The five guardians were well-known, if only because the Mortuary was one of the areas butting up against the portal hub. Their strengths and tactics had been documented by a thousand climbers, and Sorin was confident the information was good. Too many disparate sources agreed on too many things for them to all be wrong.
And what they universally agreed on was that the black viper was by far the worst guardian to run into. It wasn’t that it was obscenely powerful or had some deadly ability that killed any climber who made so much as a single mistake. No, it was something far more insidious.
The viper was a necromancer of a sort, carrying around corpses in its stomach and vomiting them back up. It could store quite a few of them, which was obnoxious because it dragged out the fight cutting through its minions and dangerous because it gave other guardians time to join in. But that wasn’t what other climbers warned against repeatedly.
The real problem with the black viper was that the corpses it barfed out absolutely reeked. All undead had what could charitably be described as an unpleasant aroma, but something about being held in the guardian monster’s stomach took that rot-of-death stank a normal undead had and multiplied it ten-fold.
Sorin could smell it the moment the viper’s enormous body crashed through the ceiling and blocked off their retreat. The stink hung around it like a shroud, one that seemed to reach out and violate his nose. It only intensified when the creature opened its mouth to reveal a moldering corpse already half-visible as it clawed its way up the viper’s throat.
“Oh, God!” someone yelled from deeper into the room. “What is that smell?”
Then the viper’s whole body convulsed, oddly reminding Sorin of a cat about to hack up a hairball on the rug, and a wad of writhing, unliving flesh flew free to crash into the floor. It broke apart into dozens of bodies, all dripping wet with some sort of acidic fluid that hissed and spat as it fell off the zombies.
I have been inside actual stomachs of monsters, and that smelled better than this thing does, Sorin thought to himself, his eyes watering so bad that his vision started to blur. This is weaponized.
The sound of someone throwing up behind him jarred Sorin into action. The best way to dampen the overpowering stink of death was to freeze everything, and he was just the man to do it. Still Winter erupted out of him, as strong and vast as he could make it. Frost coated everything within a hundred feet in the blink of an eye, which unfortunately included his team, but it was better than the alternative.
That didn’t kill the smell entirely, of course, but it was a start. The next best thing Sorin could do was to free cast one of the spells the harpies on Floor 8 favored: Wind Wall. With that, finally, Sorin could take a breath that his body could actually tolerate.
“Finish cutting our way through this room,” he said. “I’ll take care of this mess back here.”
“Please,” Odric said. “I can still taste it on my tongue. Get rid of it, quickly!”
Force Weaver was Sorin’s weapon of choice. He strode forward, cutting apart every zombie that got within range. The freezing of their stomach acid coating had made them even slower than they already were, which meant they might as well be standing still as far as Sorin was concerned. He could have cut through the entire platoon of undead in seconds if they’d been on their own.
The black viper guardian didn’t just function as a mobile undead deployment platform, however. The reason climbers referred to it as a necromancer was because so many of its abilities enhanced the power of its minions, and it proved that now.
With the Aura Sense part of Horizon Walker, Sorin could see the anima rolling off the viper’s enormous body. It reached out and latched onto every undead within sight, even the ones the team had been fighting prior to the guardian’s arrival, and all of them immediately flushed with strength and speed. Their skin and muscles were thicker, more durable, and the rotting teeth showing between loose-hanging jaws gleamed.
Suddenly, Still Winter wasn’t enough to hold them in place, and the horde surged forward. An explosion rocked the room behind Sorin—Nemari accidentally igniting one of the gas-filled undead while trying to avoid getting swamped in their numbers—and sent him stumbling forward three steps. By the time he recovered, the lead zombies were within melee range.
I hope the stink doesn’t cling to my sword. I’d hate to have to throw it away.
The tower-blue sword whipped through the air, hacking deep into a zombie’s neck but not cutting clean through. A wedge of force slammed into the back side of the blade, pushing it the rest of the way and finishing the decapitation. That did nothing to permanently end the zombie, but it was only the first of many strikes.
With Force Weaver augmenting his strikes, Sorin hacked apart anything that got within melee range. Part of him wanted to spread the net wider so that none of the guardian’s minions got past him, but he could already see a knot of anima working its way up the viper’s body. It was preparing to spit out another flesh ball of undead, and things would get a lot more complicated if it managed to bring in more reinforcements.
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Sorin couldn’t get through the wall of flesh, not before the viper completed its summoning magic. There were too many zombies, and they were all working in perfect unison thanks to the necromancer controlling them. Stalling out enemy climbers while the guardian kept reinforcing its ranks was a well-documented tactic.
Fortunately for Sorin, he had plenty of options. The empowerment soulprint was affecting every undead in the room, but the viper only had direct control over the ones it had thrown up. That was barely a dozen bodies at this point—not enough to box Sorin in. He pivoted to the right, free cast Spider Climb, and ran right up the wall and onto the ceiling.
When he reached the edge where the viper had broken through, he got a quick glimpse at a long, empty tunnel stretching off into the darkness, then he threw himself out into the open air. Twisting as he fell, he pushed forward with Air Step and drove his sword right through the thick black scales between its eyes.
Man, I hate fighting undead.
While the viper certainly noticed Sorin’s presence—how could it not with him perched on its snout?—it didn’t seem at all discomforted by the fact. He might have thought it was simply that the sheer size of the guardian prevented Sorin from actually hitting anything vital, but the truth was that it simply wouldn’t have mattered if he’d pierced its brain. It didn’t need that organ.
The only sure way to kill an undead was to just keep chopping it into smaller and smaller pieces, and the viper had a lot of body to get through. Sorin was up to the task, though. Force Weaver lashed out, hacking into flesh over and over again, tearing the viper apart with each and every moment. Scales and rotted flesh went flying in every direction as the guardian whipped its head back and forth, trying to dislodge Sorin.
He clung to his sword grimly, and the sword itself was so deep in the viper’s skull that there was little chance of it dislodging the blade. Even after Sorin flayed its head down to the bone, it still couldn’t shake him loose. Unfortunately, removing its flesh did absolutely nothing to slow it down.
That was also about the time the viper switched tactics. It abandoned its wild thrashing and rushed straight up, as if to headbutt the ceiling above it. With no desire to be caught in the middle of that, Sorin was forced to abandon his position. Now his earlier attack worked against him; he couldn’t free his sword in time to take it with him.
Force Weaver was once again the answer. Rather than a storm of slashing blades around Sorin, it slammed down like a hammer swung by God, smashing through the skull entirely and dropping Sorin through the head and down to its jaw.
The smart thing to do was to let go, back up, and regroup with his allies. He’d accomplished his goal of disrupting the guardian before it could summon another set of undead, and with its head more or less obliterated, he’d started the process of completely dismantling it.
But time was against him, and retreating would only prolong the battle. So Sorin didn’t do the smart thing. He went with the aggressive approach, and as he was falling through the viper’s mouth, he grabbed hold of its jaw. Air Step pushed him back up, allowing him to leap into the guardian’s throat.
I have never wanted to throw up so badly in my life, he immediately thought as the smell rolled over him. Getting closer to the source was the worst mistake I’ve ever made.
But he was already here, and there was work to be done. He didn’t have unlimited anima, but he had enough to finish this. The rest would be up to everyone else to take care of. Taking an almost habitual breath—and immediately wishing he hadn’t—Sorin began the process of dismantling the giant snake.
Still Winter flowed down its throat, paralyzing the zombies he sensed crawling up toward him. Force Weaver formed a ring around Sorin, then exploded outward. Like a reverse guillotine, it severed the viper’s skull from the rest of its body, only hitching once on the spine. Then Sorin took a step forward and did it again. A foot-thick section of undead flesh fell loose.
His next step turned vertical as the viper’s body shot straight up. Perhaps it thought it would swallow him, but Still Winter had locked its throat muscles directly around Sorin. He merely free cast Spider Climb to hold his position, then set off another severing ring of force. This section sat in place for a few seconds before slowly sliding off the main body to thump onto the floor.
Three sections later, he reached the closest zombie. Its limb struggled, but it hadn’t been empowered with the guardian’s earlier magic, and it couldn’t resist the chill of Still Winter. Sorin pushed its arm down with one foot, then stepped past it and pulsed another severing ring. The zombie fell into two pieces, and the top half spilled out with the next chunk of flesh.
The world shifted as the viper’s whole body slammed back to the floor. Zombies bounced from the impact, which was about the most movement Sorin had seen from them so far. Unfortunately, it also stirred up the stink, and Sorin didn’t fancy finding out what would happen if he threw another Wind Wall down the viper’s throat. That air had to be pushed somewhere, and he somehow doubted he’d be lucky enough to force the world’s biggest snake fart.
Another force ring sliced out, but this time it didn’t cut completely through the spine. Sorin sent a second force edge behind it to finish the job, but he resolved to do a better job finding the spaces between each segment moving forward.
The partially expelled ball of zombies came into view a few seconds later, prompting him to pause his work yet again to deal with it. The viper, despite losing the top twenty or thirty feet of its body, still wasn’t ‘dead,’ and it announced that fact quite unmistakably as it picked what remained of itself back up and started slamming its body into the walls and floor.
You’re not going to get rid of me that easy, Sorin thought as he sent a wave of force blades ahead of himself to dissect the corpse-ball blocking his way.
Oh, but this is going to suck when I get to the stomach, isn’t it? Fuck, why did it have to be the viper guardian and not something easy like the wraith? Stupid tower. I’m going to need about a thousand baths and a new set of skin to get the smell out of me.
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