Book 3, Chapter 60

No part of Sorin wanted to keep fighting. He hurt. He’d lost anima. Beyond that, he was just plain tired from crossing Floor 23 and battling its guardian before being immediately thrust into another fight. The only thing Sorin wanted was to find a bed, fall face first into it, and not wake up for a month.

As always, the tower refused to give him what he wanted. Complaining wouldn’t change reality, so instead of giving in to the pain and weakness, he hefted his sword and marched toward the void giant. It was ignoring the humans for the moment as it approached the rift, and Sorin worried that it would reestablish its connection to whatever was on the other side if he let it.

New levels of pain flashed through his body as he forced himself into a run. It wasn’t his normal fast, graceful gait. At this point, his anima was nearly gone, either spent on his own soulprints or eaten by the void during the fight. What was left was muscle and sheer, contrary grit. That would have to be enough.

Part of him knew that it wasn’t. Against a voidling, he’d still win easily. Against a void beast, he’d bet on himself, but with a bit less confidence. To beat a giant, though, meant he was relying entirely on the void-consuming properties of his sword and the soulprints embedded in his mosaic. They’d do the work; he’d be too busy just trying to survive.

Sorin had forgotten one thing, though. He had an advantage Samael had lacked, one he’d spent a lot of time and effort cultivating. He had a team, and if they weren’t as experienced as him, they were still powerful, and they were still there. It didn’t take long for Rue to catch up to him, with the others just seconds behind.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

Sorin appreciated that there was no attempt to talk him out of it. She understood that the fight wasn’t over, and that there was no walking away. Leaving now would just give the rift time to regrow. They’d sacrificed too much for it to all be for nothing.

“It’s still a giant,” he said. “Even without a direct connection to the rift, it’s dangerous. I don’t think it’s going to be doing that mist trick again. Probably, it won’t even throw out voidlings now that it doesn’t have an easy way to regain mass. We’ll whittle it down as safely as possible until there’s nothing left, then close the rift once it’s unprotected.”

“I’ll take point,” Odric said. With the defense from his wristband protecting him, that was an obvious call.

“Left flank,” Yoru called.

Nemari nodded along. “Guess that leaves me with the right.”

“You want to take the back or stay with Od?” Rue asked. She hesitated, then added, “Or maybe stay back and recover a bit so you can close the rift once we’re done.”

The idea of not fighting appealed to Sorin, but it warred with the idea of letting his team fight what was probably the most dangerous battle of their lives without him. If he didn’t participate, it would be sheer luck if all four of them survived. Maybe that was uncharitable, but this wasn’t the kind of battle he wanted to see them testing themselves on.

“How confident are you that you can hold it?” he asked Odric.

“So long as it doesn’t decide to ignore me and turn around, I can stay in its way,” the big man said.

That was a ridiculous statement, really. They barely came up to the giant’s knees, even at its reduced size. It could quite easily step over any of them if it wanted to. But Odric wasn’t wrong. The giant wouldn’t flee, as long as he kept pulsing anima to use himself as bait, it likely wouldn’t try to bypass him.

“We’ll both hit the back. Our best strategy is to shred this thing as quickly as possible. Don’t hold back,” Sorin told him. “Thirty seconds should be enough.”

The plan decided, they broke apart to play their roles. Nemari led the assault with a beam of devouring energy from her wand while Odric sprinted ahead. Anima rolled out around him, coursing up his arm and covering his whole body just as he slammed into the giant’s leg. It reached down slightly, dripping new tentacles that unspooled to reach the ground and try to grab him.

Then Yoru was there, whipping his weapon around in wide arcs that cut the tentacles free of the main body with each slash. The amount of overall damage it did might have been negligent, but it protected Odric and reduced the strain on his barrier. Those extra seconds he bought for everyone else to work were just as important as the damage Sorin and Rue did when they hit the back of the creature.

Voidlings weren’t normal monsters, though, and just because it was facing toward Odric didn’t mean it ignored everyone else. New tendrils sprouted to get in Sorin’s way, forcing him to deal with those.

“I got it,” Rue said, slipping between the outstretched limbs and Sorin.

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He shifted to the side to give her room and got back to work on the trunk that was the giant’s leg. Just stabbing the sword into it was visibly reducing the giant’s size. It wasn’t as simple as standing there and waiting, though that would have been difficult enough to endure, but Rue switching to focusing on holding back the giant’s reach made it a lot easier to tear it up.

Without the rift to reinforce it, Sorin’s thirty second prediction came true. If anything, he’d overestimated how long it took to kill it, having failed to properly factor in how much more effective they were as the giant shrunk. Once it reached the point where it was barely twice their height, it seemed to almost fold in on itself all at once. There was a brief burst of void as it expanded outward in every direction, but that was followed by it falling into thin strands of wispy void-stuff that faded away completely.

The battlefield was silent but for the heavy, pained breathing of the five climbers. There wasn’t even a whisper of wind across the dead landscape, and certainly there were no monsters remaining. All that was left was the much-reduced rift still hanging in the air, and that was a small fraction of what it had started as.

A few minutes passed while they recovered, though in truth it did little enough for their injuries. Soul damage wasn’t something that healed quickly, and very little of their exhaustion was physical. The break was more to regain just a sliver of their anima reserves, enough to start feeding the passives that provided them with superhuman endurance and strength.

Once he felt ready, Sorin approached the rift. Closing it was going to be more on the tower than him, which hopefully meant his part was to just stand there and endure while it worked through him. Banishment triggered in his soulspace without him doing anything, and he felt tower anima fill him for just a moment before the ability activated.

Something felt wrong there, like he’d done a backward Liminal Gateway. The anima flowed the wrong way, imparting an unpleasant sensation that was just strong enough for him to notice it. If his soulspace hadn’t been scoured raw from the fight, he might not have.

What formed in front of him wasn’t the liminal space he was used to seeing when he used Liminal Gateway, but a giant, floating seven-tower sign anchored to nothing at all. Back when Sorin had still needed to carve those to use the soulprint, he’d always done them as a circle, but this one was in three dimensions as a sphere. Each line was iridescent, anima given solid form, and it fully encapsulated the rift. Then it shrunk, crushing the rift down with it until they both vanished at once.

“That was... easy,” Nemari said. “I think?”

Sorin barked out a laugh. “The last part, I guess. It was all the prep work for it that sucked.”

Yoru made a show of looking around. “But it’s over with. There are no more void creatures remaining. The rift is closed. We actually did it.”

“Once. Thirteen more to go,” Sorin said.

He didn’t need to say that there was no way they could repeat their performance even a single time, let alone thirteen more. They’d made a step forward, perhaps the first real bit of progress against the Void Wall anyone had ever made, but it was a single step in a long journey. And the clock was still running against them. Until they managed to clear the whole floor, there was nothing saying new rifts couldn’t open up.

Maybe not even then. Though, I think the tower itself generally contains them with its monsters when they aren’t artificially torn open by Samael. Or myself, I suppose, he thought, recalling the behemoth he’d accidentally unleashed on Floor 4.

The good cheer vanished once the scope of their task set in. Despite the hard-won victory, they knew that this had been the smallest and easiest of the rifts to challenge. Things would only get worse, and they were unlikely to get stronger to compensate for it. There was a reason the infestation had been growing for a decade with the natives of the red tower unable to do better than checking its advance.

“Alright, let’s get a move on. We can have a proper celebration once we’re safe,” he said.

“Thank God it’s only a minute long walk through your gateway,” Rue muttered. “I don’t think I could do the whole fifty miles to the hub.”

“Rue...” Odric said gently.

“What? Why are you all looking at me like that?”

“The tower told us we wouldn’t be able to use the gateway here. The void is too thick. We’d get eaten alive on the other side. It’s the same reason the portal hub doesn’t connect to Floor 25 anymore, remember?”

“When did it say that?!”

“Sometime after that light show Sorin insisted was supposed to be a map,” Yoru told her. “I think you were distracted trying not to vomit at the time.”

“Well fuck. We have to walk everywhere again?”

“Run, you mean,” Sorin said. If he listened to his body, he would just drop on the spot, but since he’d already established he wasn’t doing that, running would get them to the portal hub faster than walking.

“Damn it. Okay, what else did I miss that was important?”

“Only all the greatest mysteries of the tower unraveled before our very eyes,” Odric said. “No big deal. Catch it next time.”

That wasn’t true, of course. The tower didn’t seem opposed to answering questions, but it had been limited in how much time it had and had reasonably chosen to focus on what it felt Sorin needed to know to win against the Void Wall.

“I’ll fill you in,” Sorin told her. “It’s mostly just about what we’re doing on Floor 24.”

They waited another half an hour, excusing the delay as ensuring that the rift didn’t open right back up. Sorin was confident that wouldn’t happen. A new one might open somewhere else, but this one was closed. Even still, none of them could force themselves to push, so they took the time for their own sake.

Partway through the break, Azlo showed back up. He hadn’t gone too far, just a mile or two off so that he’d be out of the way. The void rift’s closing had been eye-catching, however, and once the rest of the team hadn’t shown up immediately, he’d decided to circle back and find out what was going on.

“Can he just carry me back?” Rue asked, only to be shot down by the entire group.

Eventually, they left the field. Already, the edges were starting to lighten from void-black to dark, healthy soil, and Sorin guessed it’d be a day at most before the tower reclaimed the area. Whether that would help them later on remained to be seen, but he took it as a sign things were heading in the right direction.

The journey to the portal hub took far, far longer than it should have, but they managed to make it without having to fight any rogue voidlings. For that, if nothing else, Sorin was thankful.