Book 3, Chapter 55

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Rue said. She pushed past her brother and turned to face the stone wall where she wouldn’t have to look down at the swirling cloudscape.

Odric gave her a sympathetic pat on the back while the rest of the team ignored her. They all knew the plan already, but getting into position was a whole different task. Each of them wore a harness with three lengths of rope attached to it, and Sorin helped them to reach their predetermined position, anchor the ropes to metal pitons he drove into the stone, and settle into place.

One by one, they took their spots in the formation. Then Sorin, hanging upside down with only his feet touching the mountain slope, confidently strode toward the center. Below him, his reflection marched forward, but in the mirror, it moved directly toward the towering giant.

Some portal guardians were passive, remaining motionless as a statue until they were attacked. The giant was not one of them. Sorin barely came up to its ankles, but that didn’t stop it from regarding him as a threat, or perhaps it just considered him a bug worth squashing. Whatever its reasoning, it raised its bare foot and stepped forward to crush him to death.

Dodging in three dimensions was easier said than done, but Sorin was far more agile than any human had a right to be. He released Spider Climb, twisted as he fell, and kicked off against empty air to reorient himself to the side. Stone collapsed right where he’d been standing, which somehow resulted in a shower of small pebbles and rocks pouring into the open air to fall down into the clouds.

A glance in the mirror revealed the truth. The stone had been compressed under the giant’s foot, but it wasn’t a slow, ungainly thing. As fast as the foot had slammed down, the giant had raised its leg to stomp Sorin again. Like a cockroach running for his life, he flitted back and forth. Random direction changes, variable speeds, and frequent uses of Force Weaver to help redirect his momentum kept Sorin ahead of his invisible attacker.

The first wave of magic hit the giant, most of which it ignored. Rue’s Force Spear didn’t have the penetrative power to even inconvenience it, and the earth-based attacks Yoru and Odric favored fared no better. Nemari’s flames were the most effective, darkening its skin in the mirror world below them.

I need to introduce some vulnerabilities, Sorin decided.

Switching tactics involved essentially letting himself fall closer to the eye of the storm below him so that he could strike at the giant’s trunk instead of just its feet. That also put him within easy reach of its massive hands, and it was quick to take advantage of that. He darted back and forth mid-air, always one step ahead of the grasping fingers that tried to pluck him out of the empty sky.

Blood spattered across the mirror despite nothing appearing in the real version of the battle. Sorin’s reflection dragged its sword across the giant’s fingers, forcing it to flinch back and giving him an opening to race up toward its neck. Not stupid by any means, the portal guardian immediately raised its other hand to protect itself.

Despite the roaring power of the B-rank Lion’s Blood soulprint surging through his soulspace, Sorin couldn’t outmuscle the giant. There was no amount of leverage that could bridge the gap, and he could only rely on his speed and his reaction time to stay in the fight while he gave the monster a death of a thousand cuts.

He took openings where he could find them, split open black skin to reveal seared meat beneath, and laid into the monster from a hundred different angles. His allies focused their own attacks into those wounds, and now they were enough of an annoyance that the giant targeted them, too. It scooped up what to it were small stones despite being ten feet in diameter, and it threw them out by the handful. Nemari in particular had to cut off her efforts just to keep ahead of the deadly barrage, so much so that Azlo deliberately sliced his own safety ropes so that he could scramble in front of her and plant himself as a shield.

The monster clapped its hands together, unleashing a deafening wave of pressure that flung Sorin back through the air. Long seconds slipped away before he managed to right himself, only to find danger all around him. Strands of cloud-stuff stretched up from below, threatening to engulf him, and he wasn’t eager to find out how long he could survive inside it.

The rest of the team suffered from the attack as well. Even as Sorin dodged around the misty limbs seeking him out, Observer showed him more than one loose-hanging rope. For now, the harnesses held, but a few of his fellow climbers were down one of their lifelines.

Good thing we planned with redundancy in mind, he mentally congratulated himself as he sprinted upward in a bid to regain altitude so that the cloudscape would lose interest in him.

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Azlo proved his worth yet again. With Sorin no longer distracting the portal guardian, it turned its attention to the long-range magic that kept slamming into its open wounds. There was no competing with its raw strength, but Azlo did wonders at redirecting its attention and keeping ahead of its blows. Even when one clipped him, he had enough power and tenacity to recover in time.

Then Sorin was back, and he swiftly regained control of the fight. They pressed the guardian even harder, all of them knowing that the surest way to make sure it didn’t pull any other tricks was to kill it before it found the opportunity to use them.

Slowly, the giant wound down. The valley was a lake of blood that hissed and spat as it sizzled whenever a lick of flame caressed the surface. Every injury weakened the portal guardian further, and not even its prodigious constitution was enough to save it. Eventually, inevitably, it slumped over, crashing first to its knees, and then tilting like a tower coming down.

Sorin didn’t waste a moment. The instant he was certain the guardian was dying, he broke for Azlo. Everyone else was still safely tethered to the mountain, but he was only holding himself to the stone with his own power, and he was a handful of seconds away from a rank up, which would probably be the worst pain he’d ever felt in his life.

He didn’t have good odds of surviving the experience without help. Even if he wasn’t a mosaic-holder, he’d been invaluable over the last few months and deserved better than to be dissolved inside of an acid cloud. Sorin wasn’t going to let that happen.

He was halfway there when the rank up hit the rest of his team. All of them locked up, and none of them managed to keep active whatever abilities they were channeling to remain attached to the slope. That was expected and planned for. It was one of the reasons they’d added the safety ropes still attached to their harnesses instead of just relying on soulprints.

Oh, you smart man, Sorin silently congratulated as Azlo started to fall, only to jerk to a halt. He’d looped one of Nemari’s ropes around his arm several times and was dangling from that. The extra weight was straining the rope, and he was slowly slipping out, but it was a brilliant bit of improvisation that probably would have saved him all on his own.

Sorin reached him before he fell free and stabilized his position. A second later, Azlo let out a shuddering, pain-filled cough and blinked several times. “Holy shit,” he croaked out.

“You’re alright,” Sorin told him. “Come on, let’s get you back to safety before you fall out of the sky.”

Above them, the red Antechamber portal hung in the air. It was strange to think that, for the first time ever, they wouldn’t be taking it to the next floor, but there’d been no arguments from anyone about how insanely risky it would be to step through it. Maybe the tower wouldn’t drop them in the middle of a pit of voidlings, but there was no way to guarantee that.

The plan was for everyone to make their way back to the little bowl of a cave they’d arrived in and use the portal hub to reach Floor 24 the old-fashioned way. It was a good plan, as safe as climbing could be. They needed to rest, they needed to prepare, and they needed to get a preliminary look at the Void Wall so they could fine tune their plans to account for any new information.

The tower did not care about any of that.

Lines of red light lanced out of the Antechamber portal, tagging each and every person there. There wasn’t even enough time to blink before they reached their targets, and even Sorin, who was well-acquainted with combat at speeds that surpassed stock-human perception, didn’t have the ability to react in time.

Then the light retracted, and it pulled its victims with it. The force was so strong that the physically weaker members of the team passed out briefly, though Sorin, Azlo, and Odric all managed to maintain consciousness. They were pulled through the portal and left standing in the Antechamber, only this time its tower-red color scheme had lines of void-black cutting through it like jagged bolts of lightning.

The whole team laid there in a heap. Yoru was the unlucky soul who ended up at the bottom by virtue of being closest in proximity to the portal when it had grabbed hold of them. Odric and Rue were on top of him, with Nemari off to one side and Azlo on the other. They’d both landed hard before rolling.

Sorin was the only one who hit the ground on his feet, and only because he could step through the air and had diverted his course in the split second between being pulled through the Antechamber portal and being released from whatever tower magic was holding him.

He had his sword out, red giant’s blood still staining its length, but there were no monsters lurking about in the shadows and no traps looming over their heads, waiting to be sprung. The portal behind them winked out of existence, just like it always had in every Antechamber before them. In that respect, things proceeded as normal, but that was where the similarities stopped.

There was no platform in the center, no treasure chests full of rewards, no raised dais for them to assemble on. Instead, there was a gleaming crystal pillar that glowed iridescent, even in the red light of the Antechamber. Housed inside it was a human-shaped shadow, almost a voidling that had taken on the form of a man.

Sorin had seen and destroyed plenty of human-sized void creatures in his life. Void beasts were generally significantly bigger, and voidlings usually half the size of an adult or less, but those were more labels of convenience than hard rules. They could come in any and every size.

The thing was that they usually didn’t have such perfectly human proportions. The legs might be too short or the arms too long. A voidling was just as likely to be missing a head as it was to have two. They normally shifted around a lot, too, so even if one managed to mimic a human silhouette by lucky coincidence, the illusion would only last a bare handful of seconds before falling apart.

Sorin’s first thought was that the crystal trapping it was somehow forcing the voidling into that shape, that this whole thing was just more of the tower’s inscrutable power. Then the shadow shifted, turning to face him fully, and Sorin felt the blood drain from his face.

“Oh shit,” he whispered. “Samael.”