The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 76

Sorin was too busy being uncomfortable with Calder’s clumsy, if enthusiastic, advances to notice much else, but Yoru noticed the looks the other team exchanged when they thought no one was looking. There was definitely something going on there, and the whole situation was just a bit too volatile for his liking. It made him wonder what he’d missed before he’d returned back to Floor 6.

The weird thing was that Yoru could tell there was something shady going on, but he didn’t think the whole team was in on it. Their mage was either the best actor Yoru had ever seen in his life, or his naivety was completely genuine. Their leader was a bit more reserved, but also seemed authentic. It was the other four that were suspicious.

It wasn’t anything they said. They didn’t make any overtly hostile actions. It was the way they were studying Yoru’s group. Glances lingered a hair too long on weapons. Climbers pretending to busy themselves with their own work watched Yoru’s group out of the corners of their eyes, measuring and judging.

If it had been one person, Yoru would have just dismissed it as paranoia, but with most of the other team trying to hide the fact that they were readying themselves for a fight, he felt it was prudent to prepare himself as well. He’d already nearly died to a sudden betrayal once; there was no way he would allow himself to be caught unaware again.

But as the reunion went on and nothing went wrong, Yoru forced himself to relax. It’s just two climbing teams bumping into each other in a relatively isolated area and being wary, he told himself. They’re probably thinking the same thing about me watching them.

He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was more to it than that, but after half an hour, Ostelle pulled Calder away from his attempts to flirt with a man who was completely oblivious to what was going on. The whole team packed up their stuff, thanked Odric for providing them with a meal, and left to start their climb.

“You’re an idiot,” Rue told Sorin after they were gone.

“What? Why?”

“Calder is into you. He wasn’t subtle about it.”

“He… is?” Sorin shot an uncertain glance in the direction the other team had gone in. “That would be unfortunate for him. They don’t even know my real name.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Nemari asked.

Shrugging, Sorin simply said, “We were fugitives when I first met them, and there was no reason to expect to ever see them again. It was a basic precaution.”

“No, I meant why didn’t you correct that just now?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Just seemed like it would be an awkward conversation I didn’t want to have. We’ll probably never see them again, anyway. Even this was a surprise. I can’t believe they climbed up to Floor 6 so fast.”

“It is suspicious,” Nemari admitted. “Maybe someone is carrying them? Or they have sponsorship?”

“Maybe,” Sorin said. “I don’t think they did back when I first met them, though. I suppose we didn’t either back then, so who’s to say.”

* * *

“Do you think it was him?” Enare asked.

“The description matches. We should have realized it the first time we met him,” Shara said.

The two sisters were apart from the main group, ostensibly scouting ahead while Giev and Womak stayed with Calder and Ostelle to keep them safe. They’d split up to scour both flanks, then met up a quarter mile ahead of the rest of the team to talk.

“Can’t believe we never connected ‘Vanir’ to that guy on the bounty posters,” Enare muttered.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference. I don’t want to fuck with that guy. I heard Naxra took a shot at him and got herself killed in the attempt.”

“Fucking how? She’s rank 11.”

Shara shook her head. “No idea, but nobody’s seen her in weeks.”

“You think he’s got a watcher? I mean, that’s impossible, right? He’s wanted by the Hellions.”

“Could be some other organization.”

Enare snorted. “Who’d be stupid enough to go against—”

“That’s enough, you two,” Womak said, appearing out of thin air right next to them. Enare recoiled and was halfway to throwing a knife in his face before she got control of her hand, and Shara actually jumped backward to give herself space.

“Jumpy, aren’t you,” he said with a sneer. “Shows how little attention you’re paying. Don’t worry about the bounty on that guy. Even if we wanted to claim it, it’s way above our pay grade. Just focus on doing your jobs here so we can get to Floor 7.”

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

“Right. Sorry, sir,” Shara said.

“And don’t call me that,” Womak snapped. “Always, always, always maintain your cover. Now, pull yourself together before the others get here.”

Before either woman could reply, Womak vanished again. A few minutes later, the rest of the team caught up to them, and he was walking near the back as though he’d been there the whole time. If not for the subtle warning look he gave them when no one else was watching, they might have thought they’d imagined the whole conversation.

* * *

Aside from that one chance encounter, things proceeded more or less as expected on Floor 6. There weren’t a lot of great farming spots, and nothing they knew of really suited their needs. The ruin was also fairly close to the main climbing routes, which made it a popular spot for teams to challenge themselves at.

All of that combined made the floor unattractive to Sorin’s team. It was, in a word, too crowded. They didn’t want to wait for their turn to take a crack at the ruin, especially when that could take days or weeks, and since everyone was already rank 7, there wasn’t a lot of need to fight over the popular farming spots. They rushed the floor guardian instead, where they fortunately didn’t have to wait on some other team to claim their kill and advance upward.

The Antechamber didn’t give them anything special this time, and with the Telpike family sponsoring their climb, the equipment it did award them seemed less extraordinary now. The whole floor felt like more of a chore than anything, but it was cleared easily and quickly without complications. The highlight of it was Rue successfully making her own Thermal Insulation, with the others hopefully soon to follow.

They also tested Passenger Through the Void and confirmed that Sorin could bring two people with him through the Liminal Gateway at a time now. The void on the other side didn’t react to them any worse than it did to Sorin himself, and he theorized that as his capacity with Liminal Gateway grew, he would eventually be able to pull everyone in at the same time.

Floor 7, by mutual agreement, was cleared just as quickly. Even with Thermal Insulation or Cold Resistance, the frigid mountain slopes that made up the floor were punishing to traverse. With poor illumination, slick ice, and the unceasing howls of frigid gales, nothing about the environment appealed to them.

Sorin could have told them that they’d look back fondly on it in twenty or thirty floors, but he kept that opinion to himself. No one would be receptive to it anyway. They were all so eager to move on to Floor 8 that they didn’t even bother locating the portal hub. Sorin himself kept their supplies topped off, and despite his desire to go farm an umbral goat eye to finally acquire permanent Aura Sense, he stayed with the rest of the team.

They finally slowed down on Floor 8, both to take a well-deserved and much-needed rest and because they’d reached the point where they’d functionally nullified the advantage their mosaics gave them by all still being rank 7. It had been useful in bypassing floors that were overly crowded or too inhospitable to tolerate, but now they needed to prepare themselves properly.

* * *

The map lay on the ground, its corners held down by a few rocks Sorin had pulled out of the dirt. Nemari and Yoru joined him, but the other three ignored the discussion entirely. None of them really cared which route the team took.

“Look, it might be faster on paper to cut through the center, but the Sol Pillar is going to cook us if we actually try,” Yoru argued, jabbing his finger at a circled zone where an enormous, heat-emitting pillar of light towered ten miles into the sky. There were no sun or stars on Floor 8, only the ever-present column that banished the shadows within a hundred-mile radius of its position.

Nemari didn’t back down. “I’m not saying we go through the center, just skirt the edges. Yes, it’ll be a bit hotter, but it’s a documented shortcut. We have heat resistance, and we’re fast. Save ourselves a day of traveling by sweating for two hours. Otherwise it’s the long, long way around the gorge.”

“If we don’t do the loop around the gorge, we completely miss out on the opportunity to hit the salt plains,” Sorin pointed out.

“Screw the salt plains. There’s nothing good out there. We need high density monsters, and preferably a location with an undesirable journey so we don’t have to share.”

“And where are you proposing we go with this shortcut?” Yoru asked.

Nemari leaned forward and pointed at a mesa near the mountains that formed the northern border of the floor. “No one wants to go up there. It’s a week of walking one way, maybe longer. We could do it in two days. The anima farming is good, but needing to carry a month of supplies makes it an unpopular destination. The fact that it’s all F-rank soulprints when E’s are common and the occasional D is just finally starting to show up on the floor means we’re almost certain to have it to ourselves.”

“It does fit our needs pretty well,” Sorin admitted. “We could spend a week there and try to push you all up to rank 10 so we can skip over Floor 9, unless you’d all like to go swimming?”

Floor 9 was a hard stop for a lot of climbers since it was the first floor that truly required more than just the basic environmental utility soulprints. It was a small archipelago, but almost everything interesting was underwater. That meant the full climbing team needed magic to handle moving, seeing, breathing, and communicating underwater for an extended period of time, not to mention the changes in water pressure as they went deeper.

Plenty of climbers in the red tower gave up without even trying it, unable to afford the full suite of soulprints needed to challenge the floor or unwilling to make the room their soulspace required to absorb them. Those that had the finances or luck to acquire everything they needed quickly found out that Floor 4 had been a pleasure stroll by comparison, that fighting in the dark depths of the ocean was a completely different experience.

No one farmed on Floor 9, and the better Sorin’s team could prepare for the experience, the quicker they could get through it. With them already being behind the curve thanks to their rapid advancement across the previous two floors, they needed to put in the work on Floor 8.

“Alright, I think we have our destination,” Sorin said. “Let’s discuss hazards. There’s the pillar’s proximity to this portion of the route, obviously, but what else can we expect to find in our way if we bypass the gorge?”

“Light elementals,” Yoru said immediately. “They’re the big reason climbers don’t like to get close to the Sol Pillar. It gets worse if you go toward the center, but they’re still a problem even on the edges. There’s no outrunning them, either. We don’t really have the proper abilities to hunt them.”

“I can take care of those,” Sorin promised. “What else?”

The trio’s discussion ended soon after that. They had a goal, they had a plan, and once they had full bellies, they packed up the camp and set about executing it.