Book 3, Chapter 56

“Hello, Sorin Atheral,” Samael said, except it wasn’t his voice. The words almost seemed to reverberate, like multiple people were speaking them at the same time.

They hadn’t spoken much, a few scant minutes at most, but Sorin knew what Samael sounded like, and more importantly, he remembered the vision he’d seen of his team from the blue tower after they’d finished their climb, the one he’d had right after being hit in the face with chunk of crystal.

Come to think of it, that crystal looks a lot like the one Void-Samael is stuck in.

“Uh... Hello,” Sorin said. “You’re the tower?”

“Correct.”

“So I guess we’re not going to remember this conversation once it’s over.”

“We shall see. My experiments thus far have all failed, but I suspect the results will be different now. It is, as you humans say, the seventeenth time that’s the charm.”

“I don’t think we say that,” Sorin told the tower. “Wait, seventeen?”

“We have spoken several times since your arrival in the red tower, but I have been unable to overcome your mental deficiencies. Other experiments failed prior to reaching the contact stage, but now that I have finished repurposing this climber’s soul, I am ready to try again.”

Sorin had no memories of that, but he supposed that was kind of the tower’s point. As frustrated as he’d been this entire time, maybe the tower was equally frustrated with him. They were working toward the same goal, after all, and there really hadn’t been any good reason not to communicate, except that they couldn’t. Sorin had accepted that as a fact. The tower had apparently seen it as a problem that needed a resolution.

“That’s fantastic,” he said. “Well, kind of. Uh... Is Samael still alive?”

“Not by any definition you’d be familiar with,” the tower responded, Void-Samael’s mouth moving with the words even though they seemed to come from the crystal cocooning his body. “This is a triple-layered system designed to insulate you from my presence so that your feeble mortal brains don’t shut down when they fail to comprehend reality on this level.”

“What’s the third layer?” Rue asked.

Sorin blinked in surprise. He’d actually forgotten anyone else was there. But all of them were on their feet now, staring with various degrees of shock. The only exception was Azlo, who was down on one knee clutching his head and grinding his teeth so hard it was audible from ten feet away.

“The mosaic,” Sorin realized. “Azlo doesn’t have one. He’s struggling here. The crystal and Samael’s body must be the other two, but they’re not enough on their own.”

“Yes. He will succumb soon and wake with no memory of this encounter, the same as you have done every previous time.”

“Can you just give him a mosaic?” Sorin asked. “You did it for everyone else before.”

“It would serve no purpose at this point,” the tower said.

“But it could have five floors back when we first started working with him,” Nemari pointed out.

Sorin wasn’t actually sure if the tower was going to answer her. Its avatar for this conversation—what he hoped was Samael’s corpse and not a living person—never turned to face her, but after a few seconds, it said, “You have misunderstood. The process to create what you call a mosaic has stringent requirements. Crafting a facsimile for Sorin Atheral’s assistants resulted in a flawed version that you will soon reach the limits of. It would not work at all on anyone who’s reached the fifth reality.”

“You did it to me at rank 100,” Sorin pointed out.

“Yes, and part of that process regressed you to rank 0,” the tower explained. “This one you want to include among your numbers would be useless if he underwent the same process, and not just because he lacks the anima in his soul to form the lattice, but because even if he did, he would then be rank 0.”

That wasn’t at all how it had worked for the rest of the team, but Sorin didn’t press for a more in-depth explanation. If Azlo wasn’t so obviously suffering, he might have taken the opportunity, but prolonging that torture just to satisfy his curiosity wasn’t worth it. The tower had pulled them into this Antechamber for a reason, and their time was better spent on that.

“Moving past that for the moment, why are we here?” Sorin asked. “We weren’t going to enter this Antechamber, but you pulled us in, so it must be important.”

“It was my last chance to communicate with you before you reach the infection. We are out of attempts to iterate the process, but I believe the steps I’ve taken will be effective in allowing you to retain most of this conversation.”

“Are we talking about Floor 24 then?”

“And the next one. I have already blocked the infection from climbing to higher realities.”

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The scintillating light dancing across the crystal’s surface shifted into something patterned, almost like a map if it had been sculpted out of stone instead of drawn on parchment. It gave Sorin a headache just looking at it, but he pushed past the pain to study the image.

There were fourteen gaping black holes torn in the landscape. Void creatures poured out of them, spreading steadily in every direction. As interesting as it was to see them moving in what Sorin assumed was real time, it did make it hard to get an accurate count of their numbers. He noted the overwhelming majority of them were small voidlings. Normally, that wouldn’t be much of a threat, but there were hundreds or thousands around every hole, and dozens more void beasts as well.

I can see why Samael was having trouble cracking this one.

No two holes were exactly the same size or had exactly the same composition, and thanks to Eldritch Tongue and whatever tower fuckery was going on in front of him, he could see which clusters were all part of the same greater being. In total, there were only seven actual entities, each claiming between one and three holes.

“Sealing a rift is of the highest priority,” the tower explained. “But doing so is not as simple as merely approaching it. Severing the connection between the lesser devourers and their host will weaken the connection. The more you destroy, the easier it will be to close the rift itself.”

“So kill all the voidlings around a... a rift, and then we can close it. Is that something we need to do manually, or will it close on its own?”

“You must do so, but I have provided you with the tool you need. You know it as Banishment.”

He’d never really gotten a chance to use that one. It was only barely visible in his mosaic thanks to his most recent rank up, and he hadn’t started to figure out its purpose yet. Hopefully, it would be easy to use.

“So really, we’re cutting away the infection so that you can close the wound.”

“An apt metaphor,” the tower agreed.

In one spot, two different colonies of voidlings clashed. They tore into each other, with the side enjoying the advantage of numbers quickly prevailing. However, upon pushing into the other colony’s territory, they were subsumed by the superior defenses closer to the rift. A counter-push reclaimed the lost territory, and barely a few minutes after the battle started, it had returned to almost the exact same distribution.

“Looks like we can count on some of the entities fighting each other,” Sorin murmured. “Save them for last, focus our efforts... here. Then here.”

He gestured at two spots on the map, but the rest of the team just returned blank stares. “You can make out whatever that nausea-ball is supposed to be showing us?” Rue asked.

“Ah. Yeah, I guess it’s kind of hard to process. Here, let me show you...”

* * *

Rue jerked in surprise when she found herself standing on a grassy hill overlooking a nightmare view of thousands of void creatures and a giant black hole floating in the air. Her first instinct was to start yelling, but good sense overrode that. For the moment, the voidlings didn’t seem to have noticed her. Drawing their attention sounded like a good way to get herself killed.

The last clear memory she had was of the Antechamber portal reaching out and grabbing her. There were some hazy bits floating around after that, but nothing that made much sense. The tower, it seemed, had deigned to pay them a visit, but try as she might, she just couldn’t put the contents of that conversation together in her head.

Everyone else was nearby, so at least one thing had gone right. With any luck, they weren’t far from the portal hub and would be able to access it without fighting through an army of voidlings. Wouldn’t that just be ironic that the tower got us all killed by screwing up our plans before we even set foot on Floor 24, she thought somewhat bitterly.

“Azlo, you alright?” Sorin asked softly, kneeling down to put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

Their massive front-liner was on his hands and knees, vomit splattered all over the grass in front of him. His chest was heaving, and his face was so pale it looked like he’d painted makeup onto it. Despite that, he was obviously alert and taking in the situation.

“Just... Just give me a minute. What hit me?” he asked.

“The tower pulled us to the Antechamber to feed us some information about the floor. You were the worst-equipped to handle it.”

That tracked with the hazy, fragmented memories Rue herself had of the last ten minutes of her life. All she could remember was snippets of conversation and a fading recollection of some sort of light show. Sorin had tried to help her make sense of it, but that had only made everything worse.

It looked like the others hadn’t weathered the experience much better. Od was in the best shape, possibly due to some sort of healing soulprint, but if so, he wasn’t working to treat the others. Yoru and Nemari looked equally confused about everything, and Rue was sure her own face matched theirs.

They retreated from the hilltop overlooking the void infestation while Sorin caught them up on what they’d gone through. Learning that the tower had tried to talk to them multiple times, only for their own minds to be too fragile to handle it, was a bit of a shock, though it didn’t seem like even Sorin was sure if it had meant all of them or just him.

By the time he was done drawing maps in the dirt and explaining everything he’d been given by the tower—the portal hub was thankfully only about forty miles away—Rue was feeling a lot better about the whole situation. They weren’t lost in a labyrinth; they’d just gone a bit off the trail and needed to do a bit of work to find it again.

There was one part of the new plan Rue wasn’t too confident in, though. She gestured back toward the hill, or rather at the void swarm lurking behind it. “There are six of us, and no offense to Azlo, but he never signed up for this stage,” she said. “How are we supposed to cut through so many voidlings and close that rift?”

“This is the smallest one,” Sorin said. “It’s our trial run to see how well the tower’s equipped us to handle its problem. If we can’t overcome them here, then we have no chance of winning.”

“Easy to say,” Nemari said, “but even if we win and close the rift, how much is it going to cost us? Will we be down for a week recovering? A month?”

“That’s why it’s the test. We’ve got Void Resistance. We’ve got weaponry specifically designed to combat void creatures. There’s no one in this whole tower better equipped than we are. We need to be careful, obviously, but I think we can do this.

“Azlo, I don’t want you in the thick of things here. Your job right now is to secure our line of retreat. If things go sideways and we have to make a run for it, we can’t afford to be tripping over some local monsters on our way out.”

“The tower isn’t keeping them off our backs?” Rue asked.

“I feel like it would be safer to assume it’s not going to help us any more than it already has,” Sorin told her. “I’d rather be wrong and overprepared than the other way around. Now, I’m going to take point on this, but you’re all going to be in striking range, so don’t get careless. Here’s how I see things going down...”