Book 3, Chapter 65

The assault was not going well. That was well within expectations, thankfully. No one had gone into this with the idea that they were going to close a second rift so soon. The purpose of today’s work was to gather some information about how quickly voidlings could move from one rift site to another and maybe measure how long it took the rifts to spit out enough void-stuff to fully replenish the ranks.

In that respect, Sorin had accomplished his goal. It had taken some time and a lot of carefully crafted pushes to thin the numbers enough for the rift to pull reinforcements from the other site, but eventually they’d managed to trigger the response they’d been aiming for. The real issue was the secondary goal.

Attacking the voidlings was also an opportunity to test out his new allies, and in that measure, they’d been found lacking. Galdred’s friends were powerful and quick to adapt. They had experience dealing with void creatures and knew what to do when confronted with one. But they’d been pushed back far, far too quickly once they had to fight hundreds of them at a time.

It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t have the tower’s gifts empowering them. But it did highlight the reason the Void Wall had persisted for so long—normal climbers could really only fight void creatures for a few minutes before their souls were eroded so badly that they needed to disengage from the battle.

The strike team had been moderately effective despite the handicap, killing probably two hundred or so voidlings in the time they’d had. And they definitely could have pushed harder, but they’d agreed to withdraw to minimize the amount of soul damage they accumulated. It would be a few days before they returned to full strength, which was far better than the near-month Sorin’s team needed.

Samael’s mutagenic climbers had also pulled back once fresh voidlings started pouring out of the rift. They flooded the field, more than doubling the number of enemies Sorin’s team faced. Worse, an entire giant fell out of the rift, appearing so abruptly that Sorin honestly thought it would have been the death of him if he’d been near the rift when it popped out.

“Time for us to retreat,” Odric said. “If we hold off any longer, we won’t be able to make a clean break. We’ll have voidlings chasing us all the way back to the hub.”

“Another minute,” Sorin decided. The other climbers were still fast, but they weren’t as fast as they’d been on the way in. Thus, his team was acting as the rear guard to give them time. He hacked his sword through the closest voidling, causing it to unravel into strands of darkness that drifted away before fully dissipating. “I don’t want to risk the voidlings overtaking the slower people.”

As long as Sorin, Odric, and Nemari stood in the way, especially with all of them purposely projecting their anima reserves to tempt the voidlings into attacking, the swarm was too busy descending on them to chase after the stragglers.

“I’m still hurting from the first battle,” Nemari argued. “And I know you are, too. Odric’s the only one who’s fresh, and he’s the least effective at actually destroying these things.”

Sorin wanted to argue, but she had a good point. “Go,” he said. “I’ll follow in a minute once you’re far enough away.”

Odric smashed a fist into the blob-shaped head of a voidling leaping at him. Half of it disintegrated, but the rest just grew new limbs and came at him again. “We should make a fighting retreat of it.”

“Just go!”

Sorin leaped forward ten feet and slashed through two voidlings rushing in at the same time. They were so close together that their bodies were getting tangled up, but the amorphous nature of their shapes just meant that each one flowed around or through the other without slowing down. It was disturbing and somewhat headache-inducing to behold, but it did make it easier to hit both with a single attack.

Nemari poured anima into supporting him with flashing beams of light while fleeing with Odric, who kept himself between her and the trail of pursuing voidlings. Sorin intercepted the swarm there, cutting off their progress and redirecting their attention to him, leaving only a dozen or so of the creatures chasing after his allies.

He lasted another thirty seconds, but when a void beast got close enough that he had to handle it, he lost control of the swarm. By the time he killed that, they’d tripled in number. Worse, the giant that had fallen out of the rift was closing in on him. Its arm split into a hundred smaller tendrils that flared out like a net as they descended. There was no way for Sorin to run that didn’t result in him smacking straight into void-stuff.

Despite being given ample evidence, the simple creature hadn’t accounted for the power of Sorin’s tower-blue sword. He sliced through the wall of tendrils and leaped free in the fraction of a second he had before new ones grew to seal the hole back up. Then he was running, two leaping steps taking him up out of the voidlings’ reach and giving him some space from the pursuing giant.

Psst... this chapter was scraped from NovelPhoenix, and the author would much rather you read it there.

His route wasn’t a straight line like everyone else’s. As the final diversion, he had one last duty before he broke away. He led the voidlings on a swift fifty-mile chase directly to the next closest rift. Only once the two entities were fully meshed in a struggle to consume each other did he run off. A few of the stragglers turned to chase after him, but Sorin was quickly out of range.

Could have gone worse, he thought to himself as he watched the void creatures eat each other from a few hundred feet in the sky and a mile away. The rift-spawn he’d led away had been a tiny fraction of the total swarm, and he wasn’t sure it was a viable strategy to deliberately introduce outside conflict while assaulting a rift.

Samael’s people had used it as a way to cull numbers, but they’d determined that whichever rift won ended up growing stronger in a proportional amount. Clever tactics allowed them to keep the closest rifts relatively weak, but at the expense of making others untouchable, at least until they’d split off and new rifts had started opening elsewhere.

Would it be better or worse to have one entity that takes from all the other ones? It would certainly make it easier to contain if all the voidlings were coming from a single rift, but we’d never be able to fully clear the infestation that way, not as we are now. On the other hand, it could buy us the time we need to grow stronger.

Sorin doubted that would work in the end. After all, that was what Samael had been doing, and even with the utterly immoral methods he’d employed to field soldiers, he hadn’t managed to do better than check the void’s advance.

Divide and conquer was a much better solution, and his group actually had the tools to make it work. They’d already proven that by closing one rift. Now they had more backup to help take the pressure off them. That meant they could target some of the larger rifts and actually end the threat piece by piece.

All that assumed Galdred’s group would be sticking around. There would be no hiding the fact that some weird stuff was going on, and Sorin wasn’t looking forward to answering the questions. He could only hope that he wouldn’t lose them now that they’d had a taste of what fighting on the Void Wall was actually like.

Might as well get this over with, he thought with a groan.

* * *

“What the hell is that wand?” one of the high family women asked.

She’d practically pounced on Nemari the instant she’d walked into camp. Blinking in surprise, Nemari took an involuntary step back. “I got it as an Antechamber reward,” she said.

“And the appraisal?” the woman pressed. “Do you not realize how this could change the whole nature of this fight? If we could reliably use magic against void creatures, the whole wall would—”

“Enough, Kali,” Galdred cut in, saving Nemari from the woman’s frightening intensity.

“What? No, this is huge! We need to dig into this.”

“Save your questions for the meeting. I’m sure you’re not the only one who wants to know more,” he told her, but his eyes were locked on Nemari as he spoke.

Sorin better get his ass back here soon. This is his show to put on, not mine!

She’d thought he was going to be right behind her, but last she’d seen, he was running off in the opposite direction with a hundred or so voidlings chasing after him. Now it was anyone’s guess as to when he’d make it back, though she didn’t doubt that he would. Even if he’d ended up having to kill all hundred of his pursuers, he’d somehow find a way to wade through them and emerge out the other side unscathed.

“Okay, but seriously, that wand is a big deal,” Kali said in a whisper after Galdred walked away. “Sorry, I come on a bit strong sometimes. If you really don’t know what the enchantments on it are, I will pay for the appraisal myself so we can duplicate them.”

“I... Uh, yeah, we can talk about that at the meeting,” Nemari said.

I don’t think it has enchantments on it, though. Sorin seemed convinced that any actual enchantments we put on the weapons would be eaten by the voidlings when we put them to use. Rue had that storage enchant, though. That’s still working. Maybe it just takes longer? Or maybe Sorin’s wrong about them.

It was too bad they hadn’t been able to recover Vendis’s amulet when he’d died. By the time they’d dug out enough of the collapsed tunnel, the tower had already reclaimed his body. If they’d had it, they could have passed it on to someone else to use and had that much more power to wield against the void, maybe.

If we could make more, though, or get the tower to give them to us... Could we just ask it to? It’s alive. It’s sapient. It knows everything we do. It probably wouldn’t do it for me, but maybe if Sorin was the one to bring it up, it might listen. Getting rid of these things helps it, too, after all.

Rue’s group showed up about ten minutes after Nemari did, which still put them ahead of Sorin. By the time he appeared, everyone else was already gathered by the map and complaining about the full-body ache that accompanied soul damage. Some of them had gotten it worse than others, but only the scouting party had gotten away unharmed.

He strode in, casual as could be, like he hadn’t held off half as many voidlings as everyone else had killed combined, and came to a stop in front of the map. Conversation ceased instantly, though there were a few raised eyebrows from those who’d specialized in sensory enhancements and were surprised to not notice him until he was already there.

“I trust that the information is still accurate, that the reinforcements arriving at the main assault point were pulled from the rift our scouts observed. I’m sure you’ve all compared the numbers already. So, what’s the verdict?”

“Pretty much exactly what we expected,” Rue said. “As much as it’s possible to count voidlings, it seems like more or less the same number went into our rift as came out of yours, including that one giant.”

“Hopefully, this helps reassure you that our source of information is as accurate as claimed. Now, we’ve kept some stuff hidden, and we had a good reason for that. The truth of the matter is that without proof, it’s difficult to get people to believe me when I start the explanations. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to experience it for yourself at this point, so I’m hoping you’ll take at least some of this on faith.”

He looked around at the expectant crowd. “Our source is no less than the tower itself, which spoke to us through the body of Samael, now deceased, less than two weeks ago. I’ll assume you have questions.”

The gathering exploded into noise and chaos.