There was no way to know anything for sure, and while it might ultimately prove relevant to Sorin in the long run, his speculations had no markable impact on what they needed to do next. The only thing they could conclude was that there had definitely been one baby kraken on Floor 9, and they had no proof it had been alone.
Krakens were very territorial monsters, so if they assumed it had slipped through the cracks from a higher floor in a physical event that had a specific location, there probably weren’t any more. But no one wanted to bet their life on a ‘probably,’ so the whole team was left in a state of heightened paranoia, just watching for other powerful monsters that had no business existing on Floor 9.
It was a shame because it really ruined what could have been a relaxing atmosphere in Sorin’s opinion. A climb was always serious business, but he’d been looking forward to at least a few hours of enjoying the natural beauty of the floor. Now that there was no chance of that happening, he was left just sourly eyeballing how many miles of open water they’d have to cross to reach the next island on the chain.
His concern was less encountering another kraken—though that was certainly a possibility—and more some of the many other predatory monsters that would no doubt be far too powerful for a normal climber to handle. His hope was that anything else that might have gotten pulled through with the kraken also hunted exclusively in deep water.
The water between islands was relatively shallow, so much so that Sorin could see the sea floor going out a few thousand feet from the beach. He figured any attacks that were beyond their ability to handle would be in that dangerous part smack in the middle between two islands, and even that was a stretch. It just wasn’t deep enough there to make good kraken hunting grounds.
Of course, if the monsters got hungry enough and the surrounding ocean didn’t have enough food for them to survive on, they’d venture closer to the surface. Sorin’s luck was bad enough that just thinking of the possibility was probably enough to conjure it forth. Thus, he found himself doing mental calculations and hoping his team was up to holding Water Walking and Speed Burst for a few minutes at a time.
“I think I know where we are,” Yoru said. Half the team had circled the beach to get eyes on the two nearest neighboring islands in the hopes that they’d spot a distinguishing feature. It appeared they’d been successful.
“There’s a volcano on the island south of here, which narrows our position down to one of three possibilities. I can eliminate one of those based on the size of the island we’re currently on being too small to match, and the island to the north appears to have pretty heavy vegetation coverage.”
Sorin had seen the same map Yoru was working off of in one of the books in the Telpike library. It took him a second to place the location based on the context, and once he did, he let out a heavy sigh. “If you’re right, we’re four islands from the southern tip of the archipelago.”
“And have sixteen to cross just to reach the portal hub,” Yoru confirmed.
“Then another five to the floor guardian’s arena.”
Most of the islands were only a few miles apart, at worst. Hopping from one to the next wasn’t a huge issue, at least not under normal circumstances, but it did mean they’d landed on the wrong side of Big Blue, a fifty-mile-wide channel that split the archipelago into roughly two equal pieces. That was a pain to cross under normal circumstances.
As if reading Sorin’s mind, Yoru said, “Nobody reported anything strange anywhere that got back to us in the last week or so. Maybe the kraken was an isolated incident.”
“We’d best hope so. We’re going to need to build a raft and tow it along behind us so we have something to rest on. Best guess is two days to cross Big Blue if we’re lucky.”
“About that… How fast could you do it by yourself?”
“A liminal space skip?” Sorin asked. “Hmm. It would reduce the danger significantly.”
On the other hand, it would leave me to fight by myself. If I got hit at a bad time, and by monsters from a higher floor… Well, it’s a risk no matter what we do.
“You know, we never did find out what happens if you use the portal hub,” Odric pointed out. “Maybe just go back to another floor and see if you can take the portal right to the Floor 9 hub.”
Sorin blinked in surprise. “Oh, right! We did forget to try that. If nothing else, it would get us to within a few hours of the portal guardian instead of a few days.”
He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten that. With everything else they’d been dealing with, and then having made the decision to stop bothering to visit the portal hubs on the previous floors anyway, it had completely slipped his mind that they’d meant to experiment with the mechanics of Liminal Gateway and the tower’s own portal system.
“If it does work, we should probably still go in two groups,” Yoru said. “Passenger Through the Void is all well and good, but the risks of overstressing your liminal space are too high not to be careful with it.”
“One way to find out,” Sorin said, drawing his knife and turning toward the closest tree. “Give me half an hour. It shouldn’t take that long, but I still don’t know how Void Strider has changed the process. And stay on guard for a voidling emerging from the sign.”
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
He carved while he spoke. By the time he was done leaving what were probably unnecessary instructions, the seven-tower sign was complete. He pressed his hand against it, triggered Liminal Gateway, and stepped through to the void.
Where it had been a pathway of sparkling, silvery dust so ethereal that he’d almost fallen through it once when he’d fought off a pair of void beasts, now it was a thick, solid road made of silver sand. It curved upward at the edges, providing the illusion of safety against wandering feet roaming too far to the side.
His nodes had been more suggestions than anything else, a nub of a branch sprouting from the main trunk of the tree. Those had been replaced as well. Instead of that thin, two-foot strip of silver leading into nothing, each node had its own little archway bracketing the entrance and a circle of sand five feet wide he could step into.
Sorin turned to inspect the archway right behind him. Curious, he stepped through. Immediately, the void faded from its forever-roiling darkness to something that had perhaps seen too much sunlight or been laundered until it lost its luster. Overlaid on top of that was not the rough, misty image of the tower he was used to, but a full-color, vibrant scene. He could see a hundred feet in every direction easily, as if the sign he’d left behind was a single, massive eye.
Well, not every direction, he amended silently. The tree itself served to limit his vision, but he could see at least halfway to every direction, and he suspected his range would widen if he chose a thinner tree next time. As it was currently, about a third of what was visible was just an extremely close up look at the grain of the bark around the seven-tower sign.
It was still a potent upgrade in terms of not walking blindly into a trap. Before, an ambushing party had merely to wait close-but-not-too-close, and he’d never know about them. He’d assumed Samael would have told them that—though there was always the possibility that the Black Hellion was too paranoid to give away a weakness of his own—and been forever paranoid when exiting liminal space.
At least now, if they are laying a trap for me, I’ll have enough time to react to their approach. It’s not perfect, and I’ll need to be deliberate about where I place the sign, but… Yeah, I think this is a solid upgrade.
Just as he thought that, something shifted beneath his feet. He was distracted first by that sensation, then by the sight of Yoru’s panic-stricken expression. “What the hell?” Yoru breathed out, his eyes wide and darting around. “It’s… It’s gone? Guys, I think we’ve got a problem.”
The sign wasn’t gone, at least not as far as Sorin could tell. He could still feel the connection to Floor 9. Experimentally, he willed the circle to shift again. At the same time, his view rotated around as though he was spinning in place. It swung up, then down with his thoughts.
It moves independently of the physical location of the sign? I wonder how limited the range is. Could I… Hmm.
Twisting himself mentally, he shifted his view from the north side of the tree with its view of the open sea to the jungle on the south. Everything blurred for a moment, then settled into place to show him a wall of bark and leaves.
“Are we stranded here?” Rue asked.
“We still have the option to simply walk like normal climbers, so, no. But I don’t know what this means,” Yoru said.
Probably should poke my head back out and tell them it’s fine.
The act of emerging from the now-vanished sign was more a mental one than a physical one. Sorin reappeared directly on the spot he wanted to rather than in front of the tree he’d carved the sign into, which put him right behind Yoru and right next to Nemari, who’d been looking over his shoulder.
“So, a few changes,” he announced, causing Yoru to jump almost a foot into the air.
Startling a climber could be dangerous, but Yoru stopped himself before he could finish whatever spell he’d started to cast. “God! Don’t do that.”
The scolding tone was undercut by Rue and Odric both snickering in the background. Even Vendis’s lips were twitching, but he mostly kept a straight face. Only Nemari seemed to find no amusement in Yoru leaping like a startled cat.
“Noted. As I was saying, things have changed.” Sorin gestured to the tree, which no longer contained a seven-tower sign. There were some scars in the bark, as though something had been lightly scored there a long time ago and had since grown over. “I don’t seem to need the physical sign anymore. I think I can even create a new node just by willing it into existence, and I can move around where the node drops me out at.
“Things look different on the path itself. I haven’t tested that out yet. I can see and hear you all much better from the other side now, too, which is why I thought I should probably keep you updated on what’s going on so no one thinks they’ve been abandoned.”
“A wise decision,” Yoru said, sniffing and holding himself stiffly.
“Yeah… That’s why I did it. Anyway, just hold tight. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Sorin focused for a second and disappeared, the exact same as if he’d been touching a physical sign. If he could step into liminal space in a combat scenario, this opened up a whole new range of possibilities for him. Currently, the limitation was the time it took to carve the physical symbol, especially since doing it with magic seemed to draw voidlings like shit drew flies.
One more thing to experiment with, he thought to himself as he strode out of the annex and onto the main path.
A minute later, he was standing in the circle of sand that represented his node back to Floor 3. It was one of the few spots he’d bothered to remake after the behemoth incident, finding it conveniently close to the portal itself while being far enough out of the way that no one was likely to stumble across it. Now that he could make the nodes without carving an actual sign, he considered moving it even closer.
No, he decided, the current spot means no one is ever nearby. I don’t want to pop out of nowhere when someone might see me, and I don’t want to have to wait for them to move. Worst case, I’ll just make a second node nearby and keep both.
Sorin appeared on Floor 3 a few seconds later. Glancing around, he smiled. There was no sign of the physical symbol here, either. It was the work of minutes to reach the portal hub, and nobody seemed to be out and about. That probably had something to do with a time shift between floors making it a few hours before dawn here instead of midday like it was up on Floor 9.
He approached the portal and started rooting around inside the mental space that connected him to the tower. All the portals were there, from Floor 0 up to Floor 9. Even the ones on Floors 6 through 8 that he’d never personally visited were right where he expected them.
Perfect! That’s going to save us some work. Wait. What’s this?
Somewhere far, far away, so faded as to be almost invisible, a field of stars hung overhead. One hundred and one points—a fact he knew without ever bothering to count them—looked down at him, out of reach, but oh so visible.
The portals to his original tower were in sight once more.
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