“Are you sure about this?” Nemari asked.
“I’m already naked, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, and that’s just… fantastic.”
“I don’t know, I think he looks good. He’s got a nice ass. You’ve got to appreciate that,” Rue said.
“Shut up,” Nemari told her.
Then she set Sorin on fire.
It was the only way to get rid of the smell. They’d already tried dumping water on him, but that just left him soaked and still smelling like he’d just crawled through a hundred-foot tube of undead flesh. This was their last-ditch effort, and it was a gross misuse of anima, but nobody argued about its necessity. Odric had even tossed Pain Suppression on him first.
The fire scoured Sorin’s flesh. He was too durable for it to do more than redden his skin, though it did leave him without a single hair on his body. That sadly included his eyelashes and eyebrows, along with every single strand on his head, but he’d have them grown back later. There were soulprints for that; he just didn’t know the structures well enough to free cast them.
Someone in Yoru’s family’s staff would know how to do it. A professional stylist with all the various soulprints for keeping skin blemish-free, hair perfectly cut, and other grooming necessities was practically mandatory for a high family. It wouldn’t even surprise Sorin to know that they had two or three on retainer.
The flames did what the water couldn’t, and Sorin was barely more than uncomfortably warm between Thermal Insulation and Pain Suppression. Piling a few regeneration soulprints on top of that to help heal him up was the icing on the cake. Thirty seconds after it started, the bath by fire ended.
Yoru gave an experimental sniff. “Well, mostly you just smell like… huh… pork. Ew.”
“It is a bit disturbing,” Nemari agreed.
“Better than the alternative,” Sorin said. He reached for his clothes, but the smell coming off them made him gag. Just the thought of putting them on made him shudder. Working quickly, he separated out the non-flammable armor pieces and had Nemari cleanse them as well.
The clothing was abandoned as a lost cause. Sorin fetched a spare outfit from his pack, which only smelled of the regular levels of death everything else had infusing it. Getting dressed, he shot a dark look back at the pile of diced undead snake littering the hallway behind them. “Had to be that one, didn’t it?” he muttered.
They quickly abandoned the position once Sorin was ready, especially because new undead kept spilling out of the hole in the ceiling and attacking them. Without some sort of door to seal off an exit, it seemed like they’d never stop coming. It wasn’t even worth the effort to farm anima. The undead had less to give than what Sorin had been fighting back on Floor 2.
The guardian was a different matter, and from that he profited greatly. Rank 15 was just around the corner. A second guardian would have guaranteed advancement, but since they still had Black Walls, Blood Thorn Garden, and Stalking Depths to get through, he didn’t see any reason to hang around the Mortuary waiting for the next guardian to find him.
And so, they resumed the tedious and often disgusting process of clearing rooms and hallways in their pursuit of the southern exit. Sorin often found himself wishing for a more reliable map, but that was half the battle when it came to the Citadel. They could only push forward and hope the end came sooner rather than later.
* * *
“Fresh air!” Rue practically fell to her knees as she stumbled out of the Mortuary.
Sorin ignored her antics and scanned the hallway they’d found themselves in. Black Walls wasn’t the most original name for the place, but it was accurate. Everything was smooth, polished black marble. Metal sconces with intricate design work held stones that glowed a soft, unobtrusive white. There were doors every fifty feet or so, all made of lacquered black wood and trimmed with gold.
Vampire chic. Bleh. At least they don’t smell bad.
Of all the routes they could have ended up with based on where the Antechamber dumped them, this one was… Well, no, it’s not the worst. But it’s certainly not the best. I suppose it was the one we were most likely to take, given it’s the straight shot from the portal hub, and if we’d landed somewhere on the north half of the floor, we’d have ended up going this way as well.
They got the metal door—it looked grossly out of place next to the elegance on display everywhere else—to the Mortuary closed, then took a minute to recover as best they could. That mostly involved trying to get cleaned up without wasting anima. No one else had gone diving down an undead monstrosity’s throat, so no one else warranted that level of effort.
“Honestly, I’m not against the idea of returning to Floor 0 and coming back again once we’re refreshed,” Yoru said once it became apparent that their attempts at hygiene were not going to suffice. Without the stink of the Mortuary all around them, it quickly became obvious how much of that smell they’d carried out of the area with them.
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“I’m not sure that’s an option,” Sorin said. “The way this floor moves around, I’ve got a feeling that my waypoints might just break once we leave. I’ve already confirmed that we can still leave through Liminal Gate whenever we want. I just don’t think coming back is going to be so simple.”
“So if we leave now, we’ll be coming back through the portal hub and have to march through the Mortuary again,” Nemari said. “Which may or may not be the same route we already took.”
“More or less.”
“Shit. I guess we’re stuck here, then. What’re we fighting now?”
“Vampires,” Sorin said. “Specifically, thralls and spawn. The actual vampires function as miniature guardians. There are dozens of them, but they each have their own entourage and don’t like to mingle. Every fight we engage in will probably be waves of minions with a single elite monster backing them up.”
“And vampires are killed by decapitation or staking?”
“No,” Sorin said. “Decapitation and staking. Though technically it’s not the stake. It’s the heart removal. Basically cut out the brain and heart. One or the other isn’t good enough, but if you have to go for one, go for the heart. That’ll slow it down and make it easier to finish it off.”
“You’d think they’d have more trouble functioning without a brain,” Nemari said.
“Why? We know plenty of climbers who do just fine without one,” Rue said. “Remember that one guy with the big axe and the headband?”
“Oh, God, don’t remind me.”
“Before your time,” Odric explained, noting Sorin’s confusion. “One of the early applicants. Nemari decided to pass, and he went on to lead some other team through a series of disasters that only ended somewhere on Floor 2. Presumably, the portal guardian killed him and everyone else.”
“But for almost two whole floors, he did manage to function without a brain!” Rue added.
Sorin just rolled his eyes.
* * *
Vampires, as it turned out, were trap-happy bastards. At least, the ones living in the Citadel were. Maybe it was the combination of undead durability and troll-like regeneration, but they happily put their thralls to work installing poisonous dart throwers, explosive glyphs, electrocuting floors, and about a thousand other things all over the place.
“I’m just saying, it can’t actually be the vampires doing it,” Nemari said. “If it was, the tower would clean it up, right?”
“It’s not the same for monsters as it is for climbers,” Yoru told her. “Else how would they make any sort of nests? Did you not see about a thousand when we were culling those harpies?”
“Sure, but that’s just the numbers keeping things stable. I bet the nests all vanished after we left.”
“It’s both,” Sorin said from the front. “The tower will clean up after its monsters, but it gives them significantly more leeway, and if it’s something useful to the monster replacing the dead one, it’ll leave it there long enough for the next one to claim it.”
Blind Sense on its own wasn’t great for seeing through doors, especially not ones as well fitted as these, but since the upgrade, it was significantly better at revealing what was in closed boxes. At least, as long as what Sorin was looking to find was alive, and thralls very much were. So were the shadow-spawn wolves accompanying them.
“Contact,” Sorin said, ending the discussion. “Left door up ahead, six thralls and… twenty wolves. There’s something farther back, but I can’t get a clear read on it. Might be a spawn or three.”
One thing vampires were famous for was their excellent hearing, and their spawn had inherited that trait. Perhaps listening to Sorin rattle off their location and numbers was enough to trigger the attack, but either way, the door was blasted off its hinges, and black-robed figures poured out. They filled the hallway in a line, weapons brandished in hand and looking like a party of human climbers to the unobservant.
Vampires could claim climbers as thralls—and the ones who fell under their sway were sometimes more deadly than the vampires themselves—but when lacking the necessary fodder, the tower created a sort of monstrous humanoid to serve the function. They weren’t that strong, nor were they fast or coordinated. Their purpose was more to be used as menial labor, and the thralls were often found being set to just such tasks on their own.
Once the vampires became aware of invaders in their territory, however, they didn’t hesitate to use the thralls as front-line shock troops. So it did not surprise Sorin when a pair of spawn strolled through the door behind the thralls, sized up the team arrayed against them, and ordered the thoughtless humanoids to attack.
The thralls weren’t an issue to defeat. Any single climber on Sorin’s team could wipe them all out in seconds. Their actual purpose was to act as a distraction for the wolves that had literally melted into shadows and were racing across equally black walls, essentially invisible to human eyes.
Been awhile since I used this one.
Sorin wove his anima into Radiant Purge and let the light spill out across the hallway. The wolves recoiled in pain, their outlines now starkly visible as patches of matte black against the polished marble, and even the thralls stumbled at the unexpected brightness. They didn’t stop coming, but their already uncoordinated rush became even shakier.
Rue took them out with a series of force spears perfectly aimed to blow their heads off. At the same time, Vendis took control of the spattering blood and used it to lash the spawns in the back of the formation.
Spawns, unlike true vampires, were only human in shape, not appearance. They had gray, pebbly skin and grotesquely over-large mouths, with shocks of wiry hair that stood up at stark angles. They were larger than the humans their sires mimicked, standing at seven feet or more and with bulging, malformed muscles thickening too-long arms.
That did not make them weak, however. Like the vampires who lorded over them, they were unnaturally fast and strong, with extraordinary senses and the powers of magical compulsion that let them control thralls and unwary climbers. They even had a limited form of hemokinesis, though these particular specimens didn’t seem to be strong enough to contest Vendis’s control.
The thralls went down in seconds. The wolves lasted slightly longer. By the time Radiant Purge’s light died down, Vendis had carved both spawns into pieces. Nemari finished the fight by burning the chunks of spawn to ash.
“Seemed easy enough,” Rue said. “I barely did anything, and half of our group actually didn’t do anything.”
“Okay, but now imagine the groups are three times bigger, and there are two of them flanking us, and that there’s a guy who’s faster and stronger than me and who can fly harassing us while he sacrifices waves of minions to keep us distracted,” Sorin told her.
“Uh… That’s… specific. Is there a reason it’s so specific?”
“Because that’s probably going to be us in the next five minutes.”
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