With Sorin back on his feet, the three of them were easily able to overcome the gremlin swarm threatening them. He worked with Rue to cut down the monsters while Odric hung back and recovered his spent anima.

  Navigation through the dark fortress was much easier now that Echo Trace had been merged into Blind Sense. Simply walking around gave Sorin a sense of the layout of the room, though the quieter he was, the less feedback he got. That was one of those weird quirks of low ranked soulprints, though, and he was confident it would vanish as he built the soulprint up.

  Simultaneously, combat became slightly harder. Blind Sense had given him crisp, well-defined edges before, but now things were a bit blurrier. The extra range didn’t do anything to compensate for that when a gremlin was only a few feet away, but Sorin had spent years fighting with just his eyes and ears to guide him. He could do it again now.

  His team slaughtered gremlins by the dozens as they worked their way through the fortress. Sorin chose to pour most of his gains into Vigorous Constitution and Minor Regeneration in preparation for joining them together, and also because his knee pulsed with a constant ache. Every step he took sent a new jolt through him, never mind the rigors of combat itself.

  With the Black Hellions showing far too much interest in the team, though, he wasn’t about to take it easy. More than once, Sorin caught Odric watching him closely, and he knew the big man was gauging how much damage Sorin was doing to himself by not slowing down, but neither of them mentioned it.

  After they finished their first sweep of the fortress, they slowed down for a break. None of them were even close to full strength, and some time to rest, recover, and reassess was sorely needed. They set up in a defensible storeroom that still had all four walls intact; just because they hadn’t found anymore gremlins didn’t mean there weren’t any or that the tower wouldn’t make more.

  “Alright, let’s go over how we’re doing. Rue?” Sorin prompted.

  “Ribs still hurt. Other than that, I just need a break and a snack.”

  “I can’t recover anima fast enough to keep up with the injuries you two have,” Odric said. “And yeah, rest and food is about the only cure for it.”

  “And I just need a day or two off my knee to fix it completely, or less with Odric’s help. So really, we’re not doing too bad, nothing a bit of healing and a day off wouldn’t fix. I’d like to get a bit farther from the portal hub before we take any long breaks, though.”

  “I thought the fortress was a good spot for a break,” Rue said.

  “Yes and no. This room is defensible, but we’re practically guaranteed to be attacked here. It won’t be frequent enough for farming purposes, but it’ll still happen so often that we can’t ever let our guard down. That means it’s fine for taking a short break, but not a great place to set up camp unless we have to. Besides, it wasn’t just gremlins we encountered here. Imagine fighting another ogre in such a cramped location.”

  They’d only found the one ogre, which Sorin suspected probably meant it had wandered in from outside the fortress. Since there might be more of them beyond the walls, though hopefully not as powerful as the one they’d already fought, that also made the prospect of camping outside the fortress less than appealing.

  The truth was that the loss of Nemari was going to be felt most harshly when they all had to take longer watches or during long fights that dragged on because the team’s offensive capabilities were greatly diminished. It would have been nice to have her to help put down the ogre, but they hardly noticed the lack of her flame spells fighting the gremlins.

  “There’s not much we can do about it. This is the reality of life outside Floor 0,” Sorin told them. “Normally, we’d recruit a few people to help lighten the burden, but seeing as to how we’re on a self-imposed exile, bringing in contractors who might then be coerced into revealing our locations and goals to the Black Hellions is counterproductive. We’ll try to find a defensible spot outside the fortress where it’s less likely we’ll be attacked.”

  “And then what?” Rue asked.

  “Stick to it for a day or two while we get healed up. I doubt there will be even a quarter as many gremlins in this place tomorrow, so it should be a light day of work for us. Once we’re all fully healed, we’ll head deeper into the floor.”

  They spent an hour resting. Sorin produced a cloth sack that he generated a chunk of ice to fill, shaped it to sit on his knee, and let out a small sigh of relief as the swelling started to drop. Being injured was nothing new to him, but it had been decades since he’d been forced to deal with the aftermath of a fight once it was over. Normally, his wounds healed within moments. Even lost limbs regrew in a minute or two at the level he was used to operating at.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He suffered in silence, more or less, and waited for the weak F-ranked soulprint to patch him up. Sadly, but inevitably, the monsters found them. Sorin sensed the first one coming well before it actually appeared in the doorway to the storage room his team had claimed, and by the time it showed its face, he was more than ready to put an ice blade into it.

  “Looks like our break’s over,” he said.

  * * *

  “Gremlins seem kind of… bad, for farming,” Rue pointed out at the end of their second day.

  “They are,” Sorin agreed. “Well, doing it like this is, at least. If we left for a week or two, it would be worth the time to do a lap around the fortress just for the anima, but they don’t seem to have much going for them in the way of soulprints.”

  They were only still in the fortress to finish healing up. Gremlin hunting was a way to keep active with low intensity work that wasn’t likely to cause them any trouble. There had been no more ogres, either inside the fortress or out where they’d camped three miles north of it, and as Odric and Rue had better learned to fight the little menaces, injuries dropped down to nothing.

  “Tomorrow, I think we can move on,” Sorin said after thinking about it for a bit. “One last healing session when we get up, then an hour or so to let Odric recover. After that, we’ll keep going north and west to our next stop. That’s where we’ll farm for soulprints and a few other materials that should sell well.”

  “Given any more thought to how exactly we’re going to sell it, though?” Rue asked.

  Their conversation was interrupted by a trio of gremlins clinging to the ceiling and covered in shadows. Normally, gremlins weren’t bold enough to attack in low numbers, but in this case, they had only a few seconds window to ambush their prey as the three humans walked beneath them.

  Sorin and Rue both killed the gremlins leaping down on them with a single thrust of their swords. The one about to fall on Odric had slightly better luck in that it actually made contact with him for a split-second before an ice blade cut through its face. Odric reacted instantly, flinging the small, light monster into a wall. It struck with a wet, meaty impact, fell to the floor, and lay still.

  “You guys could have warned me,” Odric said.

  “That would have tipped them off that we were aware of their ambush,” Sorin told him.

  Rue just nodded along and tried to hide a smile while her brother scowled back at her.

  “Anyway,” Sorin said, kicking a dead gremlin that was blocking the door to one side, “I actually do have some thoughts on resupplying. The basic plan is to use drop points. That way, we only have to find one person we can trust rather than disguise ourselves and hope that no one recognizes us. I’m hoping you two have some ideas on who that person might be.”

  “Nemari would have known,” Odric said. “Her whole family could have helped.”

  “If she wasn’t a traitor,” Rue ground out. “Who just runs out on their friends like that? Oh no, things got a little dangerous, better aban—”

  “Rue,” Odric said softly, interrupting her with a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry that you’re hurting, but this is not the time or place to let it out. Remember where we are and what we’re doing.”

  “Sorry. Right. You’re right.”

  Sorin watched the exchange silently. To his eyes, they were both hurting, just expressing it in different ways. Odric was more quiet and subdued than usual, his grief internalized. Rue was louder, vehement, and maybe a bit unstable. To Sorin, it mostly just served to remind him how young Rue was.

  She’s letting her emotions control her despite the fact that, less than a minute ago, we were attacked by monsters that would happily have killed and eaten us, hopefully in that order.

  That was a problem, but not one Sorin felt he was equipped to solve. Some climbers burnt out and retired. Some got themselves and their teams killed when they stopped being smart. Sorin could recognize when someone was diving into that second category, and while he didn’t think Rue was there yet, it was clear what direction she was heading. If she lived long enough to process things, she’d probably be fine, but until then, she was quickly turning into a liability.

  I wish Meto was here. He always knew how to handle this kind of stuff.

  It was probably just his soulspace mosaic expanding, but his old team had been on his mind a lot over the last day. All of them were self-sufficient and capable. No doubt they were all alive and thriving, just like him. But he still worried. And he still missed them.

  I’m as bad as the teenager, he thought to himself with a small, soft smile. Getting lost reminiscing when I should be focused.

  There weren’t any gremlins within Blind Sense’s radius, anyway, but that wasn’t the point. While it was unlikely any other type of monster was in the fortress ruins, and it was even more unlikely that if there was, it was capable of hiding from Blind Sense, the possibility still existed. A few lousy weeks in the playground floors at the bottom of the tower were already dulling his edge.

  Dismissing his own mental woes, he refocused on hunting. Rue and Odric could wallow in their misery over the sting of casual betrayal if they wanted, but Sorin had felt it too many times to be affected now. He’d keep them safe for the moment, and hopefully they’d grow past this kind of weakness before it got them killed.

  That, or they’ll retire. I suppose that’s not an option right now, not with a powerful organization of criminal climbers so interested in us.

  “Nemari’s withdrawal from the party notwithstanding, I’m still hoping the two of you have a trusty contact or two,” Sorin said.

  “Maybe a regular at the Meat Grinder,” Odric suggested.

  Rue snickered. “Bradford is too old and too strong to let the Hellions bully him. He’s the whole reason they have to get spies in there. Their normal members get stopped at the door.”

  “The owner,” Sorin said. “Huh… Yeah, that might just work. If he’s hostile toward the Hellions, he might help us just to spite them.”

  “Can you get to him without being seen?” Rue asked.

  “With Liminal Gateway? Sure. We just need to get somewhere where I feel comfortable leaving you two alone, but that’s a problem for next week. We don’t have anything worth justifying the trip back yet.”

  That was true for the moment, but if what Sorin had read was to be believed, their next target was an area rich in anima with plenty to harvest for up-and-coming crafters to practice their soulprint-backed skills on.

  They just needed to get there and get to work, first.