The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 80

Unsurprisingly, Morlin did not show up to supervise the use of the enchanter’s cabinet. One of the more important servants, possibly the house’s majordomo, arrived shortly after Sorin appeared, bringing with him a tired-looking enchanter who was rubbing his eyes with one hand and holding a steaming porcelain cup with the other.

“Sorry, give me a minute. I just finished filling it about six hours ago and laid down for some sleep. Let me finish my tea and I’ll be ready to start working,” the man said by way of apology.

“Sure, take some time,” Sorin told him before turning to the majordomo. “What do you have for me?”

“The full suite of Floor 9 navigational soulprints has been prepared for the whole team,” the man told him. “Alas, your… special orders remain unavailable. Such soulprints simply do not appear on the market often. Even using our connections to peruse some of the other family’s private collections in hopes of finding them have met with failure.”

Sorin didn’t let the irritation show on his face. It wasn’t this man’s fault, and he was right about the rarity of some of the soulprints Sorin was asking for. It was frustrating in one case, simply because Ghoul’s Tongue was a relatively common soulprint back home that was so useful, practically everybody who could use a D-rank soulprint had one.

He hadn’t expected it to be hard to find here, but apparently it fell into the category of known-but-obscenely-rare. That was too bad, because the ability to eat anything for sustenance without becoming sick from it had saved Sorin’s life multiple times. It was especially useful on the larger floors higher up, where he’d sometimes had to travel thousands of miles to get from one end to the other.

It also protected against parasites and other food-borne illnesses that came from eating monsters, which was even more important when consuming flesh from the higher floors where the parasites wouldn’t necessarily be killed by simple things like cooking the meat. That was less of an issue once various healing and physical augmentation soulprints were factored in, but it was still nice to have the blanket assurance Ghoul’s Tongue granted.

“Fine. I guess it’s not terribly surprising,” he said. “I think we’re going to be about two or three hours working on this, so if you could just leave the supplies here for me, that’ll be all.”

“Of course,” the majordomo said, not a hint of unease or hostility in his voice or on his face.

Sorin idly wondered if the man didn’t like his employer and was secretly pleased to see Morlin humbled. More likely, he was simply accustomed to weathering the whims of the powerful and never allowed his personal feelings to affect his demeanor.

Might even have Empty Mask to help him keep up the act. It’d be wasted on a climb, but for a man who lives on Floor 0, I could see him using it.

Sorin left off studying the majordomo, who departed with a single, shallow bow. The enchanter and Sorin got to work, first going over the enchantments that were going to be added to the blue-tower sword in detail while the man blew the last steam off his tea and sipped at it. By the time they were ready to start, he was much more alert.

Though he stuck around to watch, Sorin wasn’t enough of an enchanter to follow what the man was doing. His presence there was mostly born of his refusal to let the irreplaceable weapon out of his sight. It went into the cabinet, where it sat for about half an hour and soaked up the anima that had built up inside like a sponge.

The enchanter, whose name Sorin belatedly realized he’d never asked, hovered over the cabinet the whole time. Supposedly, he needed to take an active hand in directing where the anima pooled, else it would all fill evenly, leaving a surplus in the hilt and a deficit in the blade, where most of the enchantments would rest.

Since Sorin’s skills started and ended with identifying enchantments to know what tower-forged caches contained, he mostly let the explanation wash over him without comment. It seemed to help the man to narrate what he was doing in some way, and Sorin was happy to occasionally grunt or nod when the monologue called for some input.

Finally, the real work started. At that point, the enchanter went mum while he worked. One after another, he laid down the enchantments in the sword. The base layer was simple: sharpness and durability, the old stand-by of every basic enchanted sword in the tower. After that came an aura stabilization matrix, generally seen in wands or staves, to help keep any magic channeled through the sword from damaging it.

A large anima reservoir was built into the cross guard, though ‘large’ was relative. It was good for a single C-rank soulprint at best, which made it a hell of a trump card for Floor 8, and maybe, just maybe, put it at the low end of relevancy for a fight with someone as strong as Samael. Compared to the contingencies Sorin had enjoyed back in his old tower, it was a drop in the bucket.

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The best part of the process, in Sorin’s opinion, was the final enchantment. For him, and only for him, the sword had limited telekinesis. It drew directly on Sorin’s own anima to power it, and the range was a pitiful five feet, but he could slash open an ogre’s throat without having to scale its whole body now. More importantly, fighting while clinging to a wall was now possible, not to mention all the different angles of attack that opened up now that he didn’t need to hold the hilt in order to strike his target.

Layering five enchantments on a single weapon was a daunting task, but with the cabinet, it was extremely possible. Still, by the time the enchanter finished a few hours later, his face was dripping with sweat, and he was panting for breath. Despite that, he looked inordinately proud of himself.

“I think that’s the most powerful set of enchantments I’ve ever done,” he said. “No, I know it is. I would have struggled to do either the reservoir or the telekinesis alone. Doing both on a single piece on top of three other enchantments is a damn miracle.”

“Well, get used to it, because we’ve got plenty more work to do,” Sorin told him. He held the sword up to examine it, then released it to float in the air in front of him. It swished through the air in a couple of quick slashes, not quite as fast as Sorin could have done it by hand, but that was a hard limit of the enchantment itself.

Fighting with one floating sword and one in hand was a possibility, but he wasn’t that interested in exploring the idea. Between the relative slowness of the enchantment and the mental strain of the fighting style, it’d be a few more floors before he started building up his mind enough to make it efficient. By then, he’d have far better ways to fight.

Just a gimmick anyway. Too difficult to pull off without at least a Multitasker soulprint and too weak by the time your soulspace is big enough to waste space on C-rank soulprints just for the fun of it.

Bidding the enchanter farewell, Sorin collected the three packs containing the team’s supplies and stepped back through the Liminal Gateway. The void seemed unusually calm lately, but Sorin still didn’t dare make any unnecessary noise while on the liminal path. He couldn’t prove it, but he suspected the growth of his own soulprint was somehow keeping the void from noticing him.

Either way, it meant no voidlings appearing when he walked down the path. He’d only had to deal with that twice, and both times they’d chased him out into the tower before he’d managed to put them down. Ideally, he’d never have to deal with it again, but he remained extremely aware of the potential danger.

Sorin nearly tripped over a harpy corpse when he came back out of the gateway on Floor 8. At the same time, a pair of talons swooped down for the back of his head, and Rue screamed a warning for him to duck. Instead, his sword flew over his head and pierced through the harpy’s stomach. It dragged the monster sideways and flung it free, which was about the extent of the weight it could move.

Good thing these things are only sixty or seventy pounds, he thought as he got his bearings.

Blind Sense revealed three more harpies descending on him, but those were quickly dispatched with a few applications of Force Edge. The rest of the team was about fifty feet away, fending off more of the flock, with reinforcements already on their way.

“Damn, you guys have been having fun without me,” he said. “Anyone finish rank 8 while I was gone?”

“Not… yet,” Rue grunted, jumping to avoid a low wind wall sweeping for her legs and disemboweling a nearby harpy that had probably thought itself out of her range. Reach was powerful enough to extend her cuts more than a foot past the tip of the blade, though, and even though the steel didn’t physically reach flesh, skin tore and blood spilled anyway.

It took a few more minutes before things calmed down, upon which time Sorin cracked open the packs and started distributing soulprints. “Water Breathing, Aquatic Vision, Dark Vision, Pressure Resistance, North Homing, and the real doozy of the pack: Limited Telepathic Bond.”

The last one wasn’t true telepathy, not at E-rank. Instead, it allowed the user to push an empathic feeling toward another person. That was limited to simple things like getting someone’s attention or projecting a sense of danger or fear. It wasn’t particularly useful in most situations, but it was as good as communication was going to get when they were a couple hundred feet underwater.

“Once you’ve all finished making Thermal Insulation, you should know that Aquatic Vision and Dark Vision are another set of extremely compatible soulprints,” Sorin said. “Better than that, Clear Eyes, if made correctly, will also help you see through other obstructions like dust storms or fog.”

“There goes all the free soulspace I had,” Nemari said with a sigh. “And I was going to rank up Sentinel’s Vigilance and Iron Body, too.”

“Another benefit of merging soulprints is the extra space it gives you to add even more abilities to your repertoire,” Sorin said with a grin.

“Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you go merge your own soulprints and leave me to my complaining?”

There were a few possible combinations, like Blind Sense and Clear Eyes, but in Sorin’s opinion, he lost too much versatility to justify the space savings. It was the same with Warrior’s Vigilance and Blood of the Mountain. If he smacked them together, too much didn’t fit right, and he’d be left weaker for it.

I could probably mix Pressure Resistance with Thermal Insulation, but… let’s wait until after Floor 9. We’re probably not going deep enough for it to matter either way, but on the off chance some big-ass sea monster drags me all the way down, I’d rather have it undiluted.

North Homing would eventually be folded into some better mental soulprint, mostly as a quick and easy way to get rid of it. It was a useful navigational aid for low floors, but failed too often to take up even an F-rank’s space in a serious build. That was probably why it was so cheap and readily available. Its only real use for this tower was on Floor 9, and even then, it was the least necessary out of the whole kit.

“I suppose that’s a job for later,” Sorin mused after considering the matter for a few seconds. “I believe there are about ten thousand harpies eagerly awaiting our attention at the moment.”