It didn’t take much work to enlarge the hole enough for them to step through. Sorin led the way in, though he didn’t expect any trouble. The ruin guardian was already dead and, apparently, it wasn’t the kind that sat on a seed and waited for trouble to show up anyway. On the off chance that there were any traps or smaller monsters waiting in ambush, he wanted himself between them and Rue.

  “Are you sure you’re alright?” she asked as he climbed into the room.

  Was it that obvious that I’m still hurting?

  “Fine. I picked up Minor Regeneration from the portal hub and added it to my build. I just need to keep feeding it anima, and I’ll be back in fighting shape in no time.”

  “Assuming we live that long,” she muttered.

  “Why do you think I wasn’t willing to pick a bigger fight with Yoru?”

  “Because we got the only good soulprint out of the four anyway?”

  Sorin chuckled. “Well, there is that. That spike-generating soulprint will probably go for more money to some higher ranked climber looking to merge it into a different ability, but Tremor Sense was the most immediately useful of the lot.”

  “What’s that like?” Rue asked with interest as she peered around the room.

  “What? Tremor Sense? I don’t have it.”

  She paused and glanced over at him with a frown. “But I thought…”

  “Didn’t have room for it. Ended up merging it into Acuity, and even now, it’s a tight fit.”

  “You can do that?” she asked, shock coloring her voice.

  “If you know how. We can talk about it later, though. For now, we’ve got a ruin seed in front of us.”

  There was a doorway opposite the hole Sorin had made to get in, one which led out into impenetrable darkness. At a guess, he suspected it probably linked up with one of those underground tunnels he’d found himself in after that sinkhole had opened under his feet. A normal climbing group would need to navigate that lightless maze, infested with rats and other small monsters, until they stumbled across the heart chamber.

  Rue’s Aura Sense soulprint had picked up the anima flooding the ruin seed, however, and Sorin had enough firepower to punch through the stone wall. They’d bypassed the maze, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The tower didn’t tend to like that kind of behavior, but he was hoping with the guardian already killed, it wouldn’t cause them any problems.

  And hopefully Yoru’s team is still trying to figure out exactly where the proper entrance to the tunnels for this section of the city is. We’ll be long gone before they make it here themselves.

  He might have felt worse about taking the loot from the ruin if not for the fact that he personally had killed thousands of monsters in the last six hours, including striking down the ruin guardian itself. That and the fact that Yoru was a giant asshole made it pretty easy for him to justify first dibs on the loot.

  “Okay, how do we get the stuff out of this tree-looking thing?” Rue asked as she circled it. “Do we just… you know… hit it?”

  “More or less. It’s usually weakest about a third of the way from the bottom, where the crystal thins out. A hammer or mace would be ideal, but we’ll make do.”

  Rue stepped out of the way and Sorin approached the pillar. He took his sword in both hands and tapped the crystal a few times, then hauled back and swung as hard as he could. The blade whistled through the air and rebounded off the crystal with a sharp crack.

  “Tough little bugger, aren’t you,” Sorin muttered. There was a single, hair-thin line running through the crystal, just enough to let him know he’d eventually break through, but not without a great deal of work.

  This is going to suck no matter how I do it. Might as well go for the time-saving method.

  His anima reserves protested, but he scraped out every last little bit that was left to shape it into a block of ice encasing the end of his sword. It added ten pounds to the blade’s weight and made it awkward to balance, but Sorin only had to swing it once. Clutching it in both hands again, he put his whole body into a horizontal slash that ended in an explosion of ice shards and a fractured mess of crystal.

  “Fuck,” Sorin breathed out slowly as he leaned forward and put one hand on his knee. “Okay, that’s all I’ve got in me. You can fish out the loot.”

  The hole was about a foot in diameter, hopefully large enough to extract everything inside the hollow pillar. The room’s only light was the dull red glow and what little trickle of daylight made it through the cellar door and past the hole Sorin had busted in the wall, and with the pillar broken, its light was quickly fading. That left them in rapidly-growing darkness, but it didn’t matter to Rue.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She fetched six things out of the hole, though Sorin could only tell by tracing her movements with Blind Sense. What those things were would have to wait until they got back up to the surface. “Here, hold these,” Rue said, shoving the first three objects into Sorin’s hands. She scooped up the other three, and together they climbed back out of the seed chamber.

  “Can you tell what they do?” she asked once they were back above ground.

  “I can probably figure it out, but let’s get a bit more distance between us and the other team before we stop to look at them,” Sorin suggested.

  * * *

  The good news was that, with the seed broken, the whole ruin was starting to die. The bad news was that it was extremely noticeable. Ruin seeds were the anima conduit between the ruin and the tower, and breaking one would stop new monsters from forming until the seed restored itself. Why it all behaved that way was a question for God or, for those who believed it was truly alive, the tower itself. The common speculation, and the only one that made sense to Sorin, was that the tower wanted to be climbed, so it provided challenges and rewards in equal measure.

  Having made it to the very top once, Sorin found it impossible to argue with that logic. The tower was absolutely lethal and had claimed countless lives, but humanity as a whole had been consistently reaching higher and higher floors with every passing generation. Only the truly outstanding climbers among them had a shot at the top, but Sorin remembered his grandfather saying that when he’d been a child, most climbers didn’t make it past Floor 10 or 12.

  Six generations later, Sorin’s peers commonly reached Floor 30 before retiring or dying. The exceptional climbers could easily double that record, and the generational talents like himself had pushed to floors he doubted more than a handful of people had ever seen. In theory, another few hundred years would see climbers regularly pushing past Floor 50 and those with talent and drive reaching the top.

  While they walked, Sorin looked over their loot and made his best guess about what he thought it all did. The first thing he pulled out of their bag was a small ceramic jar filled with smokey gray paste. After looking it over, he tossed it to Rue. “Ointment to rub around your eyes. It’ll let you see through smoke or fog. Good for scouts.”

  The next item was a short sword in a midnight blue scabbard with silver trim on it. It wasn’t hard to guess its purpose; merely holding it was enough to get a feel for the enchantment on it. “Quickened blade,” he said. “Another one for you, I think.”

  “Does it do what I think it does?” Rue asked, her eyes glittering with avarice.

  “If you’re thinking that it's magically lightened so that you can swing it around faster, then yes.”

  “Gimme.”

  If it had been a full-sized sword, he might have fought her for it, but it was far better suited to her fighting style than his, so he handed it over without an argument. There was no guarantee that the loot pulled out of a ruin would be useful to any particular individual, but the tower didn’t make worthless items. Even if they got a few pieces they wouldn’t personally use, they could always sell them.

  “Keep an eye out for traps,” Sorin said when he noticed Rue watching him instead of the street. “I’m trusting you to be my eyes while I examine this stuff.”

  Not exactly true, but Blind Sense will give me enough warning if you miss something and we end up triggering it. I hope.

  He pulled out a glove next, or something that looked like a metal casting of a glove. It was completely inflexible, but a cursory examination revealed that putting it on would fix that issue. “This is a defensive piece,” he said. “It works like the Iron Body soulprint, except only for the hand wearing the glove. You usually see it among people who are worried about hurting their weapon hand, especially with sword-wielders.”

  “You want it then?” Rue asked.

  Sorin shook his head. “Nah. It might go into the sale pile for something more useful.”

  “Od might take it. He wants to punch things.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe,” Sorin mused. “I’m not sure how it’ll interact with that Venom Strike soulprint he got from the manticore, though.”

  Next, he pulled out a small rock on a silver chain. It looked like nothing more than a cheap piece of jewelry and had a simple light enchantment on it. With no options beyond ‘on’ or ‘off,’ it was limited, in his opinion. “Maybe someone will buy it for the look of it, but nobody wants a light-emitting necklace that’ll blind them every time they use it, and holding it up would tie up a hand. It’s not junk, but it’s not exactly premium loot, either.”

  About as close to useless as it gets, and even that still has some niche uses outside of climbing.

  There were only two pieces of loot left in the bag. One was a sort-of-ring made of bone, and the other was a small slate tablet the size of Sorin’s hand. He pulled out the ring first and examined it. It was designed to cover the whole finger, with articulated joints to allow the wearer a full range of motion. Streaks of black ran through the bone like tiny little veins, and the end curved into a sharpened point.

  “Tricky,” Sorin muttered. “This one is complicated.”

  “Complicated how?” Rue asked. “Oh, watch your step here. There’s a tripwire.”

  Sorin took an exaggerated step over the wire and glanced over at the spring-loaded dagger just waiting to be launched. The street was far too wide for the trap to be positioned with any accuracy, meaning that even if he had tripped over the wire, the dagger almost certainly would have missed him anyway.

  “I think it’s going to need to be charged with anima every time you want to use it, but it’s got some potential synergy for Odric. It appears to be carved from rat bone, and when it pricks a target, the wielder can channel anima through it to infect them with a disease that slows their natural recovery. More importantly, the disease weakens the targets to future afflictions.”

  “Meaning Od could tag them with this weird little finger claw, then Venom Strike the ever-loving shit out of them,” Rue finished.

  “Exactly. I’m not completely sure it’ll work like that, but the theory is solid.”

  “How can you tell all of that just from looking at it?”

  Experience, mostly. You don’t make it to the high floors without being able to figure out what’s cursed and what’s not before you put it on. The enchantments on this stuff are all dead simple.

  “It’s not too hard to read the anima patterns if you look closely. I bet you’ll be able to tell what enchanted gear does from thirty feet away once you rank up your Aura Sense soulprint a few times and learn to recognize the anima patterns.”

  “That would be handy,” Rue said. “Do monsters use a lot of enchanted gear?”

  “Eh. They can. Other climbers can be a danger, too. Alright, let’s see if the last piece is something good.”

  He pulled out the slate, which was completely blank on one side. Flipping it over, he felt his heart seize up. There, carved in the center, was a circle with seven horizontal lines going through it. The same as the cave. Same as my mosaic. What is this thing?