Book 3, Chapter 57

They were assembled behind him, Nemari and Yoru to his right, Rue and Odric to his left. Sorin took a breath, then cleared his throat. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff in my life. I’ve done a lot of crazy stuff. But this... This is a whole different experience. I just want you guys to know that I could not be more impressed with your dedication and your bravery.”

“God, shut up,” Rue told him. “You’re making me fifth-guess this whole bullshit scheme.”

“Fifth?” Odric echoed.

“I already did second through fourth guessing on the way over.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” Nemari said, laying a hand on Sorin’s shoulder. “But you suck at speeches. You’re making it sound like we’re about to do a suicide charge.”

“Ungrateful, all of you,” Sorin said, but he smiled as he said it. “Fine. Alright. You know what to do. You know what to watch out for. Let’s go tear shit up and make it out the other side in one piece.”

The plan was straightforward. Leaping into the middle of that mess would only result in an ugly, painful death, so they were going to approach it the same way they fought individual voidlings: by keeping highly mobile and skimming off strips of void essence to whittle the whole thing down.

The sword in Sorin’s hand was far better at stripping away the void than anything else he’d ever used. His companions had similar weapons. They could do this so long as they were fast, precise, and nothing interfered.

Sorin did a final sweep with Observer, taking the time to deliberately push it to its maximum range in every direction. He spotted Azlo a quarter mile away, loaded down with all their enchanted gear and heading in the direction of the portal hub while swinging wide around the rift. Other than him and the voidlings themselves—which Observer struggled to even see—there wasn’t a single moving thing anywhere near them.

Did the tower clear out the monsters, or did the voidlings eat them all?

Deciding that it was irrelevant for their purposes in the next few minutes, Sorin leveled his sword ahead of him and selected his first victim. “Going,” he said. “Three, two, one...”

Anima surged out of his soulspace. Lesser Aspect of Grace let him move faster than the eye could see, leaving him as nothing more than a blur to the rest of his team, and Lion’s Blood gave him the raw power needed to actually coordinate his body under such incredible speeds. Second Mind rounded out the trio with one entire mind devoted to nothing more than sensory processing while the rest decided what to do with that information.

The distance between him and the outer edge of the voidlings disappeared in a heartbeat. Normally, void creatures would rush toward any source of anima they found close enough that they could sense it. In this case, it seemed that there was nothing left but the tower itself, so they were slowly expanding outward from the rift while draining the landscape.

They made a sharp, distinctive border where the ground was blackened and dead behind them, dying and crumbling at their feet, and still healthy in front. There was a few thousand feet of darkness between the edge and the rift in the middle, and Sorin wondered how long it had taken them to expand that far. This being the rift closest to the portal hub, he imagined the remnants of Samael’s forces had focused their efforts on pushing the void back here.

They were nowhere to be seen today. Sorin and his allies could rely on no one but themselves, but he’d never expected anything else. At best, Samael’s mutagenic build climbers were a stall that relied on numbers and a lack of free will to hold the line. They no longer had either of those.

All of that was something he noticed as extraneous detail to be shoved to the back of his mind until he had time to dissect later. Once he made contact, his focus was fully consumed by the fight. His sword rammed into the voidling, right into center mass where a normal attack would accomplish absolutely nothing.

But Sorin’s sword was hungry. So was the mosaic in his soulspace. He could feel Void Eater activating and the tower’s magic pouring through him. It was kind of funny. He hadn’t noticed that until he’d gained Anima Tap and felt the tower’s anima for himself. Before, he’d thought the soulprints in his mosaic were free of cost, a foolish assumption that he’d have never made in a normal situation.

The voidling deflated like a water bladder being stomped on by an ogre. One moment, it was a vital, destructive being from beyond the tower, eagerly gorging itself on the unending trickle of anima that was the very floor they stood on. The next, it was flat, a drawing of itself that shrunk in real time until there was nothing left. Killing the eldritch abomination was as simple as sticking it with his sword and letting the magic do its thing.

This wasn’t a surprise to Sorin. They’d tested all their weapons thoroughly as they climbed whenever they got the opportunity to do so. Voidlings were easy to kill; there was so little void-stuff to them that they were gone practically before the process even started. Void beasts fared better, though they usually only lived long enough to get one or two attacks in.

Extrapolating from there, giants and behemoths would put up a fight and need to be approached with caution. They’d still die, if such creatures could actually be said to do that, but just being near them would be enough to flay Sorin’s soulspace as they consumed his anima.

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Voidlings did that too, technically. It was just that the Void Resistance the tower had given all of them made it feel more like a papercut than a knife wound. Having no desire to die the death of a thousand force edges, Sorin remained keenly aware that the mass of other voidlings he hadn’t killed was still a very real danger.

Sorin destroyed six more voidlings in the span of two seconds before Rue caught up to him. As planned, he leaped back out of range, disengaging from the swarm before they could fall on him. They surged after him, the ones closest taking the lead over the voidlings that had been spread farther out in the line.

Sorin channeled anima through him, not in preparation for a spell that could do nothing but waste his resources and empower the enemy, but to present himself as fat, juicy bait. Rue was strong, but Sorin was stronger. Rue was also best equipped to hide her own anima from detection, which was why she was acting as his second.

The void stretched out its fingers to take hold of Sorin, and Rue cut those fingers off. With twin blades—red like her home tower instead of his blue—she carved two of the little creatures apart at the same time. Lacking Void Eater in her mosaic, they took longer to die, but she gamely avoided the reaching claws and emerged from her first contact untouched.

The two worked together to carve through as many voidlings as they could, but there was no resetting their position. They adapted on the fly, with Sorin acting as bait that moved just barely faster than the voidlings to keep them strung out in a line while Rue hacked apart the ones that strayed too far toward the edge of their formation.

Yoru was waiting for them to arrive a hundred feet away from the leading edge of the void zone. His blade whip went to work immediately, and unlike Sorin or Rue, he had the distinct advantage of his weapon having some range. That was counteracted by just how damn difficult it was to control, but he’d also had plenty of time to practice.

The main drawback was that he couldn’t lash a voidling with it and leave the weapon embedded in its body so that it had time to work. It would simply fall away or, if he managed to entangle a limb, lop off a piece of void-stuff. That meant he had to work a lot harder to kill a void creature, and while he was safer doing so, time was of the essence.

Nemari helped with her wand, and between the two of them, they managed to kill voidlings about as fast as Rue did on her own. The whole while, the team retreated to keep from being overwhelmed by the swarm’s numbers, and though it seemed like they were doing well, Sorin could see where they were quickly going to start running into issues.

They’d killed maybe fifty voidlings and taken minimal damage in return. That was a small fraction of the total number, and as more and more of them passed on the message that dinner had delivered itself to them, the swarm got thicker. Voidlings started slamming into each other, somehow entwining and shifting into void beasts instead.

Shit, we’re not doing this nearly fast enough.

This was a known problem. A hundred voidlings were far easier to kill than a void giant, but the void tended to clump together with itself sometimes. No one knew why, but with Sorin’s newfound insight, he suspected it was a case of all the individual creatures being part of the same entity. That was exactly what was happening at the rift, and he’d expected them to shift from large numbers to big threats.

He'd just hoped they’d thin the numbers out a lot more before it started happening. The void beasts were faster and had much better range, neither of which were unbeatable, but the whole floor was going to be a war of attrition. Having to stop every few hours to recover for a day or two made it impossible to make any real progress, not to mention how miserable soulspace injuries were to suffer through.

“Switch it up to phase two,” he ordered, shifting from retreat to charging forward in the blink of an eye.

The voidlings chasing him were not quick enough to adapt, and he blew through them before they realized what was happening. Rue followed in his wake, and Odric rushed forward to guard her flank. His own armament, if it could be considered that, was less a weapon and more of a shield. The wristband he wore allowed him to channel anima through it to increase his Void Resistance to the point of practically being immune, at least against a single voidling.

His job in phase two was to keep the heat off Rue. Phase one had called for him to help Nemari and Yoru maintain a safe distance, but the void creatures had shifted tactics so quickly that it had never come to that. That did mean he was completely fresh, though, which Sorin hoped would help him keep up longer. As the slowest of their trio, he was bound to lag behind, and they couldn’t reduce their pace to match him.

With Yoru working to keep his left flank clear, Rue and Odric claiming the right, and Nemari launching short-range artillery at the voidlings up ahead, Sorin drove himself far deeper into the swarm that he was comfortable with. He could feel the ache of his soul being sanded down by the void starting to set in through Void Resistance, and he knew he had only a few seconds to get out.

There were two goals to this tactic. The first was that by abandoning the hit-and-run tactics, they could trim down the enemy numbers quickly. The second was to perform a surgical strike that would eliminate a powerful void creature before it could grow too strong to handle. There was already one void giant hovering around the rift as some sort of guardian; they didn’t need a second one mobile and assisted by a few hundred lesser voidlings.

His support quickly fell behind, far sooner than he’d liked but later than he’d expected. The plan called for them to pull back before the soul burn got too bad, though they’d probably pushed harder than they should have to dig that deep in. The four of them turned from helping Sorin to extracting Rue and Odric, which mostly just involved blasting any clingers away so the pair could take to the air for a brief flight.

It was more like a long jump, really. Their soulprints weren’t powerful enough to sustain true flight, but it was enough to glide back to the far edge of the voidlings as they rushed in to fill the empty space left by their destroyed kin.

And in the middle of that, surrounded on all sides by voidlings, was Sorin. He leaped into the air, no longer needing to use himself as bait to keep Rue and Odric from being the center of attention, and rammed his sword into the amalgamation of void beasts that was steadily growing larger.

Void Eater triggered, but for the first time, the target was strong enough to fight back. A massive arm whipped through the air, and Sorin was forced to break contact to avoid being spiked back to the ground by it.

Should have known you wouldn’t make it easy for me.