At the same time Sorin was turning to face the voidling, the statue came to life. He’d been expecting a flesh-and-blood monster to erupt out of it, but instead, the granite just started moving. Color bled into the stone, turning it a dark, mottled gray that would have been hell to keep track of if it were dark out. That had been a known issue, though, so they’d timed their fight to take place under a bright afternoon sun.

  The voidling was an unexpected and unwelcome addition. “Focus on the guardian,” Sorin yelled out. “Don’t bother attacking the other one. It’s immune to magic, and it’ll drain your anima if it touches you.”

  He could only hope the others would listen to his warning. A voidling of this size wasn’t a difficult enemy to dispatch, but it could waste valuable resources better spent on the wolf. The portal guardian reached him ahead of the voidling, being many, many times faster. Sorin dodged snapping teeth and whipped his sword across the wolf’s muzzle to punish it for its aggression, but then he was past its backside and open for the voidling’s first strike.

  Unsurprisingly, Blind Sense didn’t work on the voidling. No other sensory-enhancing soulprint did either, to the best of his knowledge, so Sorin wasn’t really shocked to see that nothing had changed there. It did make the fight just a little bit harder though, having to split his concentration to react to the portal guardian that he could sense one way and the voidling he could only see with his eyes.

  “What the hell is this thing?” Rue asked as she finally arrived in melee. “It’s got no aura at all.”

  “A voidling. They’re not monsters. They’re from the darkness beyond the tower. Stay away from it and focus on your job in the fight. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Maybe it’d be better to just pull back?”

  “Let’s give it a try before we run,” Sorin responded. If they had to retreat, it meant days of marching back to the portal hub and a trip back to Floor 0 to reset their attunement to the battle so they could challenge it again. None of them wanted to do that if they didn’t have to. “Trust me. I’ve got this under control.”

  The first firebolt arced across the arena, smashing into the portal guardian’s face. It shook its head, not really all that injured, but the distraction was sufficient to keep the team’s momentum going as they took turns tearing into it.

  Rue drove her quickened sword into the wolf’s shoulder and pulled it back out, revealing blood-covered steel. She danced backward, avoiding its retaliatory bite. That would have been the opening for Sorin to hit it hard from the other side, but he was a little busy fending off a blob of darkness with limbs. Instead of smashing his sword into the wolf’s flank, he settled for launching a trio of ice blades behind him.

  That got the wolf’s attention, even though two of them shattered on its fur. The third one drove deep into its side, causing it to flinch back into Rue’s next attack. Sorin gave ground willingly, letting both the guardian and the voidling pursue him. Tower monsters didn’t seem to register that voidlings existed for some reason, but the reverse was not true.

  The voidling promptly leaped on the wolf’s back when their paths crossed. Normally, Sorin would have said that was a good thing, but he honestly wasn’t sure how it would affect their rank up. Of more immediate importance was that it was only a short hop from the portal guardian to Rue, and Sorin wasn’t sure she understood how much danger she was in.

  If the voidling jumped on her, the best she could hope for was that it would take a bite out of her soulprints. That would cost her some anima, and she’d need to spend a few days or maybe a week farming monsters, but there’d be no lasting damage. More likely, one or more of her soulprints would fracture from the strain, and if Sorin couldn’t get it off her in time, she’d wither away and die.

  Warrior’s Vigilance boosted him far above normal human levels of physical capabilities. A six-foot jump wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, but it was foolhardy and reckless—probably a few other adjectives too—to leave the ground in the middle of a battle, not to mention jumping onto a living, moving monster. Still, it was the only good way to keep the voidling looking his way.

  Somehow, even with nothing but an E-ranked soulprint to boost him, he stuck the landing. The wolf went berserk immediately, obviously, but in the half a second Sorin was upright and stable, he managed to get the voidling interested in him again. A single sword slash swept it off the wolf to land on the opposite side as Rue.

  The wolf rolled, throwing Sorin so hard that only an agile twist in midair kept him from landing directly on the voidling. Immediately, a cloud of roiling darkness billowed out of the wolf at precisely the wrong time. It engulfed Sorin just as he landed, leaving him blind to the threat within arm’s reach.

  At the same time, he picked up the movement of four new monsters. They appeared out of the darkness and raced off in every direction. “Rue! You’re up!”

  Sorin rolled free of the darkness, or at least he got far enough away that the mist was streaming around him. He sucked in a breath of fresh air as soon as he was clear and shook his head to banish the dizziness from breathing in the mist. He’d only gotten a hint of it, and even that was enough to affect him through the durability his soulprints gave him. The voidling’s anima-consuming aura had worked in his favor, thinning out the poison mist near Sorin.

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  The additions to the fight were already beyond the range of his Blind Sense, but Rue was shouting out their positions, and flashes of heat were pummeling them with the side effect of burning away the black mist. Every second or so, another firebolt would cut across the arena, opening up more ground and sometimes striking one of the smaller wolf monsters.

  The voidling appeared out of nowhere, utterly unbothered by the mist as it lunged at Sorin. He threw himself backward, twisted to the side when he felt the portal guardian shift into position behind him, and flicked his sword across the voidling’s ‘face.’ A bit more of its body slipped free and broke apart, but hacking it to pieces that evaporated on their own was a long process, and it was far from finished.

  Ice blades shot out of him in three different directions, two of them slamming into the portal guardian and one carving a furrow out of a monster that darted through the very edge of Blind Sense’s range. At the same time, he rushed by the voidling, skipping a step to avoid a clawed limb aimed at his ankle, and hacked off another piece of its body.

  That one was too big and required him to chop his sword down into the dirt to split it in two before it started to dissolve. After that, fire burned away enough of the mist that Sorin got a good look at the arena again. The voidling was still a solid presence, slightly smaller but by no means vanquished. The wolf bore numerous wounds, but wasn’t injured enough to slow down yet, and its helpers were either dead or dying.

  On Sorin’s side, Odric was busy pumping healing magic into Nemari, whose chest was heaving from the effort of throwing so many firebolts in such a limited span of time. One of the smaller wolves had reached them, but it looked like someone had broken its back and snapped its neck. Sorin doubted that was Nemari’s handiwork.

  The other wolves were dead, either burned up or stabbed by Rue. I knew you could do it. Good job, team. Just got to finish them off faster so they don’t make it to the back line next time.

  That wasn’t their fault. Sorin was supposed to help kill them, but he’d been too busy contending with the voidling and keeping the portal guardian from chewing up Rue. Hopefully, the wolf wouldn’t be able to use that ability again for a minute or two, but Sorin wasn’t going to bank on that. He needed to finish cutting down the voidling.

  The next thirty seconds of his life were pure reactive chaos. He struggled to keep the wolf under control while dodging attacks, mostly because Rue seemed intent on carving it into pieces as quickly as possible. The only way to keep the portal guardian focused on him was to make it as punishing as possible to turn away from him, but dishing out that kind of damage while avoiding being grabbed by the voidling was not easy.

  He was making steady progress toward that goal when a deep inhale behind him alerted him that the guardian was about to spew out more dark mist. Sorin took his own quick breath, then darted along the wolf’s flank. His sword split open fur, leaving yet another bloody furrow in its body as he ran by.

  Damn, this thing is tough—not all that fast or strong, but it can really take a beating.

  That was the worst kind of guardian to encounter when its abilities included summoning additional monsters. Too much time was spent keeping the battle under control while the guardian stalled out the offense with powerful defensive soulprints. If they didn’t start making some real progress before the next mist cloud came in, he’d have to call the retreat.

  Maybe even sooner than that. He’d noticed Nemari’s firebolts were coming in slower now, a sure sign that she was running out of anima. Without her ability to burn away the mist, they’d have no choice but to run.

  The voidling appeared out of the mist again, surprising Sorin because it was coming at him from the opposite side he’d last marked its position in. It shouldn’t have been able to circle around him so quickly, and he had a sinking feeling he knew exactly what had happened.

  A second voidling, the original voidling, popped up exactly where he was expecting it. It undulated across the ground, more rippling like a snake than running on legs, but that didn’t exactly slow it down. It was a coin flip which one would reach Sorin first, but he didn’t intend to stand there long enough to find out.

  “Second voidling!” he bellowed. The fight was blown now. “We need to retreat!”

  “Clear the mist around me!” Rue yelled. “I’m blocked off he—eaaaahh!”

  With two voidlings to dodge, Sorin hadn’t been able to keep the portal guardian focused on him. Blind Sense showed him it was moving away from him, probably bursting through the mist roiling across the ground to loom over Rue.

  Desperately, he flung two ice blades at the wolf, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough to stop it. His imagination treated him to a picture of the guardian’s enormous jaws clamping down on her throat, and an old, familiar pang went through his chest. He’d lost a lot of companions over the years. Sometimes it had been his fault; sometimes it hadn’t.

  This time, it definitely was.

  The distraction cost him. One of the voidlings grabbed onto his leg and started ripping anima away from him, and not his personal anima that slowly recovered—the tower anima he’d taken from uncounted monsters to reinforce his own soulspace. His blade slashed down, severing the limbs growing out of the voidling’s body and pulling himself free, but he knew that second he’d lost was the last chance he’d had to save Rue.

  Something big flitted across the edge of Blind Sense—Odric?—and crashed into the wolf with a familiar roar of fury. Blades striking heavily-armored flesh sounded out, and the guardian let out a wild howl of mixed pain and rage.

  Then flames washed across the battlefield, a firebolt enhanced by both Nemari’s Sear and Flare soulprints. The fire ate through the mist, giving Sorin his first clear glimpse at what had happened. It wasn’t Odric, though he’d known that a second after he’d first sensed the person moving.

  That didn’t make him any less surprised to find Heldigar battering the portal guardian with both of his massive swords, alternatively striking it with one then the other while it snarled and snapped at him.

  That must mean that Yoru is here, too.

  Then Sorin didn’t have any more time to think. He let Heldigar hold the front line and drew the voidlings off to the side. Without the wolf consuming his time and attention, he could finally start making progress on ridding the tower of those nuisance creatures.