Chapter 286 Book 3, Chapter 73

Every time they took out another rift, the battle was absolute chaos. Anima Resistance was all well and good, but it wasn’t an absolute defense. It merely let them withstand proximity to the void longer by slowing down the rate it stole anima from them. Rue considered herself lucky; she had some actual void resistance bestowed on her by the tower that let her last even longer than most and a weapon designed to consume void-stuff rapidly.

But those advantages were no guarantee, and there were enough voidlings to challenge everybody. As far as rift battles went, this one was actually pretty tame, which meant that there were only three or four voidlings trying to leap onto her at a time as opposed to ten or twelve. She cut apart what she could, dodged what she couldn’t, and relied on mobility as her greatest asset.

Usually, that was enough. Rift battles were about whittling enemy numbers down and outlasting the reinforcements. Superficially, this was the same, at least if she didn’t count what was essentially a bunch of ten-foot-thick death columns flowing across the battlefield. She’d already seen two of Galdred’s climbers get caught in those. They hadn’t come back out the other side alive.

It’s the rain that’s going to win this for the voidlings, she thought.

It wasn’t really rain. It was little thumb-sized drops of pure void falling out of the colossus’s underbelly. When it splashed onto a void creature, it swelled ever so slightly in size. With dozens of them hitting the same void creature every second, it grew faster than any climber who didn’t have a tower-certified void-slaying weapon could kill it.

Worse, when it landed on a person, it acted exactly like every other void creature did. It consumed anima, and it clung. The battle had barely started, and they were already organizing a rotating schedule of skirmishers at the edge of the ‘rain’ to keep the voidlings in check with a mobile triage station behind them that worked to clean void-stuff off climbers before it could drain them dry.

All of that would have been manageable. Some of it was new, but it was really just the same tactic in a different outfit: destroy the voidlings before they were overwhelmed. But they’d all gotten damn good at judging how quickly a big void monster was shrinking, and this one... wasn’t.

“Switching out,” she called.

She cleared out the three voidlings within reach in a blur of swordplay, then threw herself into a flying backflip that took her over the head of the climber rushing in to replace her. It was Birran, she noted with a wince. He was good at holding a line, but not so much as destroying voidlings quickly. That meant he was always among those who took the longest to recover.

Back in as quick as I can, she told herself. Two minutes, tops.

Other climbers were already advancing on Rue. The whole operation took place at a jogging pace as they moved to keep abreast of the main battle, and not just so that they could get back into the thick of things a few seconds quicker once the clinging void-stuff was cleared off her. The mini-rifts were new, and they seemed to like finding stationary targets.

Scrapers flashed by, skimming Rue’s armor and scooping up void-stuff. They were almost like swords, but with the end flattened out and then curved into something that resembled a long, thin paddle on a metal stick. Someone had come up with the design around the fifth rift, useful as a way not to kill a voidling, but to detach it from its victim still whole and fling it clear.

Nobody had expected to need them to scrape away raindrops made of raw void essence. They’d just been thankful to have a tool on hand that could be repurposed to fit the task. Rue was clean in less than ten seconds, and it only took the team another twenty to clean up the mess once it had been detached from her. Void that wasn’t alive in the traditional sense didn’t do much to fight back when the climbers fell on it with swords and sliced it into pieces so fine that they vanished into thin air.

Then she was back in the queue to switch out with someone else. The line moved quickly; most climbers stayed on the skirmish line for a minute at most before being replaced. Any longer and the void-stuff piled up so thick that it started causing real damage.

Rue was back in the fight just shy of two minutes after she’d left. She lasted longer than either of the people flanking her, but eventually she was forced to switch out again. The cycle repeated, and she took a moment to shoot a worried look up at the sky where Sorin and a few others were hopefully doing something to break the stalemate.

* * *

This isn’t working, Sorin thought to himself.

They’d been brute-forcing a solution to every rift with numbers and Anima Resistance soulprints. It had worked, and it wasn’t exactly fair to claim that his fellow climbers were unskilled, but there was no denying that they’d won each battle through superior defense. Their tactics had grown as they’d come up with new tools to help them win, but now that they were up against a seemingly inexhaustible enemy, it was becoming apparent to everyone involved that they didn’t have a strategy beyond outlasting the voidlings.

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There was no doubt that this was the rift guardian. Sorin could only assume there was an open rift hidden somewhere inside its massive body that connected it to the main rift. If he could get to it, he thought he could force it closed, severing the invisible tether that fed the colossus all the void-stuff it could ever need.

The problem was that he couldn’t get to it, no matter what he tried. He couldn’t even find it, and there wasn’t enough time to rely on blind luck. Just hoping that he’d attack a new spot and find the hidden rift was no strategy, and that was supposing the rift couldn’t move, which he didn’t think was true. The whole colossus was moving; if the rift was stationary, it would have left it behind. At best, it was fixed to its relative location inside the colossus.

Ten minutes of battle against the towering void creature had seen them getting nowhere. Their attempts at coordinating and searching the colossus had revealed nothing of any use. It was time to fall back and try something new. He just didn’t know what.

The obvious solution was to attack the rift itself. That, at least, they knew where to find. If Sorin went by himself, it was possible the rest of the assault team could slow the colossus down long enough to give him a few minutes to work. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d closed the rift before destroying the guardian, but he’d never managed it without severing the tether first.

Better odds than we’ve got now. I’ll just have to muddle through.

He leaped through the air, each step bolstered by Wind Strider and carrying him thirty feet. “I’m going to switch to the rift,” he told a nearby climber, a woman named Kali that Sorin vaguely remembered as being incredibly pushy in conversation but ultimately reliable in combat. “Spread the word. Try to buy me as much time as you can. This thing’s probably going to turn around and come after me the moment I break for the rift.”

“Got it,” she said.

Sorin sensed anima weaving around her into a spell to communicate with the others. Within a few seconds, everyone knew the change of plan and started shifting formation in anticipation of the colossus changing direction. They’d left miles between themselves and the rift, which would hopefully give them plenty of time when it turned back.

And hopefully I’m not going to find a fresh horde of voidlings waiting for me there. Would it be too much to ask that it’s undefended?

Sorin drew closer at tremendous speed, having dropped from the sky to run across the plain once he was a few hundred feet away from the main battle. The colossus had charged after him, of course, but its great size didn’t give it any real advantage in that race, and he left it behind almost immediately. He spotted the rift within seconds of starting his run, and he reached it a few minutes later.

Surprisingly, somehow, there were no voidlings there. It was just the rift, floating in the air, all by itself. Sorin hadn’t expected enough opposition to stop him, but he’d thought there’d be at least a few put in his way just to slow him down and give the guardian a chance to return.

Apparently, that concept was too alien to whatever intelligence the void entities on the other side of the rift wielded. If it had been anything else, Sorin would have been certain he was walking into a trap, but the void just didn’t do things the way a person did. Sometimes that meant an illogical tactic, like when a giant started throwing off chunks of its own body as a weapon and helped speed along its demise in the process.

Reminding himself to be wary wasn’t a thought Sorin even consciously needed to have. It was ingrained into his every action, and it was a rare occurrence indeed that he was caught completely flat-footed by an ambush. His mind was already cataloging possibilities as he approached—everything from void creatures hidden underground to them pouring out of the rift onto his head to the rift itself sprouting limbs and fighting back.

None of those happened. He came to a stop below it; the colossus rumbled along in his wake, still at least a minute or two behind him. Other than the barely perceptible sounds of the assault team coordinating with each other, it was quiet, almost peaceful.

Now let’s see if I can close you while you’re still connected to your guardian.

The familiar resistance to closing the rift pressed down on his mind, perhaps harder than usual because the rift was just so damn big. Sorin would have struggled closing the very last one even if he’d been fresh, but it was his third of the day, coming after hours of having his soulspace slowly mutilated one papercut at a time.

It started to close, slowly, but noticeably. Some small flicker of hope flared in him, lending strength to a mortal’s will that struggled to hold up against the pressure bearing down on it. He could do this. He knew he could. But seeing visible proof of his progress helped him fight through the pain and exhaustion.

Then he hit a wall. It wasn’t a matter of willpower or discipline. There was something in the way, and the rift wasn’t going to close until he dislodged whatever it was. Pushing against it accomplished nothing, not if all he was going to use was the rift itself to try to cut through the obstruction.

It had to be the tether. Invisible and intangible as it was, it nevertheless still existed. But if he couldn’t target it, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to hit it. Worse, the rift seemed to be strengthening itself and was slowly forcing its way back to its original size.

Think. You’ve got a full toolkit for handling the void. What do you need?

Void Eater was the obvious solution. He’d never combined it with another soulprint from his mosaic, but he didn’t see a reason why he couldn’t. It had just never occurred to him to try until now.

The soulprint embedded in his mosaic rose to his call, almost eager to rush out along the connection between him and Banishment. It attacked the invisible obstruction propping the rift open, making the entire thing shudder in place. The black rent in the sky started to close again, and Sorin noted with elation that it shrunk down past where it had stopped before.

He had just enough time to feel a spike of satisfaction at the successful combination tinged with annoyance that he hadn’t thought of it until the very last rift. Then the world vanished into black as the fully formed colossus guardian erupted into existence, looming over him for the barest fraction of an instant before it collapsed down to consume him whole.