First thing in the morning, Odric burned through all the anima he’d regained overnight to work on Nemari’s injuries. Torso wounds were generally the most dangerous and life-threatening, if only because of the higher likelihood of some sort of organ damage, and so Odric had focused his efforts there yesterday to make sure she was stable even though the bite wounds were mostly superficial. Today, Nemari wanted to be able to walk without slowing the rest of the team down.

  “Most of this is just superficial damage, but there’s a few deep bites around the backs of your knees and calves,” Odric told her. “I’m trying to stimulate some muscle regeneration there, but it’s slow going. Really, the best thing for you would be a few days of bed rest and an attentive healer.”

  “Let’s pretend that’s not an option and try for something a little more reasonable,” she said dryly.

  “You’re not going to be walking pain-free, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to run unless you have to,” Odric warned.

  Sorin watched him work with professional interest. Though not a dedicated healer himself, a few healing soulprints for emergency patchwork were part of every powerful climber’s kit. Rapid regeneration was one of the most popular soulprints in existence, at least back in his tower, and he couldn’t imagine it was much different here.

  Odric’s work was rough, and that was putting it mildly, but he was using F-ranked soulprints in a rank 1 soulspace. That wasn’t much to work with, and the young man only had a few years of practice, not decades. On his own, he would probably never climb past Floor 10, and that was fine. There was nothing wrong with settling on a lower floor.

  It just wasn’t what Sorin needed in a new team. Odric didn’t have the skill or the hunger to make it to the top. Nemari might have the hunger to keep pushing, but she’d run out of time long before she got close. Out of the three, Rue was the only one Sorin considered to even have a chance of making it to Floor 50, and even then, only if she smartened up and learned how to properly judge a dangerous situation before jumping into it.

  “Let’s take it easy today,” Sorin suggested. “We’ll put a few more miles between us and that ruin, then Rue and I will feed bark elementals into a lane in front of you to incinerate. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a Bark Skin soulprint, and if not, we’ll still be a day closer to filling all our soulprints so we can challenge the portal guardian.”

  “Is the ruin still a threat?” Rue asked.

  “Probably not. It usually takes weeks or even months for them to regenerate, but if the tower decides to fuck with us, it might speed that up. Best to just not hang around rather than tempt fate.”

  “I don’t know if—” Odric started to say, his worried eyes locked on Nemari.

  “I’m fine,” she announced. “Climbers get hurt. That’s the lifestyle. I can still walk, and I can still fight. We’re here for anima and soulprints, not to go camping.”

  That pretty much settled it for the whole team. Nemari was the leader, and she wanted to keep going. As she was also the person who was injured, it was hard for anyone to argue against her. They packed up camp, a task which only took a few minutes, then set out to find a new spot in the forest. Unfortunately, their only option to find a reliable source of bark elementals was to go even deeper in, and that presented its own set of problems.

  “Something’s weird about that dragonfly,” Odric said while they walked along the edge of a small creek.

  “What? It looks normal to me,” Nemari said.

  “It’s poisonous? My Detect Poison soulprint keeps pulling my attention to it.”

  Sorin peered closely at the insect. “Not that unusual. Usually they can’t deliver enough of whatever juice they’ve got to do more than make you feel a bit sick, but once soulprints get in the mix and they turn into monsters, all bets are off.”

  Odric and Rue could both sense the miniature monster easily, and Nemari wasn’t getting more than a few feet from Odric. With him pointing them out and her ability to set things on fire with her magic, it wasn’t an issue for them. Sorin, unfortunately, lacked the ability to reliably differentiate the monstrous dragonflies from the regular ones.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll just be careful of all of them. I doubt any of them can get through Iron Body anyway.”

  Blind Sense had been going off constantly as small critters moved around them. Millions of bugs were hiding behind leaves and underneath stones, and the soulprint made Sorin aware of all of that. Tuning the ability’s input would come with additional anima, but for the moment he was just suffering with the inconvenience. It wasn’t terribly difficult to block out all the tiny wiggly motions of crawling insects, but it was an adjustment.

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  They quickly set up their new killing ground and got to work. Then, the strangest thing happened. Rue didn’t get sucked into any new ruins. Sorin managed to avoid being poisoned by the rare dragonfly. Nemari got steadily stronger throughout the day as Odric continued to work on her. And they killed better than two hundred bark elementals.

  All in all, it was practically the perfect day of farming. The only way things could have gone better was if they’d managed to acquire one of the expensive Bark Skin soulprints the elementals were known for dropping. Sadly, that did not happen. No one was discouraged, though. It was the expected outcome.

  “If they were a common find, they wouldn’t be so expensive,” Sorin told Rue when they finished for the night and she started grumbling.

  “Yeah, but why couldn’t we get lucky and get one?”

  “It’s fine. We can try again tomorrow,” Nemari said. Her voice was a lot steadier than it had been that morning, though it was still lined with fatigue. A full day of repeatedly burning through her anima reserves had obviously left her feeling drained.

  “Why don’t we retreat out of the deeper forest while we’ve still got some light left,” Sorin suggested. “There were enough other monsters around here that I’m not confident in setting a camp without relocating first.”

  “Especially not with the poisonous bugs,” Rue said in agreement.

  There were no arguments there, as none of them were eager to wake up to something biting or stinging them in the night. They moved back out the same way they’d come in, then had a nice, easy night with no incidents. There wasn’t even a single monster sighting.

  * * *

  “So, yesterday went suspiciously well,” Nemari said to start off the meeting the next morning. “Maybe that was God paying us back for that shit with the ruin, or maybe we used up all our good luck for the trip in one day. Either way, I don’t think we should expect another day like that.

  “Now, we’ve got enough supplies for about a week. It’s three days to the portal guardian, and if we go through the portal directly, that gives us another four days to find the Floor 2 hub. So we need to make a decision. I’m pretty close to capped on my soulprints’ anima. The only reason to stay here killing bark elementals is for money, and as valuable as Bark Skin is, I feel like there are better ways to make danirs if that’s our goal.”

  “I’m also capped on pretty much everything,” Sorin said. That was a bit of a lie. He was over the cap for rank 1, and barely a quarter of the way there for rank 2. That left him with plenty of room to grow, but he’d do it faster on the next floor.

  “Slow growth for me, as always,” Odric added. “But I was close to full before we started.”

  They all turned to look at Rue, who just shrugged and said, “I could use another day or two, but it’s not the end of the world if we don’t wait.”

  “We’ll see where you’re at when we get there, then. If you’re not as strong as possible, we’ll either retreat, or we’ll spend some time farming near the shrine before we tackle the portal guardian.”

  “Shrine?” Sorin asked before he could think to stop himself.

  “The guardian’s arena, I mean.” Nemari gave him a weird look. In fact, they were all giving him that look.

  “Oh, right. The shrine. Sorry, still a bit tired.”

  No one seemed to believe that excuse, but they didn’t push it. Nemari turned back to the rest of the group and said, “So, that’s my plan. We go straight for the shrine, funnel as much anima into Rue as we can on the way there, and maybe take a day or two to top her off if we need it. Then we kill the guardian, get our attunement, and either go through if we’ve got enough supplies or retreat back to the Floor 1 hub. What do you think?”

  “Good plan. We can also do some foraging to stretch the rations. That was part of my original plan for this trip, anyway,” Sorin said.

  “I don’t want to stop for it, but anything we spot along the way is fine,” Nemari said. “Odric, Rue? Anything to add?”

  “Nope. Sounds like a plan, boss,” Rue said.

  She sounds confident, at least, Sorin thought, but he resolved to help her work on her fundamentals a bit more. She was still too much flash, not enough skill, and it was only her raw speed and the fact that monsters weren’t usually intelligent enough to take advantage of the openings she left that was keeping her safe. It would be better if he helped her break those habits sooner rather than later.

  Odric just nodded his head silently, apparently having nothing to add to the discussion. With everyone in agreement, they broke down camp and started walking.

  * * *

  “Yoru, this wasn’t in my contract,” Heldigar complained. “It was the ruin and back again. What we’re doing is not ‘back again.’ It’s the opposite of that.”

  Everything had been going fine, as far as Heldigar was concerned. Then they’d run across an emptied campsite and followed the trail to find a few different kill boxes another group had set up. There was no proof they were the one from the ruin, but Yoru was convinced. He was the best tracker of the trio by far, the soulprint not being in either of the other two’s skill set, so neither of them argued that point with him.

  But this wasn’t a quick diversion. They’d lost a whole day dogging a trail that Heldigar couldn’t even see. Only the fact that Yoru insisted it was plain as day—and that he was the guy holding the purse—had Heldigar still following him.

  “I will double your pay when we get back,” Yoru snarled. “Now keep going. And don’t let another one of those fucking burr-tipped squirrels jump on me again.”

  Vestus had healed the wound, but the dried blood running down one side of Yoru’s face stood as a testament to the surprising lethality of the tiny little monster. Its tail fur had hundreds of little hooks in it, not dangerous individually, but there were enough to scour the flesh off a person if the rodent got a good smack in with the appendage.

  Heldigar held back a sigh. “You’re the boss.”

  Double pay, he reminded himself an hour later when they found another kill box. Bark elementals didn’t precisely bleed, and the tower had reclaimed most of the bodies, but the trees were charred black and the stink of scorched green wood still filled the air. But what exactly are you going to do when we catch up? I’m not fighting another climbing team for you, and I’m pretty sure Sorin could kill you by himself, let alone with a full team supporting him.

  With Yoru muttering to himself under his breath the whole way, he led his team toward the mountains. He did not notice the concerned looks Heldigar and Vestus exchanged behind his back.