The good news was that, despite their rocky start, Sorin had correctly guessed where they’d landed. It took them two days to get to the portal hub, mostly as a consideration to Rue and Odric, who were both pretty battered from the fight. Sorin took Rue’s job as their forward scout for the trip, and they took plenty of breaks whenever he dropped a monster that had something worth harvesting.

  Unlike their time on the first floor, he didn’t bother to try feeding monsters to the rest of the group. They could work on filling their soulprints with anima later, once the priority wasn’t survival and safety. They weren’t missing out on much, anyway. Sorin picked their route with a focus on avoiding monsters, one that went around the thickest spawning grounds. He barely made up what that voidling had ripped out of him on Floor 1 anyway.

  He spent a lot of his free time worrying about the connection between the seven-tower sign and the voidlings. It was possible it was just a coincidence that they’d shown up when he’d touched the symbol for the first time, but when he factored in the roiling darkness pressing down on the silver path, he seriously doubted it. There had to be something there, and that meant he needed to be wary of random voidlings finding him.

  His experiments with Liminal Gateway finally bore fruit. The missing element had been the physical symbol. It didn’t need to be anything special, he’d discovered. Using his hunting knife to carve it into the trunk of a tree was enough for the soulprint to latch onto it.

  The biggest limitation was that the symbol was vulnerable to outside forces acting on it. Cutting it into the ground worked, but not for long. Making it out of twine or other materials didn’t work at all. Placing it on a chunk of wood that he could carry around also caused the ability to fail. It had to be carved into a solid, immobile object.

  Sorin suspected the tree he’d marked wouldn’t remain viable forever, but it would probably work for a month or two at minimum if nothing messed with it. The first symbol’s location in a random cave out in the middle of the floor made a lot more sense to Sorin once he started figuring out the rules, though that did raise the question of who’d carved it there in the first place. For all he knew, the tower itself had laid down the sign for him to find.

  By the time he’d spotted the portal hub late on their second day, he’d pretty much addressed every question he could think to ask—things like how precise the carving had to be and that it had to be him specifically that did it. Some of them had no answer, at least not one he could test, but he felt like he had a much better grasp on how the soulprint worked. What he didn’t know was what would change when it ranked up, or how exactly it would even do that. It didn’t take anima like a normal soulprint did, but he suspected he’d see a change when his soulspace expanded to rank 3.

  Floor 2’s portal hub was similar to Floor 1’s, with two major exceptions. The first was that the sheer size precluded a simple crossroads layout. Instead, the hub had more of a wagon-wheel roadmap, with eight wide dirt trails all cutting through the camp grounds and bazaars. The second big change was the presence of actual buildings. They were crude things, admittedly, mostly done up in log cabin styles with thatch roofs, but knowing how the tower generally disliked humans building towns in it, Sorin was surprised to see one so close to Floor 0.

  Surprise quickly turned to annoyance when he spotted the Climber’s Union logo on a sign hanging near the biggest of the buildings. Great. Those assholes again. Nobody but him seemed to have an issue with them, and Sorin could privately admit to himself that it mostly galled him to pay for what should have been a free service.

  Many climbers had donated to the Climber’s Society back home, including himself, but those had the important distinction of being completely voluntary, a way to help the next generation get started. The money was negligible after a certain point, and it only took a few rich patrons to completely fund the Society for the first ten or so floors indefinitely.

  He did a quick lap around the hub, taking note of an inn and something that referred to itself as a bank. Considering that it was the only building with stone walls in the hub, Sorin supposed he could give it the benefit of the doubt, but he was having trouble believing it had any kind of real security. Whatever the case, he certainly wasn’t planning on leaving any of his valuables in the bank’s possession.

  His whirlwind tour complete, Sorin jogged back out into the plains to find the rest of his team. It was easy enough to follow his own passage back, especially since he’d only been roaming half a mile or so ahead of the others. They’d made little enough progress in his absence, not that he was surprised.

  “I found the hub,” he announced as soon as he walked into their makeshift camp. “Ten minutes of walking, most of it downhill.”

  “Sweet, merciful God, finally,” Rue said. It was pretty hard for healing magic to fix up busted ribs when she kept moving around, so the last few days had been especially rough on the girl. She’d complained frequently at first, much to Odric’s chagrin. It was only after Sorin had had a quick, whispered conversation with her about how personally her brother was taking his lack of ability to heal her that she’d subsided.

  “Take ten minutes, then we’ll get moving,” Nemari ordered.

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  “Here, hold still,” Odric said softly. “I’ll reinforce things to make it a bit easier on you.”

  “Save it for after we get there,” Rue told him. “I’m going to bed for a week the first chance I get, and some freshly healed ribs are exactly how I want to start that off.”

  “You’re in luck. There’s an inn there,” Sorin told her. “Can’t speak for the quality, but I imagine it’s still cheaper than paying taxes at a Floor 0 check point.”

  “Better than sleeping on cold dirt.”

  “Let’s just hope they’ve got a few rooms open,” Nemari pointed out.

  They set out soon after, arriving to the curious stares of other climbers. Rue and Odric had changed clothes, but the burns on Odric’s arms were still very visible, and nobody could miss Rue’s fragile, hobbling shuffle. A few of the rougher climbers were eyeing the pair up with the same look predators used on prey, but Sorin made sure to stand next to them.

  He met their gazes with a cold glare that promised swift punishment if they so much as attempted anything, and most of the climbers had the good sense to take the warning for what it was. A few seemed to read it as a challenge, and Sorin suspected he’d be dealing with one or two of them before he moved on to Floor 3, but as long as they left his team alone long enough to cross the hub, that was good enough.

  The inn’s sign proclaimed it as the Lucky Duck, complete with an image of a cartoonish winking duck flipping a coin using its wing feathers like fingers. One look inside the building was enough to explain the moniker; fully half the ground floor was full of dice or card games. The other half was doing brisk business selling beer and stew, neither of which looked appetizing to Sorin.

  They paid for two rooms, one for Nemari and Rue, the other for Sorin and Odric. Rue quietly choked in outrage at the price, but Odric just pulled her away from the surly innkeeper while Nemari negotiated out of the team funds. Then all four of them piled into a room that could scarcely hold them, one which Sorin noted contained a single bed.

  I guess that explains the sneer the guy had when he found out we only wanted two rooms. Looks like I’m sleeping on the floor tonight.

  “Okay, first thing’s first,” Nemari started. “Odric, you know what to do.”

  The big man was already shouldering his way past Sorin, who unfortunately didn’t have any more room to give him. He got to work on Rue, who just laid back onto the bed with a soft sigh. Sorin estimated at most four more days to full recovery now that she wasn’t constantly moving around and agitating the injuries.

  “While you two recover, Sorin and I will work on fencing the loot,” Nemari said. He’d identified their loot as best he could while they travelled, though he wasn’t an expert in tower-forged enchanted gear. With them being only Floor 1 prizes, they were simple enough that he was confident in his guesses, and all of them had decided to keep what they’d been given.

  Nemari’s loot was obviously a wand, one that allowed her to speed up her fire spells, unlike her original general-purpose wand. That made it a bit more efficient at the cost of being more specialized, but it was hardly an issue for her. It only worked if she channeled the magic through the hand holding the wand and out the tip of the implement, but she hadn’t made any great strides toward casting without her hands anyway, so it was no big loss there.

  Rue’s trinket was a bit more unusual. It mimicked a soulprint called Distraction that was particularly effective against monsters, or at least against the stupid ones. The handkerchief drew in anima on its own and, on its owner’s command, would cast out an illusion that would hopefully split the target’s attention.

  Sorin wouldn’t rely on something like that, since it only worked if the victim didn’t recognize the illusion for what it was or was so undisciplined that a splash of color was enough to draw their eyes away from their enemy. That having been said, he was sure Rue would find plenty of use for it among the lower floors, and she could always sell it later once she outgrew it.

  Odric got what was simultaneously the best and worst reward out of the three. On its own, it did nothing at all, but Sorin recognized the small lump of ore as a core component to a Steel Skin soulprint. That was Bark Skin’s bigger, meaner, tougher older brother, with a correspondingly bigger price tag. Having the primary piece gifted to him by the tower would save Odric a fortune once he found someone capable of crafting the soulprint for him.

  Since the big man was angling for some sort of brawling build that involved punching monsters with one hand and healing allies with the other, Steel Skin was an excellent upgrade for him. The only real downside was that it was a D-ranked soulprint, which meant Odric wouldn’t have room to fit it in his soulspace until rank 4 at the absolute earliest, and even then only if he didn’t put any other soulprints in first.

  The rest of their loot was various odds and ends harvested from monsters throughout their trip. Sorin mostly hung back and let Nemari haggle with the merchants at the bazaar. Nothing was really priced the way he felt it should be, mostly as a natural consequence of different monsters showing up in different numbers in different locations relative to the red tower’s portal hub.

  Some soulprints were expensive because they were highly sought after; others were priced high merely because they were difficult to obtain. Sorin didn’t really know which was which, or which ones were worth very little. All he knew was that he found a Vigorous Constitution soulprint in the form of some unidentifiable powder in a glass vial, and that was a good use for his limited funds.

  “That’s F-ranked,” Nemari remarked after he bought it. “Shouldn’t your other soulprint be better?”

  “Oh, it is,” Sorin said. “I’m going to tack this onto it to increase the stamina regeneration it gives me so I can operate at one hundred percent even longer. Probably won’t happen until I hit rank 3, though. I’m pretty tapped out for room right now.”

  “We just got to rank 2,” Nemari pointed out. “Where would you even get new soulprints to fill the extra space?”

  “Mostly I spent it on rank ups and mergers,” he admitted quietly, not wanting to discuss his build in any sort of real depth out in public.

  Nemari seemed to take the hint, since she dropped the subject. At least, that was what Sorin thought at first, until he followed her eyes toward a man who stood on the other side of the bazaar. “Someone you know?” he asked.

  “Not me, personally,” she said faintly. “Shit. Let’s go back to the inn. I need to—Never mind what I need to do. Let’s just go.”

  Huh. Sorin looked the stranger over again. The man hadn’t noticed either of them. Well, everyone does have their secrets. I’m guessing this one belongs to Rue, though, else Nemari wouldn’t be scurrying back to her.