Book 3, Chapter 54

The month passed slowly, at least for Sorin. His team made quick progress toward the peak of rank 23 despite fighting a floor down, and he slowly worked his way across the twisted landscape of Floor 23 toward the portal guardian.

The whole floor was an inverted mountain range, or maybe a normal mountain range with inverted gravity. However the tower accomplished it, the end result was that a careless climber could find themself falling into the ‘sky’ beneath them to disappear beneath the layer of clouds, where they’d never be seen by another living soul.

Scaling the labyrinthine trails was difficult on its own, and even with the ability to fly and utility magic like Spider Climb, there was a real challenge just finding places to rest. A bit of earth shaping was enough to carve out caves or ledges when Sorin needed them, but of course the tower didn’t like to let such changes persist, so he had to make a new one every single time.

It turned the whole floor into a game of resource management where Sorin had to carefully balance how much anima he spent moving forward with how much was ‘wasted’ creating places to rest and recover. This was one of those instances where a full team would have made things immeasurably easier since they could split the burden of blazing a path forward and creating temporary safe havens.

The inverted mountain range was a significant challenge on its own, but there was no such thing as a floor without monsters, and so Sorin had to contend with the additional complication of being regularly attacked by spiders that could burrow through stone, nests of granite wasps, elementals of various stripes, and a species of territorially aggressive giant eagles with brown and golden feathers.

Any of that would have been manageable on its own. Even fighting while clinging to the slope of the mountain or floating in mid-air was merely another dimension of anima management for him, one that slowed him down and forced him to take more frequent stops. But the aspect of Floor 23 that really pushed it over the top was that the cloud layer itself was alive.

Long, vaporous tendrils were constantly rising out of it and scouring the mountains’ surfaces. They groped around blindly, sweeping across the stone with what appeared to be slow, ponderous progress, except that they only seemed slow because the tendrils were miles long. In absolute terms, the tendrils moved almost as fast as Sorin himself could run on flat ground.

Anything caught in the mist disappeared just the same as if it had fallen into the cloud layer itself, and the mountain surface that the tendrils left behind was scoured clean and smooth. Sorin took that as a sign that the cloud was acidic in nature, powerful enough to dissolve its prey and even the rock it passed over. He was not eager to find out firsthand how accurate his guess was.

Forewarned was prepared, however, and there were a few ways to escape the tendril. The easiest but riskiest one was simply to fly down below the mountains to the dangerous open-air zone between stone and cloud while the tendril swept by. They were perhaps a thousand feet thick or so, and barring being particularly unlucky and having one form directly beneath Sorin, he had plenty of advance warning.

Exposing himself like that drew out the monsters though, and getting closer to the cloud layer seemed to make it react, too. Thousands of smaller tendrils would sprout and reach up toward Sorin if he got too low, and these ones weren’t content to just passively sweep the area for whatever they could grab. No, they knew where he was and chased after him as he fled.

In short, finding the correct height to avoid the massive tendril without drawing the notice of the thinner, smaller ones was a delicate balancing act, one that it wasn’t always possible to maintain when he was fending off monsters at the same time. In so many ways, Floor 23 exemplified the sort of challenges so many higher floors offered. It wasn’t anywhere near the most hostile Sorin had experienced, though having to do it solo did offer a unique bump in difficulty from his time in the blue tower.

It's a good thing I can cheat, he thought to himself as he opened Liminal Gateway and stepped through it. The rolling wall of cloud tendril closing in on him was still half a mile away, which gave him perhaps twenty seconds to escape. That was plenty.

In truth, he probably only needed a minute or two in liminal space before he could pop right back out and continue his journey, but he used the time there as an opportunity to rest and recover, and that was far more comfortable back on Floor 0 than it was surrounded by an endless void that would consume him given half a chance.

All of that saw a marginally perceptible increase in Sorin’s total anima, barely a nudge in the path to rank 29. Even if he’d been a normal climber, Sorin would undoubtedly have chosen to go back to Floor 22 to farm anima there, just as the rest of his team was doing. The guidebooks even recommended exactly that, just as they outlined the safest path to the portal guardian.

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Safest was not the same as quickest. Someone had observed the cloud layer long enough to discern a preference for touching mountain peaks—probably because they were closest to the clouds—and plotted a route through the valleys of the inverted range in an effort to reduce the chance of being consumed by a tendril, which made perfect sense to Sorin. Nothing was guaranteed, and the monsters tended to be thickest in the valleys where upside down trees stubbornly clung to rocky soil that by all rights should have fallen into the sky, but the route did what it could to keep climbers safe.

It also took four times longer than going over—or under, depending on how one looked at it—the peaks, and since Sorin had access to options normal climbers didn’t, he opted to deviate from the outlined route whenever the opportunity to skip a chunk of it presented itself. That still left him with the better part of three weeks of miserable traveling before he finally laid eyes on the portal guardian.

Perhaps fittingly, it was in the very center of the floor, where the clouds swirled around the eye of the storm. It was only here that Sorin could get a glimpse at what lay beyond the other side of the cloud layer. The guidebook told him, of course, but he’d been looking forward to seeing it in person.

It was a giant mirror, probably the width of the entire floor. When he looked down into it, he saw himself looking back up. Admittedly, with miles and miles of distance between them, the details were rather indistinct, but he could still tell who it was. He could also see the portal guardian, which was a towering giant, probably a hundred feet tall. It was not looking up at Sorin, but rather down at his reflection.

There was no giant where Sorin stood. All of his senses agreed on that fact, and he had a lot of ways to sense things beyond the five basics. But the giant was very real, nonetheless. Striking it would give no feedback, the same as if he swung his sword through empty air, but he knew wounds would appear on the giant in the mirror below. Similarly, if the reflected world showed the giant injuring the Sorin beneath the clouds, he would receive the same wounds.

That was the trick of it—an entire fight they had to spend looking at the mirror in order to battle against a monster that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist in their reality. Worse, the giant had no issues with gravity, whereas they were as vulnerable to falling as ever. The reports indicated that climbers had tried that, thinking to bring the battle down to the mirror.

The clouds had reached out into the eye and plucked them out of the air. The results had been exactly what one could expect. There would be no cheating the tower out of its puzzle. Climbers could either play along or they could retreat, but not even Sorin could cheat the rules here.

That meant, of course, that his team needed some new soulprints in order to survive the bizarre landscape, and true flight was beyond all of them. They’d have to use workarounds and hope for the best. In this case, that meant rope harnesses with redundancies in case one of the lines was severed, abilities like Spider Climb and Air Step, and deliberate spacing to keep them from getting tangled up with each other when the guardian inevitably forced them to move out of position.

Finally finished with his preparations, Sorin chose a shallow cave, really more of a scoop taken out of the mountain, for his exit point. The floor wasn’t level, but it did exist, which put it one step ahead of any other spot he could find near the portal guardian.

Entering Floor 22 was almost a relief, even if the smell was horrible and the ground was soft enough to sink into. The fact that there was ground at all was an upgrade after nearly a month spent clinging to upside-down mountain slopes and needing magic for every step forward.

The team had ranged far and wide, apparently efficient enough at their work now that they had to follow a circuit in order to find new rot shamblers to kill. Sorin knew the loop, and he set about it in a reverse course that would eventually lead him to wherever everyone else was.

Not stopping to kill anything on his way sped up his progress, but it was still six hours to find them. They’d just engaged in a trio of rot shamblers, all of them larger than average. Sorin applauded their boldness, but he suspected it was greed that had enticed them to take on such a challenge.

Or maybe not, he corrected himself thirty seconds later. The first rot shambler dropped without ever getting close to anyone, Azlo had the other two tripping over each other while they pursued him, and Rue was a blur of black and gray as she practically climbed up and down the monster. Her swords dug in and flicked off large chunks of its fungal body structure.

He watched for two minutes. That was all it took to demolish the three huge shamblers. The only complaint he could make was that only Rue and Azlo had noticed him. The other three, admittedly, were a hundred feet farther back, but that didn’t excuse the lack of awareness. Plenty of monsters could strike at them from that distance, and he hadn’t really done much to hide himself.

They’ve become too reliant on Rue to give them a warning. What would you all do if some trap split the team up?

Sorin shook his head and reminded himself that it didn’t matter. They were on the cusp of reaching the Void Wall, at which point they’d be together every second. If and when they emerged from the other side of Floor 25 still in one piece, it could be addressed then.

“You’re two days early. Is it time?” Rue called out, drawing everyone else’s attention to him.

“Almost,” Sorin said. “We’ve got to do the last-minute prep to make sure you can survive the environment, then we’re ready to go.”

“Oh, right. This one’s going to be a nightmare,” Nemari said. “A whole floor with no ground. I’m happy to skip it.”

“Same,” Azlo told her. “You have no idea how much complaining I’ve heard about Floor 23. Just about everyone agrees it’s the absolute worst. I suppose having dimensional storage does simplify the logistics, though. The endless rock climbing is bad enough without having to lug around half a year’s food supply on your back.”

“And the food attracts monsters,” Sorin said. “Every damn meal break, something else shows up trying to kill you. But, lucky for you, you’ll be on that floor for half an hour, hopefully less, and you’ll never have to look at it again.”