Chapter 30: Entering the Tower

Eventually, the trees began to thin. The forest gave way to open ground. There, rising from the clearing was a tower wide enough to be a city block, and so tall she couldn’t fathom how it stayed standing.

The structure itself looked almost crystalline from a distance, though not in the delicate way of glass. It looked geological. Like a mineral, or like someone had cut into a crystal vein and used the polished stones as material. Veins of faintly luminous ore or crystal ran through the dark stone in uneven lines, pulsing softly in a pattern Scarlet couldn’t yet begin to understand – though she knew there was one.

Scarlet stopped at the edge of the tree line, breathing with more difficulty than she would have liked. Honestly, she was beginning to suspect that ‘with more difficulty than she would have liked’ had become her default. At least difficult was still achievable, she told herself.

Her senses spread outward automatically, probing the clearing ahead. Unlike the dense forest, the open ground around the tower was almost unnaturally barren. No brush. No clusters of strange plants. No movement or signs of life, at all.

That should have been reassuring.

It wasn’t.

The clearing itself was enormous, extending hundreds of meters around the base of the structure. The tower rose from its centre like a monument, ascending into the sky. The upper reaches vanished into the clouds above that still drifted along despite her not knowing if this world was spinning at all.

There, all the way across the clearing, at the base of the tower and insultingly small compared to the impossible structure surrounding it, was a single door.

Scarlet stared at it for a long moment.

‘That looks truly ominous,’ she thought as she considered whether the potential respite was worth crossing the mysteriously-devoid-of-life-clearing to get to the ominously-placed-single-door.

Maybe if she felt something from the clearing, a beast hiding underground, or a winged predator or something, she’d at least know where the sense of danger was coming from. Unfortunately, all she had were her senses, and they weren’t picking up anything.

No emotional signatures. No mana flares. No hidden predators waiting in ambush. Even her strange energy sense stretched outward into a vast and almost uncomfortable emptiness.

That bothered her more than if something had immediately tried to eat her.

Scarlet forced herself forward anyway, limping across the clearing one painful step at a time. First one foot, then the next was gingerly placed into the clearing. When nothing happened, she moved further forward. Every time nothing happened, she moved forward until she was most of the way across, and still quite unmolested.

Sure, her wounds ached beneath freshly reapplied bandages, and despite the effects of the poultice she could feel the accumulated strain dragging at her body. However, that was to be expected from moving for hours, fighting for hours, bleeding for hours. Somewhere along the way exhaustion had stopped feeling like a temporary state. Eventually she shunted the unpleasant sensation into the background with the rest of her aches and pains.

Still, she kept moving forward.

<-…->

The subjectively tiny, ominously placed, tower door wasn’t locked. Scarlet found that to be both suspicious and a relief.

She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when she first entered the tower, but what she got was the equivalent to a boot room, only made entirely of stone and completely devoid of boots or jackets or really any signs of life.

The room itself was spacious enough, like the kind you’d find at the back of a farmhouse. There was a sink against one wall, and even fresh linens and towels stacked in an open cupboard. The décor was mostly grey – a lot of the furniture was obviously made from the same material as the interior stone. The interior tower stone didn’t have that same somewhat crystalline look of the exterior. Outside of that, the small room was clean and serviceable.

There was a door on the far wall. Presumably it led to the tower interior, though Scarlet would have to check to be sure. Something she wasn’t willing to risk just yet. Especially considering that the restrictions that had been placed on her senses from outside the building were no longer there.

She took no hesitation when flooding the area with her senses. She could sort of feel the space around the room beyond this one. The only thing she could really make out was that it was big. She thought she felt something like stairs, maybe.

There were things out there, just none of them exuded any of the signs of life that she was so used to latching onto and orienting herself with. She’d need to get better at sensing and deciphering inanimate objects.

It was embarrassing to be blind, not because she couldn’t see, but because she had no clue what she was seeing.

As far as she could feel, it was safe, or at least she couldn’t sense anyone in the nearby vicinity. This was about as safe as she was going to get in the near future.

Eventually, she felt assured that if someone were to approach, she’d feel it, or at least the way it disturbed the things around it.

She got to checking her wounds, especially after all that exercise. She was delighted to find that the sink worked, and after running the taps for a while, she filled the basin with the lukewarm water.

She didn’t want to light a fire in such an enclosed space, so instead she mixed iodine into the otherwise clear water. Leaving that to sit for a while she then started the careful work of peeling away her bandages and checking her wounds.

She was unsurprised to find that yep, constant excessive exercise and exertion meant that in the places the poultice hadn’t been able to fully heal, the skin was still quite raw, and inflamed.

She had an odd sense of detachment when looking down at her body.

She wondered if this would scar, and if so, how badly. On the bright side, the poultice had bound her flesh back together, so there had been no need to whip out the needles and thread.

As she cleaned and rewrapped her wounds, Scarlet pulled up her Action Log and System notifications.

There were a lot of them.

[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 5]
[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 4]
[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 4]

[You have killed Adolescent Earthen Fox – Level 8]

[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 5]

[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 5]

[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 3]
[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 4]

[You have killed Adolescent Earthen Fox – Level 6]

[You have killed Juvenile Earthen Fox – Level 5]

[You have killed Iron Claw Burrower – Level 5]

[You have killed Steel Claw Burrower – Level 6]

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Her eyes skimmed over the entries rapidly.

Then she pulled up her reward notifications again.

The Advanced Poultice had already proven itself worth more than its weight in gold – not that there was much left of it. The storage expansion was a purely beneficial upgrade. Then the knives…

Scarlet reached over and picked one up from beside the sink.

The blade was beautifully balanced, dark metal veined faintly with mineral-like patterns that almost resembled sedimentary layers folded through steel. When she pushed mana into it the weapon responded immediately.

She tested the recall function carefully, wrapping one of the knives in a cloth before tossing the quiet bundle a distance away. Then she recalled the knife. It disappeared from within the cloth bundle and flew back into its sheath with the dull thwap of leather meeting metal. Scarlet only barely avoided being nicked by dodging out of its flight path.

Okay, so the sheath for those knives would have to be placed carefully in the future, and she’d need practice recalling the knives safely.

A faint smile tugged briefly at her mouth. Dangerous on the way out, and the way back in.