Sorin couldn’t help but contrast this moment with his memories of entering the trial grounds for the first time. Though the exact details were fuzzy—forty years was a long time to keep it all locked in his mind, after all—he’d never forgotten that heady mixture of excitement and apprehension. It had been his first real challenge, one he’d secretly trained for using an old broken practice sword he’d found in the trash outside of a prestigious academy for rich people’s kids while ...
2025-09-29 11:47:55 +0000 UTC
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Hunger made for the best seasoning, but Sorin wasn’t hungry enough for this. They were sitting at a small, almost intimate, table for two on an outdoor patio deep into the slums. It was almost like a mockery of the fine dining establishments the rich and powerful frequented, all the pieces in place, but everything made out of trash and refuse.
They hadn’t even ordered yet; he’d just seen what was on the plates of the three other people there, and he was almost positive that the on...
2025-09-26 11:10:43 +0000 UTC
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There were bloodstains on the stone floor. In fact, more of the floor was stained red than not, which made Sorin wonder if the would-be climbers at the Meat Grinder knew what the word ‘spar’ even meant. There were no padded weapons to be seen, no leather training jerkins, no dummies or targets.
This is literally just an empty room for people to fight in, which, apparently, they use their normal weapons to do. I know the place is a discount version of the Climber’s Union, but w...
2025-09-25 11:39:18 +0000 UTC
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Job boards were generally cut up into four sections. Most numerous by far were the requests for specific materials or soulprints. Those always varied by the needs and wants of the people posting them. Less common were jobs looking for climbers to escort someone somewhere or to guard some place, usually posted by businesses trying to exploit some natural resource on a higher floor.
Below them were the standing resource gathering jobs the Climber’s Society—or Union, in this case—pai...
2025-09-24 11:13:02 +0000 UTC
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Lamor Street was made of packed-down dirt filled with ruts and holes and flanked on both sides by a bunch of single-story shacks all squeezed together like a row of dingy townhouses, except the only thing keeping them upright was the fact that they all leaned against each other. The Meat Grinder was at the nicer end of the street, not too terribly far from the tower itself.
It was little more than an old meeting hall, its roof covered in wood shingles and its shutters ripped off to leav...
2025-09-23 11:23:47 +0000 UTC
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My own fault for being cocky about getting out of that slum without a fight.
All three men felt like rank 1s to Sorin, probably without even five soulprints between them. Two of them were tall and broad-shouldered, the result of Musclebound or some other basic soulprint giving them their physique. The third one was almost scrawny, just over five feet tall and whip-thin. He had a bandoleer of throwing knives crossing his chest that he kept running his hand across.
Sorin me...
2025-09-22 11:23:29 +0000 UTC
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-----
Sorin was already a legend in his own time. He thought his journey was complete, but it’s only just begun.
It is said that those who reach the top of the tower become immortal. After forty years of calculated risks, dead companions, and spent fortunes, Sorin Atharel was ready to take the final step and join those hallowed ranks. Instead, his reward was to have...
2025-09-19 10:20:17 +0000 UTC
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Here we are, the end of the story. The last book ended up being pretty chonky compared to the first two (about 30% longer), and I think that might have messed with the pacing a bit, but it is what it is. Originally, this whole story was supposed to be about 100k words as a simple writathon project, but then it turned into my most popular story ever and all a sudden, I was scrambling to weave a greater plot than the simple one I'd originally imagined.
I'm probably biased, but I like to t...
2025-09-18 11:49:33 +0000 UTC
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Velik appeared on the roof of a watch tower in a flash of jagged, crimson light. It looked like nothing so much as a crack in reality that unfolded into the shape of a person, one that mirrored the slash through the new moon overhead. Even during the daylight hours, he could sense it. He didn’t even need to look to point directly at the dark moon, not with [Dusk Watcher] on his new skill list.
“Again?” a voice below his feet bellowed. “Quit landing on the damn r...
2025-09-18 11:28:41 +0000 UTC
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Six months later…
Jensen finished finalizing the roster with his caravan quartermaster, then turned to where his new assistant was silently waiting for him. The boy was perhaps a bit overeager, but he had a solid managerial class that helped him keep track of a million little details, and he was smart enough to leverage it. Jensen’s day-to-day burdens had almost completely vanished.
“What is it, Lendin?” he asked. It was pretty rare that the kid even needed help w...
2025-09-17 11:26:21 +0000 UTC
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Velik did not have the first clue how he’d survived, but he suspected it had something to do with the massive golden ball spinning in place in front of him. He tried to drag himself to his feet, only to discover that while he was somehow completely uninjured, he couldn’t remember having ever felt weaker. Gone was his speed and his strength, and he felt practically blind.
Is this what everyone else felt like when they lost the system? And… is that my system in that bal...
2025-09-16 11:25:19 +0000 UTC
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Now would be a fantastic time for you to do something! Velik called out to his system as he frantically pumped out [Void Lance] after [Void Lance] in an attempt to push back the build up of raw essence surrounding him. The fact that he was disintegrating the flesh of the divine beast he’d climbed inside of was a secondary effect of his actions.
Essence, unfortunately, didn’t want to vanish just because he unleashed a bunch of void magic on ...
2025-09-15 11:21:52 +0000 UTC
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The whole city was panicking, not that Jensen blamed them. Velik had told some people that the system was going to break and that everyone was going to lose their class, levels, and skills, but it wasn’t widespread knowledge. Most of the people Jensen had tried to warn had just laughed at him.
They weren’t laughing now. The monsters besieging the city were noticeably weaker, too, but that didn’t seem to reassure anyone. Where before powerful, high-level archers were putting arrows...
2025-09-12 11:44:03 +0000 UTC
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Eslaka’s work proceeded at a manic pace, hours flowing endlessly and unheeded as she ferried the fuel for her pyre to her place of power. She’d gathered the fuel in secret over long centuries, just waiting for the day she’d be allowed to use it. It was a motley collection, everything from rare wood imbued with the elemental essence of fire that caused the wood to smolder continuously to heart stones from greater fire elementals. Gems that glowed with inner heat and massive sheets of gol...
2025-09-11 11:29:13 +0000 UTC
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There wasn’t a single thread of essence inside that monster, not as far as Velik could tell. Wherever it was storing it, the divine beast had secured that resource completely. Mana, on the other hand, was not so hard to detect. Or rather, it was easy to spot whenever the monster actively used it. Unlike every other living—or unliving—creature Velik had ever encountered, this one didn’t seem to pull mana from some sort of internal reserve.
Instead, it grabbed it from the world ar...
2025-09-10 11:22:42 +0000 UTC
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Velik watched thousands upon thousands of undead speed off in every direction. They weren’t fast, not by his standards, but they were relentless and untiring. In a matter of hours, they’d spread across the country, aided by magic they somehow used without essence or a system. Portals opened up, cooperatively formed and maintained by cadres of skeletal mages, and infantry streamed through them.
He tried to ignore that niggling feeling in his head that he was unleashing a plague upon ...
2025-09-09 11:08:07 +0000 UTC
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“Stop it?” The liches started laughing, though it was more of an evil hissing sound than anything Velik thought of as actual laughter. “That was never our job. We were supposed to keep people like you from poking at it and waking it up. We all knew that eventually this would come to an end. We’ve fulfilled our role, and Darshu will free us from this cursed existence.”
“If that’s how you feel, then why are you here?” Velik asked, confused.
The lead lich sneered back...
2025-09-08 11:27:38 +0000 UTC
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Lacking access to the real system, and with his personal system also completely silent, Velik wasn’t entirely sure he’d get the same forewarning everyone else did. He’d considered sticking close to people under the assumption someone would tell him, but ultimately decided that it was better to be on-hand for when the divine beast broke free of its confinement, however long that might take.
He could sense the undead below his feet, thousands of feet down. They stomped through the n...
2025-08-29 12:46:07 +0000 UTC
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Velik wouldn’t say he was happy that he was apparently nothing more than an arrow the gods had pointed at their target, but he wasn’t exactly surprised either. Gods used mortals, not the other way around. The fact that they’d lied and withheld information to get him to do what they wanted was pretty much what he’d expect from them.
If he’d known that taking the LPS out into the wider world outside the Garden would trigger the collapse of human civilization, he wouldn’t have ...
2025-08-28 12:03:48 +0000 UTC
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The first question Sildra had to ask was, “Is Velik right? You can’t talk to him because he’s not part of the system anymore?”
Morgus rolled his eyes. “No, Velik is not right, not about much of anything, honestly. That boy is good at hitting things with his sticks and that’s about it.”
“Really? That’s a relief. He painted a pretty dire picture of the situation,” Sildra said.
“Ah. Well… I suppose I should give him a little credit. He’s not entirely w...
2025-08-27 12:21:01 +0000 UTC
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It took a bit of luck and a lot of persistence, but Velik could cross a thousand miles in a matter of hours and his ears could pick up people miles away. With Jensen giving him a heading to start, he found his target about four hours later. Along the way, he killed several thousand monsters and probably a hundred elites.
It was strange not to get any sort of notifications. He hadn’t reconnected to the system, nor had the LPS woken back up. His essence configurations weren’t degradin...
2025-08-26 12:25:54 +0000 UTC
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For fourteen hours, thousands of defenders had stood on Ashala’s walls and exhausted themselves driving the hordes back. Jensen had joined early on and killed several thousand monsters between level 3 and level 30 scattered randomly across the open plains surrounding the city. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their placement, which was something of a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, the stronger monsters never clumped together and overwhelmed any single portion of the wall, so...
2025-08-25 11:12:36 +0000 UTC
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Sildra’s chest heaved as she struggled for breath, the exertion of the day having worn her down to a nub. Her vision was blurry and her head pounded, but there was no time to relent. Another monster was closing in, this one some sort of feathered biped that looked sort of like a bear. It lumbered closer, completely unconcerned about the field of corpses it had to wade through to reach her.
[Lunar Judgment] slammed into it, silver fire igniting along its limbs and cons...
2025-08-22 13:39:38 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: I had planned on this series being four books, but then I changed my mind and decided to just extend book 3 by about 40% to close it up as a trilogy like I originally wanted. We're about 15-20 chapters out from the end of the story at this point and heading into the final arc now.
* * *
While [Void Lance] had penetrating power, it lost a lot of the versatility and wide area effect of [Dread Lance] as a trade-off. At...
2025-08-21 11:55:12 +0000 UTC
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Pain.
Like nothing Velik had ever felt before, so much that his brain just shut down. Or maybe that was his non-existent blood pressure due to his non-existent blood. Velik had a brief moment of vertigo before everything shut down. The world went black and then, mercifully, he couldn’t feel anything at all.
This isn’t it… I’m not done. Just… need to focus… I can fix this.
But the mana didn’t come. Or it wasn’t there. Or maybe it was, and Velik wasn...
2025-08-20 12:44:40 +0000 UTC
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It galled him to admit it, but Reisha was struggling. Zelamir’s experiment had yielded powerful results, though the gods had certainly played a part in raising the human up to power with their system and whatever gifts they’d bestowed on him as reparations for Tesir’s screw up in the Garden. Eslaka had also grown immensely in a very short amount of time, though she was even more erratic than usual.
He wasn’t worried for his own survival. His enemies were strong, yes, but they we...
2025-08-19 11:49:53 +0000 UTC
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The fetters were nothing to Reisha, either because of his sheer size and strength, or simply because Zelamir had control of them and wasn’t trying to hinder his ally. Similarly, Eslaka ignored them. Anything that got too close turned to ash anyway, and the magic in the fetters wasn’t strong enough to resist her flames.
Velik, unfortunately, had neither of those advantages. He could only take some comfort in the fact that if he was captured, [Sun Eater] would quickly...
2025-08-18 13:02:42 +0000 UTC
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Zelamir ran through the air in much the same way Velik did, one bounding leap at a time. He had a decent lead and was remarkably quick, but it was still just a matter of seconds until Velik closed the gap. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage it before his prey reached the next floor.
Mana poured out of Zelamir, dozens of tiny threads that lashed at his surroundings, connecting him to something bigger than himself. By the time Velik passed through the open archway, the divine beast had ful...
2025-08-15 11:53:17 +0000 UTC
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Velik was under no illusions that he had an ally in this fight. If anything, Eslaka represented a thirty party interfering. In his opinion, the most likely scenario here was that she would try to kill all three of them, and the only question was the order.
Even in her human form, waves of heat rolled off her. If the ground hadn’t already been turned into a stretch of charred, blackened dirt, it would be igniting around her. Instead, the air itself shimmered around her, a testimony to ...
2025-08-14 11:54:13 +0000 UTC
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The specimen was honestly more than Zelamir could have hoped for. He was fast, strong, ate basically every type of magic that got close to him, and had… well, not exactly impressive control over his own essence, but far better than he should have. It was inflexible and rigid, but that also meant his essence was incredibly stable.
In fact, the more Zelamir considered that, the more suspicious he became. The specimen’s control couldn’t be that good, not in the middle of a battle lik...
2025-08-13 12:34:04 +0000 UTC
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