Book 3, Chapter 69

The hardest part about fighting what the group had collectively coined a rift guardian was that they were a lot smarter than they were supposed to be. Sorin’s theory was that the direct link to whatever entity lurked beyond the rift let it control the guardian, as opposed to a normal voidling that was driven by an instinct to seek out the nearest and strongest source of anima it could find.

The guardians were less predictable, and though the climbers had only fought two of them, both had shown abilities outside the norm for their classifications. The void mist cloud that one had emitted as a defense was something Sorin had only seen once before in his entire life, back when he’d killed a titan on Floor 67 of his original tower. It had used it to feed on a large swath of the floor then, not as a defensive measure.

The one Sorin had dealt with when he closed the first rift used the same underlying principle, but many times smaller and more concentrated. It was such a different experience that he hadn’t even realized at the time that both creatures had done the same thing, just not on the same scale.

Thus, he was expecting the behemoth in front of him to have some tricks neither of the previous two had shown, and he could only guess at what they’d be. The best and probably only real solution was to sever the cord linking it to the rift as quickly as possible. With any luck, that would render the creature merely extraordinarily lethal while being ultimately predictable.

Why am I not surprised that didn’t go to plan?

The others were a beacon of anima charging directly at the behemoth. In theory, they were the perfect distraction for any void creature. In practice, it had worked about as well as Sorin had expected, which was to say it mostly just served as another data point in confirmation of his theory that rift guardians had an actual intelligence lurking behind them.

He fell through the air from five hundred feet up, his drop lined up perfectly to cut into the cord tethering the guardian. It was at least ten feet thick and would probably take three or four passes, but he could already tell not even the first one would be clean. In all likelihood, he was about to find out whether the cord could repair itself and, if so, how quickly.

Four limb-thick tentacles unfolded from the behemoth’s flank, each one ten times longer than the smaller ones that normally writhed around it. They flexed once, then snapped out like a whip. Sorin could actually see the bulge of size shooting up their length to explode from the tip, though there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Two of the blasts shot toward the mass of climbers rushing at the rift. That was fine, expected, even. Their whole job was to get its attention, though they’d all been hoping that would manifest more as a counter-charge that pulled the behemoth away from the rift. A ranged attack wasn’t outside their predictions, and Sorin trusted the rest of his backup team to handle it.

The other two blasts shot up at him, however. Considering he was farther away, keeping a tight hold on his aura to help hide his anima, and trying to sneak around a target that had been given a big, obvious distraction to hold its attention, he shouldn’t have warranted a single attack, let alone two.

Either that thing recognizes me from closing its other rift, or it’s even smarter than we gave it credit for. Maybe both. Then again, if I’m right and these void entities are just smaller, less powerful versions of the tower itself, it makes sense. We’re facing something with an actual intelligence now, not the automated feeder constructs it’s been scattering all over.

Unfortunately for the behemoth, Sorin’s trajectory wasn’t dictated by gravity. It took almost no effort to dodge both void bolts. He corrected his course back on target the instant they passed him by, but he didn’t make the mistake of thinking the danger was through. He’d already seen attacks like this before, and he keenly remembered them falling apart into a pack of voidlings.

So he wasn’t surprised to see twenty of them falling down after him, though he doubted they’d catch up since they relied on nothing but gravity to speed them along. Nor was he surprised when a second round of bolts came out of the behemoth. The entity controlling it had probably realized it couldn’t push its guardian to colossus stage and had decided to divert the excess void-stuff back down into smaller units.

What he hadn’t expected—and in hindsight, he really should have—was that the next bolts would explode right in his face. The moment they reached his altitude, both of them burst apart into void beasts already reaching out with a few dozen grasping tendrils to ensnare him.

Sorin’s agility saved him. With the void so close, trying to use Wind Strider didn’t really work. External anima projections had a way of breaking down immediately, and without that to reposition himself, he was left wiggling around and throwing his weight to reorient himself into a spin that allowed him to hack at the tendrils.

Whoever runs this site didn't write this story. It was copied from NovelPhoenix, where the author actually publishes it.

It wasn’t easy, and he didn’t escape unscathed, but he managed to keep himself from being tangled in either void beast long enough to get the distance he needed to break free. He took a single step upwards, breaking his momentum at the cost of an immense wave of pain shooting up his leg, and the void beasts fell too far away to reach him.

With creatures above and below him, Sorin’s margin to work was too thin to survive any more interference from the behemoth, but fortunately, he didn’t have to. It ran out of time. The void beasts splattered against the black, crumbling dirt below, and Sorin’s blade slashed through the cord running into the rift.

He took two steps forward on the air, circling under the cord and coming back up the other side. With his sword held overhead, he cut across the bottom, then up the opposite side of his initial cut. A longer blade might have enabled him to cleanly sever it, but failing that, Void Eater made up for some of the lack. Where he’d sliced through the connection, the tower’s magic had widened the blows.

There was still the inner core to deal with, and Sorin could see the two halves trying to grow back together less than a second after they’d been parted. That answers the regeneration question, I suppose. No surprise it’s the worst possible result.

The only positive note was that the tether appeared to be much, much more rigid than the actual void creatures. Cutting a voidling in half didn’t really do anything. The blade just passed through it, leaving a whole creature standing there, uninjured and reaching for the nearest source of anima. That was why Sorin wasn’t surprised that the cord was regrowing so quickly. He was just happy it could be severed at all.

But now he was within the behemoth’s reach, and it wasn’t content to sit by, passively waiting for him. Left with no choice but to retreat or be engulfed in a tide of encroaching void, Sorin started to leap through the air. He aborted the maneuver as soon as it began, however, because he wasn’t the only one who’d realized the issue.

It was the climber who’d told him that they didn’t get to rank 24 by making dumb mistakes. He’d seen that Sorin hadn’t been able to cut completely through the cord, correctly deduced that the behemoth would surge back up its length to reach him, and decided to do something about that. Unfortunately for him, it looked like the only thing he’d come up with was to use his body as a living shield to give Sorin the time he needed to finish the job.

No, damn it! Don’t—

But it was too late. The void flowed over him like water, surrounding the climber and completely engulfing him. It barely even slowed, not for more than a fraction of a second. A man couldn’t stand against a flood. It just didn’t work that way. Water wasn’t stopped by a single body, and neither was the void. The climber’s body ignited with anima—one last desperate attempt to draw the behemoth’s attention as it rolled over him.

But at the level they worked at, a fraction of a second could make all the difference.

Sorin swooped back down, sword leading, and dove through the cord. He could feel the void scraping against his soul as it tried to close back up. If he let it, it would entomb him inside just like that climber whose name Sorin had never bothered to learn.

The tower-blue sword flashed through that last few feet of void cord, snapping it and disintegrating the whole link. Sorin emerged into open air, his eyes already scouring the void for some sign that the climber was still there, that there was a hand he could grab and pull the man out.

Nothing.

It would be a miracle of pure blind luck if that climber survived now. Sorin plunged his blade into void-stuff at his best guess of where the man would be. If he skewered human flesh, good. At least then he’d know where to dig. Limbs could be regrown after.

That didn’t happen, but the sword ate a chunk out of the behemoth before Sorin was forced to withdraw. After that, he had no choice but to revert to typical tactics. He targeted tentacles most of the time, the same as everyone else was doing. He watched for new voidlings dripping down from the creature’s trunk, splattering like fat, black raindrops against the dirt before they sprang back up as independent beings.

He destroyed the void as quickly as he could. The others helped. All of them knew they were racing against time to break the behemoth down and rescue their teammate before it sucked the very life out of him. For a normal climber, that process would take seconds. With Anima Resistance, Sorin hoped they had a minute.

Victory was, perhaps, inevitable. Without the guiding intelligence of the rift entity, the behemoth became far more predictable. The more they whittled it down, the easier it got to avoid it and the faster they worked. Still, it wasn’t a job that could be done in a minute, no matter how reckless some of them were acting.

It took closer to five before the body fell free. Immediately, a climber claimed it and darted out of the behemoth’s range. Whether the man was still alive or not didn’t change what the rest of them had to do, so they kept fighting. By the time they’d reduced it to a giant, the battle had turned completely in their favor. Soon it was too small for all of them to circle around, and half the group retreated.

Eventually, there were no more void creatures left on the field. Sorin spared a glance for the other climbers gathering around the fallen man, then turned back to the rift itself. Despite his exhaustion and the pain of his scoured soul, it was easier to close this rift than it had been to close its twin. Only when he was done did he finally turn to limp toward the gathered climbers.

Though he knew the answer without asking, a small flicker of hope still burned in his chest. They were in uncharted territory, and the old rules didn’t always apply. It was possible that maybe, just maybe, the man had survived being submerged in a behemoth.

The others looked up at Sorin’s approach, and that flicker of hope dwindled away to nothing. None of them said a word. They simply gathered their gear, hefted the body, and started walking back toward home.