“Not what I was expecting,” Sorin said aloud as he looked at the new Antechamber.
He was alone, so he’d guessed that part right, at least. It was the rest of the situation that had him scratching his head as he peered around. There were no pedestals in the center of the room holding rewards for the team, but there was also no magical image of the seven towers like he’d experienced before.
Not sure exactly what I was expecting, though. I already did this part for the slate a few floors ago. I just need it… unlocked, I guess, since I didn’t have the full mosaic filled in.
Sorin slowly approached the middle of what appeared to him to be an empty room. Blind Sense revealed nothing unusual, but Living Earth didn’t function through the Antechamber’s stone. If there was something hidden in this particular version of the space between floors, Sorin couldn’t detect it.
There was no exit portal, however, so he had to be missing something. Since the Antechamber wasn’t a tower puzzle, that meant he was probably overthinking things. Straightening up, he took a few confident steps into the exact center of the room and waited.
Sparkling silver dust started pouring in from nowhere. It fell into mounds around Sorin, slowly piling up until the whole Antechamber was full. He took a few steps up to keep from being buried to the knee, then again when it just kept coming.
Normal dust would have filled the air in blinding, choking clouds. This dust seemed to cling to itself, which was strange enough on the surface, but Sorin had immediately recognized where he’d seen it before. It was the material that made up the pathway through liminal space.
It took a few minutes for Sorin to realize that the dust was building up, but it was also disappearing. At first, he wasn’t sure where it was going—for all he knew, it was simply returning to wherever it had come from to begin with—but it didn’t take long to figure it out. Simply looking into his soulspace gave him the answer.
The mosaic was practically glowing silver. The paper-thin cracks between each tile were all filled with dust, and when that wasn’t enough space, it climbed the stone to paint the walls. For a moment, Sorin worried for the massive oil painting that represented his soulprints, but the dust passed by without harming them.
The image off to what Sorin mentally considered to be the east section of the mosaic was more or less complete now. It showed him walking the liminal path, except instead of a single trail with nodes marked along its length, it branched out like a tree, forming smaller paths that forked over and over again. Sometimes the paths joined back together. Sometimes they reached out into the void.
Even as Sorin examined the image, which had previously shown only a single road through the darkness, more paths grew in. Tiles that were black, empty void shifted to reveal silver lines cutting through them. Those lines thickened and grew, expanding the web and forming a network that filled the entire image.
And hanging between those silver lines like glistening orbs, each one connected in a dozen places, were the individual floors of the tower. Some were bigger than others. Floor 5 was the largest of the collection, for example, while Floor 0 was barely a pinprick in comparison. There were only nine orbs at the moment, but Sorin could see where plenty of new ones might form.
Interesting placement, though. Is this what the tower truly is, just a collection of small realms linked together by these pathways? No, that can’t be right. The portal hubs are accessible to everyone, so there’s that, at least.
That probably looked more like a string of lights moving in a straight line, however. There was no need for such a complex pattern when there was only a single point of entrance and exit for each floor. The Liminal Gateway was infinitely more complicated by virtue of letting Sorin create his own entrances wherever he wanted.
While Sorin was finishing studying the new aspect of the mosaic, the silver dust finally stopped flowing into his soulspace. The ‘trunk’ portion of the path that the image depicted him walking on flashed, drawing his attention to the new soulprint set into the middle of it.
“Void Strider,” he said. As always, understanding what a soulprint did at a basic level was instinctive once it was inside his soulspace. It was mastering it that took time and practice.
In this case, it was sort of the reverse of Liminal Gateway. Rather than traveling to a location in the tower and carving the seven-tower sign to create the entrance into liminal space, he could manipulate the path itself to reach new areas. His mind immediately went to that gap between his portion of the path and the one only a few feet away when he’d first entered liminal space.
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With Void Strider, he could bridge that. What exactly it was, he didn’t know, though he suspected it was someone else’s path. As far as he knew, he and Samael were the only people capable of traversing liminal space in the red tower, but there could be others on the other side of Floor 25. Or they could be paths of people in other towers. Could I go home with this ability? Could I find the rest of my real team?
That thought was certainly worth taking some time to consider. The people he was working with were fine. They were competent, learned from their mistakes, and were rapidly gaining the skills climbers needed to thrive. And that was great. It just wasn’t a full team of rank 100s.
The more he looked at it, though, the more Sorin became sure that it wouldn’t work. He didn’t doubt that his original team had their own problems to overcome, but how many of them had become fugitives practically from day one? It was possible there was a whole team giving them problems, perhaps even the rest of Samael’s team that had been scattered across the tower in the same way, but Sorin had been extraordinarily unlucky to draw the Black Hellion’s notice by partnering with Rue.
Extrapolating from that, if everyone else had their own liminal paths, then surely one of them had beaten him to this point. Whoever got there first would immediately have explored that connection in the exact same way Sorin was planning on doing. The fact that no one had reached out to him—not counting Samael, who’d modified Sorin’s liminal path with what was probably this exact same soulprint—pretty much cemented the idea in Sorin’s mind.
Besides, if this did let me jump to another tower, Samael would have already used it to dodge the mess on Floor 25. That’s just more proof that it’s not going to let me out of the red tower’s sphere of influence.
Sorin pulled himself back out of his soulspace and found the silver dust had all vanished from the Antechamber. Presumably, it was inside him now, stored under his mosaic and in the walls. He wondered if the image in the new section would continue to shift as he moved his liminal path, if it would form a sort of living map he could reference.
Suddenly realizing exactly how much time he’d spent pondering the mysteries of the tower and the void, Sorin hurried over to where a portal now stood at the far end of the Antechamber. Whoops. I told them I’d only be a few minutes. Hopefully, I haven’t kept them waiting too long.
* * *
Rue really, really, really hoped Sorin was just late coming out of his Antechamber, because the other alternatives were so much worse. He’d always come out in the same spot, which in theory had no reason to change now. It was impossible to rule that out, though, so Rue kept it in mind.
The other option was that he had indeed come out of the portal by himself like he’d planned and then immediately been attacked by the same monster they were fighting. It made the wyrm look small, with each one of its dozens of tentacles being longer than the Floor 8 portal guardian. The only saving grace was that it seemed to have no passive defenses at all beyond its enormous size.
Muscle split open and blood poured out as Rue slashed a set of parallel lines into the tentacle coming down on her. It might as well have been a paper cut, but it was still enough to make the massive octopus-thing flinch back for a moment. That was all she needed to slip out from between the limb and the water with a burst of speed.
She ended that knee-deep in the sea, but taking a moment to shore up her concentration on Water Walking allowed her to climb back up to the surface. It was just in time, too, as another tentacle rose up from the depths to grab at her.
As Rue dodged out of the way, Nemari took hold of the water around the tentacle and did… something… Rue couldn’t tell what exactly it was. All she knew was that the last ten feet popped off, spilling gallons of blood into the water and further staining it red.
“Retreat to the island!” Yoru bellowed. With no ground in easy reach, his magical attacks were limited, but he was flailing about with his new blade whip to great effect. The octo-monster didn’t seem to want to get near him, but Rue suspected that had more to do with Vendis’s blood manipulation combined with the sheer number of small injuries Yoru had opened up on the monster.
The island was the sole bit of good news. While they had landed in the water like they’d been afraid of, there was land clearly visible perhaps a thousand feet away. If they hadn’t almost literally fallen into the monster’s mouth upon exiting the Antechamber, it would have been a mostly smooth transition.
Calling for a retreat was a lot easier than actually pulling it off. The monster was fighting three simultaneous battles—Nemari and Od were also paired up, helping to defend each other—and, as far as Rue could tell, it was easily corralling all of them. If not for Water Walking, they’d have been helpless.
Well, maybe not helpless, Rue silently amended as Nemari ripped off another tentacle.
Despite the damage, they certainly weren’t winning, though. Their only hope was to get to shallow enough water that the monster couldn’t follow them, and even that might not be enough. It wasn’t hard to imagine its tentacles rising out of the water to blindly swipe across the beach. And that assumed they managed to successfully break away from its corralling limbs, which was feeling more and more impossible.
Then Sorin was there, tumbling out of nowhere and falling three feet to land on the surface of the water with his knees slightly flexed. “Holy shit,” he said, his eyes widening. “A baby kraken.”
“What the fuck do you mean by ‘baby?’” Rue asked. “How big do these—”
Her question was cut off by two tentacles trying to hit her from the front and the back. If the monster—the kraken, apparently—had been a bit smarter, it would have kept the second one underwater to hide it from her Blind Sense, but since it hadn’t, she saw the trap coming in time to dodge it by rolling beneath the one coming at her face.
By the time she looked back up, Sorin was gone. It took only a moment to locate him, now underwater and swimming closer to the source of the tentacles in complete disregard for what any sane person would consider to be logic or survival instinct.
Then Rue lost track of him again, her own battle for survival overshadowing her ability to keep track of Sorin’s sinking aura.
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