Odric was sunk halfway into the ground just from the sheer weight of his body, which was made entirely out of steel. His clothes were shredded, and he was covered in scuffs and dirt, but he was alive. More than that, he’d probably weathered that second explosion without injury.
Sorin had almost completely forgotten about the Steel Skin brooch. Odric used its secondary function of anima storage far more often than its primary purpose, but it had come through for him this time.
As the rest of the team climbed to their feet, Rue rushed over to where Odric was still motionless on the ground. Nemari got the bats under control, freeing Sorin up to cross the forty feet or so of open ground. He arrived a few seconds after Rue did.
The steel in Odric’s skin was fading away to reveal his natural color. With a groan, he started casting healing spells on himself. “Anyone see where my backpack went?” he asked.
“Over with everyone else’s,” Rue answered.
“Oh, no. I meant you,” he said, his eyes focusing on his sister.
“Shut up, jackass. Don’t scare me like that!”
“Believe me, I don’t plan on doing it again.”
“Can you stand yet?” Sorin asked.
“I might need Vendis’s help first. That first mine damn near killed me. Hell, I might need both of you. Lot of damage to fix here.”
Sorin cast a few healing spells of his own, and he couldn’t disagree with Odric’s assessment. It felt like just about everything that could break was broken, and everything that could tear was torn. It was probably only thanks to Pain Suppression that Odric was speaking to them at all. Otherwise he’d just be screaming and drawing new monsters to them.
Vendis and Yoru joined them a few seconds later. Working together, the three of them pumped Odric so full of healing spells that he was on his feet bare minutes later. That was by necessity, though. Everyone knew that he needed real rest and time to recover, not to mention time to process his near-death experience and the associated pain.
“Let’s see if we can find somewhere else to take a break,” Sorin said. “Nemari’s having fun, but she’s going to run out of anima soon if we hang around here.”
* * *
Their progress through the Dueling Grounds slowed considerably, but thankfully they moved away from the bats and the mines soon enough that there was a lot less tension in the group. When the next monster appeared, Sorin and Rue took care of it while Nemari provided ranged support. After that, Yoru and Rue took a turn.
As they worked their way toward the Mortuary entrance just barely visible in the distance, Vendis and Odric poured every scrap of anima they could into healing magic. It was a slow operation, but they couldn’t afford for Odric to be down, not if he was going to accompany them.
“It might be better to take him back to Floor 0,” Yoru suggested during one of the rare stretches when nothing was challenging them. “I’m confident we can defeat whatever is waiting for us down a man, and you can always pick him up in a few days when we reach the door.”
“Odric? Your call,” Sorin said.
“Not yet,” Odric said immediately. “I’m getting better. A few more hours should be enough.”
“Yes, but in those hours, we’re moving at nearly a quarter of our normal speed,” Yoru pressed.
“Hey. Back off,” Rue told him.
Nemari let out a small gout of flame to grab everyone’s attention. “Enough, all of you. We’re not in so much of a hurry that we can’t spend a bit of time on recovery.”
They limped along, probably attracting more monsters with their slow pace than they otherwise would, but that allowed the rest of the team to also reach rank 11, and Sorin could feel himself slowly inching his way to rank 15. If he’d been fighting alone, the elites probably would have made for excellent gains, but on the other hand, he wouldn’t have wanted to fight that centaur solo.
Having to run from monsters was never a good thing. It could easily snowball into an impossible situation as other monsters joined in the pursuit or climbers stumbled into traps they weren’t taking care to avoid, not to mention that it wasn’t always possible to outpace the monster, leaving the climbers stuck in the same battle or even a worse version of it with more opponents.
That was one of the reasons Sorin had picked Speed Burst as his mobility soulprint, though. A few quick bursts of speed to break away from an unwinnable fight were far more important than a slight permanent increase that might let him outrun a monster if he had to. Still, the Dueling Grounds was a poor hunting area for a solo climber, and he was glad not to have to fight through it on his own.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Eventually they reached the doors to the Mortuary. By appearance, it was nothing but a simple door made of metal with a black-iron knob set into the granite wall that ringed the Dueling Grounds. It could have led to a storage room for all anyone could tell from the presentation, but Sorin peeked his head in to check once they got there, then quickly closed the door again.
“Yep, that’s the Mortuary. Loooooots of undead monsters.”
“Let’s take a break here so Odric can get back up to full strength,” Nemari said. “We’ll want to tackle the next area as fast as possible.”
Yoru shot Odric a glance, but all he said was, “Indeed.”
The undead weren’t strong, and they weren’t worth much in the way of anima. Their real advantage was in their numbers and in their complete and total immunity to the various poison traps that filled the area. All of that was just a stall for the roaming area guardians, however.
There were five of them, so far as any climber had been able to determine, each with its own abilities. The goal was to be in and out so quickly that none of the guardians had time to find the team, but there was very little they could do to control whether or not that happened. A confrontation was inevitable if they stayed long enough—the guardians apparently actively hunted intruders, and the records stated that they were incredibly strong for Floor 10 monsters.
And half the poison gas is flammable. We’ll have to be very careful about fire magic. Sorin glanced over at Nemari, who was alternating between glaring at the back of Yoru’s head and hovering over Odric. This’ll be an interesting experience.
* * *
The goal was simple. They were entering from the west side of the Mortuary, and they planned to leave through the south. At every intersection, they’d take whichever path brought them closer to that goal. Unlike some areas, the Mortuary was no maze. It was a simple gauntlet in the shape of a massive grid of intersecting hallways and rooms.
Nemari went first. Her opening move was to send fire rolling down the hallway, igniting the pallid flesh of dozens of zombies standing there, motionless, in the dark. They turned in response to the light stimulus, though so many of them had rotted faces with no eyes that Sorin couldn’t see any reason they should respond.
Whatever senses they still possessed were enough to recognize the incoming magic, but not to realize it was dangerous. Or maybe they just don’t care about danger. Undead aren’t exactly famous for their cautious approach to murdering climbers.
The purpose of the spell wasn’t actually to kill anything, but to ensure that there was nothing flammable that they might accidentally ignite during the true battle. To that end, the flames licked across zombie flesh, scorching it, and then moved on to taste the next target. It washed out a hundred feet down the hall, and nothing exploded in its wake.
“Clear,” Nemari said, stepping to one side to let the rest of the team in.
Sorin was in the lead. With Force Weave hanging in the air around him, he launched out dozens of dismembering slashes every second. The zombies literally fell to pieces, which unfortunately wasn’t enough to actually kill them. It did make the job easier for Yoru and Odric, who went about crushing the remains with earth magic. Sadly, the Mortuary was an area composed fully of iron and steel, leaving little in the way of raw earth to be manipulated.
The zombies themselves also had nothing remotely resembling blood, which left Vendis without a way to contribute his specialty magic to the fight. While the team advanced down the hallway, it was Sorin and Nemari who did the most damage, with everyone else assigned to clean up and watch for surprises.
None of the rooms they entered were lit, but all of them were packed with various types of undead. Zombies and skeletons were the most common, but they encountered several wights—notable for their intelligence and group cohesion—in a chamber that was made up of catwalks strung over a pit of lurid green acid.
A later hallway had thousands of feet of barbed chains strung up across the ceiling, a sure sign of a butcher revenant. The massive, hulking undead was easily nine feet of rotting, peeling flesh and vibrant green bone, and the chains came to life at its order. They streaked through the hall, attempting to tangle around the human intruders and string them up for the revenant to cut apart at its leisure.
Sorin regulated himself to defense for that fight and spent all of his time creating small force barriers placed in strategic locations to neutralize the revenant’s greatest offense. That left Rue, Yoru, and Nemari to tackle it head-on, where they only had to worry about the enormous cleaver it held in one hand and the sharp, bony claws that passed for fingers on the other.
The revenant only lasted a minute, but that was the longest yet they’d been forced to stand still. Though they were all eager to get moving before something nastier found them, they took the extra few seconds to carve out a rib that contained the Chain Dance soulprint. It was only useful to someone with a very specific fighting style, but no D-rank soulprint was cheap, so they took it anyway.
They hurried through a few more rooms, then caught a wave of bad luck when they started encountering gastric abominations. That more or less benched Nemari, which forced Sorin to assume her role of dealing with the chaff. Water Bond didn’t take her completely out of the fight, but it wasn’t effective for cutting down dozens of targets at a time.
The abominations were dangerous to even get near, since stabbing them would release the toxic gas. Not only was breathing that in a terrible idea, it could also eat through flesh, which made defending against them difficult. The whole fight turned into a game of keeping the abominations at mid-range while avoiding the dozens of lesser undead swarming them, with Sorin running interception to ensure nobody found themselves backed into a corner.
They’d killed six of the abominations, but it was taking too long, and Sorin knew they were all thinking the same thing. We’re getting bogged down here. If we don’t keep moving, a guardian will find us, and this is not a great room for that kind of fight.
Sorin wasn’t sure there were any good rooms, but at the very least, if they had to fight a guardian, he wanted an arena that didn’t prohibit Nemari from using her most potent offensive abilities. Unfortunately, the tower rarely cared what people wanted.
The guardian announced its arrival in a clatter of metal as a section of the ceiling a hundred feet down the hallway behind them collapsed. Thick, black, ropy coils of an enormous snake came down with the steel, and the head of a massive viper rose up into view.
Ah, damn it. Of course it would be that one, Sorin lamented.
Comments