Stormblade 4 C 39: The Pit

I have returned from my vacation. I was unable to get any writing done, except for a couple of chapters on something new that I'm tinkering with very casually. Right now, that's not ready to be revealed beyond saying that it exists, but it was lovely to get a break from the routine, and I did see some beautiful things while I was gone. Very refreshing.

That being said, I'm currently operating with essentially no backlog. My plan right now is to hold at 3/week chapters until I've built up more than the one chapter of backlog I have, then gradually try to get back to 5/week. Thanks for your understanding

39 - The Pit

Tanat couldn’t remember how long she’d been trying to clear the Black Tower.

Her world had first encountered portals a century beforehand, and she knew all their tricks. The Grand Archive was full of information on every type of portal. The Fast-Breakers. The Paragon-Filled. The simplest E-Rank beginner portals all the way to the strongest, elite-killing SS-Ranked ones. And, of course, the Lonely Gates.

Every student in the Soaring Saber sect received a Lonely Gate key, and clearing it was the sole requirement for ascending into the sect’s inner school.

Hers was the Black Tower.

She’d been the first to get a key.

And she was the last of her cohort to still be struggling.

Not that it mattered. Tanat’s people had no strict time limits. Every person grew at their own pace, and that was accepted and celebrated. It had taken her twenty years to slowly, painstakingly master her sword and begin clawing her way up the ranks. It had taken her another fifteen to reach the strength necessary to enter her Lonely Gate and begin killing its occupants, one or two at a time. If it took her another two decades to scale the tower and slay the champion on its highest floor, then so be it. It wasn’t a badge of shame—not unless Tanat chose to wear it as one.

Slow, methodical, controlled. Tanat had started outside of the Black Tower. She’d killed everything. No enemies would hide at her back, ready to stab it when she finally entered the Tower. It had taken her months to be sure that, when she stepped into the city’s streets, she was alone.

She wasn’t a natural talent with the blade, and her grasp of magic was mediocre at best. Her true strength was in her determination and stubbornness. No one had pushed as hard as Tanat for as long as Tanat. No one. She trained constantly. Her sword’s grip was worn through the leather—and through the leather she’d reinforced it with. Her callouses had callouses.

But she’d reached the third floor. Not alone. Not without unwitting assistance. But she’d done it.

And here she was, armor shattered, body bleeding, and sword hanging loosely from a broken wrist as a monster in the shape of a man dragged her down to the first floor. She tried to say something, but words didn’t come out. Her sword clattered to the ground as its tip caught a section of wall and jarred her wrist. The monster scooped it up by its hilt and said something, then slid it into her scabbard.

A moment later, she sat at the bottom of the stairs, propped against a wall as the monster summoned its cloud-and-lightning-wreathed blade from nowhere. It said something else. Tanat didn’t understand, but she didn’t have the energy to explain that. She half-shut her eyes and watched as the man-shaped monster stepped through a Lonely Gate and disappeared.

How was he here? How had he gotten into her Lonely Gate? This was supposed to be her world, not his! And how had she not realized he wasn’t a monster after their first fight? The question pounded against her skull like the mace that had shattered her helmet, and Tanat’s eyes shut the rest of the way. Her meager Stamina dulled the pain enough to let her start drifting off.

He’d be back, and when he was, she’d find a way to get an explanation.

◄▼►

I stepped back through the multicolored Solo Portal’s exit into chaos.

Heat filled the air around me. Heat—and steam. Some of that was the pool below the limestone dome evaporating as the Phoenix Reborn summoned enough flame to melt brass armor and set the silk inside ablaze. But not all of it.

Steam Sentinel: S-Rank Monster

Four legs. Two vents up front, both vomiting steam so hot my skin blistered under my armor. A massive brass plate that had to be a foot thick and ten feet wide, like a triceratops. It pushed against Bernard’s shield as the S-Ranked tank’s sword tried and failed to find a gap in the armor. His back foot was five feet from my closing portal. Steam eddied around us.

I had a few Charges left over, though.

Rain-Slicked Blade. I jammed my sword into the thickest part of the S-Rank Sentinel’s armor. Nimbus Edge sank into it like it was paper, cutting something inside, but instead of recoiling in pain, the Steam Sentinel only pushed forward, legs pulverizing the limestone below it as it shoved forward. I backpedaled against the wall of steam. Through the mist, I caught bursts of magic and sparks as portal metal met brass. The other S-Rankers were fighting all around the pool we’d stopped at.

“Help me take this out!” Bernard yelled. “ Hammer and anvil! No one makes a better wall than me!”

I smiled as I shifted stances and used Storm Dance. My body disappeared, reappearing on the Steam Sentinel’s far side—but even as I readied myself to go on the offensive, its wall shifted, splitting into two tower shield-sized chunks that rotated until one faced me and the other blocked Bernard. More steam poured out onto the limestone, burning my calves and shins.

My smile vanished, and my vision tightened.

Cyclone Forms. Polarity Shift with Rolling Thunder. Echo it off another Polarity Shift, then another. Apply all three Polarity Shifts to Brendan’s Stormfire Lance.

Stance-shift to Thunderbolt. Use the Stormfire Lance—right into the hole in the armored shield. Lightning crackled, and the nonexistent stink of burning Mana filled the air. I smiled and used Cutting Storm. Electrically-charged wind blades ripped into the Steam Sentinel’s shield—and into every enemy around us.

It wasn’t enough. But that was okay. Two more attacks at the damaged S-Rank monster, and a shield slam that shook the cavern from Bernard, and the Sentinel was on the back foot.

Stormbreak. I excluded Sarah and the Phoenix Reborn. Lightning flowers bloomed around every other portal monster and delver in the area, and a moment later, the seven pulses of electricity I was expecting rippled out as my Mana—and everything else’s—was consumed in a blinding blossom of light.

When it was done, I was bottomed out. So were Bernard, Terrel, and Hugo. And, more importantly, so was every single monster above A-Rank.

The ones lower than that were dead or deactivating.

“Good hit, kid,” Bernard said. His sword jammed into the Steam Sentinel’s armor, and this time, it gave. “We’ll mop it up from here.”

I relaxed slightly. It was nice to work with people strong enough to not only survive Stormbreak, but be able to fight cleanly afterward.

Two minutes later, the cavern was quiet except for Cheddar’s wings as they beat in the darkness, funneling Mana into me so I could recover.

“Well played,” Sarah said. “We’ll recover on the move. The portal’s monsters know we’re here, so we’re done with stealth now. Breaking and entering time.”

Hugo grinned savagely and shifted the arrows in his quiver. Terrel’s hammer rested on his shoulder. He, too, was smiling around a shallow wound to his cheek.

And Nathan Anders reformed into his human form. “Great. High chance of dying, small odds of winning. Exactly where I want to be.”

The crazy thing, I realized as we turned down the dark, humid passageway and pushed toward the Bottomless Pit, was that he wasn’t joking. None of them were.

◄▼►

The earth shook violently as we broke for the Bottomless Pit.

It was only a few hundred yards, but we’d be making our approach through a maze of stalagmites and columns and shattered, broken boulders the size of houses—and that was only what we knew about the cavern from almost a decade ago.

No one had been this deep inside of it since the portal broke.

So none of us were ready for what we found.

Brass piping ran across the floor in a grid between columns of limestone, venting steam from welded joints until the entire massive room was shrouded in burning-hot fog. Gigantic tanks filled every space that wasn’t stone. Some of the pipes plunged down into the limestone, while others reached up into the ceiling; the cavern looked like an organized game of pick-up sticks, but with brass tubing instead of wooden or plastic poles. Dozens more pipes lit the room with flickering fires that, with the thick mist in the air, seemed almost like candles—if candles had flame lengths in the dozens of feet high. It smelled like smoke, mold, and stale, fetid air.

There was one other thing about the room; aside from a quartet of absolutely gigantic, many-legged brass constructs in the steam-filled distance, there were no monsters in the pipe field. None.

“They’re all moving along the west wall,” Hugo said.

Sarah shook her head as we worked our way through the maze of pipes. “They know we’re here. Why aren’t they reacting?”

I peered into the steam cloud. Then I shrugged. “They either don’t know what we’re trying to do, they have other orders that are more important, or they don’t think we’re a threat. Probably the last one.”

“How do you figure?” Sarah asked.

I ducked a pipe and kept moving. “Well, Angelo Lawrence is out there with probably thirty S-Rank delvers and an army of A and B-Rankers, right? That’s the threat. All the constructs moving out of here are reacting to that, not to us. We’re outgunned—or at least the portal’s boss thinks we are—and we’re outnumbered hard.”

We closed the gap to the first of the four massive constructs, and Sarah cleared her throat. “Interesting assessment, but there’s one other possibility.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“That.”

Brass Foreman: S-Rank Monster

All four of the massive, many-legged constructs noticed us at the same time. As they moved toward us as one, my eyes widened. They were brass centipedes—the same number of legs and shape as the C-Ranked monsters that had swarmed Dad under. They were just bigger.

Much, much bigger.

The ceiling overhead was at least a hundred feet high—maybe more—but the monsters filled almost the entire space. Silk strands connected them to a second grid of pipes overhead and to the first grid below, and as they moved, their bodies wove between the columns of limestone, missing them by what felt like inches.

“Can we take them?” I asked.

An arrow whipped through the air toward the closest of the four massive machines. Before it could hit, a burst of steam exploded out from the monster’s segmented body, and the Falcon’s Eye’s shot tumbled across the room. It hit the cavern wall, and stone shrapnel exploded outward.

“I guess not,” Sarah said. “Let’s go!”

We broke into a sprint, ducking and jumping over pipes as the four Brass Foremen closed the gap. Hugo and Nathan kept up the fire, but all their attacks accomplished was forcing the monsters to use their defenses. It wasn’t enough. I could probably cut through their armor with Rain-Soaked Blade, but I couldn’t stand up to these things in a fight. Not all four, at least. We only had one good move, and that was to run.

It took thirty seconds of being doused with steam and brass shrapnel as the monstrous automatons opened fire with all sorts of onboard weapons. Of running through the maze of brass pipes and layers of silk webbing that rained down on us. Of trying to return fire and keep moving forward. An eternity, for A and S-Rankers on the move.

But then we stood over it. The Bottomless Pit—and the golden glow of the S-Rank portal deep inside of it.

It was three hundred feet down, suspended the width of the hole horizontally, and monsters rose from it onto a brass-and-silk lift that dragged them up to the cavern floor. Pipes from above ran through the portal’s mouth; I’d never seen a portal that had been in place long enough for the portal world’s infrastructure to occupy ours, transferring from side to side and connecting both. Even the Wickenberg portal was kept mostly clear, and its water flowed freely from its mouth into the human-made canals that kept the fields growing.

Then something hit me from behind. I had just enough time to realize it was the Falcon’s Eye, and we tumbled into the abyss and through the portal deep below.

◄▼►

The portal hung high above me as I pushed myself to my feet. The impact of Stormsteel armor on the brass floor below me had driven the air from my lungs, but adrenaline drove me up, and I found my sword in my hand and my body in Mistwalk stance.

It was loud.

That was the first thing that hit me. When we hadn’t been fighting, the caverns had been quiet. Not silent—the echo of moving monsters made that impossible—but quiet. This portal world was different. Thundering thumps shook me to my bones, coming in several times a second as massive weights in the distance crashed into gigantic steel blocks. Grinding, squealing chains moved through the air, propelled by massive, slow-spinning cogs. Portal metal buckets hung from them, their contents steaming and rippling the air around them.

The heat hit me second—molten brass, steam venting from pipes, and forges burning in the distance.

“Have you ever seen a portal world like this?” I asked.

Sarah stood up next to me. The others were already up and ready as the massive brass disk we’d landed on slowly started to spin. She shook her head. “No. There is no other portal world like this.”

Nathan Anders, the Phoenix Reborn, cracked his knuckles. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re the first known delvers to make it into the Carlsbad portal. Let’s make sure we’re the last to have to.”

◄▼►

The Craftsman was annoyed.

In the years he’d heard the whispered urge to fight and kill, he’d resisted it by creating weapons of war instead of drawing blood himself. He’d gotten away with that not because he was smarter or more powerful than any other being, but because he took steps to ensure that he couldn’t leave his world—and because his creations could do that work in his stead.

Now, though, there were enemies in the Workshop. They’d find his greatest creations and destroy them. He’d been outmaneuvered—even if only to the tiniest degree—and he didn’t like it at all. And worse, that whispered voice was only growing louder and more insistent.

His machines continued to forge monstrous automatons to deploy to the ever-escalating war outside, though. Crushing the threats beyond his portal was much more important than defeating the rats who’d slipped into it. They’d die to the Workshop itself. It wasn’t possible for anything living to move through it. He’d made sure of it—entombed himself within its forges and smelters so he couldn’t escape and listen to the voice.

If the Craftsman couldn’t leave, then his enemies couldn’t enter. It was that simple. He forced himself to relax into his brass chair, letting steam pour around him, and gave the order for the Workshop to come to his defense.