Book 3, Chapter 64

It had been ten days since Sorin had set foot on Floor 24. His soul damage was mostly gone—practically a miracle given how badly he’d been injured—and everyone else had recovered enough that they were at least up and about. Only Odric was truly ready for a fight, but that was enough. Today wasn’t about throwing themselves back into the fray; it was about preparing the new recruits for the front line.

As it turned out, only nine of Galdred’s circle were actually capable of fighting voidlings in any meaningful way. The other three were too reliant on magic and lacked the necessary physical skills to participate in the fight. That didn’t make them worthless, but it did force them heavily into support roles that revolved around handling logistics.

“Your primary job is going to be to keep an eye on this rift two hundred miles northwest of the hub,” Sorin explained as he jabbed his finger at a spot on the map. They’d pinned it up to a rough wooden board to make it easier for everyone to see and gathered them all together for the briefing. “Specifically, we want to know if their numbers change during the encounter with the rift the rest of us will be pressuring.”

Each rift was clearly marked, and the ones that were linked together were connected by string to show the relationship where a single entity was emerging into the tower on multiple fronts. What Sorin was mentally referring to as the master rift sat by itself, part of a set of three and specially marked for being over twice the size of any of the others.

“You think they’re connected?” Zildra asked. “I can’t see any pattern to this. Why would they be so far away from their partners here, but right next to them over there.”

“I don’t know the why, I just know that it is.”

“How?”

Sorin vividly remembered how difficult it had been to get his team to believe him, and rightly so. His claims had been extraordinary and flew in the face of all conventional logic. It had only been after the tower itself had started to provide proof that they’d finally gotten onboard.

Telling Galdred’s group how he’d come up with the rift pairings wouldn’t go over well. He might convince them eventually, but he wouldn’t be able to provide the same proof the tower had the first time. A lot of it would have to be taken on trust, and that would be a lot easier to establish once they’d verified that his information was right.

“This is just testing to confirm what those who came before us already figured out,” Sorin said smoothly. It wasn’t technically a lie, either. If the climbers assumed that he was referring to Samael and the poor souls he’d transformed into pseudo-monsters, well, that was on them.

“Probably a good idea,” Galdred said. “Not to disparage anyone else’s hard work, but when you’re putting your life on the line, it’s better to make sure. Things could have changed since the last time anyone checked on this stuff. It’s not like we understand how these rifts work, anyway.”

“Precisely,” Sorin agreed. “Today’s goal is just to test out the theory to make sure everything works the way we think it does before we commit to a full assault. Now, moving on...”

* * *

Rue and Yoru were in what Sorin had taken to calling the recon team, which Rue thought was a pretty stupid name since none of their sensory soulprints did much of anything when it came to keeping an eye on a horde of voidlings. Yoru had enhanced vision that didn’t rely on anything but his own eyes, which was great for him, but Rue’s enhanced perception came from the esoteric senses she’d picked up to see without seeing.

That meant there was no real point to her being there, or at least that’s what she’d thought when she’d brought it up to Sorin. That was when he’d told her that her real job was to watch the newcomers and make sure they weren’t doing anything suspicious. The whole operation would fail if someone betrayed them while they were in the thick of it.

At first, that hadn’t made much sense to Rue. Once he’d reminded her that he was on bad terms with two of the high families, including Galdred’s, it became a lot clearer. She was actually annoyed with herself for not thinking that they might be an issue and could only blame it on how bad she still felt from the first rift they’d closed.

With her personal mission in mind, Rue joined the group of four that included three mages, one of the freaky mutagenic climbers Samael had made, Yoru, and herself. They set off at an easy pace, knowing they had a full day to get into position before the other teams launched their offensive. Her brother and Sorin would be taking point on that, with Nemari lurking in the background to fire off some easy shots.

Getting Sorin to agree to that had been another battle, but there was no way to actually contribute if they had to hide the void-killing gear the tower had given them, so he’d eventually folded. They’d handle the questions that were sure to follow after the field test was done.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

“Two hours until it starts,” one of the new guys said. Rue thought his name was Jinno, or Rinno.

Something like that. Uh... Finno? No, that sounds wrong.

They’d been... boisterous back when she’d first met them, but now that they were out in the field, the whole group was deadly serious. The jokes had vanished, replaced by a dour mood worse than anything Sorin ever put off.

“Plenty of time to get a count. We just need to be careful that they don’t notice us. No active soulprints, especially not anything that projects anima outward. Rue, can you extend your suppression out farther?”

“Maybe another ten feet, but it’ll drain me fast if I do,” she said. “I can’t promise coverage for more than half an hour if I do.”

Anyone could control their aura if they knew how and practiced, but it got harder and harder as they grew stronger and their soulspace expanded. Aura Suppression was the cheap and easy answer to that. For the cost of a D-rank soulprint, she could create a localized effect that forced the aura of anyone in it into a state of stillness that made it significantly more difficult to notice.

It wasn’t as good as doing it manually, but it was better than nothing. Some of the high family group could already manage it; unfortunately, none of them were on Rue’s team, so she’d been assigned the task of helping keep them unnoticed.

“Understood. Everyone, stay tight on Rue.”

Two hours came and went with all of them somewhat uncomfortable being crowded so close together, but they were professionals, and there were no complaints. She was sure that would change once they were back to safety, but hopefully she’d be out of earshot by the time they started up.

“It should be starting now,” Jinno said.

They watched intently, their eyes locked on the mass of voidlings crawling all over each other and slowly expanding outward at a rate of a few hundred feet an hour. It was larger than the rift she’d helped Sorin close, and if the tower was to be believed, only half of a greater whole that the rest of the team was poking at that very moment.

“I don’t see anything,” their martial specialist said.

“Give it some time. They need to get the other rift stirred up enough to need reinforcements.”

Another ten minutes passed before Yoru perked up. “One of the void beasts just disappeared,” he said. “Right there by that cluster to the left.”

They’d all made their counts hours ago. Rue knew there were twenty-two of the monsters, and she’d checked that several times to confirm the number hadn’t changed. Now she did another sweep and frowned.

Twenty? How’d we lose track of two of them?

“Anyone else come up two short?” Jinno asked.

A soft chorus of affirmations answered him. There were too many voidlings to do a count now, and if the number had gone up or down by a few, they wouldn’t be able to tell anyway. No one had come up with the same total as anyone else, but their best guess put the horde at between three and four thousand. Even Sorin could have spent hours just cutting through them, and she had no idea how they were supposed to handle that.

The worst part was that this wasn’t even one of the big rifts. It was mid-size at best. Even if all the high family climbers, all Rue’s team, and all the lizard-looking freaks attacked together, they’d still need to kill at least a hundred voidlings each, not counting the bigger void beasts and the three giants guarding the rift itself.

I guess there’s a reason ten years of throwing bodies at the problem hasn’t solved it.

They watched in terse silence for a few more minutes. The leading edge of voidlings continued to expand, and more of them stepped in to fill the gaps in the line as it got wider. The ones in the middle mulled around, doing God only knew what.

“They seem... agitated,” Rue observed.

Nobody answered immediately, but eventually Yoru nodded. “You’re right. Maybe they know what’s going on at their sister site.”

“If so, they’re not doing anything about it,” Jinno said.

Rue didn’t look away from the swarm. “Not yet, at least.”

Abruptly, on some unseen signal, the nearest group of voidlings turned as one and rushed toward the rift. It hovered fifty feet in the air, but that didn’t seem to matter to them. More voidlings just piled on the backs of the first to arrive, forming a living ramp that allowed the newest ones to leap directly into the rift.

“Well, that’s something. Looks like that old intel is still good,” one of the mages said. “How many do you think have gone through?”

The pile heaved and shifted, throwing voidlings through the air to spill down the sides where they splattered against the living carpet still surging toward the rift. Rue wasn’t certain, but she thought the ones that had formed the ramp were merging together into something bigger.

“It’ll be all of them in about a minute and a half,” Jinno said. “That’s... Uh... a bit more than we expected. I’m a bit worried about the other team now.”

“They’ll get away,” Yoru said without looking over. His eyes were locked on the ascending column of voidlings, still trying to count the numbers. “This was only ever supposed to be a probing strike. It won’t matter how many reinforcements hit them.”

“That’s at least a thousand already,” the mage said. “I hope you’re right, because they’re dead otherwise.”

“Sorin’s pretty much unkillable,” Rue told him. “And he won’t let anyone else die, either.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith in him.”

“Stow it,” Jinno said. “We’re counting, not arguing.”

That got him dark looks from the other two scouts and the martial specialist. One of them opened their mouth and snapped out, “Well, I count four giants, and I’m pretty sure there were only three a minute ago.”

“We already knew they could do that,” Yoru said.

“Hearing it and seeing it are two different things,” the mage muttered darkly. “How the hell does anyone kill one of those?”

“Maybe you’ll get to see it in person next time we do,” Rue told him.

One of the giants reached up and stuffed an arm into the rift. It was sucked inside, there and gone in less than a heartbeat. Rue could easily imagine it popping out the other side, whole and ready to fight.

Unkillable, she reminded herself. But it felt weak in the face of such overwhelming reinforcements. And don’t let anyone else die either, especially not my brother.