They got the story out of Sorin, though it was a confused, disjointed jumble that Rue could only partially tease into a coherent whole. The salient parts were that Nemari had been held captive by her own family and that Sorin had fought off not one, but three climbers, all a higher rank than him. That included Nemari’s uncle, who was the patriarch of her family.

  It’s kind of funny. A month ago, rank 7 seemed so far out of reach. Now it just feels like a matter of time, a few months maybe, before I can match that.

  For the moment, however, Od was hard at work on Sorin’s concussion. He was already complaining about how much anima Pain Suppression was using just to keep Sorin conscious—they didn’t want him falling asleep until Od had finished healing the head wound—and how many days it would take to heal up just the burns. The arm facing backward was an entirely different story.

  Od had confessed that he wasn’t sure he could actually heal that, but Sorin had just waved off his concern and mumbled something about taking care of it himself. Rue couldn’t begin to figure out how that was going to work, but Sorin had pulled enough outlandish bullshit out of his pocket that she wasn’t going to start second-guessing him now.

  Eventually, they got to the time-sensitive part of the story. Nemari had escaped with only vague instructions on where to find them, so it was up to the team to get back through the fortress and down the cliff so they could meet her. The plan seemed half-baked to Rue, but she suspected the missing element was that Sorin could have much more easily met Nemari near the portal hub using Liminal Gateway if he hadn’t gotten the shit beaten out of him fighting a trio of climbers all stronger than he was.

  “Look, this is just too much damage to take care of in one day,” Od said, finally giving up. “I’m sorry, but once I let go of Pain Suppression, you’re going to be suffering. And I can’t hold that much longer.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve had worse. I’ll heal,” Sorin said, his voice sounding a lot clearer after half an hour’s treatment. He held up his hand, still backward. “Just help me get this rotated the right way and splinted.”

  Gruesome as that was, Sorin didn’t let out so much as a murmur of complaint. Even when Od pulled his anima back out and let the pain in, all Sorin did was grimace slightly, the same expression Rue might make if she stepped in some water in just her socks. He puts on a tough front, but he’s going to be absolutely useless in a fight.

  “Let’s dole out the armor, and we can get going,” Sorin said, like he wasn’t basically crippled. He nudged a large bag with his foot, which Rue opened to find a jumble of hard leather plates and straps.

  They got it all sorted out into two front and back plates, helped each other get them on, and cinched them down. At the bottom of the pack was another scrap of leather the size of her palm with distinctive red veins. She held it up and asked, “What’s this?”

  “Oh, oops. Sorry. I’m still a bit out of it. That’s a Minor Regeneration soulprint for you. F-ranked, so don’t expect miracles from it, but it should ease some of Odric’s burden.”

  A few days ago, she might have argued about the necessity of it, but after getting her ribs pulverized as an introduction to injuries Odric wasn’t powerful enough to wipe away with a few seconds of healing, she’d started to come around to the idea. As Sorin had explained, Minor Regeneration increased her natural healing rate by a factor of five, which wouldn’t change the outcome of any single battle, but would certainly increase her staying power in a multi-week hunting trip.

  Thinking long term, though, it was an excellent base. Just growing the soulprint up to rank E or D would provide her with a solid passive healing ability upon which she could eventually layer other soulprints. How exactly that was accomplished, she had no idea, but she trusted Sorin when he said it was possible even at the low ranks with enough practice.

  She took a minute to incorporate the soulprint, then considered the boys. Od was wiped out from healing. Sorin was wiped out from needing to be healed. Neither of them was up for another run through the fortress, especially since it was probably thick with gremlins again by this point. Rue could probably cut her way through on her own, but that was dangerous, not to mention leaving them in the camp meant they were vulnerable to monster attacks at a time they were ill-prepared to defend themselves.

  “Come on then,” she decided. She’d have to babysit both of them and take it slow. Crossing back through the fortress would still be the easy part. She had no idea how they were supposed to even find Nemari once they got back down the trail. They’d figure that out as they went. “On your feet. Let’s get moving while there’s still daylight to see by.”

  * * *

  For taking a beating like this, Sorin would have liked a hefty sum of anima or at least some nice tower-forged gear. Unfortunately, he’d received nothing of the sort. Nemari was hopefully free and making her way toward their location, else it had all been for naught, and that was all the reward they were going to get.

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  Annoyingly, he wasn’t even sure he’d managed to escape without killing Muscles there at the end. If someone came along fast enough to heal him, he’d survive, but otherwise he’d likely bled out in that alleyway. Considering the way her family had been holding her captive, Sorin hoped Nemari would forgive him for any accidental deaths, but it was always hard to tell with new climbers.

  After a few years in the business, people got familiar with death. It became a casual thing. Climbers didn’t make close friends—not easily, at least—because there was every possibility that those friends would be ripped away in the blink of an eye. For someone who’d only been climbing a few weeks, those emotional callouses weren’t there. The first death was always the hardest, especially if it was a family member.

  Sorin wasn’t sure whether Rue or Odric would get to experience that first, but the odds were not in their favor that they’d both survive long-term. One of them was likely to be torn up bad in the next year, and that was the best possible outcome. It was entirely possible that they’d both die in a team wipe, especially since Sorin had no plans to make climbing with them permanent.

  He let Rue lead the way through the fortress ruins, trusting her ability to see monster auras to give them enough warning. Normally, he’d take point, but he could admit that, at the moment, her reaction speed was probably better. Vigorous Constitution was the only reason he was still on his feet, and he actively fed every bit of anima he picked up to the soulprint. It didn’t reduce the amount of pain he was in, but it did make him more easily able to endure it.

  If nothing else, the gremlin population was light. The packs hadn’t had a chance to recover beyond five or six, and with Sorin and Rue both possessing strong perception soulprints, the ugly little creatures couldn’t hide well enough to build up their numbers. It was a relatively uneventful, if painful, run through the fortress.

  It barely took them an hour to get down the trail to the grasslands below. From there, they had a twenty-mile hike if they wanted to make it back to the portal hub. Assuming Nemari met them halfway, it was still hours of walking, and they couldn’t assume that. ‘Go west toward the old fortress’ wasn’t exactly the best of directions.

  “Let’s establish a base camp down here,” Sorin said. “Rather than scour the landscape looking for a single person, we’ll do some scouting for a few miles looking for her coming in.”

  “There’s no way she makes it this far before nightfall,” Rue argued. “She’d be out there all alone.”

  “Yep, she will. That’s still better than the situation she was in,” Sorin agreed. “And I sure wish I could have gone through that portal with her, but I had two other climbers to deal with at the time.”

  They did exactly what Sorin wanted, in the end. He spent most of his time near the base of the trail, just sitting there and snacking on dry trail rations to help Minor Regeneration. The soulprint didn’t strictly need food, but it eased the anima burden slightly if it had more raw material to rebuild his body.

  Odric hovered nearby, occasionally pushing more anima into Sorin’s body. He wasn’t even sure where to focus his efforts, but Sorin insisted that if he was going to work on anything, it should be the arm. That would take the longest to heal on its own, so getting back to one hundred percent depended on Odric’s healing helping it along.

  “I’m telling you, though, this isn’t possible for me to heal properly,” Odric said. “And the way I understand Minor Regeneration, that only speeds up your natural healing. It’s not going to fix all the tearing, at least not properly. Even this splint isn’t really good enough to keep the bones lined up right.”

  “Do you remember when we saw those pillars at the trial grounds, the ones with all the depictions of soulprints’ anima patterns on them?” Sorin asked.

  “Yes?”

  “And I said that we could create magic by replicating those patterns in our soulspaces even though we didn’t have the soulprint.”

  “Yes,” Odric said again, but he frowned as he thought about it. “You also said we needed the space for it, though. You don’t have that much space.”

  “Not yet,” Sorin said. He gave a weak wave with his busted arm. “This is temporary, though. It’s going to suck for the next few weeks, but I’ll push for rank 5 as quickly as possible. As long as I don’t add anything else to my soulspace or let my current soulprints grow, I should be able to form a healing pattern strong enough to fix this.”

  “How… How are you going to actually climb to Floor 5 using a set of soulprints sized for a Rank 2 soulspace?” Odric asked.

  “Very, very carefully.”

  Odric was silent for a few seconds, then he said, “Maybe we could pay a healer to fix it sooner than that?”

  “That would be nice,” Sorin said with a sigh.

  There were problems with that idea, but it sounded wonderful in theory. Nobody liked being in pain, and he was no exception. But the reality of the situation was that it would likely be difficult to find a healer on Floor 0 powerful enough to do what Sorin needed, and even if they could find one, and that person agreed to treat Sorin, there was still the matter of paying for it.

  “I do still need to set up a deal with a fence. I didn’t get that far before running into trouble. Maybe I’ll see if Bradford has a lead on a good healer while I’m down there,” Sorin said, knowing full well that he’d bankrupt the team trying to pay for it.

  It seemed to be what Odric wanted to hear, though, as the big man just smiled and agreed. Rue came back a minute later, soaking wet as she stalked into their camp. Without a word, she set about rooting through one of the packs for a steel pot and the tripod to set it over the small fire they’d started.

  “No luck?” Odric asked.

  “Slipped on a damn river rock about a mile east of here,” she spat out. “Fucking fish tried to eat me while I was clawing my way back out. I want a cup of tea and something hot to eat, and I don’t want to discuss anything else for the next hour.”

  And, because Sorin considered himself to be a relatively smart man, they did exactly that.