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The Fractured Tower- Chapter 37

The rats poured into the tunnel without end, coming at him from both directions in a rising tide of furry bodies. Then, as abruptly as the fight had begun, it was finished. Sorin’s clothes were shredded, and what was left was soaked through with the blood of a thousand monsters. His flesh was somehow whole, and his muscles ached from the abuse he’d put them through.

But he was alive. Despite everything, he was still alive. His spontaneous and miraculous rank up had given him the pow...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 36

Rue went scouting for something by the outer wall that was more defensible than the house they’d picked before. Ideally, it’d have a single entrance on the ground floor and some sort of exit out of reach from street level. That way, they’d only have to defend one spot and would still have a way to escape if need be.

Of course, that was impossible to find. Even with the tower’s shoddy mimicry of human architecture, it still knew that houses had windows and doors. It was far easie...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 35

“You do?” the man asked. He peered at Sorin, but there was no light of recognition in his eyes. Shrugging, he examined the rest of the team.

It wasn’t that unusual to run into other climbing teams, though having one show up to save them at the very last second was a bit suspicious. Sometimes, coincidences happened. Other times, they were manufactured. But in this case, Sorin couldn’t imagine what the other team would stand to gain that they couldn’t loot off the dead bodies of...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 34

“What is it?” Sorin yelled back to Rue. “One of the monkeys?”

“No, it’s bigger,” she said.

He doubted it was some sort of ruin guardian. They tended to lurk near the center, or wherever the seed was. It might be a sort of region guardian though, something that ruled over one particular section of the ruin. Usually, they had some sort of thematic tie to whatever monsters inhabited that region, which meant it was probably a bigger, nastier version of the rat-looking th...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 33

It took another few minutes before everyone accepted that they were trapped. Truth be told, Sorin was confident that if they absolutely had to leave, if they were backed into a corner with monsters coming at them from every direction, he could find a way over the wall. He was even confident that Rue could follow him. Nemari and Odric, however, wouldn’t make it.

Part of it was that the wall had grown higher, a full fifteen feet now as far as Sorin could see in either direction. But ano...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 32

Three more times in the next ten minutes, Sorin caught another of the gray-furred monkeys trying to beguile him with illusions. The spears were real, but their trajectory was masked to prevent anyone from tracing them back to their source. He didn’t have a good answer for why they were visible at all except to guess it was some limitation of the monsters’ abilities, possibly tied into things in motion being harder to influence.

Without the monsters hiding Rue’s passage, it became ...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 31

There was something weird about this ruin. It took Sorin a few minutes to figure out what exactly it was that was bothering him, but eventually he realized what the problem was. We know this place is occupied. Something chucked a damn spear at me. But there’s no sign of anything or anyone besides Rue in here. Even the animal tracks are sparse, probably because they learned that going in here means getting killed.

When logic and reasoning failed, the answer was usually some so...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 30

Sorin ran back across the woods to the trail to fetch Odric and Nemari. “Come with me,” he said as soon as he spotted them. “Rue went into a God damned ruin.”

“Are you sure?” Nemari asked sharply.

“Her tracks are in the area and someone went inside. I’m as sure as I can be,” Sorin explained.

Nemari started cussing as she scrambled after him. Odric said nothing, but he didn’t wait for their team leader to get herself situated before he took off. For such a...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 29

Sorin took a few seconds to absorb the Iron Body soulprint he’d purchased once he was back at the relative safety of the camp. At F-rank, it would only passively toughen up his skin, but that would help immensely in giving him a wider margin of error for dodging attacks. If something scraped him, he’d be unharmed, which was a lot more important than it sounded. Little injuries had a way of compounding as they sapped at a climber’s strength, weakening him and making it easier to get hurt...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 28

It was a short walk back to the market, made only slightly longer by having to slow his pace down to account for Rue having significantly shorter legs. The pair walked in silence for a minute or so until they were far enough away from camp that Sorin wasn’t worried about being overheard.

“So?” he asked.

“Don’t get the wrong idea. This has almost nothing to do with you,” she said. “It’s to give them some time alone.”

“I believe that’s part of it, but you...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 27

“I guess we do,” Sorin said. “What are we going to do about it?”

He wasn’t ready to even attempt to climb solo. Maybe with a good defensive soulprint and some self-healing, he might have considered it. As it stood, if the team was breaking apart now, he’d have to go find some new recruits. Annoyingly, that would mean needing to redo his planned route. It had focused heavily on enemies that Nemari would do well against.

“I have no idea what you’re going to do. We’...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 26

If he’d still been in his fifties, there was no way Sorin would have woken up without some kind of back pain. Even being back in the prime of his life, he was still a bit sore from laying on what was essentially a thinly padded board for six hours.

Should have gone back last night. Too bad I have no idea where they camped out. Still might have been more comfortable sleeping on the ground.

After a brief detour to take care of his morning business, Sorin trudged directly ...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 25

They set up their camp a quarter mile from the portal hub, far enough away to give them some privacy, but close enough to enjoy the safety a large group of humans clumped up together provided. There were no less than six other campfires studding the darkness within five hundred feet of them, and many more beyond that.

“It’s time to plan our next move,” Nemari announced after they’d finished eating.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Sorin to get back?” Rue asked, more to open up...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 24

The lobby to the Climber’s Union hadn’t changed in the last week. The only real difference was that rather than the young redhead he’d spoken to last time, now there was a portly middle-aged man who had too much fat hanging off his jowls to pull off the jawline beard he was sporting. It just looked like someone had drawn a line of hair across a ball.

“Union card,” the man demanded in a pretentious, nasally tone.

“I don’t have one,” Sorin explained. “I’d like to...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 23

The hub was almost exactly what Sorin had expected. It seemed some things remained the same, regardless of the color of the tower. There was the portal in the center, an opaque disc of swirling red light surrounded by a stone archway. That stood in the intersection of four broad roads, each one nothing more than a worn rut of dirt flanked by ropes looped around wooden poles on either side. There were no homes or permanent buildings. Instead, a series of tents filled the land around the roads....

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 22

They made their camp in a small gully two miles away from where they’d been attacked. It had a row of trees growing across the upper banks, so thick that thousands of root ends stuck out of the walls and the canopy blocked out the sky. Sorin was confident nothing of any significant size could come at them from above, which just left the front and back of the gully as possible attack angles. A smart and numerous enemy would hit them from both sides at once, but monsters were rarely that inte...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 21

Voidlings weren’t monsters, or at least there were enough differences between them and normal monsters that climbers had agreed to classify them as something else. There were a few common traits they all shared despite coming in a seemingly infinite variety of sizes and shapes. First, voidlings had no other colors besides black. Each and every one of them appeared to be made of liquid darkness that had coalesced into physical form. Second, they were unfailingly aggressive against everything...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 20

The cave was shallow and dry, perfect for temporary camps. Climbing teams used it regularly, at least those bold enough to hunt for soulprints, reagents, and crafting materials in the Volwood did. The apex predator of the region, a manticore, was attributed with over a hundred kills already, and those were just the ones the climbers knew about. There was no telling how many teams had been completely wiped out by the monster.

When Lorka had announced that they were going to kill the fuck...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 19

Three?! How is that possible?

Sorin’s mind whirled as he tried to come to terms with that. A monster on Floor 1 just did not have three soulprints, not ever. Their soulspaces weren’t like humans, but they still had limits. Three soulprints was pushing their maximum capacity, especially since monsters needed free space to shape their anima as they pleased.

Even at the higher floors, finding three soulprints on a single monster was rare. There had to be some kind of sto...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 18

The tower Sorin had been born outside of, the one he’d grown up seeing standing over the shantytown slums of his version of Floor 0, was a monument to violence and death. Every floor boasted creative new ways to kill a man, whether it was from monsters stalking climbers in search of a taste of human flesh, traps that could do anything from rip their victims to pieces to melt them into steaming puddles, or even just environments so hostile than a weak climber would succumb to the intense col...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 17

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https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/138567/the-fractured-tower

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Sorin shifted his position, sidestepping the surge of wind-driven steel grass that threatened to flense his f...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 16

Rue was the freshest in the group, largely due to the fact that she hadn’t actually fought in the previous fight. Sorin was taller and faster, but he was already wiped out both physically and mentally, so when their team’s youngest member sped off in Nemari’s direction, neither he nor Odric were capable of stopping her.

“Wait, Rue!” Odric called, but she ignored him and ran. Both blades were in her hands now, as though she was determined to make up for failing against the warb...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 15

A hail storm of ice struck the warbler in the face and throat, not because Sorin thought he could kill it that easily with such a weak soulprint, but because if he could damage its throat, that would remove most of the danger from this particular monster.

“Go!” he barked at his team. They stared at him in dull incomprehension for a second before snapping out of it. Nemari turned to start running, but stopped when she saw she was the only one.

“Rue,” Odric yelled, grabbing ...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 14

They decided to use the same ring of trees for camp that night, even though they had to go south four miles to reach it. Rather than fight their way through the branches, bushes, and vines of the forest, they strolled along the outside edge. That had the unfortunate side effect of occasionally drawing a harpy or three to attack them, but really, they just made for good target practice.

“Can you not kill them from so far away?” Sorin asked. “I’d like to actually check them for so...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 13

The second day on Floor 1 went much the same as the first. Sorin was hunting for a very specific soulprint, one he knew he could get from a harpy, but his lack of success was making him wonder if these particular harpies even had it. How exactly monsters developed soulprints was widely speculated on, but it was generally agreed that they did it by manually twisting their anima into the shape of a soulprint enough times that it became instinctive to them.

The theory went that all monster...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 12

Things were a bit crowded inside the ring of trees, but that was an acceptable trade off to the solid wall of foliage keeping them safe. Nothing bigger than a squirrel was going to get through, which was about as defensible as a makeshift camp could get. After a dinner of cold rations, they all settled down in their various spots to rest. Sorin found himself with Odric on one side of him and Nemari on the other, with Rue directly across from him in the circle

Rue ended up with first wat...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 11

After their twentieth kill, they decided to relocate rather than continuing to haul the bodies out of the way. The smell was starting to get to all of them at that point, except for maybe Sorin. Rue couldn’t tell. Nothing seemed to actually bother the man, but maybe he was just so good at hiding his thoughts that it only appeared that way.

Sorin was actually pretty fucking scary in a way that the other two didn’t fully appreciate. Rue’s soulprint was called Aura Sense, and it let ...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 10

Odric’s knowledge of Floor 1 was spotty, if Sorin was being generous. ‘Useless’ was perhaps the more accurate term. He didn’t know where they were, he’d never seen monsters like those disruption hounds, and he had only a general idea which direction the floor guardian was in. That would be useful in a week or two when they’d grown strong enough as a party to challenge it, but for the time being, that only served to tell them which way not to go.

“We need something weak eno...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 9

Emerging onto a new floor was always a risk. The tower wasn’t so nice as to just dump climbers at the portal hub for that floor, not the first time. They had to go find it. And unfortunately, that wasn’t always easy. Within limits, a new team could arrive almost anywhere on the floor. Sorin had never heard of anybody popping up in a river about to go over a waterfall or a thousand feet in the air on a lower floor, but then again, any teams that had entered a floor in that manner probably ...

The Fractured Tower- Chapter 8

Two things happened when a portal guardian died. First, every climber involved in the fight—if they hadn’t already defeated that floor’s guardian—had their soulspace expanded, a sensation so subtle that it was easy to miss it even happening. They’d be able to hold more soulprints and produce more anima faster, a boon necessary to conquer the challenges of the next floor.

After that came the part that wasn’t subtle. Climbing the tower wasn’t a physical act, but a magical on...