They’d been in the underwater cave network for about six hours, descending another mile or so from where they’d started. Nothing worse than merfolk had attacked them, though the potent combination of merfolk and trained attack fish had added a new dimension to the challenge of fighting back once.
They were exhausted, physically and mentally. Nemari had taken to heating the water around them and holding it from spreading out just to give them a reprieve from the cold, even though that drained her own anima reserves even more. Water Breathing was struggling to feed them the air they needed after so long, and they all knew what awaited them if they ran out of anima completely.
Part of the problem was that the merfolk were intelligent. While the guides had noted this, it had assigned them nothing more sophisticated than the ability to work in cohesive units utilizing ambush tactics. Nowhere had there been a mention of removing the guiding marks Sorin’s team had left to keep themselves from getting lost.
Another part was the damn tower itself. The first few times they’d found themselves somewhere unexpected, he’d thought they’d simply taken a wrong turn somewhere. But no, that wasn’t the case. The tower had filled some of the tunnels with a form of toxic coral, blocking off the routes they’d planned to take.
Destroying the coral was an option, but it was an expensive one. It could stretch for hundreds of feet, and moving that much water to keep any of the poison from reaching them completely wiped Nemari out. She’d come close to drowning the first time they’d tried it.
We can’t keep this up, Sorin decided.
Fortunately, they had an advantage normal climbing teams lacked. Sending out the signal to retreat to the rest of his team, he swam over to the nearest wall. They’d already decided on the order earlier, which meant Yoru and Odric went with Sorin first. He quickly pulled himself and his passengers through the gateway and into liminal space, where they stood dripping sea water onto the sand.
A minute later, he was back for the other three. They were radiating a sort of nervous energy, as though they knew they were about to die and were just waiting for the end to arrive. His return signaled a vast rush of relief from them.
“Alright, that could have gone better,” Sorin said once they were all back together on the island above the caves.
“Oh, God, air,” Rue groaned. “I’ll never take you for granted again.”
“I imagine our experience was probably a lot like the climbers a few generations back, charting a course into the unknown,” Yoru said thoughtfully. “They wouldn’t have even realized they were closing in on the portal guardian.”
Having had plenty of experience mapping out floors no one had ever set foot on before, Sorin was less enamored with the idea than Yoru was. There was something to be said for the thrill of exploring the unknown, but this wasn’t it. It was more of the tower screwing with them.
“The reefs are unexpected, right?” Nemari asked. “You guys studied the books. There was no mention of them?”
“None,” Sorin said. “The monster spread seemed strangely homogenous, too. Are we in the wrong place?”
“That would be a stretch. The layout matched closely to what we were expecting,” Yoru said. “I suppose it’s possible there are multiple caves with identical maps. The tower could certainly make that if it wanted to.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Rue said suddenly, catching everyone’s attention. “I think your books are just old and out of date.”
“We update them regularly as new teams climb—”
“As cheap as your dad is, I kind of doubt that. Buying information costs money, and the books from your library have been wrong more often than not. It’s not just this floor. We’re constantly being surprised that the info was bad about something or another. I think Daddy Telpike stopped paying his informants, and we’re operating on old, outdated information. It might be time to start rubbing elbows with other climbers and chasing rumors again.”
That was a disturbingly probable idea, one Sorin couldn’t bring himself to dismiss out of hand. Yoru had proven himself to be a reliable and trustworthy companion; Sorin had no problems at all climbing with him. Yoru’s father, on the other hand, had been a pain in the ass despite not even being there. Reaching the other side of the Void Wall and ending that partnership couldn’t come soon enough.
“Let’s say you’re right,” Sorin said. “We’re in the right spot and just a little bit lost. The merfolk have somehow grown and organized, taken over the whole lair and started blocking off problematic passages with this coral they’ve cultivated. I’m sure they can grow it pretty fast, so this could even be a recent change in the last few months.”
“What do we do about it?” Nemari finished the thought for Sorin.
“Exactly. There’s still a giant, electrified jellyfish down there waiting for us to kill it.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
It really was too bad there was no weak soulprint to resist lightning. Outright immunity was on the table, but not before B-rank, which wouldn’t happen until rank 30 at the absolute earliest—or maybe rank 25 if Sorin recalculated to account for the anomalous rate his soulspace was expanding. Either way, it wasn’t going to help him today, which was why he had healing abilities to counteract the damage instead.
“Let’s start by mapping out what we experienced and comparing it to the official maps,” Yoru suggested. “Maybe we can figure out where we are and plan a more efficient route to the guardian’s arena.”
“Better plan out some alternates,” Sorin said. “We might be able to break through a few hundred feet of coral, but Nemari will drown herself before we manage to brute force it all the way to the bottom.”
“While we’re strategizing, let’s coordinate a better response to those fish people,” Nemari said. “There’s got to be a more efficient way of killing them.”
Sorin frowned. “The problem there is that they’re smarter than our information gave them credit for. Honestly, I don’t have a ton of experience with this particular type of monster, but it does seem a bit weird to me.”
“When in doubt, the tower did it.”
“Hmm,” was all Sorin said in response to that.
* * *
The strands of coral were new, something they hadn’t seen just a few hours earlier. If Sorin had to guess, he thought the merfolk were just lining random tunnels with it, stringing up toxic coral like spiderwebs and hoping that whoever broke it would imbibe the poison and save the monsters the trouble of hunting them down.
The good news was that the merfolk hadn’t had the time to properly seed and fill the tunnels Sorin’s team was using. That meant they could just swim around the strands of new coral as long as they were careful. It slowed them down slightly, but it wasn’t a threat.
The bad news was that when they were attacked by new schools of merfolk, the coral strands became yet another hazard they had to account for. The environment was already challenging enough to work in without the added difficulty, and more than once, someone broke a line, requiring Nemari to sweep the toxins away and one of the healers to fix up whoever had screwed up.
It drained their resources and added to their mental load, but two hours after they resumed exploration, they finally found what they were looking for. It was a giant cave, three hundred feet or more across, with dozens of holes in the walls. The portal guardian, a massive, thousand-armed jellyfish, floated at the ceiling.
It was transparent, almost invisible to Sorin’s eyes. To Horizon Walker, however, it blazed with a rippling, yellow-and-blue aura. Most of its tendrils hung limply in the water, waiting for some foolish climber to swim through them, but it had at least two dozen longer arms, probably thousands of feet long, just based on the size of the main body, that slithered through tunnels and snatched food up.
Their first clue that they were nearly there was when the water started to sting. That sensation got stronger the deeper into the tunnel they went until, a few minutes later, they finally laid eyes on the guardian.
The hard part is over, thank God. Now we just need to kill the bastard.
Before they could start, however, Nemari sent out a frantic emote to halt. Everyone froze, and a few seconds later, merfolk started pouring out of four different holes in the far wall. There were a hundred of them, maybe more, and they wasted no time in attacking the massive jellyfish.
It was a suicidal rush. At best, a merfolk traded its life to sever a single tendril, and sometimes it wasn’t even that equal. Often, they were simply stung and immobilized, then scooped up and brought to the portal guardian’s mouth to be consumed. That didn’t seem to matter to them, which confused Sorin because they’d shown much more advanced tactics earlier.
The wave of bodies didn’t slow down, and soon there were so many corpses in the water that it was getting hard to see anything through the blood.
The jellyfish didn’t seem to care, as it didn’t have eyes anyway. However it sensed prey—blindly groping with thousands of limbs, probably—it was more than up to the task of scooping up its meal.
What are they trying to accomplish? Sorin wondered. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be working. The merfolk were dying in droves, their lives spent on nothing that Sorin could discern.
A few minutes and several hundred dead merfolk later, Sorin finally figured it out. He couldn’t really claim credit for any brilliant insight, though. The answer literally swam into the room. It was only after he saw the monster that it all came together.
That’s a triton! I guess that confirms our theory about other monsters getting pulled down here with that kraken.
Sometimes called a deep siren, tritons were dangerous enough on an individual basis, but the real threat came from their ability to enslave other monsters to their will. It wasn’t something Sorin would expect to fight before rank 20 or 25, and its presence neatly explained how the merfolk had suddenly organized and taken over the whole cave complex.
This one was about ten feet long and six feet tall. Much like the merfolk, its body was composed of two segments. The human-like portion was upright, its skin mottled and crusty. The back half swept out behind it, an armored tank of a sea creature that looked more like a crustacean with fins than anything else.
It was essentially a sea-centaur with a crab half instead of a horse half, easily as intelligent as any human climber, utterly amoral, and driven only by the need to conquer and devour. It couldn’t be reasoned with, and the only way to stop it was to kill it.
And it’s strong enough to kill that jellyfish. All it needed were a few waves of disposable minions to cut through the stinging tentacles so it could reach the main body. Fuck, if it kills the floor guardian, it could very well set up here in the lair. The tower might never create a new one.
They needed to defeat the triton before it stole their kill. Worse, they needed to do it while the portal guardian was actively trying to eat them all, and in an arena that was so choked with blood that half their team was effectively blind.
The only other option was to retreat and wait. They could hope the triton would kill the jellyfish and move on, but if it didn’t, it would start fortifying the arena. The odds were low; it had probably targeted this place specifically because it wanted the wide-open cavern to build its defenses in. Leaving now meant giving it time to prepare for the challenge.
I’ll deal with the triton. As long as I get a few shots off on the guardian, it’ll be fine. I just wish there was a better way to tell the rest of the team what to do.
Projecting his intent as hard as he could, he signaled the attack.
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