They spent two weeks on Floor 8, just cycling between three different spots that the tower kept refilling with harpies. There were stronger monsters with better soulprints worth more anima, but Sorin doubted they’d find a spot that could compare when it came to sheer quantity.

He reached rank 14 and finally revealed the indent for the slate, which had something to do with the liminal path. The whole mosaic was him walking on it, except it branched out in every direction and seemed to be shifting to his will. Given that interpretation, his suspicion was that this was the ability that had allowed Samael to manipulate Sorin’s own path.

Sorin could only hope there was more to it than that, considering that he had no desire to screw around with whatever Samael had going on in liminal space. He didn’t spend too much time theorizing on it, though. There was no point, not when they’d soon enter the Antechamber again.

During their downtime, the rest of the team kept working on soulprint merges. Nemari was the next person to succeed in making Thermal Insulation, followed by Vendis. Odric finally managed it about a week after everyone else, much to his chagrin.

They debated what to do with the enchanter’s cabinet. Nemari initially championed a rotation system to give each person a powerful piece of gear, and that notion was supported by both Rue and Odric. Then Yoru pointed out the obvious issue. They were already sporting a complete set of enchanted gear thanks to the Telpikes’ sponsorship. It was serviceable, if not top of the line, and while they could benefit from the cabinet, Sorin was the one who needed it the most.

He'd be the one to fight Samael in the end, and they didn’t know how many months they had before that confrontation. The stronger Sorin was, the better. And so, instead of spreading the enchantments around, they collectively agreed to pile everything onto one person.

That was when they discovered that the cabinet had a maximum quantity it could hold, which was roughly equal to ten days of continuous channeling from the enchanter. That took close to twelve days in practice, and then the man slept for almost an entire day after that, so in real terms, it would be two weeks between each use.

Sorin’s pick was what was known as a lifecatcher. It was a talisman that consisted of a carved wooden frame with an intricate web of strings tied in the interior. Supposedly, it was important that the center be left clear, though Sorin wasn’t sure why. It didn’t matter much to him as the user, so he didn’t question it. The Telpikes acquired the base unit, and then the enchanter imbued it with as powerful magic as he could manage.

The enchantment’s purpose was simple: to save him from an otherwise fatal blow. There were limits, of course. The closer to death he was when the final blow was delivered, the harder the magic had to work to restore him. Death by massive damage could similarly overpower the talisman, leaving Sorin as nothing but a corpse that was in slightly better shape than it had a right to be. He’d still be just as dead.

Sorin hoped never to need it, but it was a standard protective tool for highly ranked climbers, and it was better to have it sooner rather than later. The enchanter’s cabinet enabled the rank 14 enchanter who’d made it to do work equivalent to that of a rank 40, so Sorin couldn’t complain about the quality. Samael was probably the only person in the red tower who had a prayer of overwhelming the enchantment in a single blow.

Of course, that excluded the void. Voidlings wouldn’t care one whit about the lifecatcher. If anything, it’d simply make the holder that much more enticing to eat. There was a lot of anima bound up in that little palm-sized trinket made of wood and string.

They decided to move on once the rest of the team reached rank 10. The tower simply couldn’t keep up with the rate at which they were killing the harpies, and the plan had always been to spend a considerable amount of time beyond the gates the Lion’s Fang Key unlocked.

There was just one issue left to figure out.

* * *

“Maybe we shouldn’t take the Antechamber portal this time,” Yoru said. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

The team stood at the mouth of a deep cave. A few hundred feet below the surface was a slumbering wyrm, weak in terms to what Sorin was used to, but still dangerous with its plethora of earth shaping abilities. Their plan was a simple one: bring the hammer down on the monster and annihilate it before it could do much of anything to fight back.

“Now is when you want to bring this up?” Nemari asked, exasperated.

“Well, I just got to thinking about how it’s going to spit us out on Floor 9 in a random spot. What if it drops us into the ocean a thousand miles from the archipelago? How would we ever find it?”

“It won’t do that,” Sorin said. “Or rather, it can’t.”

“How do you know? It’s not like you’ve ever been there.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Because most floors are a sphere. They don’t just stretch on infinitely, and we’re way too close to the bottom of the tower to start seeing the other types. From what I understand of Floor 9, it’s a few hundred miles at most.”

“That’s not really any better,” Rue pointed out. “What are we supposed to do? Just run on the water for days in a random direction and hope we’re going the right way?”

While their fear was a very real possibility on higher floors, and Sorin had actually found himself in precisely that situation once—though his goal had been a submerged portal on the sea bed, not a nice, convenient island—he wasn’t the least bit concerned that it would happen here.

“In the absolute worst case, we’ll dive down to the bottom of the sea, and I’ll etch a seven-tower sign for us. I sincerely doubt it’ll be necessary.”

That brought some relief to the team. Knowing that they had a way out no matter what reduced the threat of being stranded in the water to essentially nothing. Things only calmed down for a moment, however, before Rue pointed out the new problem.

“You’re not going to be with us in the Antechamber,” she said. “You’ll be off doing your slate thing. We need to coordinate before going in so we can all come out at the same time.”

“It should only take me a few minutes,” he said. “Just take your time looking at your rewards. I won’t linger on my side.”

The plan firmly decided, they ventured into the cave. It quickly narrowed down into a tight tunnel that sloped sharply downward in a spiral before splitting apart. Thanks to everyone acquiring Dark Vision, there was no need to light anything up anymore, though it was very likely that the wyrm would be blind. A lot of monsters that burrowed through the ground used magical senses over physical ones.

Possessed of his own version of those senses, Sorin knew exactly where the wyrm was. Unfortunately, he’d already proven Living Earth wasn’t strong enough to mask the whole team’s approach, so there’d be no sneaking up on it this time. It probably wouldn’t be necessary anyway, not with all of them sporting a D-ranked offensive soulprint now.

Limited Telepathic Bond also helped them communicate silently, though in this case it was mostly just Sorin projecting ‘danger’ and drawing their attention to where the sleeping wyrm was encased in a few feet of stone near one of the tunnel walls. It was a hundred feet long and actually looped around the entire tunnel three times, meaning they’d be walking right through its coils if they went that way.

That was almost certainly its plan for an opening ambush, but Sorin could easily foil that. Stopping some distance away, he projected a sense of readiness to his team, then began working once he got affirmation back. Living Earth laced through the stone, clay, and compacted dirt, ripping it apart in one massive tug and spilling the wyrm’s body out into the open.

None of them could see through the resulting dust cloud, but they didn’t need to. As one, they unloaded their most potent abilities, scoring huge hits on the wyrm’s flank and drawing blood that splattered like magma on the ground. It even glowed, throwing the billowing clouds of dust into harsh illumination.

Then the wyrm was moving, its bulk slithering through solid stone like it wasn’t even there. The team got off another two rounds of attacks before their target vanished from sight. Strangely, it seemed to have its own shielding technique to prevent Sorin from tracking it with Living Earth, though either its sheer size or the fact that it was wounded made that a lot less effective.

“So much for one burst of destruction,” Nemari said grimly.

“I’ll signal when to Speed Burst once it comes out of the wall to attack,” Sorin said. “This is going to be a hit and run fight now, but at least we know everyone’s involved. We’ll kill it quickly and move on.”

Ah, it’s not to hide itself. It’s to obscure the moment of impact and disrupt our timing, he realized as he studied the wyrm. It was shielding specific segments as it writhed through the stone, making it appear to be five independent monsters traveling in a line. That was disorienting, but not exactly worrisome. The wyrm simply lacked the power to hide enough of its body to be a problem.

What it could do was concentrate a lot of that on the tip, where the mouth was. Going purely by what Living Earth was telling him, the wyrm was a hundred feet away. But in reality, it was probably more like seventy and closing fast. Every second or two, its imperfect shielding would reveal a flicker of its bulk, and Sorin easily kept track of its speed.

“Now!” he called, throwing himself into a Speed Burst that took him down the tunnel. The group split in two different directions, and the wyrm couldn’t compensate quickly enough. It burst into view, the stone in the tunnel simply disappearing as it plowed through, but there was nothing to hit. Immediately, it altered its angle and dove for the floor to get back out of sight.

That gave the team a few more seconds to lay down some serious hurt, which they did by unloading long-range spells at maximum strength into its length. Perhaps having learned its lesson about needlessly exposing itself, the wyrm next tried to bury them alive. Sorin and Odric prevented that from happening.

If it had been patient, the wyrm might have eventually succeeded, but wyrms weren’t known for their intelligence. Like all varieties of dragonoids, they were aggressive and arrogant. When the indirect approach failed, it quickly gave up and returned to its favored strategy of digging through the ground to charge at them directly.

That was why the team stood victorious five minutes later, a bubbling segment of wyrm carcass embedded in the wall and magma-like blood seeping into the tunnel. It hissed as it plopped onto the ground in sticky globules, so hot that Sorin could see the distortion in the air above it.

“That was both easy and utterly terrifying,” Yoru said eventually. “At one point, I really thought we’d be completely crushed when the ceiling started coming down.”

“That was the most challenging part of the fight,” Sorin agreed. He’d done ninety percent of the heavy lifting himself, but being able to coordinate with Odric had made it a lot easier. It had allowed him to stabilize the weight while Odric shifted it off piecemeal, which eased the concentration burden considerably.

“And we’re still set on going to the Antechamber?” Yoru asked.

“I’m going,” Sorin said. “If you all would prefer to take the portal hub, I won’t try to stop you.”

“Nah, fuck that,” Rue said. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

Yoru sighed, but didn’t argue against the plan again. Together, the whole team approached the portal that hung open in the air nearby.