platform to your left, I’m connecting Sammohan to it. YOUR OTHER LEFT!”

Will used Titan’s Grasp to grab Jorn’s hand and point with it.

“Thanks for the backup!” Beth’s words went unheard as Sammohan collapsed to the ground.