“What are you doing here?” Sorin asked, ignoring Rue’s question in the vain hope that she’d take the hint and drop the subject.

  “Looking for you. Now answer the question.”

  “You were looking for me inside an empty house?”

  “No! I saw those ice blades go flying every which way, and I was trying to get up onto the roof to see if I could spot you. That house happened to have a hole in the ceiling that I was going to climb up through, but then I felt anima out on the street going past, and I realized it was you. Now, answer the question!”

  If only I had a good answer. The best I can do is guess, and I’m not sure sharing my suspicions is a smart move. Sorry, Rue.

  “I don’t know,” he said aloud. “I was fighting for my life against another of those rat swarms, and it just happened.”

  “Shit, let’s go find another one, then!”

  Sorin laughed and shook his head. “I think we should worry about finding your brother and Nemari first.”

  “I already found them,” Rue said. “They’re holed up about a quarter mile southeast of here near the wall. We found a real good spot—one entrance, no windows. The door was already partially caved in, and we moved the rubble around a bit to seal up most of the rest. Their biggest worry right now is running out of food and water.”

  “Then why are you out here?”

  She gave him a flat stare. “Looking for you, obviously. Odric was really worried about you after you fell into that hole. I even got some rope set up to climb down in there, but when I started yelling for you, you didn’t answer.”

  That was considerably more loyalty than he’d been expecting from his new team under the circumstances. Nemari had nearly died, and Sorin had figured both Odric’s and Rue’s focus would be on her. He could take care of himself, and Rue knew that, so while it was touching that she was out here risking her life to find him, it was still a foolish risk, especially when Rue hadn’t come out of that fight unscathed herself.

  “I suppose I could have just stayed near the sinkhole and waited for help to arrive, but I had no way of knowing how long that would take,” he said. “It’s probably for the best you didn’t follow me into the tunnels though. There were plenty of monsters in the dark.”

  “No shit. You killed so many that you somehow forced a rank up without a floor guardian.”

  “I… really don’t think that was because of the number of monsters I killed. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Apparently, it does,” Rue argued.

  Sorin just shook his head and changed the subject. “Any sign of those other three climbers?”

  “Not since we first ran into them. Why?”

  “I was thinking about going for the seed and clearing the ruin. That was before you found me, though. We can probably just sit tight and wait for the other team to finish up so that we can all leave.”

  “We could do that,” Rue said with a sly grin. “Or we could go with your first idea. That sounds more profitable to me.”

  “It’s not exactly proper climber etiquette,” Sorin said, “but, we were technically here first.”

  “There we go! So, which way?”

  “Not so fast. Let’s discuss strategy, first. We’ve got at least four different types of monsters here, not to mention sub-bosses. Our team is down a healer and a mage, and if another swarm finds us, I won’t be able to protect you. I’ve got some ideas about how to handle things, though.”

  * * *

  Sorin was so impressed by Rue’s new soulprint that he was seriously considering hunting down more monkeys to get a copy for himself. It was naturally E-ranked, which was rare enough for Floor 1 already, and while it wasn’t strong enough to make Rue herself invisible yet, it could and did let her bend light away from her weapons. It was already growing from static concealment to something mobile, if still small. Monsters generally weren’t anywhere near human level of intelligence, and unless they had some exotic senses that didn’t rely on sight, they didn’t tend to even consider that the girl was armed.

  That gave her all sorts of openings, most of which Rue was quick to take advantage of. Of course, against dozens of rats, it wasn’t all that necessary, but they did occasionally run afoul of something bigger. Sorin mostly just stood back and let his fellow climber practice her new style of fighting in relative safety. Between Bend Light and Bloodlet, she was able to quickly drain even the most stubbornly powerful opponents, as long as she could get into range.

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  That left Sorin to snipe any of the illusion-spinning monkeys clinging to the roofs nearby, their primary means of offense almost completely negated by Rue’s ability to sense their anima. Bereft of the ability to ensnare victims in their traps, the monsters fell without any real struggle, and the duo of climbers advanced toward the center of the ruin.

  “Does this feel almost too easy?” Rue asked after they took out a pair of giant weasels who’d been lurking behind a collapsed wall. The ambush had failed spectacularly, with Sorin killing one before they could even close the distance, and Rue’s invisible blades leaving half a dozen slashes in the other’s body. It bled out in a matter of seconds.

  “You’re approaching the pinnacle of what a rank 1 is capable of,” Sorin said. “Go up a floor and you’ll see how bad of an idea it is to just rely on your soulprints to do the heavy lifting for you.”

  “When you put it that way…”

  “Oh, don’t take it like that. Your skills are improving rapidly as well, but the truth is this is your second climb. You’re a long way away from being the most impressive blade dancer in the tower, still.”

  “Blade dancer?” Rue asked.

  Sorin shrugged. “Your build is leaning in that direction. High speed, light attacks that focus more on contact than on damage. It’s enough for you to cut a monster and let it bleed. You don’t need those heavy slashes I use.”

  “Not sure I love the name,” she said. “But I guess it’s accurate.”

  “Don’t shove yourself too far into the niche,” Sorin warned. “First time you come up against an undead or a construct, you’ll be completely fucked.”

  “Nobody can prepare for every possible situation. That’s why we have teams.”

  “Yeah, but everybody should be able to handle a wide swath of the most common problems on their own, especially things like getting hurt or functioning in hostile environments.”

  He paused and focused on the roof of a house three blocks ahead of them. “I think… Yeah, almost positive. One second.”

  There was a low wall running parallel to the left side of the street, eight feet high and made out of some sort of brown brick. Sorin vaulted on top of it, then jumped again to grab the eaves of a single-story house. After scrambling onto the roof, he had a good enough angle to snipe the monkey perched ahead of them. An ice blade tore through it, killing the monster instantly and rewarding Sorin with a sliver of anima.

  He did a quick sweep while he was up there but didn’t see anything else. The closer they got to the center of the ruin, the less he saw the illusionist monsters, but the more the probably-venomous lizards and giant weasels appeared. Thankfully, they hadn’t run into another rat swarm yet.

  Before he could start to climb down, a loud boom rippled through the city. Sorin’s head whipped around to face the explosion just in time to see hundreds of bricks flying through the air a quarter mile to the north. “Huh… probably worth looking into,” he muttered.

  “What the hell was that?” Rue called out from the street.

  Sorin traced the streets they needed to take to get to the explosion, then climbed back down. “Some sort of trap, maybe? Or another sub-boss fight that the other team is working on? One way to find out,” he said.

  They’d only made it another hundred feet when a tremor shook the street. A second one followed a second later, along with the sound of what Sorin had to assume was a collapsing house. “I think they might have found the ruin guardian,” he said. “And it sounds like it’s big enough to knock over buildings.”

  Rue slowed down and shot an alarmed look at Sorin. “Is that something we should be fucking with?”

  “You were the one who said it was getting too easy,” he replied. “We should at least see what’s going on. That other team might need help.”

  “Who’s going to help us, though?” she muttered as they took off again.

  Despite their need to hurry, Sorin still took care to watch for traps ahead of them. There was no guarantee that the other team had taken the same streets, or that, even if they had, they’d stumbled across and cleared out all the possible traps. His caution was rewarded when he pointed out a trip line two inches off the ground that was linked to some sort of deadfall hanging off the side of a house.

  Without an illusionist to disguise it, it was an obvious trap, though it still could have gotten them if they weren’t careful. He pointed out the line to Rue, and they both leaped it easily, only to be ambushed by a giant weasel that scurried out of hiding just past the trip line. The attack might have been enough to drive them back into the trap if Rue hadn’t sensed its anima well before they got within striking distance.

  Instead of taking them by surprise, the monster took a sword to the face and a heavy, thick ice blade to its flank. It was thrown back into the building it had leaped out of in short order, too weak to even crawl back into the fight. By the time it died thirty seconds later, Sorin and Rue were two blocks away.

  “We’re getting close,” Sorin said. “Feel anything yet?”

  “Lot of anima. Maybe too much? It’s hard to sort out anything individual in it.”

  “Definitely the ruin guardian then. Are the other climbers fighting it?”

  “Can’t tell,” Rue said. “Probably. What else would it be fighting?”

  “Tower monsters don’t always work together just because they’re all monsters, but in this case, it’s a safe bet that the other team found it. Let’s go see if they need some help.”

  There was a square at the end of the street, but before the duo could reach it, something big and gray flashed by the opening. Brick and stone exploded into the air as it smacked into a house on the corner, burying the end of the street but apparently doing nothing to slow whatever it was down.

  I can’t see shit through this dust, but I’m pretty sure whatever that thing is, it’s armored. This would have been an excellent time to have Nemari along.

  Even as he thought that, a flash of anima cut through the dust to slam into something big and bulky. A deep, guttural squeal filled the air, followed by rapid, crashing footsteps as the behemoth ruin guardian charged across the square again.

  “Holy shit,” Rue said. “How is that a fair fight on Floor 1?”

  “Who told you the tower fights fair?” Sorin asked.

  “Fu-u-u-u-ck. What do we do?”

  He eyed up the wall of rubble. It was probably climbable, but not quickly, and it’d leave them vulnerable to being attacked. “Circle through that alley there,” he said, pointing to one nearby. “We’ll connect to the next street over and get into the square that way. Then… well, we’ll see if the other team is still alive and try to find a way to help.”