Book 3, Chapter 71

Sorin could honestly say the next two weeks were among the best of his time in the red tower. His soul healed, he spent his afternoons in charming company, and he worked on his projects. The constant pressure to climb was gone. The clock was no longer against him. He could afford to just let himself exist for a little while.

Inevitably, everyone recovered from the previous battle, and while Sorin would have loved to extend his vacation, the rifts waited for no climber. The good news was that he only expected to be gone for a few hours.

“Sure,” Lorvaine said, “but when you come back, you’re not going to want to move for another week.”

They were sitting at a restaurant that was honestly too fancy for his tastes. She’d picked it, though, and he couldn’t find a good reason to refuse. Judging by the outfits basically everyone else there was wearing, he was severely underdressed for the occasion. The constant looks he’d been receiving certainly seemed to confirm that.

Lorvaine took another sip from the goblet of wine in front of her and cocked an eyebrow as if daring him to argue the point. He couldn’t, though, and she knew it. He would functionally be on bed rest for a few days at minimum, and that was assuming everything went well. They still weren’t up to the numbers they’d had for their first group assault, but he hoped that having a lot more veterans in their ranks would even that out.

There was no need to say any of that. He and Lorvaine had gone through that conversation the first day they’d spent together, and they’d rehashed it twice more as the number of willing participants in the next assault fluctuated.

“Not much I can do about that, and it’s a small price to pay if it keeps anyone else from dying,” he said.

“Didn’t have you pegged as the selfless type.”

“Call it self-interest then. The better this goes, the more people we’ll have for the next one, and the one after that. We’re not halfway done with Floor 24, and no one knows what’s waiting for us up on 25.”

“Just see that you come back in one piece,” she told him. “I’ll be quite cross with you otherwise. I mean to spend quite a bit more time with you.”

“I’ll do my absolute best,” he promised solemnly.

* * *

They collectively decided to take an entire month of rest after the next rift. Things had gone better the second time—more people and more knowledge had seen to that—but the lost anima was too great to ignore. Some people didn’t even need a week of farming to recover it. Some people needed the whole month. For the moment, they had skirmishers pushing back the void’s growth where they could while everyone got back in fighting shape.

Sorin was comfortable working in his soulspace around others now that he could keep an eye on what was going on, but he was still annoyed at being pulled from it while he was in the middle of yet another attempt to manufacture a soulprint out of raw tower-anima.

“Good news, I think,” Yoru said. “The scouts are back with the latest reports. Floor 24 is starting to come back to life.”

Records showed the floor to be a vast, mostly flat plain scoured by endless storms and stuffed full of associated elementals. The land itself supposedly turned against the climbers there. They’d seen none of that, and if the Hellions were to be believed, the tower itself had seemingly abandoned holding the floor against the encroaching void.

“What’s it doing?” Sorin asked.

“Gathering clouds on the horizon. The scouts were attacked by a bladewind elemental on their way back from their latest patrol, and they spotted lightning streaking across an otherwise clear sky.”

“Maybe we’ve retaken enough ground that the tower felt like it wouldn’t be pissing away anima to start repopulating it,” Sorin mused. “Or maybe it’s all autonomic, outside its control.”

“Either way, the tower is going to start putting pressure on the rifts we haven’t gotten to yet,” Yoru said.

“Maybe, but it could also feed them anima at the same time. This might speed up rift growth.”

“You think the tower would do that? It’s intelligent. We’ve seen that. Surely, it judged the damage it could do would outweigh any gains the void might make.”

“We can only hope you’re right,” Sorin said.

* * *

The situation devolved over the next few months. It turned out having the tower’s assistance was significantly worse than it being absent. The expected elementals appeared sporadically, rarely contributed anything of value to the fight against the void, and attacked the climbers in equal measure.

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More than once, Sorin had to fend off angry climbers demanding he do something to get the tower to stop at the meetings, and the fact that he had no line of communication didn’t seem to assuage anyone. All they could do was adjust their tactics and keep pushing forward.

Things almost fell apart completely when they launched their second-to-last assault. It was the last of the double rifts, with only the triple left. Everything started off more or less according to plan, which at this point involved simultaneous assaults. They’d decided on a seventy-thirty split, with the smaller group’s job being primarily to prevent any void giants from forming until the rest of the assault force finished up the primary location.

That was when the tower introduced its latest change: greater bladewind elementals. Unlike the smaller versions they’d been dealing with, these ones were living clouds of metal strips easily twenty feet in diameter. As a monster to use against the void, it was probably about as effective as an elemental could get, but it was also incredibly lethal to any climbers that got caught inside them.

They were fast, too, billowing across the ground at incredible speeds and shredding everything that had the misfortune to get in their way. No natural phenomenon, the elementals were prone to altering their course and chasing after people, often detecting them from as much as a mile away.

Unfortunately, no one in the smaller assault team had any first-hand experience with greater bladewind elementals, and running into them for the first time in the middle of a battle with a few thousand void creatures was a recipe for disaster. The decision to abandon the field was made almost instantly, but they still lost a dozen people before the rest escaped.

By the time the main team finished with the first location and connected with what was left of the secondary team, the rift was occluded in a storm of void-stuff and flying metal so thick that Sorin couldn’t even see through it. For all he knew, there wouldn’t be a single voidling left once it all cleared up, but he doubted he’d be that lucky.

He stood a silent vigil along with two dozen other climbers while the storm of black and gray raged across the plain. The rest of the assault team retreated back to the portal hub with the fallen in tow, and finally, hours later, the bladewind was devoured by the void, leaving not one, but two behemoths guarding the rift.

They managed to close the rift anyway, but Sorin was out of action for another two months after that battle.

* * *

“It’s been almost a year since you started working on this. Are you ready to admit it can’t be done yet?” Nemari asked one day.

“No, there’s a way,” Sorin snapped, unable to keep the heat out of his voice.

“That’s what you said before the last rift battle,” Rue pointed out.

“Samael had soulprints no one else had access to,” Sorin said. “This has to be how he did it.”

“Maybe he just merged other soulprints together,” Nemari suggested.

This wasn’t a new argument. He’d had it multiple times, usually when someone in a leadership position wanted him to spend more time being productive and less time working on what was increasingly looking like a pointless personal project. All the goodwill he’d garnered figuring out how to modify existing soulprints had long since vanished.

“Let him have his hobbies,” Lorvaine said absently. “God knows he’s done enough for everyone else that it’s completely unfair to begrudge him the time to work on something just for himself.”

Her point was accentuated by the plethora of soulprints scattered across the table in front of her. She was examining them one by one and jotting down notes about the alterations he’d made. As a token of apology for forcing her into unintended seclusion, he’d helped her fill some long-standing bounties for rare abilities desired by climbers with large bank accounts.

“I don’t begrudge him his hobby,” Nemari said, “but we need him making more Anima Resistance soulprints for the new recruits. He’s the only one who can, and we need another fourteen.”

That was a never-ending task. The soulprint inhibited the void’s ability to hurt them, but it also strangled their ability to take in new anima from slain monsters. Ripping it back out after a successful raid had become standard practice so that the climbers could regain any lost strength. That, unfortunately, kept Sorin busy making replacement ones.

Sorin waved a hand at a metal box in the corner of the room. It was sealed now, but inside, nestled in padding, were the next batch. “I already made them. They’re in that case over there.”

Nemari scooped it up, popped the latch, and did a quick count. “That’ll get some people off your back for a few days,” she said. “We’re just waiting for the tower conditions to be right to start the next attack. You should get some rest, though. Even if you crack this artificial soulprint thing right now, it’s not going to change much in the next week. We need you at your best for this.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ll be up there tomorrow on standby. If the party starts early, someone will come get me.”

The others filed out, leaving just him and Lorvaine. “You seem... grouchy,” she said.

“Feeling a bit stressed about this last one. We’re already short on manpower between casualties and deserters. I don’t know if we can do a three-rift, but I don’t think we’re going to get any stronger as a whole group.”

“And there’s still Floor 25 after this.”

“And that,” Sorin said with a heavy sigh.

* * *

“Bladewinds moving in on Rift B,” Cirara reported. “Scouts counted four of them lined up to hit the rift within minutes of each other, with two more coming in maybe half an hour behind.”

They’d decided that, if they couldn’t stop the tower from interfering, they’d harness the elementals and divert them toward their purpose. With that plan in mind, the speediest of their numbers had been dispatched to hunt down and lure bladewind elementals in. Rift B had ended up being in the most centralized location, and in a feat of impressive coordination, the runners had managed to arrange for multiple monsters to hit the voidlings there at the same time.

The remaining climbers were split evenly, with Sorin’s team positioned at Rift C. It was the smallest of the three, and they hoped to hit it hard enough to clear it quickly. Then they’d rush to Rift A, close that one, and finally relocate to the vantage point outside Rift B.

That’s if everything goes to plan, and how often does that happen?

There were plenty of ways things could go wrong, and he wasn’t the only one thinking that. That was overshadowed by the fact that this was the last set of rifts. If they won today, they’d fully reclaim Floor 24. That might not be the end of things, but it was a monumental milestone.

Zindra stirred next to Sorin. “As soon as the elementals hit the voidlings, we go.”