The blade cut deep, but not through. Somehow, the monster’s neck was nothing but a bundle of thick, ropey muscles. Even with his enhanced strength, Sorin couldn’t decapitate the tortoise in one smooth blow. How the hell is this thing a reasonable challenge for Floor 1? And why do I keep running into this shit?

  Heldigar was there to help, fortunately. As Sorin’s own strike stalled out a foot into the monster’s flesh, the huge warrior brought both his swords down, one after another, to hammer on the ice coating Sorin’s sword. Each strike drove the blade down deeper, but even that wasn’t enough. Somehow, the ruin guardian was still alive. Worse, its body was weeping that thick, sap-like blood at such an alarming speed that Sorin was afraid his weapon would get stuck as the wound sealed around it.

  Heldigar ripped his blades free and brought them down again and again while the monster thrashed around, desperately trying to shake Sorin free. It was nearly successful, too, with each movement dragging Sorin across the ground or lifting him from his feet. His muscles burned with the strain of holding his sword in place and his anima was rapidly draining away to nothing.

  Cut, damn you! Cut through!

  Minor Regeneration was helping him keep his muscles from tearing apart, but it was only a stall, not a solution. He’d sunk an enormous amount of anima into the strike, knowing that they needed something powerful enough to overwhelm the ruin guardian’s natural armor. If they failed to behead the beast now, the only thing left would be to retreat and hope to find a way out.

  The tortoise flexed again, in that same weird way it had done before, and a hundred iron-hard spurs had erupted from its skin. As close as Sorin was to the side of the monster’s face, the chances of him avoiding being skewered without letting go of his weapon were practically zero.

  The expected burst of spikes came, forcing Heldigar back and stabbing into Sorin’s toughened skin. Even at E-rank, Iron Body wasn’t strong enough to keep him completely safe, but the only other option was letting go of his sword. If he did that, the ice blade he’d formed around the steel core would vanish, and at the rate the guardian’s wounds clotted, it would mean that all of their efforts were for nothing.

  So he held on and kept the anima flowing even as the monster’s barbs tore into his skin. A few seconds later, the pseudo-metal sucked back into its flesh, leaving Sorin battered, but still breathing. He grunted in pain and put his weight into dragging the blade down to sever another inch of tendons, aided by the appearance of a block of stone in the air overhead that slammed down onto the ice.

  Even that only pushed the ice blade deeper in, and Yoru didn’t have the anima to do more than that. Another two or three blocks might have finally put enough weight into it to sever the monster’s head from its body, but they just didn’t have it. Sorin’s only hope was that Heldigar could make it back into position, but that was looking less and less likely as the monster’s maw snapped at the man.

  Then Rue appeared on top of the tortoise’s shell. She took two running steps, leaped into the air, and slammed down onto the stone block with both feet. At the same time, Sorin dumped the rest of his anima into the blade to sharpen the edge and harden it as much as possible. With a sickening squelch, it finished cleaving through the last foot of flesh and struck the cobblestones beneath.

  Sorin stumbled forward a step and let the ice dissipate from around his sword. His body screamed at him from the sudden movement, but he’d long-since learned to ignore pain when he was fighting, just like he’d learned not to assume an enemy was dead until he felt the anima rush from killing it. And he’d felt nothing of the sort, meaning that somehow, even without a fucking head, the ruin guardian was still alive.

  “Get back,” he barked at Rue. “It’s not dead yet.”

  Suiting action to his words, he scrambled away from the body himself. Likewise, Heldigar backed away and put himself squarely between the monster and Yoru. Behind them, Vendis was edging toward Sorin and locked his eyes on the blood running down his side. The only one still near the body was Rue, who was stumbling to catch her balance when the stone and ice she’d been standing on disappeared.

  Sorin was just about to dart forward and drag her clear when she turned her stumble into a roll. At precisely the same instant, the tortoise’s severed head lunged across the ground to bite down on her, malice burning in its eyes even as the last of its life spurted out of its severed neck.

  “Rue!”

  “I’m fine,” she called back, standing back up just to the left of where the head was now lying motionless. “Missed me by an inch.”

  “It’s not dead yet,” Sorin warned. “Get away from there.”

  Eyeing the head up warily, Rue backed off and circled around until she joined the rest of the climbers. “How is it not dead? Nothing is so much as twitching anymore, but I can still sense anima in it?”

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Some monsters have death attacks, girl,” Yoru said. “Your education has been severely lacking if you didn’t realize that.”

  “It’s taking its time building it up,” Vendis added before Rue could snap back at Yoru. “Maybe we should move a bit farther back.”

  “Pointless. I already know what it does. This is just a stronger version of its body spike attack, with bigger ones that don’t disappear.”

  Sorin had seen that kind of death attack before, and he knew it didn’t take this long to manifest. “What do you see?” he asked Rue. “Describe it to me.”

  “The anima gets pulled into the center of the body, then rolls back out, then back in again, and out even farther. Each cycle takes about half a second. It does kind of look like when anima exploded out of it in every direction while we were fighting it, but it’s not the same.”

  “Is anything seeping out of the neck? Is there anima in the head?”

  “No, and yes. What does that mean?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Sorin said. “But Vendis is right. We should give this some more space.”

  Yoru snorted and waved him off. “If you’re going to be a coward about it, by all means.”

  “Oh, shit!” Rue yelped.

  Then barbs exploded out of the tortoise, flying off the body in every direction and slamming into various buildings, the ground, and the climbers still standing way too close.

  Rue threw herself to the ground and covered her head with her arms, which was probably the smartest move she could have made. Sorin jumped to put himself between her and the blast while forming ice blades to fling through the air in an attempt to block some of the pseudo-metal spikes from hitting them. With his anima reserves almost completely gutted already, he wasn’t very successful.

  Iron Body helped blunt the impact, but he still took a dozen spikes to his chest, arms, and legs. Only the fact that he was focusing his defense on the projectiles aimed at his face spared that from being punctured as well. Thankfully, the attack was made purely of anima; the spikes vanished a few seconds later.

  Sorin staggered in place and almost collapsed, only holding himself upright through sheer stubbornness and paranoia. He felt the anima rush come in from the ruin guardian, but that didn’t mean they were safe. Other monsters still lurked in the buildings and tunnels around them, monsters that could attack at any moment.

  “Fu-u-u-u-ck,” Heldigar swore, dragging the sound out as he staggered back upright. He was in better shape than Sorin, if only because of his armor. That was still dented and torn in places, and blood flowed freely from a few open wounds visible through the rents.

  By contrast, Yoru was unharmed. His position directly behind Heldigar had shielded him completely, meaning he was free to stand there, hands on his hips, and glower at the corpse. He doesn’t even give a shit that his front-liner is all banged up, and I don’t think he bothered to check on his healer. What an asshole.

  Vendis had taken a few shots, but was already working on healing those injuries. Sorin was actually in the worst shape out of any of them, a fact that he was uncomfortably aware of due to the presence of another climbing team mere feet away. They hadn’t been hostile yet, but a cache of Tower-forged loot had a way of changing things. Now that the ruin guardian was dead, the only surefire way to avoid a fight was to walk away.

  “You look like crap,” Rue said.

  “Thanks,” Sorin told her dryly.

  “No, seriously. It’s bad. That’s a lot of blood, man. Should we get you back to Od?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  Minor Regeneration was going to be a huge help in keeping him going, but it was an F-ranked soulprint for a reason. He’d still need days at minimum to fully recover, and it was entirely possible that he’d never heal completely without outside assistance. That wasn’t a huge worry, but it might be a financial hit if the damage was bad enough. He’d make feeding anima into Minor Regeneration a high priority moving forward just to do what he could to aid his own recovery.

  Vendis finished healing himself and moved on to Heldigar, who stood there stoically with his unsheathed swords in both hands. Still a ridiculous fighting style, Sorin thought to himself. The man had to be using some sort of targeted strength boosting soulprint just to fight that way, given the size and weight of those weapons.

  “How much anima does Vendis have left?” Sorin asked. “He going to run dry before he finishes his current patient?”

  “Probably,” Rue said. “Looks like he’s about ready to tap out now, and he’s barely gotten started.”

  “Fantastic. I guess there’s nothing to do but see if we can claim a soulprint off the guardian, then limp our way back out of here.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “And you’re welcome for that. If not for me standing in front of you, you’d probably have a spike all the way up your ass.” His voice softened, and he allowed himself a bit of a smile. “But, good job at the end of the fight. Climbing the monster and jumping down when you did was probably the only way we were going to finish it off.”

  “I was tired of dancing around its big, tree-trunky legs. When it basically grew a ladder out of its skin, it felt like the right move to make.”

  Maybe I gave her too much credit in thinking it was a deliberate move to help us decapitate the guardian. It was really just a lucky coincidence.

  “Well, either way, it worked out well. Now, let’s see what kind of soulprints we can pry out of this thing so that I can argue with Yoru that we deserve at least one of them.”

  “At least one?” Rue echoed.

  “For a ruin guardian, three to four soulprints is an expected haul.”

  And he was sure Yoru would try to claim them all despite the fact that without Sorin and Rue’s help, they’d have been forced to retreat. By all rights, the prize should be split down the middle, but Sorin was willing to give up one of the soulprints on account of Vendis’s healing saving Nemari’s life.

  “I wonder what they’ll do,” Rue said, eyeing the headless corpse speculatively. “I think there’s some anima pooling in its shell.”

  “And in its beak,” Sorin said. “Where else, though? Hopefully not anything internal…”

  “The back left foot,” Rue pointed out. “I don’t see a fourth, though.”

  “That’s because Yoru already claimed it,” Sorin said. The other climber had sliced a leathery strap of skin free of the tortoise’s leg and was already stashing it in his pack. “Come on, let’s get over there before there’s nothing left.”