Book 3, Chapter 68

The void rifts hadn’t sat still while the climbers recovered. Sorin could clearly picture the map the tower had provided him, and the one Rue and the other scouts had been updating over the last two weeks showed much larger territories for several of them. The ones near the rift he’d already closed had grown the most, but all of the other ones had continued to expand in uncontested directions.

It wasn’t good news, but it honestly wasn’t as bad as he’d been expecting. The void grew, and it consumed; he’d just thought it would do so faster. The ones that had come into conflict with each other had spent as much effort trying to eat their rivals as they had consuming the landscape, which was a factor they needed to consider carefully when they devised their plan of attack.

Their first target was the double-linked rift they’d already prodded once. It was still on the smaller side, and more importantly, the two rifts were close enough that Sorin could get from one to the other in under an hour if he pushed it. Since no one else had the ability to actually close a rift, travel time was another variable that had to be accounted for.

It had taken four days to produce the Anima Resistance soulprints, but it was worth it. They worked even better than Sorin had predicted, perhaps even better than the resistance the tower had given him and his team. The drawback was every bit as potent, unfortunately, but everyone understood the necessity. They’d address removing the soulprint once the Void Wall was broken and the rest of the tower was opened back up.

There had been a lot of debate about how to approach the assault. It was better to have everyone at the same site to overwhelm the voidlings before they could start merging together into stronger variants, but that ran the risk of letting the other site take its time to make multiple giants or, worse, behemoths uncontested.

But, as Sorin had pointed out, everyone other than his team was going to struggle with even a giant, so there was no real chance of them stopping the secondary rift from doing what it wanted to anyway. Working under the theory that all the voidlings would end up at one spot anyway once the rift started bringing in reinforcements, they eventually abandoned the multiple-assaults plan.

The sole compromise was a scout with long-distance communication abilities to keep them updated on what the secondary rift was doing. That person was someone from the Black Hellions, one of the carriers they employed to help new mutagenic soldiers climb up to Floor 24. She was a surprisingly timid woman, considering her profession, but Sorin chalked that up to a lack of first-hand experience fighting the void directly.

Their numbers had swelled to an even seventy now. Part of that was a smattering of deserters from Samael’s legion rediscovering their hope and returning to the fight. Lanir had accepted them back without so much as a hint of reprimand, if only because he recognized how essential their help was.

The remaining climbers were more of the glory-chasers associated with the high families in one way or another, as well as a few independents who’d made up for a lack of backing with an excess of skill or luck. However they’d managed to reach rank 24, Sorin was happy to have them there with him.

The whole assault force had assembled a mile away from the edge of the rift. They’d divided into squads, each with a different objective, though they all ultimately boiled down to killing as many voidlings as possible while avoiding heavier resistance. Their goal was to thin numbers in the opening strikes.

Three teams had different orders, including Sorin’s. Their job was to cut through the chaff and target the void beasts. No one wanted one of those growing into another giant, and once they were finished, two of the teams would switch to watching for new void beasts showing up. Sorin would be going after the four giants roaming the rift’s backlines.

Lanir, as the man who’d commanded the front lines of this war for the better part of the decade, was coordinating their efforts. He raised his sword high over his head and let a brief pulse of white light flash up the length to make sure he had everyone’s attention.

“Begin!” he ordered, swinging the blade down and pointing it toward the rift.

Sorin made sure to pace himself so that he hit the outer edge of voidlings at the same time as the other teams. That was as much as he could do to maintain a formation, though. Once contact was made, coherence stopped being a concern. All that remained was destroying voidlings before they could overwhelm the humans that had delivered themselves to the dinner table.

Five minutes later, the assault force had utterly annihilated the voidling ranks. The massacre was so complete that even the ones pouring out of the rift didn’t last long enough to make a difference. The special teams finished their work with the void beasts, and Sorin had already dropped one of the giants while his own team kept another one busy. The last two were glomped onto each other and rapidly merging into a single behemoth, but that was an expected outcome.

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By the time it finished, Sorin and his entire team were free to meet it. Only the voidlings coming out of the rift remained, and the scout reports indicated that better than half the secondary rift’s numbers were gone. It had, for some reason, decided not to send any of its three giants through and was doing much the same as those in front of Sorin: merging into something larger.

The behemoth couldn’t stand against seventy climbers, especially not when five of them had armaments that helped consume it, and Sorin had the mosaic soulprint Void Eater to speed that process up even more.

Their victory wasn’t without cost, but it was absolute. The hardest part was actually closing the rift, which Sorin suspected had something to do with there still being void creatures at its twin. It took considerably more effort than the first rift, but he managed it.

A victorious roar went up from the collected climbers when the rift folded in on itself and vanished. They streamed across the battlefield, rushing for Sorin and the empty sky overhead.

“By God, we won!” Galdred shouted. “We’re going to break this wall, and we’re going to climb all the way to the top!”

Sorin extracted himself from the impromptu celebration and approached Lanir. “Anything new from the secondary rift?” he asked.

“Fully formed behemoth. Cirara said it was about two hundred feet tall on four limbs and half that as wide.”

“Big one. This’ll suck.”

“I think we should move as a group. It’ll take longer to get there, but that’s literally all that’s left at that side. Whatever new voidlings the rift can produce if we take a few extra hours won’t outweigh the benefit of having all of us on the field with you.”

“I’m more concerned that it’ll grow from behemoth to colossus,” Sorin said.

“I... did not know they got bigger than behemoth class,” Lanir said, blinking in surprise.

“They do, and I’d rather fight a behemoth on my own than let it get bigger. It’s not just the size that changes. They get far more lethal as they grow. You saw how many tendrils that behemoth had coming off it and how well it controlled them. The giants had nothing on it. Colossi are worse. You basically can’t fight them on the ground.”

“Just the fastest then,” Lanir insisted. “Even ten climbers would be worth a small delay.”

In truth, Sorin wasn’t in a good state to fight another fight. Though the battle had been a rousing success, even with Anima Resistance stacked on top of Void Resistance, he’d still taken plenty of damage. Everyone was too busy celebrating to report in on their status, and Sorin figured if they had enough left in them to do that, they weren’t in too bad a shape, but he himself had taken on the biggest and most dangerous threats.

“Only people who can get to the secondary rift in the next two hours,” he said. “I leave in five minutes.”

* * *

“You were not kidding about how big that thing is,” Zindra said in a hushed voice.

“It’s still growing,” Cirara told her. “Look at the rift. You can see a stream of void coming out of it.”

Cutting that link was Sorin’s first priority. Everyone else would provide the distraction while he worked. He’d already looked at how fast the behemoth was growing and decided they had at best half an hour before it hit colossus class. That was plenty of time, but he was glad he’d rejected Lanir’s plan to bring the whole assault force over.

“Alright, this is just like the last one we killed, only more intense,” he said. “Watch out for all the same things, just with a tighter margin of error. I will not have time to bail you out if it catches you, so do not get caught.”

That had happened three times in the last fight, but they’d had the numbers to free the ensnared climber before the tendril retracted to the main body. Sorin had been forced to intervene once to extract someone they hadn’t rescued in time, which was actually where the biggest chunk of his soul damage had come from.

If it happened this time, whoever was unlucky enough to get caught would almost certainly die. That was the price they’d pay for victory, because Sorin needed everything he had left to destroy the behemoth and close the rift after it. To his mind, it was a price worth paying.

What if it was Rue? The thought came unbidden to his mind.

None of his team were with him now, which was both a blessing and a burden. They weren’t in danger, but they had the most firepower, and their absence would make the battle significantly harder. It was too bad the tower-colored weapons didn’t work for anyone else. He’d hoped that other red-tower climbers would be able to use the weapons the rest of his team wielded, but no; something about them was bound to their owners.

Something in the mosaic, I think. Without one, they don’t do anything special to the void.

Their mosaics hadn’t functioned the way any of them had expected, instead feeling cobbled together. Knowing what he did now, he understood that ‘cobbled together’ perfectly described the situation.

The tower had made them on the fly by using Sorin’s as the base to support everyone else’s. Their mosaics were extensions of his own, not something deliberately planned. It was honestly a miracle they worked at all, and Sorin wasn’t sure how much farther they could grow before they broke completely or what would happen to them when that day came.

“You ready to start this party?” one of the other climbers asked him.

No, not really. I just want to go back to sleep for another week.

Sorin ignored that thought. Yes, he was tired. Yes, he hurt. None of that was anything new. He focused on how this was the last fight. If they won here, that was another rift closed and, more importantly, a second entity kicked out of Floor 24. It wouldn’t be coming back to open new rifts next week. There’d only be five left for the remaining eleven rifts.

He tried not to think about how much worse it would be when they moved up from the dual-rift entities to the triple. Thankfully, there was only one of those. The strategists were still trying to decide if it was better to target that one next or save it for last.

“Sorin?” the same climber prompted when he didn’t answer.

Taking a deep breath, Sorin drew his sword and pulled anima through his battered soulspace. “Let’s get this over with so we can all go home, and I do mean all of us. Don’t get yourself killed being stupid.”

“Yeah, boss, we’re not kids. You don’t get to rank 24 making dumb mistakes.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sorin told him.