Sorin shifted his position, sidestepping the surge of wind-driven steel grass that threatened to flense his flesh right off him. The monster in question was deceptively small, just an unassuming-looking groundhog with gray fur and a myopic gaze. Like so many other monsters, it was its magic that made it dangerous, not its physical might.

  As much as he would have liked to finish the monster off, every time he’d gotten close, it had summoned up a storm of fine-edged metallic grass blades to swirl around and protect itself. The temptation to put an ice dart right between its eyes was almost overwhelming, but his job wasn’t to kill the monster. He was keeping it distracted while Nemari and Rue took care of its mate.

  Rage baiting paired monsters was a common farming strategy with a proven record of success. Often, monsters that hadn’t developed their abilities into soulprints yet could be pushed to the point of doing so if they were mated and saw their partner die. They’d engaged the two leaf hogs to try to determine if either of them had a soulprint, and, if not, which one looked to be closer to developing one.

  Unfortunately, in a question of which one had the stronger magic, the answer seemed to be the one Sorin was fending off. That put the onus of killing one of them on the two women of their team, but the other leaf hog’s weaker magic was still strong enough to keep Rue at bay. Nemari was recovering from her earlier fight and was doing very little to contribute. Odric, as usual, was hovering around the women, ready to dart in and heal one of them if needed.

  After the fourth time Rue was forced to abort her attack to avoid being sliced to ribbons, Nemari got sick of screwing around and threw a firebolt into the leaf hog’s face. It squealed in sudden pain as the stink of burnt hair filled the air, and a moment later leaves started raining down from the canopy overhead.

  “Back!” Nemari ordered. The three of them retreated from the leaf hog’s magic so that it could play itself out and they could move in for the kill. Perhaps sensing its mate’s distress, the leaf hog Sorin was circling around suddenly poured on the magic. The razor-edged grass started waving erratically, more and more blades uprooting themselves to slash through the air in Sorin’s general direction.

  It was impossible to dodge all of them, but Sorin gave ground where he had to and protected himself as best he could. Without a soulprint like Iron Body to protect him from attacks like this, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and bear the pain. As long as he could protect his face, anything else was fixable.

  A sharp squeal filled the air, not from Sorin’s target, but from the other leaf hog. He saw Rue leaning down, one of her swords piercing the monster’s back and pinning it to the ground. She twisted the blade sideways and wrenched it free, ending the leaf hog’s life and causing the remaining leaves to cease their wild spinning and drift to the ground.

  Predictably, the one Sorin was engaging went berserk. Everything in a ten-foot-radius that wasn’t already waving around wildly started thrashing in place. More leaves broke free from the branches overhead; more blades of grass ripped themselves out of the dirt. Everything spun like a tornado with the leaf hog at the center, and after a bare two or three seconds of churning, the monstrous rodent charged forward.

  Its deadly whirlwind of razor-edged plants moved with it, prompting Sorin to turn and run. He knew it couldn’t keep the magic up for long and considered it a good sign that the monster had managed something like this at all. If it didn’t already have a soulprint before the death of its mate, then hopefully that had pushed its anima into solidifying the pattern.

  As predicted, it only took about ten seconds for the leaf hog’s attack to fade away. As soon as the cutting wind died down, Sorin spun in place and charged back in. An ice dart led the way, not to hurt the monster, but to make it flinch back when it tried to scurry away. The real attack was Sorin’s sword, brought down in an overhead chop that decapitated the monster in a single strike.

  “That was intense at the end there,” Rue said. “No offense, but I’m kind of glad you ended up with the stronger one.”

  Me too. Odric would have run himself dry trying to patch up all your injuries if you’d gotten caught up in that last attack.

  “Let’s see if it was worth the effort,” he said, forcing some cheer he didn’t feel into his voice.

  As expected, the weaker of the pair lacked a soulprint. The stronger one, however, proved to have an anima pattern solidified in its tongue. They lacked the tools to get it out without worrying about breaking it, unfortunately, which made for a difficult choice.

  “Good news is we got lucky,” Sorin announced as the team crowded around. He held the head up and pointed to its mouth. “The tongue has a soulprint embedded in it.”

  “I think… I can feel it, just barely?” Nemari asked.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Sorin nodded. “Just takes a bit of practice. Once you get some experience with what they feel like, it gets a lot easier to spot them. Now, here’s the problem. We don’t have a good harvesting kit, and trying to extract something this small with a knife is liable to break the soulprint.”

  “So, one of us needs to absorb it directly from the body,” Odric said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What does it do?” Rue asked.

  “As far as I can tell, not the ability the monster was using on us. Rage baiting it was a complete waste of time. We just got lucky that it had an unrelated soulprint already. Based on the pattern, I think it’s some sort of perception ability linked to taste, something like Poison Detection.”

  Rue made a face. “That seems less than useful.”

  “Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean you need to taste something to determine if it’s poisonous, and even that can be useful when you’re scavenging for food. Given a bit of anima to grow, it could also let you sniff out bad air, or target poisoned or infected tissue in somebody you’re trying to heal. It might even grow into a resistance soulprint if you can merge it with the right partner.”

  The team thought about that for a second. “Okay, you’ve convinced me. It’s not as bad as I thought,” Rue said.

  “It sounds like it should go to Odric,” Nemari said. “It would pair well with his Cleanse soulprint.”

  “I already have three soulprints,” Odric protested. “One more would put me at my limit, and this one doesn’t seem that useful to me now.”

  “Take it anyway,” Sorin offered. “Nemari’s right about it pairing well with Cleanse. I bet you could even merge them together into one soulprint to free up more of your soulspace.”

  “That would mean everybody got an upgrade except you,” Odric said. “I suppose we still have that Wind Slash from the harpies. We’ll have to trade it for something you can use.”

  “Sure,” Sorin agreed. “I wouldn’t object to that.”

  He wasn’t sure if he was just being too picky, his standards skewed from a decade of using exclusively B-ranked or better soulprints, or if he’d just gotten used to spending months hunting for the perfect soulprint for his build. He wasn’t worried about not getting anything useful from this climb. The ones he needed were out there, and if it took two or three more climbs to find them, so be it.

  “We should start looking for the portal hub tomorrow,” Nemari said after Odric absorbed the leaf hog’s tongue into his soulspace. “I know we’ve got plenty of rations left, but we don’t know exactly how far away it is.”

  “It’s that way,” Odric said, pointing just to the left of a lone mountain jutting up into the sky about a hundred miles away. “I’m not sure exactly where, but that general area. As we get closer, there will be signs left by other climbers.”

  Nemari stared at him in shocked silence for a second, then said, “When did you figure that out?”

  “About the time we got a few miles out of the woods and I got a good look around,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to see the mountain without all the trees in the way.”

  Sorin started laughing. “I guess we have our heading, then.”

  “If it’s that close, we probably don’t need to hurry. The hunting is bound to get worse the closer we get to the portal hub,” Nemari said.

  “Then we have time to hunt for Sorin’s soulprint,” Rue said. “What kind should it be, though?”

  “A passive to increase strength or speed would be nice. I wouldn’t argue with something like Iron Body either. A perception ability with combat or tracking applications would also be useful if it doesn’t end up suiting you better.”

  There were some other soulprints he was more interested in, specifically those that protected his mind from being tampered with, but the odds of finding something like that among Floor 1 F-ranked soulprints was vanishingly small. Then again, the odds of encountering a swarm of warbler frogs also should have been vanishingly small, but that happened.

  “Which way should we search?” Odric asked. “And what kind of monsters should we be looking for?”

  “Good question. For strength, something big, probably a quadruped. A speed soulprint would likely come from either a bird or a reptile of some kind, or possibly from an herbivore mammal. We might also find a general awareness soulprint there.”

  “That’s a lot of options,” Nemari said. “But what it’s really going to come down to is whatever we happen across is what we’ll end up hunting. None of us know Floor 1 well enough to target any specific habitats.”

  That was true. If they’d been a bit better prepared with knowledge of Floor 1’s geography, they might have avoided those warbler frogs. That was the kind of information a prospective climber could obtain from the Climber’s Union, which was unfortunately out of their price range. Sorin had opted to spend his money on much-needed climbing equipment instead of a membership, but he was reconsidering the Union once they sold the loot from their first climb.

  The team walked for a while, but nothing jumped out at them. The only interesting thing Sorin noticed was a human footprint, and once he’d confirmed it was human and not some humanoid monster, he ignored it.

  “Pretty quiet here,” Rue commented after half an hour. “I haven’t sensed a thing.”

  “Maybe that other climber cleared the area out,” Odric suggested.

  “The whole thing?”

  “I don’t know. They could be part of a big group, I guess.”

  “It’s possible, but usually there’s news of huge farming operations starting up,” Nemari said. “Even at the Club House, we get postings looking for climbers.”

  “There’s something here!” Rue shouted, spinning in place to look behind them. An instant later, three black spikes flew out of the brush and struck Nemari in the chest. They were a foot long, two inches wide at the fat end and tapering down to a wicked needle point on the front, and even if they weren’t that heavy, they were flying fast enough to knock her to the ground.

  “No!” Odric screamed. A flash of anima ran through him as he kneeled down next to Nemari and immediately started trying to heal her.

  Sorin didn’t have time to worry about that. A second salvo of black spikes split the air, this time aimed at him. He threw himself sideways and rolled across the ground, coming smoothly to his feet in time to see a yellow-furred, leonine face emerge from cover. A long, scorpion-like tail covered in the same black spikes that had struck Nemari flickered back and forth, ready to unleash another volley.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “Manticore.”