Sorin took a few seconds to absorb the Iron Body soulprint he’d purchased once he was back at the relative safety of the camp. At F-rank, it would only passively toughen up his skin, but that would help immensely in giving him a wider margin of error for dodging attacks. If something scraped him, he’d be unharmed, which was a lot more important than it sounded. Little injuries had a way of compounding as they sapped at a climber’s strength, weakening them and making it easier to get hurt again.

  If not for Odric’s presence, Sorin would have gone with the other soulprint instead. Minor Regeneration wouldn’t save him in a fight, however. It would speed up his natural healing rate, closing wounds up almost five times faster than normal, which was fantastic utility for an F-ranked soulprint, but Odric’s healing magic was vastly superior at this rank. As long as Sorin had access to it, choosing Iron Body was the best decision.

  Nobody asked him anything about Rue, to no surprise. Whatever she’d been up to, her brother didn’t seem to have a clue. Sorin idly wondered if it was anything he needed to be worried about while the team packed up camp. Sneaking off to see a boyfriend? Or maybe girlfriend? I’m not even sure if she stayed on Floor 1 or not.

  He considered various theories, but with no real information to base them on, it was all wild speculation. At the end of the day, the only real consideration was whether Rue would bring trouble down on the group. He doubted it, but it was always possible. Ironically, that was the exact same line of reasoning that had Nemari set against working with Sorin, though admittedly with a lot more justification on her part.

  Their first stop was about twenty miles north of the portal hub. Floor 1 didn’t exactly have roads—permanent buildings and other signs of civilization drew waves of monsters anywhere other than Floor 0—but it was an easy enough walk through open fields to reach their destination. Monster attacks were infrequent and easily spotted.

  When they made camp for the night, Odric revealed that he’d updated his cooking gear to include a second pot and pan and a few pouches of new seasonings. It turned out the big man was actually a good cook, not that Sorin was surprised. The meals they’d eaten on their first climb hadn’t been terrible, just bland.

  Once they’d settled the order of their watches, Sorin went to bed. He’d pulled last watch, arguably the easiest shift to take. First might have been better since they were all relatively fresh, but he wouldn’t complain about it. Odric got the night off since he cooked, leaving Rue to take first and Nemari stuck with middle.

  He was starting to trust Rue to keep an eye out for trouble, if for no other reason than her ability to sense anima made it very difficult for anything to sneak up on them. Nemari, on the other hand, didn’t have any sort of soulprint to help her. That combined with her relative inexperience meant that when Rue woke Nemari up for her turn, Sorin also woke up and stayed that way.

  Unmoving, he laid wrapped in his cloak while the two women held a whispered conversation. Though he wasn’t exactly trying to eavesdrop, it was impossible not to overhear them while simultaneously listening for the sounds of anything approaching their camp.

  “How’d it go?” Nemari whispered once she was fully awake.

  “Fine,” Rue said. “Pretty much what I expected.”

  “They leave you with anything?”

  There was a bitter laugh, followed by a short, “No.”

  “Bastards,” Nemari said.

  What’s this all about? Sorin wondered, but he wasn’t lucky enough to get an answer. Their conversation was interrupted by some movement when Nemari took her place on watch and Rue laid down to sleep.

  He assumed they were talking about whatever Rue had gone off to do while Sorin was spending his share of the danirs earned from their first climb, something that the women were apparently keeping from Odric. Given how overprotective he was of his sister, Sorin assumed it was some sort of problem that would only be made worse if he started trying to solve it for her.

  Sorin spent a few minutes in his own soulspace, once again studying the mosaic stretching across the floor and trying to find some clue as to its purpose. Rue had said he held more anima in his soul than he should, but if the mosaic was responsible, he couldn’t figure out how.

  No surprise there. I can’t figure out any part of what happened to me. Losing my soulprints is the only thing I have even a possible explanation for, but ‘eaten by a voidling’ doesn’t exactly work since the process would have killed me.

  He was still mulling things over a few hours later when Nemari came to wake him up. Sorin stood up on his own and took her place. The two exchanged no words, the same as it had been all day.

  * * *

  They reached their goal early the next morning. With just a few hours of walking, they found themselves on the edge of a forest, one that, according to the Climber’s Union, was stuffed to the canopy with bark elementals. They looked vaguely like a person-shaped skeleton made out of sticks, except the heads were just round wooden knobs capping the neck-stick.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Sorin knew both from his reading and from personal experience that the fact that their limbs were never more than an inch or two thick was wildly misleading. Breaking those sticks was actually quite difficult—not impossible, but at least as hard as bending a metal bar.

  “Lucky for us,” he said as he finished going over the finer points of tangling with a bark elemental, “they’re every bit as vulnerable to being set on fire as any other piece of dry wood.”

  “Not really lucky,” Rue said. “We already knew that. That’s why we’re here.”

  “That, and the soulprints,” Nemari said. “A few Bark Skin to sell would help replenish our funds quite nicely.”

  “We’ll be lucky to get one, let alone a few.”

  Sorin’s schedule only called for a single day here, mostly for Nemari’s sake. Their next stop would be to farm a far fleshier monster so that Sorin, Rue, and Odric could fortify their soulprints with anima. Then, it was off to the floor guardian, and finally back to the portal hub. What happened after that was something he still hadn’t quite figured out yet.

  After a bit to get organized, the team quickly fell into a rhythm. Bark elementals, despite their numbers, were essentially solitary. They didn’t fight over territory, but they also didn’t move around in groups. It was relatively easy to find them one at a time and lure them back to the kill box they established. Sorin and Rue worked independently to haul kills back to Nemari, who scorched them immediately. Odric got placed on cleanup duty, which meant his soulprints didn’t really grow at all.

  “But I’ve got a plan for that on the next stop,” Sorin told the man in between finding bark elementals.

  They worked for a solid few hours, though Sorin saw little benefit from it personally. Perhaps it was the way Nemari torched the bark elementals that was destroying any soulprints they might have formed, but they didn’t recover a single one. More likely, it was that they were at the edge of the forest in the most heavily farmed areas searching for a popular and expensive soulprint. Delving deeper to where older bark elementals had survived for years would greatly increase their chances of finding anything valuable.

  What it wouldn’t do was give them more anima despite the danger. If they’d been here for the money, Sorin would have been carefully leading them in deeper, but the plan was to stay for a day, hope for some good loot, and then move on. His only goal was to get his team into shape to kill the Floor 1 guardian. Everything else was incidental.

  They’d been at it for about two hours when something broke their rhythm. Sorin was bringing back a bark elemental he’d smacked in its knob of a face with a chunk of high-speed ice when Odric called out to him, “Don’t leave!”

  He put some distance between himself and the elemental while Nemari turned it into a charred wooden skeleton, noting sourly as he did that she was a bit too quick on the draw for his liking. She’d gotten yet another fire-based soulprint that was stacking on top of everything else to make her firebolts hit like they were E- or even D-ranked. But they’d already argued about the dangers of overspecialization, and he wasn’t going to try to change her mind now.

  “What’s up?” he asked as he approached the pair.

  “That’s the third one you’ve brought back in a row, but we haven’t seen Rue. I think we need to take a break and go find her,” Odric explained.

  Damn it. Of course it would be Rue that disappears. Her anima sensing soulprint is the best one we’ve got for finding her. My new visual acuity doesn’t work great for spotting someone in a forest, not with all the cover. I guess we’ll see how well it helps me track.

  They’d been tramping back and forth through the wood for hours. Finding her based on any tracks she’d left behind was going to be difficult, to say the least. “Stick close,” Sorin said as he scanned the ground. “I don’t want you guys getting lost, too.”

  On the bright side, Rue had been bringing bark elementals back using the same trail over and over, so it was easy to follow that. But then they reached the end without spotting anything to lead them forward. There were a dozen different spots where she’d left the trail and returned to it in the last hour, with no way to tell for sure which was the most recent.

  “Should we start yelling for her?” Nemari asked.

  Sorin shook his head. “Not unless we want to get bogged down fighting off every monster that comes to see what the fuss is.”

  He cast about for some sign of where Rue’d gone, but there was nothing to be found here. Okay, if there’s no physical evidence, come at it from a different angle. What else lives in this forest that could have chased her off the trail? Were there any signs of that?

  Even if there were, it was just as likely that whatever it was had found her while she was moving through the trees to find the next bark elemental. He figured it had most likely happened near the end of the trail, as Rue would have gone deeper into the woods each time to find her next target.

  “I’m going to do a circle around the trail and see what’s out there. You two stick together and make sure to keep the trail in sight. Last thing we need is more of us lost out here,” he said.

  Nemari bristled, but Odric just clamped a hand on her shoulder and gave Sorin an anxious nod. “Let him do what he’s good at,” the big man told their team leader.

  “What, like we can’t help look?”

  “I’ll only be a few minutes. Just wait for me here and keep an eye out in case Rue shows back up.”

  Sorin didn’t give them time to argue with him. He slipped through the brush and started walking a wide circle, though he diverted his course once when he spotted a bark elemental tangled up in some bushes. They could pull themselves free in the blink of an eye, and he had no time to fight one right now.

  The first lap brought him back to the trail, where his two teammates were anxiously waiting. “Nothing yet,” Sorin told them. “I’m going to do a bigger circle this time.”

  That revealed more tracks belonging to Rue, but nothing stood out to him. It wasn’t until the third lap that he discovered something unusual. Some old ruins stood in the forest, practically buried under moss and creeping vines. It was all solid stone, strewn about with no discernable rhyme or reason. Tower-made for sure, he thought. If it had been a human settlement reclaimed after its inhabitants had been slaughtered, it would have looked completely different.

  Either way, Rue had clearly gone inside. There were signs of her footsteps everywhere in the form of scuffed moss, bent grass, and even a few lengths of severed vines where they’d been blocking the entrance into the ruins.

  Ruins were extremely dangerous. Oftentimes, they were populated by more intelligent monsters, ones who would form into tribes and do things like set traps. That also made them an excellent spot to find tower-forged soulprints and magic items, but they were almost never worth the risk when stumbled across in the wilds. Climbers who went into ruins unprepared had a tendency not to come back out.

  “Fuck,” Sorin muttered.