Eventually, the harpies were all dead. There might have been a handful left flitting around, but the climbers in their midst had performed as close to a genocide as was possible under the circumstances. In a month, no one would be able to tell anything had happened, but for the moment, they were simply out of things to kill.

The solution to that was simple. They climbed back down the mesa, crossed twenty miles of prairie that was overstuffed with small, burrowing mammals—a perfect hunting ground for the harpies—and scaled the side of a smaller, yet still densely populated, mesa.

“You think the tower will give us something good at the end of this floor?” Rue asked as they dashed across the prairie. Being relatively flat, it took no real effort to keep running in a straight line even under the constant effect of Speed Burst.

“Who knows?” Nemari answered. “I’m more interested in why it gave us normal stuff in the last two Antechambers.”

“Maybe it ran out of ideas,” Odric said. “We already have everything we need.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Sorin told the group. “We didn’t really stick around to do much on those floors. We just showed up, ran straight for the guardian, and left. Do you know the theory about carriers, how people who just get dragged up the tower get crappy rewards in the Antechamber?”

“Of course. That’s one of the big reasons I was climbing the traditional way,” Yoru said. “Sometimes, the Antechamber holds something utterly unique, or at least beyond our ability to replicate.” 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

“Exactly. We weren’t exactly carried, but we did overpower those two floors by a lot. Nothing we did there was a challenge. I suspect we’re encountering a similar phenomenon here.”

“Seems arbitrary to me,” Nemari said. “Does the tower want our help or not?”

“I think it does, but I think maybe it’s also operating under some rules that we aren’t aware of. The tower could obviously kill us if it wanted to. A single monster sent down from Floor 50 would wipe out all of humanity, probably in less than an hour. Yet it doesn’t. It provides us with a ladder to climb. Each step is harder than the previous, but it is a pathway to the top. Why do that? What does it get out of this whole arrangement?”

Sorin felt entirely justified in being annoyed by the fact that he still couldn’t answer those questions. He’d climbed to the top of the damn tower and found himself in a whole new one, but he still didn’t know why the tower behaved the way it did. There was some purpose to it all, of that there was no doubt. But all mankind had been able to do for generations now was to speculate, and never with any sort of proof.

If climbing to the top doesn’t answer those questions, just what does?

“Should we be slowing down and taking our time on each floor?” Nemari asked.

“I don’t think we can do much to change it. If we did slow down, we’d end up ranked so high that the floors still wouldn’t be a challenge. I think we’re just going to have to accept that not every Antechamber is going to give us unique powers.”

“Maybe if we try to keep ourselves at the same rank as a normal climber for the floor,” Yoru said. “That could be a good balance.”

“Let’s get you all to rank 10 and try it there if we’re going to experiment. I’m alright with skipping a powerful reward on Floor 9 if it means we’re only there for a few days instead of a few weeks.”

Their conversation was disrupted by something scaly rocketing at them through the grass on six legs. Sorin didn’t get a good look at it other than an impression of gray, pebbly skin and too many teeth before it was on him. They might not know the tower’s motives, but its methods had never been in doubt.

* * *

Samael eased himself into the chair, his every muscle protesting the movement. There was no part of him that didn’t ache, from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. The worst part of it was there was nothing he could do but suffer and endure. There was no cure for soul damage, no healing magic, or special soulprint. He could free cast a thousand spells, and not a one of them could relieve the agony pulsing in every single inch of his body.

“You’re pushing harder than usual,” Urd remarked. “Is it the newcomer?”

“Of course it’s the newcomer,” Samael groaned.

“Why not simply kill him and be done with it then?”

“You know why.”

Ten years ago he’d been reborn in this accursed tower, robbed of the power and prestige he’d spent a lifetime cultivating. Ten years ago he’d begun rebuilding. And after eight months, he’d reached Floor 25. That was when everything had gone wrong. The Liminal Gateway shattered, and the void spilled out, consuming the whole damn floor and building an impenetrable wall.

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The worst of it was that there was no skipping past it. They’d completely lost contact with the upper three-quarters of the tower, not that there were many climbers up there anyway. The tower’s own portal network was broken at that point, like a levitation platform’s shaft ripped in two. Anyone who’d tried to take the portal past Floor 25 had been ejected out into the void of liminal space.

It could only carry climbers so high, as proven by all six of the climbers above rank 25 who’d been on Floor 0 at the time. Sometimes Samael regretted killing them, if only because hindsight had revealed far more beneficial ways to spend their lives.

That was what Sorin was being groomed for: to spend his life in service to Samael’s needs. It certainly would have been easier if the man had been a bit more malleable, but it was to be expected that anyone who could conquer a whole tower was strong-willed. Samael had been forced to adopt a more hands-off strategy.

It was a dangerous game. Sorin was uniquely suited to be a real threat if he was allowed to grow, but he was also uniquely suited to crash through the Void Wall. There was no doubt the tower was even now equipping him with all the tools he’d need to beat back the void. That was the whole point, after all.

And really, Floor 25 is just a warm up. The tower is insane or desperate if it thinks I am ever setting foot in that indigo nightmare. I don’t care what promises it says I made that I don’t remember.

“Perhaps the risk isn’t worth it,” Urd said. “Our current plan is working, so why—”

“The hell it is,” Samael snarled. “Ten years. Ten years and we’re barely holding on. No matter how many bodies I throw at it, the Void Wall chews them up and spits them out. If our plan was working, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair right now. I wouldn’t constantly be getting called back up to Floor 24 to stop another containment breach.

“We’re never going to destroy the void incursion at this rate. These people are soft, complacent. They’re fine with a tower that ends at Floor 24 because I’m here single-handedly keeping the tide from sweeping them away.”

Wisely, Urd let the opportunity to point out that the Void Wall was Samael’s fault in the first place pass him by. Given the mood Samael was in, he wasn’t likely to restrain himself if he got any more riled up.

Taking a deep breath, he sagged back into the chair. “He will be my vanguard, and the Void Wall will break, or at least it will be parted so I may pass through.”

Samael was essentially capped out. He’d been rank 33 for over a year now, and no matter how much he annihilated the monsters of Floor 24, he hadn’t really moved the needle. With a few more years of effort, he might reach rank 34, but it was meaningless by itself. He needed to move up a few floors at minimum if he was to continue growing.

Either Sorin breaks the Wall and ends the threat, or I spend his life forcing my way through to the floor guardian and pass up to Floor 26. I’ll come back at my leisure once I’m rank 50 and wipe the void infestation out myself, if I feel like it.

Noise outside the room caught his attention, but even the thought of activating a soulprint to hear what was going on somehow made the throbbing pain worse. “Take care of that,” he told Urd.

His right-hand man said nothing, but a moment later the door opened and then closed as he slipped through. A few seconds after that, the noise cut out but for the sound of softly retreating footsteps down the hall.

That damn titan is the problem. The small voidling chaff only serves to keep my reinforcements away. If it were one or the other, we could handle it. It’s that it’s both at the same time that’s stopping me. And I can’t just sit here and wait. If I don’t keep going back and smashing my head against it, it’ll grow even bigger.

In his mind, he could see that colossal figure looming up over the horde of void beasts. It was human-shaped, a hundred feet tall or more, depending on how long he left it alone, and deceptively quick. Just being in the vicinity of it sapped his anima, even through his Void Resistance blessing.

My nemesis. But soon, I’ll have a new weapon to weaken you with. Then you’ll fall, and I’ll finally be free.

The door opened a sliver, and Urd reappeared in the room. “One of our sponsored teams encountered your… project,” he explained. “They thought it meant a face-to-face meeting with the boss and weren’t taking no for an answer.”

“Why? Did something unusual happen?”

“Perhaps,” Urd said, pausing to gather his thoughts before he spoke. “It seems that the newcomer’s expanded his ranks with a pair of high-profile picks: the Telpike scion and his support climber.”

“Interesting,” Samael murmured. “He’s getting bolder. I’d bet he’s strong enough now that he’s not afraid of the gang any longer?”

“It would appear that way. Our last report had a group with two rank 15s tracking him down. Witnesses say he slaughtered the whole team, five against one, including the freelance bounty hunter at rank 11. That was on Floor 3.”

“So that old Telpike windbag knows a few new secrets now. No doubt he’s doing his best to manipulate Sorin via his son, probably hoping to dethrone me and take control of the city.”

Morlin Telpike was probably Samael’s strongest foe, though it was less an issue of opposing moralities than it was that Morlin simply couldn’t stand to feel that anyone was above him. Killing the handful of climbers stronger than him still in the bottom quarter of the tower had cemented the blowhard’s superiority complex, and it had been a grievous blow to his pride to discover that Samael had been stronger than him when they’d clashed all those years ago.

“Who was the agent who brought the information in?” Samael asked.

“His name is Womak. It looks like he’s a plant in an otherwise legitimate group, at least on paper. Our spies have clocked two other women on the team deferring to him, so it’s probably a safe bet that he’ll bring his own muscle with him once he stops climbing and starts working for us full time.”

“Nobody important then. Reward him for the information as you see fit,” Samael said.

The Telpikes, huh? That’s certainly a rich sponsor, but Morlin is probably doing his best to lie to you and cheat you on every upgrade. You’d have done better to ally with any of the other high families, or even to simply work with me, Sorin.

It might be time to go pay Morlin a visit and take control of the situation. Samael winced as another stab of full-body pain radiated through him. But not now. Maybe in a week or two.