Sorin’s rest was interrupted by Odric approaching him. Even with his eyes closed and laying down inside the small tent they’d put up, Blind Sense made it impossible to miss the movement. So, by the time Odric actually stuck one hand through the flap and pulled it aside to let the light in, Sorin was already sitting up.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, trying not to move too suddenly. Burns lacked the elasticity of normal skin, and he had to be very aware of his movements to avoid tearing. At the rate he was going, he’d probably need another week to fully heal, and the scars would be a hindrance until he could manage to remove them.

  Just my luck to get a brand new body in peak physical condition, only to torch it wrestling with a human bonfire.

  “I’m worried about Rue,” Odric said. “She’d be a lot safer if we were moving together.”

  While Sorin was happy to let Rue wander up and down the trails leading to the portal hub, Odric was decidedly less enthused by the idea. That was a fair stance to take, considering that monsters were literally everywhere. Rue was young and relatively inexperienced, and under normal circumstances, Sorin would not have wanted her roaming the floor by herself.

  The problem was that Odric was a bit slower than either Sorin or Rue. He also tended to get winded a lot faster. He and Nemari had set the pace for their group, with Sorin acting as a scout who circled around everyone else looking for trouble. The difference was that while Odric might be upset if Sorin got himself killed in an ambush by some monsters, he would be devastated if it happened to Rue.

  “I’ll be alright alone if you want to go with her next time she circles through,” Sorin offered.

  “I don’t think she’ll listen, and I just can’t keep up with her.”

  “And you want me to do… what?”

  “If you give the order for us to look together, she might actually agree to it,” Odric said.

  Sorin started to laugh, then cut off with a wince as pain flared up and down his sides. “Okay, I guess that might work. Maybe. I’m not promising anything. Come get me next time she circles back to camp, and I’ll talk to her.”

  “Thanks. I just… I want her to be as safe as possible. I get that it’s a dangerous lifestyle, but I’m worried about the number of unnecessary risks she takes.”

  Well, you already know her judgment is flawed, or we wouldn’t be out here in this situation in the first place, Sorin thought. Voicing that particular thought would do nothing but cause hard feelings, no matter how true it might be, so instead he said, “I understand. She’s young and inexperienced. We should be doing our best to help her learn in an environment where we can watch over her.”

  “Exactly!” Odric said, nodding along.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Sorin promised again.

  How’d I end up in charge of this debacle? Oh, right, the woman who was supposed to be running the show vanished, then showed back up as a prisoner to her own family. Just my luck.

  This kind of crap never happened with his old team, which Sorin knew was a massively unfair comparison. He’d worked with those people for over a decade; they were his family, and any one of them would give their lives if needed to save the others. More than that, they were all the most competent climbers his generation had produced and better than anything from the previous few, too.

  There’d been a single up-and-coming climber that had made it all the way to Floor 50 by the time he was thirty, which was an achievement in and of itself, but Sorin had looked into the man, he’d been disappointed to find out how much other people had been propping up the climb. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with connections and money, but it did tell Sorin that the meteoric rise was due to an unlimited bank account, being carried by other, more experienced climbers, and by following a path someone else had already blazed for him.

  In short, that guy was not going to be the next person to make it to the top, not like Sorin’s team had done. Once he’d realized that, he’d completely lost interest in the new climber. He couldn’t even remember the man’s name, these days. The guy was destined to burn out as soon as he reached the point where others couldn’t drag him along behind them. And he’d been the best prospect of Sorin’s lifetime.

  In all fairness to his new team, they were nothing like that climber. Even Nemari, who actually had family connections to lean on, had been struggling to make it on her own. They’d probably given her a leg up in terms of knowledge about fire-based builds, but as far as Sorin was concerned, that was more of a detriment than anything. The fact that the old man running her whole family was only rank 7 was proof enough that they hadn’t come up with a strong build.

  Rue returned about an hour later, prompting Sorin to drag himself out of his bedroll. “Any luck?” he asked as he gingerly lowered himself down onto the log they’d set their camp around, making sure to claim the side farthest away from the firepit. The last thing he wanted was the heat to aggravate his burns.

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  She flopped down on the other side of the log. “Not a sign of her anywhere. Maybe it’s just that she hasn’t made it this far yet, but…”

  “But you’re worried,” he finished for her.

  “Exactly. What if she ran into something she couldn’t handle? What if her family caught up with her? What if she just decided not to come find us? I mean, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go on a multi-day hike out into an equivalent-ranked floor solo.”

  And yet that’s basically what you’re doing.

  “It’s dangerous,” he said. “The problem is we don’t have a closer meeting place. You want to go deeper on your next lap?”

  Rue bit her lip. “Maybe I should.”

  “Take your brother with you. Stay out longer, but be safer doing it. Besides, if she’s injured, having Odric with you will be a good thing.”

  “That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That’s a good idea.” Rue paused, stricken by a realization. “But what about you? Are you up for travel?”

  “Not if I don’t have to,” Sorin said. “But I’ll be fine on my own for a day. We haven’t been attacked once yet, and it’s not like I can’t defend myself if that changes.”

  “It kind of is like that,” Rue told him.

  Sorin chuckled. “Just because I’m not fully healed up doesn’t mean I’m defenseless. Trust me, I could still knock your scrawny ass in the dirt if I have to.”

  “Please. You wouldn’t even see my sword coming for you.”

  “I hate to ruin your little fantasy, but I can see your ‘invisible’ swords, Rue.”

  “What? Since when?!”

  “Since pretty much always. I merged Acuity and Tremor Sense together back in the ruin, remember?”

  “But I thought—”

  “Just because it’s invisible doesn’t mean you aren’t moving it,” Sorin explained. “Adding Echo Trace just made it even easier to keep track of.”

  “Son of a… You’ve got to teach me how to do that with soulprints.”

  “You’ll pick it up someday. It’s not an easy technique to pull off.”

  “Try me,” she challenged.

  “If you’re going to explain it, I’d like to sit in,” Odric said. He’d been on the other side of the camp, repacking a bag that used to have their food supplies in it until they’d eaten it all and pretending he wasn’t eavesdropping on the conversation.

  “Alright,” Sorin said. “The really short version is that you’re taking bits of the anima pattern from the two donor soulprints and mixing them together. It’s very complicated and demanding, and it requires a ton of knowledge of patterns. You can’t just mix two random things together since they might not have all the pieces you need, and even if you’re successful, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you won’t get what you’re looking for.

  “It’s also impossible to take a single soulprint and just modify it. They need anima from the tower, which we generally accumulate from monsters when we kill them, and that just causes them to grow when they become full and rank up. Trying to use your own anima won’t work. At best, you can make temporary pieces, but when the patch job fades—which it will almost immediately—you’re left with a useless, broken soulprint you need to extract somehow.”

  “But we can guide that growth,” Rue pointed out. “You showed how for when I push Aura Sense up another rank.”

  “Yes, but it’s not the same process at all. If we can find another copy of Vigorous Constitution or something similar, I’ll help you through combining them once they’re ready,” Sorin said.

  “Are you just having me copy your build now?”

  “If it’s not broken…”

  Having individual talents was fine, but everybody needed survivability, and in Sorin’s opinion, any climber who wasn’t dedicating their early builds to healing needed to leave room for passive regeneration. After that came sensory utility, then environmental resistances, and only then, after the ability to take a hit, see it coming, and be able to survive underwater or in a volcano or wherever else, was it time to invest in firepower.

  Of course, novice climbers did it all backward. Firepower was the only thing they were interested in. Nemari was a perfect and literal example of the type, and while Rue put her ability to sense monster auras to good use, she wouldn’t have gone that route if not for the Black Hellions forcing it on her. Odric alone had made the somewhat unusual choice to specialize in healing, and even in his case, it had been a decision that had been forced on him in a round-about manner.

  Some things never change.

  “I for one appreciate that approach,” Odric said. “Floor 2 has been rough on the whole team. I really wasn’t ready for how much harder it’s been than Floor 1. We crushed that, except for that ruin.”

  In truth, Sorin was a little annoyed at how many times they’d stumbled over the last few days. Even discounting the fact that his latest round of injuries was due to tangling with other climbers, Rue had been taken out of commission in their very first fight, and Sorin would have been struggling after tussling with that ogre.

  Then again, that ogre did not belong on Floor 2. Why is the red tower so much harder than the blue was?

  No one he’d spoken with seemed to think any of the monsters they’d encountered were unusual for the floor, which left Sorin with no choice but to think the difficulty was just higher here for some reason. The tower threw tougher monsters at climbers earlier and in greater numbers. It could be a recipe for lucrative anima gains, but only if he could train his team to not only survive, but thrive under the pressure.

  As it currently stood, they were not thriving. More than half of their days on Floor 2 had been downtime while one or more people recovered from debilitating injuries. Something had to change, or they’d get bogged down in a never-ending cycle of slowly grinding out anima and burning their profits to give themselves time to recover between fights.

  The explanation lasted a few more minutes, but eventually Sorin cut them off from asking more questions. He used Nemari’s absence as his reasoning and promised to resume the lecture once the whole team was back together. That prompted Rue to stand up and stretch, then the siblings left on the next lap around the countryside together.

  Sorin wanted to go lay back down, but he suspected if there was ever a time for the gremlins to venture down the cliffs, it was when he was alone. Instead of retreating to his tent, he drew his sword and stabbed it into the ground in front of the log where it would be within easy reach if he needed it. Then he settled back to wait for the inevitable ambush.