Sorin had given some thought to what he was willing to share while he was in what he was tentatively dubbing ‘liminal space.’ They’d all known the conversation was coming up, and that if he wasn’t willing to come clean with the rest of the team, that he’d be finding a new one.

  A little trust, then. Not the whole truth, but something to tide them over.

  “I would appreciate,” he began slowly, “if what I am about to say never leaves this spot. I don’t want to talk about it again. I don’t want you to discuss it with each other. I definitely don’t want you asking family about it or casually mentioning it to someone and being overheard.”

  His eyes fixed on Nemari while he spoke. She came from a family of climbers, and he didn’t doubt for a second that she regularly went to them with problems in need of solutions. There was nothing wrong with that, of course, but he wasn’t a problem to be solved, and he didn’t want to be treated that way.

  Worse, he had concerns about a more powerful climber taking an unhealthy interest in him. He could hit well above his weight class, but taking out an arrogant rank 5 who thought he could pick on the puny little rank 2 and trying to fight a rank 20 that could squash him like a bug were two different things. One was a difficult situation he’d need to be clever and careful to survive. The other was a grim certainty that he was at the mercy of someone exponentially more powerful than him.

  They were all looking at him now, silent and staring. “You know how everyone gets a prize in the Antechamber, and how teams go through the floor portal together. Well, my prize was a bit… different. That key slate we found in the ruin seems to have something to do with it. I imagine you three went to the normal Antechamber together and each got your own little treasure box?”

  At their nods, Sorin continued, “Well, I went to a similar version, except instead of loot, it was a kind of table with an illusion of the tower on it. The bottom was lit up, the exact same amount as my own progress. I doubt that’s a coincidence. There was also the same symbol on the table, just like the one on the slate.”

  Sorin left out the other six towers, or the fact that the blue one was completely lit up. That was a mystery he’d solve on his own, and if he started sharing that kind of information, he could forget getting a visit from an inquisitive rank 20. Climbers up past rank 50 would track him down, and defying them would be similar to spitting in God’s eye.

  “When I placed the slate on the table, it turned into a soulprint called Liminal Gateway. As far as I can tell, it’s sort of a personal portal network, except it seems to take me to this space that had little nubs leading to other portals rather than directly connecting me from point A to point B. So far, my only destinations are Floor 0, that cave in Floor 1 that had the symbol carved into the wall, and right here.”

  There were some outright lies in that explanation, but it covered the gist of what he was willing to share. If he was going to keep climbing with this group, Liminal Gateway was too useful not to use. Sorin didn’t fully understand how it worked, but his hope was that he could carve the seven-tower sign into a place to designate that as an access point, then travel to and from there freely.

  If that was the case, the possibilities were endless. The team could travel to remote regions on each floor, set up camp, and rely on Sorin to replenish supplies, fence soulprints and materials, and acquire whatever else they needed as easily as stepping into another room. They could stay out for weeks or even months, farming highly profitable monsters that would otherwise be too much of a nuisance to even reach.

  “That… is a very unique ability,” Nemari said, carefully choosing her words. “If you can set new waypoints, and especially if you can bring the rest of us with you, it would be insanely valuable for getting around the tower. We could return to Floor 0 right now to rest and recover in safety, then return to Floor 2 when we’re ready. If we’re lucky, we might even be able to take the regular portal to the Floor 2 hub without having to actually travel there first.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to experiment with it yet, but that’s possible.”

  Even if it was, Sorin had no intention of taking anyone with him. The soulprint—if it could even be called that—was too close to the secret of multiple towers existing. That was information he’d happily share in a few years when he was strong enough to be basically untouchable. He sincerely doubted his current team would be in the picture by then. In fact, if he could replicate the feat where he pushed up ranks without having to clear a floor, his plan was entirely to just outmuscle the tower and solo his way up.

  If, if, if… So many unknowns. How’s a climber supposed to plan anything like this?

  “This isn’t everything,” Nemari said. “It’s not even half.”

  “It’s a truthful answer to why I didn’t appear in the Antechamber with you. It’s me trusting the three of you with a secret that would earn me a lot of unwanted attention if it got out. I’ve never seen a soulprint like this, especially not on Floor 1. Don’t tell anybody about it. I don’t care if it’s your family or your best friend or your God damn barber. Keep it to yourself.”

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  Rue shrugged, then winced in pain. “It’s your secret. We’ve all got secrets we don’t want shared. I can respect that.”

  “And just what secrets are you keeping?” Odric asked her.

  “If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, now would they?”

  “Hmm. We’ll talk later,” he said.

  “Not about that, we won’t.”

  “I’m not satisfied,” Nemari said, cutting off that argument before it could start. “But let’s be honest about things. You’re using us. We’re using you. I trust you about as much as I would any other climber I got partnered with, but I know you’re competent. Hell, more than competent.

  “You’re not a permanent member of my team, Sorin. But that’s fine. I get the feeling you’re not planning on sticking around anyway. So, let’s be honest with each other about this much. I’m not upset about burning through Floor 1 like that, but it was reckless and dangerous, and I don’t particularly want to take those risks again.”

  “The ruin wasn’t his fault,” Rue objected.

  “No, but that asshole team of climbers baiting monsters on us was. Between the warblers and the manticore, we’re lucky to still be alive. We should have spent a month preparing for the next challenge, farming monsters for soulprints and selling what we couldn’t use so that we could afford better gear. A few enchanted pieces would have helped our survivability tremendously.”

  That was all true, and once Sorin confirmed that he could continue to grow his soulspace without actually ranking up, he was more than happy to grind for a little bit. But anima gains grew significantly at higher floors, and while slowly bulking up on Floor 2 was an option, it was the slowest possible way to progress.

  “Let’s just take it week by week,” he suggested. “Right now, the goal is to find the portal hub. I know a bit about the floor’s layout, courtesy of the Climber’s Union, but the details were sparse. If I’m right, though, we’re actually not all that far away from where we want to go—maybe a day and a half of walking.

  “Once we’re safe, fully recovered, and have dealt with resupplying and buying some new equipment, we’ll discuss the most lucrative farming spots on the floor and whether there’s one suitable for our team.”

  “I’d feel a lot better if Sorin had some better armor and maybe a soulprint to help keep the monsters looking at him,” Odric added.

  “Or maybe we should see if we can find a fifth. Sorin would be a lot more effective if he wasn’t focused on keeping the rest of us safe,” Nemari said. “And maybe the pickings will be better now that we’re rank 2.”

  Sorin didn’t like that idea, but he figured it was better to wait and see who was actually looking for a team before he protested too strenuously. An hour ago, he wouldn’t necessarily have objected to adding a fifth person to the group, but that was before he’d decided to trust them with his newest secret.

  Not that I had a ton of choice. The only way they weren’t going to talk about this was if they were dead. Asking them to keep it quiet as a favor to me isn’t a good solution either, but…

  He couldn’t just kill them because they were inconvenient. He’d met climbers like that, real bastards who’d betray anyone and everyone as they scrambled to get ahead. Those kinds of people might make it up to Floor 10 or 15, maybe even Floor 20. But eventually they crossed the wrong person or burned too many bridges.

  The people who made it to the top did so on a sterling reputation and excellence in everything they did. Sorin probably could get away with it, this one time. He knew that. Hell, all he’d had to do was turn around and go back into liminal space while the berserker jacks finished them off. But he wasn’t willing to stain himself that way, not to people who were his comrades in arms.

  “First things first,” Odric said, “can Sorin get us back to safety with his new soulprint? We can decide the rest from there. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d feel better knowing there was no possibility of another giant rabbit trying to pulverize my hip and bite off my hand in my future.”

  “Agreed,” Nemari said. She shot a guilty look at Rue, whose shirt had basically disintegrated from the flames, and Odric, who still had bright, painful-looking burns on his arms and scorched black patches on his clothes. “Home first. The rest can wait.”

  Sorin reached for the soulprint, only to have it slip through his metaphorical fingers. Frowning, he grasped it more tightly and tried to force anima through it. He’d used a thousand different soulprints over the years, and that wasn’t even considering how many spells or abilities he’d free cast using nothing but loose anima and his own memory of the soulprint’s pattern, but this one was unique.

  “It’s… I feel like I’m missing something,” he muttered. The soulprint didn’t want to accept his anima, for one thing. Given its position in his mosaic instead of hanging as an oil painting on his soulspace’s wall, that wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but it did make it more complicated to use. He hadn’t expected it to be an issue once he’d figured out how to trigger it, but this particular ability was breaking a lot of the rules as he knew them.

  Alright, well, let’s just repeat what I did the first time.

  His awareness dropped into his soulspace, where the soulprint stood out in stark relief against the rest of the mosaic. He stood over it and tried to trigger it like he had before, but this time there was no Antechamber around him to pull anima from. There was only the tower, and it was sluggish in comparison to the first time he’d used the soulprint.

  There was a burr in the anima flow, and it took him a few moments to realize that it was coming from the space a hundred feet away where he’d first entered Floor 2. There was already some sort of marker there, an entry point into liminal space, and it didn’t like having another one set so close by. Almost instinctively, Sorin mentally reached out and scoured the first marker away.

  The anima surged toward him, picking up speed now that the other marker was gone, but it didn’t grab him and pull him through the gateway again. It just sort of hung there, slowly building up but with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  Eventually, Sorin released his hold on the soulprint and opened his eyes. “No luck,” he told them. “I think I’ve got the first part of the process figured out, but I’m going to need to do some more experimenting with it.”

  “I guess we’re walking then,” Nemari said with a sigh.

  “Fu-u-u-u-u-ck,” Rue swore. “It’s going to be a long day.”