Three more times in the next ten minutes, Sorin caught another of the gray-furred monkeys trying to beguile him with illusions. The spears were real, but their trajectory was masked to prevent anyone from tracing them back to their source. He didn’t have a good answer for why they were visible at all except to guess it was some limitation of the monsters’ abilities, possibly tied into things in motion being harder to influence.

  Without the monsters hiding Rue’s passage, it became much, much easier to track her down. It seemed like she was running blindly, possibly trusting in her ability to feel anima to help her navigate. It would be disorienting, but Sorin thought it was technically possible.

  Eventually, they found a dead monster lying on the ground in the middle of an intersection. It had obviously been slashed open by a thin blade and had quickly bled out. “This tells us something,” Nemari said as they gathered around it. “I just wish I knew what.”

  “It confirms that Rue’s still alive. This is her work. I would also say it’s a safe bet that she’s lost in here somewhere but hasn’t been captured. If we keep going, we can catch up to her.”

  “Then let’s not stand around wasting time,” Odric groused. “Which way?”

  Sorin swept himself to confirm the lack of interfering anima in his body, then looked around and pointed to the left. “This way. She’s definitely lost, but she seems to be trying to find the outside edge of the ruin.”

  Her course was erratic, but that could be chalked up to having to navigate by feeling out anima instead of her eyes. He could imagine how easy it would be to make a mistake doing something like that, especially if she was fighting for her life at the same time.

  A screeching cry of pain came from ahead of them, out of sight and around a corner. It definitely wasn’t Rue’s voice, which meant it was probably one of those monkey-shaped mind fucking monsters. Odric reflexively started running in that direction, only to stop when Sorin’s hand clamped down on his arm.

  “Wait for me to clear the traps,” he ordered.

  Odric gave him a pained look but nodded in agreement. “Hurry.”

  Whether they got lucky with the number of traps on that street, or he missed them and they got lucky not to stumble into anything, the team made it to the fight in record time. Unfortunately, they couldn’t actually see much of anything. Rue flickered around, popping in and out of existence as the monsters tried to isolate her from the rest of the group. They were completely invisible to Sorin, but by then, Odric and Nemari knew the drill.

  He briefly cleared the illusion away, spotted three of the damn monsters working in conjunction, and promptly launched ice blades at all of them. One took a clean hit and died almost immediately, but the other two broke away and fled the fight. Their magic gone, Sorin was finally able to get a good look at Rue.

  She was bloodied and scraped up, though it looked to be more from falling or tripping over things she couldn’t see than any injuries from the fight. There were a few long, shallow slices on her—those were undoubtedly spear wounds. But overall, she was in remarkably good shape.

  “God damn am I glad to see you guys again,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve been wandering around in circles for half an hour. I keep sensing anima sources that my eyes can’t see.”

  “Some sort of monster with the ability to confuse you with illusions. You probably got too close to their hunting ground, and they started pulling you in, only to fail against your anima sensing soulprint,” Sorin said.

  While he and Nemari caught Rue up on what he’d figured out, Odric started healing up her injuries. None of them were serious, but there were a lot, so it took a few minutes to get her back into top shape. Sorin continued to check his soulspace regularly for any illusions, so quick at the process now that it barely took a second.

  “Right,” he said, looking around. “I think we’re ready to get the hell out of this place.”

  “Leave?” Rue gaped at him. “Why would we do that? Illusions are basically all these monsters can do, and those don’t work on me. You can see through them, too. They’re easy to kill once you figure out how to run them down, and getting anima is what we came for. Plus, we’re in a ruin. Who knows what kind of tower-forged treasures are hidden away here?”

  That’s… actually not a bad point, but these enemies are a bad matchup for us. Nemari can’t do shit. Odric, well, he wasn’t going to do much of anything regardless. And Nemari did get plenty of anima from those bark elementals, so we were going to need to catch up anyway. Huh…

  “Are you insane?” Nemari demanded. “This place is a death trap. We’ve spent more time trying not to spring bolt throwers and stumble into hidden pits than we have actually exploring or fighting.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “We already have a schedule, anyway,” Odric added.

  “Well, here’s the thing,” Sorin said. “That part about tower-forged treasure? She’s not wrong. It’s dangerous, but that’s what being a climber is all about. Everything we do is a risk. Plus, if we can get an illusion-based soulprint, that’ll go for a lot of money, way more than anything else.”

  “Oh, uh… about that.”

  Why do you look so guilty, Rue? What did you do?

  “In my defense,” the girl began, “I could feel the soulprint forming, but it was like… inside the thing’s head. I didn’t think I’d be able to get it out intact, and I kind of had other things to worry about…”

  “I’m surprised you had room for the soulprint,” Sorin said. “It’s got to be E-ranked.”

  “It is,” Rue confirmed. “And it was close, but I managed to fit it in.”

  “What does it do?” Nemari asked.

  “Let’s me… It’s weird to describe. I can sort of make things invisible, but they have to be still. It’s more like I make a spot invisible, so you can’t see anything inside that. But if you move, it breaks the invisibility? It’s called Bend Light.”

  “Good for scouting,” Sorin said. “You keep going this way, and you’ll be a hell of an assassin one day.”

  Rue gave him a wicked grin. “I know.”

  She might have been pleased, but Odric decidedly wasn’t. “That’s not the kind of build you should be trying to achieve,” he said. “We’re better people than that.”

  God save me from idealists. Is it not obvious to you that your sister is into some shit that she’s not telling you about? Do you know her at all?

  Rue was vicious, power hungry, and greedy. Sorin didn’t have a problem with that, not unless she tried to stab him in the back, but he was starting to think Odric was completely oblivious to his sister’s personality. The big man had some huge blinders on when it came to his little sister, but Sorin didn’t think Nemari had missed the signs. The look of exasperation on her face was enough of a giveaway there.

  “That’s a conversation for later,” Sorin said. “Right now, the decision is to go or stay. This is a ruin. There will be tower-forged loot here. It’ll probably be better than anything we’re likely to find anywhere else on this floor. But these monsters are difficult to fight. It won’t be easy, and we’ll be relying heavily on Rue’s abilities to prevent an ambush.”

  “We should leave while we can,” Odric said immediately.

  “I agree,” Nemari added.

  “Stay, kill things, get loot,” Rue said.

  All three of them turned to Sorin. “Normally, I’d say we should bail. It’s a high risk, high reward scenario, and those are never a good idea. You can beat the odds a hundred times, but you can only lose once. That having been said, I think there’s something you’ve failed to consider. We might not actually be able to get away.”

  “What? Why not?” Nemari appeared startled by the idea. “What’s stopping us from just leaving?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s a reason this place wasn’t listed in the archives. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who’s come close has probably been killed. This place wasn’t even listed in the Union’s archives. That suggests to me that there’s more going on than just some monkeys capable of spinning out illusions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something the tower itself is enforcing, probably. The monkeys might be dragging anyone who sees the ruin inside, but I’m betting it’s not them keeping us from leaving.”

  “Shit,” Nemari swore. “Did you know about this before we walked through that archway?”

  “Know about it? No. I suspected something was going on. There’s always some weird tower bullshit when it comes to ruins. I couldn’t begin to tell you what it is in this case. Either way, my vote is that we proceed with all due caution to the center of these ruins, murder the absolute shit out of anything that gets in our way, and take whatever the tower has left behind for us. That’s the only surefire way to get free.”

  “Wait, so you’re saying you knew there was a good chance we’d be trapped in here, and you still came in to rescue Rue anyway?” Odric asked. “Thank you.”

  You’re reading too much into it, big guy. I didn’t know we’d be stuck in here. Hell, we might not be, but there’s definitely something going on, and this is the kind of bullshit I like to stamp out when I find it. It shouldn’t even be on Floor 1. These baby climbers aren’t in any way prepared for something this challenging.

  “On the other hand, it would have been nice to fucking know before you led us in here,” Nemari said scathingly. “Not that I would have chosen differently, but I don’t like not having a choice in the first place.”

  “I really don’t have time to teach you everything I know,” Sorin said. “You’ve made it pretty clear at this point that you don’t trust me and don’t much want to keep working with me, so why would I go out of my way to try to educate you on proper climbing?”

  The others just stared at him, slack-jawed, but Sorin was tired of trying to save Nemari from herself. She’d made her decisions and only backed down when no one else supported her. Sorin had hoped to get through this week, expand his soulspace to rank 2 and round out his kit, and then never see the woman again.

  “Well then, if that’s how you feel,” Nemari said coldly, “then let’s get this over with so we can go our separate ways.”

  “Maybe this is a discussion better left for after we escape with our lives,” Odric said.

  “I’d have preferred to have it after we killed the floor guardian, but I don’t think that’s an option anymore.”

  “We’ll try to leave the ruin first,” Nemari declared, ignoring the two men. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll figure out what we need to do to break the tower’s hold on us.”

  It won’t, Sorin silently thought to himself, but he didn’t argue. He let Nemari lead them back south toward the outer wall, silently exchanging a glance with Rue as they walked. She doesn’t think it’s going to work either. Or maybe she just hopes it won’t.

  It only took them ten minutes to reach the outer wall, but when they tried to follow it back to the archway they’d come in through, it was nowhere to be found. “Is it one of the monsters using illusions to hide it?” Nemari asked aloud.

  “Not that I can tell,” Sorin replied, which got him a suspicious look in return. He just sighed and gestured to Rue.

  “I can kind of feel when light is being bent by the monsters, too,” she explained. “Not enough to see through the illusions, but I know when there is one.”

  “So why isn’t there an exit?”

  “I already told you why. It’s a tower-forged ruin. It’s not going to let us out until we earn it.”