Even if it was only a baby, a kraken was the last thing Sorin had expected to see on a single-digit floor. That was more of a Floor 20 or even 30 monster, depending on what type it was. He supposed a baby kraken might make for a good portal guardian on Floor 9 if there was some way to keep it a baby. But as far as Sorin was aware, all types of monsters grew up sooner or later.
That meant in another few decades, Floor 9 would have an unkillable aquatic predator circling the archipelago, one that would completely stall any advancement until some team from higher up came down to take care of it. That was a pretty weird decision for the tower to make, dropping a monster like that in a place it had no business being.
And of course we practically landed on its head, which means this is more tower fuckery. It put this thing in our way on purpose. Is it a test? Or is it trying to tell me something?
Underwater travel was a weirdly complicated thing. There was no ‘swim faster’ soulprint, not as far as Sorin knew, so it became all about raw power mixed with hydrokinesis and technique. Underwater fighting was, if anything, even worse, but he needed to get to the kraken’s main body before he worried about that.
Propelling himself on a current of water and feeling practically blind with almost none of his sensory soulprints working, Sorin dove through the mass of tentacles to find the kraken’s head. Unlike the smaller octopi most people thought the krakens looked like, its true appearance was considerably more nightmare-inducing. It more closely resembled a starfish, if each leg split into six to ten tentacles.
Of course, the starfish part had to be scaled up as well, so the core was thirty feet across, even on a baby kraken. Its mouth was a simple ring of teeth six layers deep that squeezed and contracted like the tower’s biggest puckered asshole. The comparison was perhaps inevitable given that the deep scarlet of the tentacle tips faded toward a fleshy pink, the closer the flesh got to the head.
Krakens lacked eyes with which to see. Of course, that did nothing to slow them down in the pursuit of prey, both moving and sensing the environment through a mixture of esoteric senses and something functionally similar to Nemari’s Water Bond. In fact, adult krakens were one of the few monsters to reliably farm when hunting for exactly that soulprint.
This one wouldn’t have it. It was simply too young, and baby monsters rarely had anything worthwhile to justify the effort of killing them. Sorin was only fighting this one because he didn’t think his team would be able to escape it while it lived, though he supposed heading off a potential future problem was also a good reason.
Still Winter was perhaps Sorin’s most potent tool in an underwater environment, if only because it gave him a modicum of control over the immediate area. There was no way he was going to metaphysically outmuscle a kraken, not when the best he could do was free cast something like Water Bond. Typically, he’d rely on something like Elemental Anchor to keep a monster like this from trashing him, but that was C-rank and thus outside his ability to free cast at the moment.
Or is it? It would be normally, but… I suppose this is a good time to find out if I’ve finally got enough free soulspace.
The soulprint was all brute force and no finesse, which made it extremely easy to cast. It wasn’t Sorin’s first choice for a C-rank, being somewhat larger than the typical soulprint of that tier, but he couldn’t afford to be picky. If it didn’t work, then he’d have to do things the hard way.
The kraken felt the chill spread out from Sorin’s body and responded by tearing the water apart with its own hydrokinesis, though Sorin could feel it struggling to usurp his control. What should have occurred instantly instead took eight seconds, more than enough time for Sorin to finish closing the distance and free cast his spell.
Elemental Anchor came together perfectly, though it stretched Sorin to the limits of his soulspace. It was a good thing the soulprint was so simple, otherwise he’d probably have failed to hold it together. Everything worked, though, and when the baby kraken predictably tried to drag him into its mouth, its magic failed to take hold of the water around him.
That did not make him safe—far from it. It simply meant the kraken had to grab hold of an even larger volume of water to encircle the portion Sorin had invested with the anchor and move all of that at once instead. That was well within the monster’s capabilities, but the act did slow it down. The fact that Sorin was also triggering Speed Burst repeatedly to swim faster made it that much harder for the kraken to get ahold of him, though he wasn’t making that all that difficult when he was swimming directly toward the mouth anyway.
The kraken caught up to him, and his anchor started to crack. Unresisting, Sorin let the monster’s magic sweep him down toward it, where the fanged sphincter of a mouth was already flexing open to devour him whole.
Then Still Winter rippled out, freezing the water around him into a jagged, thousand-pointed star of ice. Elemental Anchor held it steady, and in moments it grew to a far larger size than such a small kraken could hope to swallow. Magically sharpened and reinforced, the miniature barbed iceberg lodged itself in the kraken’s mouth.
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Sorin started to spin, and his ice moved with him. Blood poured out of the kraken’s mouth as its teeth were ripped free and its flesh was shredded. Convulsing in place, it abandoned its attacks on the surface of the water and brought the full force of its tentacles down to grab at the ice and tear it free.
There was nothing Sorin could do to stop that, at least not if he wanted to hold Elemental Anchor in place, but it didn’t matter. The damage was done, the kraken was dying, and the best it could hope for was to avenge itself before it went. Even that wasn’t much of a concern for Sorin, since the worst it could do was try to crush him—and fail—or hold him underwater until it died—which would be an inconvenience, but Water Breathing would keep him alive.
In the end, it did neither. So focused was the kraken on simply removing the ice star from its mouth that it ripped Sorin free and flung him through the water, where the simple act of being surrounded by ice sent him shooting up to the surface a few hundred feet away from everyone else. By the time he saw unfiltered sunlight, the kraken had sunk to the sea floor, where it was quickly obscured in an inky cloud of its own blood.
Anima slammed into him—not the tiny trickle he was used to, but a wave that threatened to knock him off his feet. The feeling came and went in an instant, leaving him feeling slightly disoriented for a moment. He was still rank 14, but more than half way through it now. It would have pushed anyone else up from rank 10 to 11 on the spot, but Sorin suspected the difference in contribution would prohibit that.
Then again, they were here for at least a few minutes before I showed up. That’s got to count for something.
The spiky ice shell he’d formed bobbed on the surface of the sea, relatively calm now that the fighting was over. Sorin cracked it open and stepped free, then strode across the water to rejoin the rest of his team.
“You’re late,” Nemari told him shortly. “Again.”
“Yeah… Sorry about that. The tower surprised me.”
“Let’s talk about it later,” she said, glancing down at the water slowly turning pink as the kraken’s blood dissolved into it. “There’s no telling what this mess is going to attract.”
“You think that thing had any soulprints?” Rue asked.
“Probably not, and I’m not going down there to check,” Sorin said. “You’re welcome to, if you’d like.”
Rue glanced down and shuddered. “No, thanks.”
* * *
Places like Floor 9 were popular vacation spots for powerful climbers. Outside of the monsters, the air was warm, the breeze was refreshing, and the view was gorgeous. It was the perfect spot to relax, albeit only if someone else was on guard, or if the climber was so much higher ranked than the floor that it was practically impossible for them to get hurt.
As fresh rank 9s—sort of—it was no vacation for Sorin’s team. They stood on the sandy beach, not admiring the scenery, but drip-drying while warily eyeing both the water and the jungle’s edge for warning of the next attack.
After getting everyone caught up on the strange glittering dust he’d been inundated with and his suspicions for what it meant, Sorin started speculating on the presence of a kraken on such a low floor. “It could be like that runt manticore we fought on Floor 1, just some quirk of the tower,” he said.
“How big are the adults if that thing was a fucking baby?” Rue asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ten times that size? Maybe a bit bigger? The tentacles never stop growing, and new ones come in to replace the ones it loses. It’s pretty difficult to say how old a kraken is just by tentacle size, and that’s before getting into the tower itself making them. An elder kraken, one that’s been dominating its territory for decades, could easily be fifty times the size of the one we just fought.”
“I’m going to need some better soulprints for underwater combat if this is what we can look forward to,” Yoru muttered.
“I would say not to worry, that we’ve got probably twenty floors at minimum before we fight anything like that, but, well, here we are,” Sorin said, gesturing back out toward the open ocean. “I wasn’t expecting something like that down here, though. Have you ever heard of a kraken this far down?”
Yoru shook his head. “No. Never. Do you think it means something?”
“Maybe,” Sorin said. “It’s just a theory. I don’t have any evidence to support it.”
“What is it?” Nemari asked.
Taking a moment to organize his thoughts on the matter, Sorin looked around. Rue was still staring out at the water, trying and failing to act nonchalant. Whatever had happened before Sorin had arrived, it had shaken her. Her brother had noticed it too and was vacillating between wanting to comfort her and knowing she wouldn’t appreciate it, at least not in public.
Vendis was looking a bit haggard, even though he’d healed everyone’s injuries. Or maybe it’s because of how much healing he did. Our healers don’t really get much of a workout from a normal fight. What he wasn’t showing was the sort of trauma Rue was struggling with, but Sorin honestly couldn’t tell what the man was thinking. His upbringing had seen him spend twenty years preparing to support Yoru’s climb, to sublimate his own desires and concerns in favor of his master’s.
Yoru and Nemari, ironically enough, were two sides of the same coin. They were proud, a bit conceited and arrogant at times, but ultimately trying to do right by their team as they climbed. Despite the differences in their upbringing, their training, and their resources, they could have been siblings for how they acted.
I guess I got lucky, in a way. For a random group thrown together through happenstance, this one’s doing alright. It’s probably my fault they keep getting dragged into fights that should be beyond them.
“Well?” Nemari prompted.
“Sorry. I got a bit off-track thinking about all this tower fuckery and how you’ve all been caught up in it,” he said. “My idea has to do with how Liminal Gateway lets me move between floors, how it’s tied in with the void, and whether or not the tower itself might be losing control of its structure.
“What if the void is filling the whole tower with cracks? What if sometimes a monster slips through, somehow survives its passage through the void by luck or skill, and finds itself stranded on a lower floor? It’s obvious that the tower cares about ending the void infestation. Maybe this is part of the reason why.”
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