Sorin wasn’t perfect. He’d never pretended he was. In fact, he’d made more mistakes than he could count, and he continued to make new ones on a regular basis. That was just part of life, and a good climber did his best to learn from those mistakes so he didn’t repeat them.
That said, Black Walls was really throwing him for a loop. It wasn’t necessarily his fault; everything he’d read had confirmed what he’d already known about vampire behaviors. And it wasn’t impossible for two vampires with adjacent territory to work together to take down a climbing team that had proven itself a nuisance. Vampires were, after all, intelligent.
Sometimes, it was an unavoidable obstacle, as vampires occasionally paired up permanently. Nobody knew anything about vampire divorce rates, either, and there were no recorded instances Sorin was aware of where climbers had faced a vampire couple that had later split up.
So while one vampire was expected and two represented a bit of bad luck, Sorin was prepared for either possibility. Knowing that the tower could be a dick, he’d even accounted for the likelihood of a vampire couple and another vampire with adjoining territory attacking as a group. On the wildest ends of improbability, there might be two couples, forcing the team to face four vampires at the same time.
Seven vampires, however, seemed a little bit unfair.
Their thralls were all dead, and Sorin had fried the overwhelming majority of the shadow wolves, which left about thirty spawn and their masters to contend with. That was a wipe-out scenario for any normal team. Two or three full teams working in unison would have struggled against these odds.
It was only the fact that Sorin and Vendis were holding back all seven vampires that allowed the rest of his team to slowly work their way through the spawn. For the first time in over a month, Odric had fallen back into his role as a full-time healer while Rue and Yoru held the front line and Nemari set everything she could see on fire.
“Yes, struggle for me,” one of the vampires sneered at Sorin as it whipped past him, too fast for him to match without using Speed Burst. Tempting as it was to run that one down, if he abandoned his position here, three of them that were trying to get at Vendis would have clean shots.
Since Sorin needed Vendis countering the blood whips, lances, and darts the vampires kept trying to kill everyone with, he stayed in place. The sneering vampire swooped by again, this time lashing out with a sword—one made of steel and not blood—that threatened to separate Sorin’s head from his body.
Now Sorin triggered Speed Burst. He dipped under the sword and struck with his own blade at the same time, catching the vampire’s chest and digging a furrow down into his stomach. The vampire just laughed cruelly as its flight swept it back out of range. By the time he circled again, the wound was gone, and even the tiny amount of blood Sorin had spilled had joined a massive rotating orb hanging overhead.
All of the vampires were feeding that, with two of them devoted entirely to enlarging it and keeping Vendis from breaking it apart. It was honestly more blood by volume than Sorin believed even existed on the battlefield. Probably half of it was created magically.
He’d seen this kind of ability before and knew exactly how deadly a blood bomb could be. Once it finally reached critical mass, it would explode into a thousand deadly spears that would skewer anything and everything in sight. The vampires would be fine, of course. It was everyone else, including the spawn, that would be punctured with so many holes that they’d simply fall where they stood.
If anyone did manage to survive it, the vampires would just gather up the used and new blood alike, making a bigger blood bomb, and try again. Really, the whole thing was complete overkill, but once Sorin had proven he couldn’t be defeated by the sheer weight of their numbers, they’d switched tactics.
One of the vampires harrying him made a break, rushing past Sorin to approach Vendis and break the blood mage’s concentration. At the same time, the other two lunged for Sorin to distract him. It might even have worked, except he’d been holding his trump card back while he waited for them to get in range at the same time.
Force Weaver erupted out in every direction, eviscerating all three vampires and digging deep gashes into their limbs. Those flailing blades of wild force were a distraction, though. The real threat was the three force spears he shot out to pierce the vampires through their collective chests. That stunned them enough for another set of blades to finish the job with a round of thorough decapitations.
The ribbons of anima streaming into him were all the confirmation he needed that he’d halved their numbers. With only four left, and two of those otherwise occupied, the fight suddenly felt a lot more even. He straightened and brandished his sword at the flying vampire, whose sneer had been wiped away and replaced with an expression of pure rage.
Eyes burning and fangs fully extended, the vampire shot down from where he’d been clinging to the ceiling. His ridiculous cape flowed wide around him, obscuring the second vampire following behind, but Sorin wasn’t fooled for a second.
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He knew better than to lock blades with the first vampire. It would only tie him down so the second could surprise him. Instead, he threw out a hailstorm of tiny marble stones ripped from the walls and floor. It wouldn’t hurt the vampire, and the monster knew it. He didn’t even try to block, just let them strike his body.
“Stupid hu—Aggk!”
The marble solidified into a collar around his neck, courtesy of Sorin’s Living Earth, and wrenched so hard that it ripped him out of the air. His companion, now completely exposed and not expecting to defend herself directly, went down to an onslaught of force blades. Sorin paced over calmly and drove his sword through her chest, then cut off her head.
“That’s four. Three more to go.”
And then the rank up pain hit him. It was bad timing, but not unexpected. Sorin flinched for just a moment before shaking it off. It’s getting worse faster than I remembered. There was no time to contemplate the implications of that, though.
The vampire he’d collared had ripped the marble free with his bare hands, shredding the stone with steel claws for finger nails and casting it to the floor. “You… stupid… filthy human!” he roared.
No longer held in place protecting Vendis, Sorin met his rush with a Speed Burst of his own. The fight ended less than a second later, the vampire’s speed wasted in his rage. Its tells were obvious; there was no plan to it, just an unthinking need to break and destroy. Sorin didn’t oblige him. When Speed Burst ended, the vampire’s head was no longer attached to his body. A force spear through his chest ended his existence.
Now, what to do with those two?
The flying was the real problem. He couldn’t physically get to them, and they weren’t too distracted to defend themselves from projectiles. In fact, they were more than willing to siphon blood off their bomb to form into shields if they needed. Wearing them down would be a massive battle of attrition, even if he took the time to help his team clear the rest of the spawns first.
And that would only hasten the formation of the blood bomb, which now that Sorin thought of it, was probably exactly what they were waiting for. It was already big enough to detonate. They just wanted the rest of the blood that would be spilled before they let it go. If they felt threatened, they could just set it off early. It would probably still kill a few people if they were careless.
But then again, I’m rank 15 now. I was already borderline able to use C-rank free cast soulprints—the simple ones, at least. Flight might still be beyond me, but I bet I can manage Levitation and Wind Strider, and for a ten second confrontation, that’s just as good.
Free casting two soulprints at the same time was going to be a challenge, but Levitation was E-rank and wouldn’t take up too much of what he had to work with. “Vendis, keep them from agitating that blood bomb. I don’t want it blowing up,” he said.
“I’m trying,” the blood mage returned, his voice strained with effort. “They’re overpowering me.”
“Pour in everything you’ve got. Give me five seconds.”
“What—fine. Five seconds.”
That was all the confirmation Sorin needed. He blurred, activating Speed Burst as he ran forward and leaped. Levitation pushed his jump height up the full twenty-some feet needed to reach the vampires where they floated near the vaulted ceiling. Wind Strider, the much stronger C-ranked version of Air Step, let him charge forward into range.
Blood rippled out from the sphere, forming long, thin tendrils that sought to pierce through Sorin’s body. He pivoted in place, turning his momentum sideways and dodging the tendrils. One of them scraped across his breastplate, gouging a line through the feather steel and tugging him off balance. Sorin recovered just in time to duck a disc of spinning blood that would likely have cut him in half.
Then he was through the barrage, just in time to get inside the wall of blood the vampires raised to stop him. He probably wouldn’t have made it through, but the wall flowed up unevenly—Vendis’s work, no doubt. Whatever the cause, he killed one vampire before it could fight back. But Speed Burst ran out then, and the other vampire glowered at him while she reached all the way up to her elbow into the blood bomb.
Sorin’s sword flashed out, cutting that arm off. The vampire recoiled, hissing at him as she did so, and thrust her other arm out in his direction. Blood spikes pierced Sorin’s stomach, ramming through the feather steel and biting into internal organs.
Oooh. I’ll be feeling that one in the morning.
It was a fair trade, though, because he took off her head in retaliation. Unfortunately, that alone was not enough to kill a vampire, and even as her hair made a pinwheel while her head flew away, the rest of her body toppled sideways into the blood bomb.
Which then promptly detonated, hurling Sorin all the way across the hall to slam into the wall well over a hundred feet away and leaving him riddled with holes. “Owwwww.”
He barely had the presence of mind to weave together a Spider Climb that saw him sliding down the wall instead of free falling to smack into the floor. The ribbon of anima flowing into his soulspace did not in any way make him feel better.
Counter Heal had gone off at least five times in rapid succession during his unplanned flight, and Blood of the Mountain was working hard skimming anima from his reserves to keep him in one piece. The unfair part was that the fight itself wasn’t over. There were still ten spawn up, and the loss of their masters had done nothing to blunt their ferocity.
Probably for the best that there wasn’t anyone left to direct it. Looks like most of the blood went upward. Vendis probably helped steer it away, too.
More unfortunate for Sorin in particular was the fact that everyone had stopped to deal with the explosion, which meant they’d all seen him go flying. And since he looked awfully vulnerable, very much like an easy kill, three of the spawn had broken away from fighting the rest of his team to come make his day worse.
Of course, dividing their forces like that just made it easier for his team to kill the rest of them. It probably wouldn’t be in time to help Sorin, but that was just how it went some days. He shoved another healing spell into himself, grimaced at the sensation of the magic pushing the foreign, rock-solid blood back out of his body, and gritted his teeth against the pain as he climbed back up to his feet.
“Come on, then, you fuckers. Let’s get this over with.”
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