Book 3, Chapter 66

“You can’t really prove any of this,” Zindra said half an hour later.

“The weapons—” Nemari started to say.

“Prove that there is a way to use anima against the void beyond internal enhancements, not that the tower is alive and talking to you.”

Things had gone almost exactly how Sorin had expected them to. He’d been met with a healthy dose of understandable skepticism and no solid evidence to present. His status as a climber from an alternate tower was unprovable, and while three or four of the gathered assembly looked thoughtful, none of them were leaping to his defense.

“None of this changes anything,” Sorin said. “We all agree that the Void Wall needs to go. That’s what we’re going to be working on. This explanation was just to tell you how we got the information and where the resilience and gear came from. You don’t have to believe me when I say that the tower told me. We’ve already proven that its information is accurate, and that’s all that really matters.”

“Accurate for one pairing,” muttered one of the three scouts who’d gone to the secondary rift. “Doesn’t mean it’s right for all the rest.”

“Fair enough,” Sorin admitted, “but since those are the rifts we’re going to work on next, that’s irrelevant until next month. We’ll need to scout out each one before we tackle it anyway just to make sure nothing’s changed.”

“Can you get us soulprints and gear like you’ve got?” one of the other climbers asked.

“Void Resistance isn’t really a soulprint—”

“Maybe the tower would give us something via a ruin cache,” another one said, talking right over Sorin as he turned in his seat to look at his friend.

“That... Maybe. I can’t promise it would work. We got all our rewards related to this through Antechambers, but it’s kind of the same theory.”

Galdred didn’t agree. “We’ve all run the ruins on Floors 22 plenty of times. None of us have ever gotten anything like that before.”

“We weren’t working as contractors for the tower itself back then. Now we are,” his friend argued.

Sorin wasn’t confident in their chances of success there, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. Maybe they were right, and any upgrades the tower gave them would only help retake Floor 24. After that... He didn’t even want to start thinking about reclaiming Floor 25 yet. That whole floor was void fodder at this point.

“That’s worth exploring,” he said. “We can’t let off the pressure here without making more work for us later, but if we could make a viable team of those who have the least effective builds for fighting voidlings, that might be a good use of resources to test that theory.”

Ideas flew back and forth as the group discussion broke down into individual conversations. Everyone had their own thoughts on what to do with the new information, and the difference in approach mostly came down to how willing they were to accept what Sorin had told them as truth.

The final result was the group breaking apart into three teams. One full climbing team planned to clear a Floor 22 ruin, one would stay on Floor 24 to reinforce the line and make sure the portal hub held, and the final group made up of the ones who’d taken the most soul damage would return home for rest and recuperation.

Sorin didn’t love the plan, but he had no authority to compel the climbers to obey his instructions. Mostly, his issue was that the ruin team would be gone for the better part of two weeks. He was reasonably certain they’d return with confirmation that the tower cache offered nothing to assist with combating the void, thus making the whole venture a waste of time and effort.

They weren’t willing to write it off without trying, however, and the compromise had been going for Floor 22 instead of 23, where the trip would have been closer to six weeks than two. Sorin hadn’t even known there was a ruin on that floor, having only Samael’s notes and route to base his approach to it off of. Galdred’s group knew of two that were relatively accessible, but those had been relegated to backup plans.

So, he bit his tongue, swallowed his criticisms, and wished them the best of luck. He sincerely hoped that he was wrong; that would mean six climbers better able to stand against the void and an avenue to empower the rest of the rank 24s as well.

Most of the climbers vanished through the portal shortly after that, and Lanir swooped down on the four who were remaining to interrogate them on their capabilities. From what little Sorin overheard, it sounded like his plan was to use them as scouts. The mutagenic soldiers were many things, but their specialization into void combat left them unable to quickly traverse large distances, and none of them had anything for real sensory soulprints.

Sorin couldn’t argue with the logic. Keeping an eye on the rifts was important, and the high-family climbers were much better suited to the task than the Black Hellion climbers. Lanir had tried to draft Sorin into doing the job—apparently, Samael himself had done it back when he’d been in charge—but Sorin had better things to spend his time on.

Specifically, he wanted to see if there was something to that whole void resistance soulprint idea. Anima was the medium through which all magic worked, and while Sorin knew for a fact that the tower’s was different from his, he now had access to tower anima with the Anima Tap section of his mosaic. In theory, that meant he could make soulprints.

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He’d been pursuing two branches over the last few months during his down time. The first was attempting to modify existing soulprints—the technique Samael had been trying to puzzle out with some limited measure of success. The second was building new soulprints from scratch inside his soulspace. There’d been nothing in the notes about that, but Sorin didn’t see why it shouldn’t work. He had the right kind of anima. He knew the patterns. All that was left was finding a way to crystallize it into a stable configuration.

Neither idea had been a priority previously. There were a few soulprints he could add to his build at the cost of some space he’d left reserved for free casting, but nothing that would tip the scales when it came to breaking the Void Wall. But if he could find a way to duplicate what the tower had done to grant his team resistance to the erosion just being near the void inflicted on the soul, that could change the game.

Now, if only it was as easy to do as it is to say. We’d have this whole thing wrapped up by next week.

As far as the void-eating armaments went, he’d fended off multiple requests to examine them. It wasn’t even paranoia either. It was that actual enchanters and smiths had already inspected them. Their findings had been simple and conclusive: the sword was made out of an unknown, unidentifiable metal, and it wasn’t enchanted in any way they could see.

The enchantments Sorin had instructed them to add after were already starting to unravel. He’d taken the time to speak privately to his team about that to confirm that was universal among them. Rue’s storage magic seemed intact, but anything and everything they’d had added on beyond what the tower had provided was either fading or already gone.

He didn’t think there was a way to replicate the weapons, at least not with the resources they had available. If high family crafters couldn’t even identify the material, there was almost certainly no way to get their hands on more of it. Sorin personally doubted it even existed in the tower at all. He’d certainly never seen it anywhere but Floor 0 itself when he looked up at the outside of the tower.

They can run the ruins and see if the tower will hand them some tools. I’ll spend my time coming at it from the opposite angle. Hopefully we can figure out Void Resistance. Hopefully it doesn’t require a mosaic to obtain.

Hanging a lot on ‘hopefully’ these days...

* * *

“It’s back to full strength,” Rue reported.

Lanir didn’t even bother to hide his grimace. It had been less than a week since their exploratory assault on the twin rifts—five days, to be precise. None of the climbers were anywhere near recovered from the experience, not including Od, but both rifts had completely recovered.

“Worse,” she added, “there are three new giants.”

“Did that cut down the number of smaller void spawn on the field?” Jinno asked. His expression told Rue that he already knew the answer.

“Not even a little bit.”

“That means they’re not just back to full strength. They’ve surpassed it and grown larger.”

“The rifts have always held each other in check as much as anything we’ve done,” Lanir said. “Destroying the one closest to the hub took the pressure off of us, but it’s temporary. The next closest ones are growing in this direction now, and it’s only a matter of time until we have to start pushing them back again. If we don’t have a solution by then...”

Rue had heard the stories from the surprisingly still-human climbers that made up Samael’s front line. They looked like monsters, but other than having some difficulty speaking due to the physical changes to their mouths, they were very much people. They felt the same pain everyone else did when they fought voidlings, and they accepted it willingly. All the ones who didn’t had already fled.

“Then we will spend our lives buying humanity a few more days,” one of those climbers said from behind Lanir’s left shoulder.

Their commander gave him a pained look, but he didn’t argue. Everyone there knew the truth. Samael was a monster, but his strategy had been working. Sorin wasn’t willing to commit those atrocities on innocent climbers, and that altruism might end up dooming every living being in the red tower. The fact that the species would live on in five other towers was not personally comforting to them.

“How’s our fearless leader’s project coming along?” Jinno asked.

“I have no idea. He locked himself away right after the debrief and hasn’t set foot out since. I know for a fact he’s got no food or water in there, but if he’s not sticking his head out for that, he’s probably not sleeping either.”

“At least he’s committed to the cause,” Jinno mumbled, “for whatever good that does us.”

“It means something,” Lanir told him. “Twenty-eight somethings, to be precise.”

Word of Sorin’s team reaching Floor 24 and closing a rift had spread. Mutagenic climbers who’d abandoned the fight had started to return, though if Lanir was to be believed, only a small fraction had turned up thus far. He’d warned them not to expect anyone at all and to take each soldier as a blessing instead of a right.

Ultimately, it was all a stall. Everyone there understood that. They were buying Sorin time to work his miracle. Rue wondered how many had faith in him, and how many had done the simple math and realized there was no other choice. If people had the strength and resolution to climb in numbers, there’d be hundreds or even thousands of climbers stuck at Floor 24, all working together to break the void infection.

That hadn’t happened. It would never happen. The closest reality had come to that fantasy was Samael mind-controlling weak climbers en masse and forcing them to the front line. And so, if the remnants failed, the void would fall down each floor until it finally reached Floor 0 and washed away the defenseless people living there.

“Perhaps we should consider striking out and closing another rift now that we have more fighters,” Jinno suggested. He looked over at Rue as he spoke, but she knew he wasn’t really asking for her opinion. He wanted to know what Sorin would think.

“We’ll hold for now,” Lanir answered the unspoken question. “When the time comes, we’ll need everything we can muster. The only way to defeat the void is with overwhelming power. We can’t win a war of attrition, not now.”

“Well, that sucks. We don’t have overwhelming power,” Rue said.

“What do we have?” Jinno asked.

“Faith,” the lizard-looking climber said quietly. “We have faith.”

God damn it, Sorin. You’d better come up with something.

* * *

In a locked room on Floor 0, Sorin opened his eyes and looked down at a little, palm-sized bell made of cast iron sitting on the table in front of him. He had a single finger resting on the stubby, little handle at the crown.

It was the soulprint containing Pressure Resistance, made by some random crafter and purchased from the Meat Grinder three days ago. There were a dozen copies scattered across the floor, all of them cracked, dented, or otherwise damaged over the course of his experiments. A dozen more were nothing but piles of ash that had been swept to one side.

This one was whole. More than that, a soft silver light spilled out from beneath it, visible at the seam of two of the planks that made up the table top. Sorin tilted it back and let the silver light from the interior spill out, illuminating the grain of the wood and the dust in the air.

He started laughing, a wild, high sound that would have terrified anyone who’d been around to witness it. There was no one, of course. For this, he’d demanded no interruptions.

“It works,” he cackled. “I’ve done it!”