The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 67

Some beetles moved. Some were still. The ones that were already in motion stayed that way, and while there were a few heading in Sorin’s general direction, none of them seemed to be actually focused on him. Five seconds of watching turned into ten and then thirty before he allowed himself to believe he’d gotten away with killing the mantis unnoticed.

Okay, now that I’m done having a minor heart attack, let’s get back on task.

Just as he went to do that, though, he noticed something. One of the beetles was heading straight toward the surface, maybe a hundred feet away from Sorin. If he was right, it was pointed directly at one of the spots where Sorin had held the vibrational dampening layer.

Are the earth senses on these things really so fine that they can still find some difference even after I’ve removed the effect? That is an insane amount of sensory fidelity for a Floor 5 monster. The tower has got to be fucking with these things right now.

Sorin had moved carefully before, not walking faster than a normal speed to minimize the amount of impact he had to account for. That was out the window now anyway. He bounded across the ravine and into the empty hut, which was nothing more than an almost square box with crooked, leaning walls of stone that had holes in them near where a window was supposed to be.

A few seconds later, the inquisitive beetle reached the surface. Sorin wasn’t physically within the range of its eyes, not that it had those, but his hope was that the solid slab of stone that made up the hut’s floor would hide the dampening layer beneath him better than the cross-section of dirt and gravel outside.

The beetle traced Sorin’s trail until it got to the spot where he’d fought the mantis. It paused there, perhaps confused at the trail’s abrupt end since Sorin had literally jumped from one spot to the next. Eventually, it determined where he’d landed and dragged itself across the ground to where the dead mantis still lay in several pieces.

Sorin’s hand inched toward his knife. Carving the seven-tower sign in solid stone was going to take a lot longer than doing it in a tree, and since he might need it, it was better to start now than wait until he knew for sure. He’d already left a companion sign on a tree a few miles away near the camp, anyway.

Then the beetle did something curious, and Sorin was forcibly reminded that it was nothing more than an insectoid monster. It might have some of the most powerful earth sensing capabilities he’d ever seen on a low-floor monster, but it wasn’t smart enough to leverage those to its full advantage. It merely brute-forced its way to finding prey.

And, in this case, it found something. Somehow, it recognized flesh and chitin and everything else there. The beetle opened its mouth and bathed the whole pile in acid, proving that if it could dissolve solid rock, a fresh corpse was no match for it. Then it scooted around the area in a tight circle, consuming everything over the span of a few seconds.

It thinks the mantis was responsible for my dampening field, Sorin realized. And since it found the source, it stopped looking!

Sure enough, the beetle promptly sunk into the ground and started burrowing a new tunnel back through the dirt. Sorin hardly dared breathe as he watched it vanish from sight and had to switch to tracking it with Living Earth. Slowly, his hand unclenched from the handle of his knife, and he let out a relieved laugh.

Maybe I’m getting too old for climbing if this is all it takes to rattle me.

Shrugging that thought off, Sorin walked over to the well next to the hut and peered down. It was dark, of course, but there was a reason he’d sought out Dark Vision as part of his build. That was an essential soulprint for every climber. With it residing as part of Clear Eyes, he could see all the way to the bottom.

That didn’t help all that much. Mostly, it just showed him a circle of cool, blue-gray stone a hundred feet down from the surface. There was nothing there, but he knew that already. Living Earth showed him all sorts of details his eyes couldn’t, like a big cavern at the bottom of the well, easily a hundred feet wide and conspicuously similar to a floor guardian’s arena.

It also showed him dozens of tunnels connecting to the cavern’s south wall, all sized perfectly for a rock-borer beetle to enter through. If that wasn’t suspicious, Sorin didn’t know the meaning of the word. All of it indicated a battle against a large, dangerous foe that would summon an endless stream of reinforcements.

It was probably designed to ensure that climbers didn’t do exactly what Sorin was doing right now: skip the beetles. Most of the ruin seemed built specifically to force that, actually. Mantises that could fly intercepted anyone coming from the air. Poisonous fumes killed anyone trying to enter from anywhere but the mouth of the ravine. The guardian summoned the beetles if they were still alive.

Except, of course, if I sneak up on the guardian and kill it in a single hit before it gets a chance to do that. The only question is whether or not I can actually do that.

Using a deliberately weakened version of Spider Climb, Sorin slowly slid down the well. Gravity pulled him at slightly better than a walking pace until he reached the end of the shaft and free-fell the last forty feet. Living Earth helped dampen the impact, but he still hit hard enough that Counter Heal flashed up his legs to repair the damage.

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What he didn’t see—and he was aware enough of everything around him that he really didn’t think it’d be possible to sneak up on him—was the ruin guardian. From what he knew, it was supposed to be a bigger, angrier, spikier version of the rock-borer beetles, and if it was hanging around, it wasn’t at the bottom of the well.

Okay, so where is it, then? Living Earth is showing me nothing. Blind Sense is showing me nothing. My own eyes are showing me nothing. Who ever heard of a ruin with no guardian? And that damn guide to this place hasn’t been wrong one single time yet, so it’d be pretty weird if this was where it screwed up.

His best guess was that the guardian was somewhere in the walls or under the floor, waiting for unwary climbers to descend into its nest, where it would then pop out and wreck their day. But thanks to Living Earth, he’d entered undetected. That was part of the plan, so in that regard, Sorin had successfully reached the arena.

Only he hadn’t counted on being unable to find the damn guardian. It wasn’t like there was anywhere to go from here, not unless he wanted to go fight the beetles in their own tunnels. And that’s weird, isn’t it? The ruin heart has got to be here somewhere, too, but I can’t find it. Maybe this isn’t the end, after all. I mean, it is kind of a small ruin if you only count the surface, but why shouldn’t it extend a mile into the ground? This floor’s whole theme is that everything is huge.

Working from that theory, Sorin quickly realized the truth of it. There was another chamber—kind of—below the one he was in. Normally, the guardian would bridge that gap by tunneling up to the arena, and then the victorious climbers would follow the tunnel back down to claim the cache.

It was way down there, too. Living Earth gave him feedback even farther than Blind Sense, which itself had a couple hundred feet of range, and he could only just barely tell there was something different below him. Getting to it was going to be tricky. He would have to dig, which wasn’t a problem. Doing it without being noticed might be.

It was probably impossible to hide it in the long run, but he really only needed a few minutes. The key then was to leave traces that could be noticed, but weren’t unusual enough to draw immediate attention. It was less digging and more slipping through the ground. He needed to close it right behind him.

Breathing is going to be difficult. I can probably hold my breath for… at least five minutes. Maybe longer. How long will it take to go a few hundred feet? I can do a hundred a minute, right?

The idea of burying himself alive was not appealing. Worse, he ran the risk of drawing notice while he was buried under a few hundred feet of dirt. Not for the first time in the last twenty minutes, he considered turning back. This was a point of no return. If he started this process and got caught, he wasn’t sure he could escape.

But he was so close. The guardian sat there, just at the very limit of his perception, unmoving and, presumably, unaware. All Sorin needed to do was slip through the dirt and stone, pop out on top of it, and hammer it with a super-charged D-rank spell. Then he could collect his rewards and skip off through a Liminal Gateway, one which he would be sure to disconnect immediately via the closest handy rock-borer beetle.

No point in running away without even trying it first, he decided.

Forming a small bubble of dampening around him, he parted the stone beneath his feet and sunk down. Living Earth was powerful enough that he immediately revised his estimates. At the rate he was going, it would barely take two minutes to get there. Already, his head was below the surface after just a few seconds.

Now for the scary part.

He let the stone close back overhead, then slid the dampening field down as he moved. There was some air trapped with him, but not much. Sorin took shallow breaths, and he spaced them out to help conserve what little he had. The deeper he went, the more loose dirt filled in the mobile pocket, occasionally prompting him to push it out to the sides and compact it into the walls.

That wasn’t ideal. It was leaving a very visible trail that the extremely sensitive rock-borer beetles would no doubt find. He could try to alter his route into something less of an obvious straight line, but he doubted he could make the pockets look random enough. The only other option was to let his little air pocket completely fill with dirt.

Speed over subtlety. It won’t matter if they find my trail if they don’t do it in the next few minutes.

The dampening sphere seemed to be working, at least. None of the monsters he could sense were investigating, and he knew if they’d realized a non-beetle was burrowing through their domain, they’d be on him immediately. But no, they were just going about their business, completely unaware of the magic happening inside that bubble.

As he got closer, a picture of the dungeon heart slowly painted itself in his mind. The ruin guardian was essentially squatting on it, its bulk curled around the heart itself. That wasn’t a problem normally, since it would rise up to the arena to fight, leaving a clear trail down. Right now, it was an issue. If Sorin killed it, he’d have to carve his way through it.

But so what? I’m already carving through stone. Once this thing is dead, I can do the same thing to it. Maybe it’ll be a bit messier in the middle, but I can just pour some stone in there to make my own little passage once I’ve broken it open.

The massive guardian beetle was exactly as described. At something like thirty feet long and half that wide, it was more oblong than the square rock-borer beetles closer to the surface. Its head had a massive, horned ridge plate mounted on it, and its shell was probably two or three times thicker than its smaller cousins. It had just as many legs, all curled around the ruin heart at the moment and tucked safely away.

However, it had a weakness the rest of the beetles didn’t. The same thing that gave it flexibility also provided Sorin with his attack vector. Instead of a single solid dome of rock, its shell was in segments. Where the seams met, the stone was thinner and weaker. Sorin doubted it could move without some sort of elemental manipulation ability, but it undoubtedly had that.

He positioned himself mere inches away from the unmoving guardian, so close that only the thin dampening layer kept him undetected. He’d stretched it behind him now, not wanting the guardian to notice any abrupt changes to the route he left behind.

There, he decided. One clean blow.

And he readied the magic that should end the guardian’s life.