Even if he’d wanted to explain why he was ranking up without defeating a floor’s portal guardian, he didn’t know how. He had theories, and of course it had something to do with waking up in the red tower in a de-aged body. But since he had no explanation for that, he certainly couldn’t elaborate on the other questions that initial event had spawned.

  “This is just a theory,” he said slowly. “I know you all think I’m lying because it’s supposed to be impossible. Believe me, if I wasn’t living it, I’d think I was lying, too. But I really was a higher rank. I woke up in a gutter on Floor 0, and I still don’t have a clue how I ended up there. I lost all my ranks, all my soulprints… Everything, really.”

  “So, what, you think you’re growing to higher ranks like this because it’s not really a higher rank, it’s just regaining lost ground?” Rue asked.

  “It doesn’t make sense, right? I should just have a big, empty soulspace waiting for me to stuff it full of soulprints if I somehow lost all of mine without it killing me. I don’t have the answers. I’m just trying to do the best I can with the situation until I figure things out.”

  And all of that is technically true, if woefully incomplete. It’s hard enough to believe as it is without adding a whole other tower and a new body that’s in my mid-twenties instead of mid-fifties.

  “Yeah, I’m not buying it,” Rue said. “You’re hiding something, probably a whole bunch of somethings. Even if this part is true, and I don’t believe that for a second, then you’re leaving out a lot of context.”

  “Okay,” Sorin said, a twinge of pain in his voice as he shifted more of his weight off his bad knee. “What’s your explanation then?”

  “Personally? I think you’re completely full of shit. I think you actually are a rank 20 or whatever, that you’re sandbagging what you can do, refusing to use your soulprints, and pretending to be a low rank. I just can’t figure out why you’d bother. But with your aura control, you could probably pull it off.”

  There were soulprints that could help a climber disguise their true rank, more as a side effect of their general stealth capabilities than any sort of targeted outcome. Sorin didn’t have any, of course, not anymore.

  “With all the trouble we’re collectively in right now, you really think I’d do that?” Sorin asked. “Hell, look at my knee. I can barely hobble around. You think I’d have let an ogre we found on Floor 2 cripple me if I was really rank 20? You think it could actually even hurt me if that were the case?”

  “Oh, right,” Odric said. “Let me get a look at that.”

  “My ribs could use some attention, too.”

  Rue snorted. “You and me both.”

  “We’ll take a break after we finish clearing the fortress out,” Sorin told her. “Hopefully, this’ll be the only ogre. Although…”

  Sorin shuffled over to it, causing Odric to huff in annoyance as he chased after. “Hold still,” he ordered with more authority than he ever exhibited in a normal conversation.

  “Got room for an E-rank in your soulspace?” Sorin asked the healer. “This one would be messy to get out, but I think you’re going to want it.”

  “The stone skin?” Rue asked.

  “Yep. Of course, none of us have the anima reserves to cover our whole bodies non-stop like the ogre did, but for a guy who wants to punch everything to death, it’d form a powerful core soulprint.”

  “Where is it?” Rue asked, eyeing up the body eagerly.

  “Not sure. One of the organs, I think. I know where to cut, just not what’s going to be at the end.”

  Thankfully, the ogre’s death had returned its flesh to normal. Sorin directed Rue on the harvesting process while Odric worked on his knee. Skin sprang apart beneath her knife and blood welled up, thick and dark as it gushed out and rolled down the ogre’s stomach.

  “Dig a little deeper than that,” Sorin instructed her. “It’s down a ways.”

  Eventually, they revealed the soulprint. It looked like a calcified lump, some sort of tumor or cancer clinging to a slimy organ sac. Revealed to the air, the almost-stone glistened wetly, waiting for Odric to reach in and claim it. The big man hesitated for a moment, mumbled “Should have brought more water with us,” and slid his hand into the dead ogre’s abdominal cavity.

  A few seconds later, the process was done, and he was dragging his hand across the ogre’s chest to wipe the gore off it. Sadly, none of the monsters had anything like clothing for him to use, so it was an imperfect job at best. With a grumble, Odric fetched a rag and a spare waterskin to finish cleaning up.

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  “Now that that’s taken care of,” Sorin said, turning to Rue, “Aura Sense?”

  “Completely capped,” Rue confirmed. “But we were talking about something else before you distracted us with shiny new soulprints.”

  “Rue, I promise you, if I had the power to get us out of this mess, I would do it. At best, the Hellions interest is an inconvenience to my own plans, but more realistically, it could be entirely fatal if the wrong people find us before we can get stronger.”

  “Hmm. Yeah.”

  Doesn’t really sound like she believes me, he noted.

  His knee still hurt, but it wouldn’t keep Sorin from walking. Fighting was going to be rougher. Mentally, he started shifting his strategies to use more anima generating ice to kill gremlins with. Any anima he harvested would go into Minor Regeneration. The recent injuries proved that he needed to focus on empowering that as quickly as possible.

  That reminds me, I have two soulprints waiting for me. Plus I want a look at that mosaic now that I’m faux-rank 3.

  “Alright, we’re going to rotate guard so that there’s always two of us with our eyes open. Odric goes first to learn how Stone Skin works, and I’ll go next. Then I’ll walk you through your future upgrade, and you can spend some time poking around your soulspace to make sure you understand everything for when the time comes.”

  * * *

  It ended up taking Odric twenty minutes before he opened his eyes, during which time Sorin and Rue killed a dozen gremlins that wandered into the hall. He expected they’d been attracted by the noise of the fight with the ogre, and Odric going down to examine his new soulprint had probably inspired them to attack with fewer numbers than they otherwise would have.

  It wasn’t that the big man needed to go into his soulspace, but it was easier to understand a new ability from there, and his anima was too precious a resource as their only healer. Any time he’d gotten close to his reserves maxing out, he’d made sure to spend a few minutes working on Rue’s ribs. Now Sorin needed work, too. It was really more than Odric could keep up with on his own, and it served to once again highlight Sorin’s need for actual armor.

  Not that it would have done much good here.

  While Odric worked, Sorin fished the Vigorous Constitution and Echo Trace soulprints out of his bag. Both were F-ranked and easy to absorb. Merging them into the soulprints he already had was the part he needed to go into his soulspace for. That could wait a few minutes for his turn.

  Odric announced his return by turning his whole body gray for a second. The stone grain receded from his skin almost as fast as it appeared, and he gave a little gasp. “That’s intense,” he said, shaking his head. “And expensive. I think I’ve got a handle on it now. It’s a bit strange, like I can almost feel it under my skin, just waiting for me to flex like a new muscle.”

  “Ranking up Aura Sense was surreal, too,” Rue said. “Double the old range, and I can make out a lot more detail, too. I can tell if a monster is using anima, now. I mean, I could already do that, but now I can almost see the strands coming together. It took me a few days to get used to it.”

  “Anima reading is always a useful skill. Soulprints can be nasty surprises to deal with in the middle of a fight,” Sorin agreed. “Are you sensing any monsters around us?”

  “Nothing.” Rue glanced around, her eyes lingering on the fresh bodies. “Nothing that’s still alive, anyway.”

  “My turn then,” Sorin said.

  And then, finally, Sorin got to look at the mosaic. The edges had filled out more, now showing other, smaller doors, as if seen in the distance. Trails of color led from the doors to each of the shadows that he thought represented the rest of his team. Shit, that seems pretty obvious. We all went through our own doors. I’d need to find a way over to the yellow tower to find… That’s probably Imuran going through that one, and Nhiv went to the green.

  The other figures were still too indistinct for him to tell which was which. It might be Zellick linked to the orange tower, or it might be Meto. The silhouettes were too similar to say. Their team only had five people, despite constant complaints from Zellick to find a sixth. Nobody else had ever been able to keep up with them, and they’d all agreed it was better to go in one short than to babysit someone who couldn’t climb at their level.

  And now I know I’m alone here. Shit. I bet Meto’s already figured out what happened and is working on a way to reverse it. Maybe they’ll come save my sorry ass before I even make it back up to the top.

  He turned his attention to his new soulprints. The plan was to attach Vigorous Constitution to Warrior’s Vigilance, but that had been before the ogre had tagged him. Now he was worried that merging the soulprint in when it didn’t have a lick of its own anima would weaken the pain-dampening effect of his more powerful soulprint.

  Vigorous Constitution would still function on its own, so for the moment, he decided to hold off. It wasn’t like he was in any rush, or that it would take long to fill a tiny F-ranked soulprint at the rate they were going. Besides, now that he was looking at it, he wondered if Minor Regeneration wouldn’t be a better partner for the new soulprint, anyway. He could practically see what they’d merge into, and he was betting it’d speed up his healing immensely.

  Echo Trace probably would have been better off in Rue’s care, but Sorin had his own build to work on, and he’d claimed that particular soulprint on a solo outing, so he was keeping it. Besides, he’d already studied what it could do and was ready to immediately smash it into Blind Sense. The two soulprints slotted together like they were made for each other, the anima easily balancing between them.

  Blind Sense would be a bit weaker temporarily, but it was worth it for the extra utility. Now, instead of cutting off in a sharp line at a specific radius, it tapered off with a gentle gradient that more than doubled the range. Everything was a bit less distinct for the moment—a minor setback that he’d correct as soon as he got his healing soulprints working together.

  Never enough anima for what you want to do, he reflected. It’s just as true at rank 100 as it is at rank 3.

  With a final glance down at the mosaic, his eyes lingering on the shadows of his friends heading for their own doors and on the two doors that none of them had taken, he pulled himself free of his soulspace and returned to the world. Rue stood in front of him, her sword buried up to the hilt in a gremlin’s chest cavity.

  “Oh, good, you’re back,” she said. “These things are persistent. I could use a bit of help.”