Rue went scouting for something by the outer wall that was more defensible than the house they’d picked before. Ideally, it’d have a single entrance on the ground floor and some sort of exit out of reach from street level. That way, they’d only have to defend one spot and would still have a way to escape if need be.

  Of course, that was impossible to find. Even with the tower’s shoddy mimicry of human architecture, it still knew that houses had windows and doors. It was far easier to find a building with an extra door in it than one that had no windows and only a single door. Frustratingly, Sorin even saw several buildings that had no entrances at all.

  While Rue could move quickly and without fear of being swept up in an illusion, the rest of the group was much slower. Odric was injured; Nemari was only alive because two healers had worked on her. She wasn’t up for moving around and only just barely tolerated being carried. Though she didn’t complain, it was easy to see how much pain every step Odric took was causing her.

  What a disaster. What the hell kind of ruin on Floor 1 has a damn swarm guardian? We just didn’t have the area damage to pull off a clean win.

  And yet, somehow, he could already hear the next argument with Nemari about whether it was better to specialize in a narrow field or pick up a broad set of skills. The problem was that what she wanted to do should have worked on Floor 1. It was impossible to be an all-arounder with a soulspace that could hold at best five F-ranked soulprints. They should have had the first four or five floors to grow before these kinds of problems cropped up.

  They kept moving in a straight line toward the ruin’s outer wall, exactly as Sorin had told Rue they would. She needed to know where they were at and where they were going if she was going to find them again once she’d scouted out a defensible location, if she could even find one. The houses Sorin could see were all just as bad as the one they’d just vacated.

  Their trip was made all the more dangerous by the fact that dispersing a swarm of rat monsters wasn’t the same as eliminating it. Hundreds or even thousands of the rodents still roamed the ruins, thankfully in much smaller numbers. Twice in a matter of minutes, the team encountered groups of ten or twenty. Sorin made quick work of the monsters before they could reach Odric and Nemari.

  “I’m worried about Rue,” Odric said. “She doesn’t have a ranged soulprint to thin out the numbers like you do.”

  “She’s also making a lot less noise, moving a lot faster than us, and is able to see them coming around corners,” Sorin replied.

  That didn’t seem to satisfy Odric, but there wasn’t much any of them could do about it. Once they reached the wall, Sorin and Rue could look for a way out, but he wasn’t expecting to find any convenient archways. The tower had almost certainly closed those off to prevent easy retreat. They were just lucky the wall hadn’t grown so high that it was impossible to go over it, not that it made much of a difference for Odric and Nemari.

  A few minutes later, they came to a wide avenue running east and west. It followed the curve of the wall, making it impossible to see more than a thousand feet in either direction, but that was less concerning to Sorin than how open it was. There were no visible monsters now, but it wasn’t hard to picture hundreds of rats pouring out into the open when they were in the middle of the intersection. With no wall to put their backs against and beset from every direction, Sorin wasn’t sure even he could survive.

  “Why are we stopping?” Odric asked when Sorin hesitated at the beginning of the intersection.

  “Good place for an ambush,” Sorin said. “We’re moving slow. I’m… concerned.”

  Nemari, who still barely even had her eyes open, peered out into the avenue. “Burn them all if they try,” she murmured.

  Yeah, right. You’d be lucky to win a one-on-one fight with the condition you’re in.

  “I don’t see anything,” Sorin said. His eyes raked across the landscape, looking for any sign of monsters. “But it’s a risk. It’s not like I can see through walls.”

  “Not going to get any less risky by waiting,” Odric said. “Either they’re already here and we’re fucked when they jump us, or they’re not here yet and we’re giving them the time they need.”

  “True enough.”

  If their goal hadn’t been to reach the wall, Sorin would have suggested changing direction. But with the avenue running parallel to the wall itself, they were going to have to cross it one way or another. It might as well be here.

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  “I’ll go first. Give me a twenty-foot lead, then follow. Keep an eye out behind you for ambushes. If the rats attack me, you need to turn around and go the other direction. I won’t be able to protect you,” Sorin said. At Odric’s nod, he started out into the open.

  He made it halfway across the avenue when he heard the first thump, a sound that had grown so familiar—the noise a monstrous rat made when it was jumping off a windowsill. Shit!

  Sorin spun to the source of the noise, anima already flowing up from his soulspace to form into an ice blade. It sliced through the air and buried itself in the monster’s brain, causing it to give a single, brief spasm before it stilled.

  Just one? Can’t be. There’s never just one.

  But no matter where his eyes darted to, no matter what shadows they peered past, he couldn’t spot another rat. Hesitating for a moment, he dove into his soulspace to make sure he wasn’t being influenced by an illusion, only to find no monkeys were nearby working their tricks on him.

  He glanced back at Odric, who met his eyes and shrugged. With a wary glance down at Nemari, still held in his arms, the big man started to follow Sorin out into the open. It had to be a trap, but if it was, the monsters weren’t springing it.

  Sorin made it three more steps before he felt something shift beneath his feet. Without a second’s hesitation, he threw himself away from the spot even as the cobblestones started to fall away into a dark pit. His reflexes were excellent, and he was in the air well before he would have fallen. However, that wasn’t enough to save him when the gaping black maw of the sinkhole opening beneath him just kept widening.

  He leaped a solid ten feet to the side, and promptly fell into the darkness as the street kept collapsing. It wasn’t a terribly long fall, at least not by the standards he was used to. Sorin couldn’t tell just how far he’d dropped, not with the darkness and the falling cobblestones jumbling everything up, but he stuck the landing with a flex of his legs to absorb the impact, then stumbled forward two precise steps to regain his balance.

  “Holy crap!” Odric yelled from above. “Sorin! Are you still alive down there?”

  Dust filled the air, a rolling cloud that choked and blinded Sorin. The sound of stone grinding away as more of it fell into the pit and rolled down the side of the pile masked the sound of scurrying paws, but Sorin sensed them anyway. He wasn’t sure exactly what gave their presence away—maybe it was just that he was expecting something to jump out at him—but he wasn’t surprised when the first flash of movement cut through the dust.

  The lunging rat made it within a foot of Sorin’s face before being bisected cleanly. Two more took its place, forcing him to work his sword in a circular motion to kill them before they could reach him. “Odric, get running before they climb up to street level!”

  “But—”

  “Go! I’ll be fine. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Maybe. God, this might be it for me. Fucking red tower bullshit.

  Rats kept coming, leaping through the rolling clouds of dust or scurrying between loose stone in an attempt to sink their fangs into him. Sorin killed them as quickly as they came, but it was only his Iron Body soulprint that kept him safe from the swarm. Even that wouldn’t be enough to save him eventually, but for the moment, his soulspace still held anima to feed into the ability.

  Every hit he took drained his reserves just a little bit more, even as rats fell by the dozens around him. They came at him from every direction, and he responded by turning it into a running battle. With so much dust in the air already, it wasn’t any worse to fight in the dark away from it, where everything was shifting shadows and silhouettes. Anima built up in his soulspace, one little sliver at a time stolen from his victims, slowly flooding all of his soulprints. All of them were close to ranking up again, but there just wasn’t enough room to let it happen.

  Until he actually reached rank 2, any additional anima would just be wasted. Iron Body was the weakest of his four soulprints, and Ice Blade had the most room to expand with it already being rank E, but even those were rapidly filling up just from the sheer number of monsters Sorin had killed in the last hour. The rats might be individually weak, but they were endless, and those sub-bosses hadn’t helped things either.

  The battle dragged on, a minute turning into five and then to ten. His personal reserves of anima started to gutter out as Iron Body drained them away, but his soulprints had to be nearing maximum capacity. Fat lot of good it’ll do me if I die down here.

  Still, he fought. The physical enhancement soulprint he’d taken from the manticore kept strength flowing into his trembling limbs, and the vision soulprint helped keep his eyes keen to pick out movement in the shadows. The rats came at him three or four at a time, and they died in equal number. For all that, he felt his body flagging and knew it was only a matter of time.

  Then something tore in his soulspace, a feeling unlike anything Sorin had ever felt in all his decades of climbing. It hurt, but in a good kind of way, like finally being able to stand up right after days of walking hunched over in dark tunnels. And with that feeling came another sensation, one that he recognized from having felt it a hundred and one times over.

  His soulspace had, somehow, miraculously, grown to rank 2. With that additional space came room for his soulprints to grow, but it wasn’t how he wanted to do it, not again. Combat advancements were born of dire necessity and rarely met any need beyond immediate survival. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for not dying!

  Warrior’s Vigilance was what he needed the most—the strength and energy to keep fighting. With it empowering him, he could kill monsters faster, stop them from biting at him. It was going to cost him to look away from the fight even for a moment, but it was necessary to see into his soulspace to trigger the advancement.

  He let the soulprint, already straining against its bonds, break free and unfold into something significantly bigger and grander. Without taking the time to even look at what it had become, Sorin threw himself back out of his soulspace and felt new power flood through his body. The rats came on, and, alone in the dark, Sorin met them with his blade in hand.