“Monsters can be really predictable,” Sorin lamented as he put an ice blade through a gremlin’s skull.

  He wasn’t in any real danger, mostly because the gremlins were grossly underestimating him. Rather than let their numbers build up to an overwhelming amount, they kept attacking him in groups of five or six. That had steadily ramped up to the latest pack of ten, mostly because they saw the corpses of the previous attempts scattered around the edge of the camp.

  But Sorin didn’t let it get much farther than that. When they did start to wise up, he simply attacked them instead. That was enough to trigger that suicidal frenzy they all shared and force them all to leap out of hiding. Truly, if not for the tower continually creating new ones to replace their losses, Sorin couldn’t see how gremlins would survive as a species.

  This was a perk of sending Odric out with Rue, as far as he was concerned. Gremlins weren’t individually worth much in anima, probably less than a hundredth of what he’d claimed from that ogre, but there were a lot of gremlins, and he was willing to bet even if he fought a hundred at once, they’d still be easier to kill. So he was happy to harvest the anima and keep pushing Minor Regeneration to the peak of F-rank.

  After all, he wasn’t even getting off the log to fight. Thus far, he’d won every fight using nothing but Blind Sense and Ice Blade. So he almost cursed when he noticed the last batch of victims had a soulprint in it. A large part of him wanted to just wait for the others to get back so he could point it out to Rue, but there was every chance the tower would reclaim the body before then.

  With a groan, he heaved himself out of his seat and grabbed his sword. Fortunately, this particular soulprint wasn’t something he needed his harvesting kit for. The anima pattern was crystallized in a single finger. All he had to do was chop it off, let the blood drain out, and then toss it in a jar for preservation.

  Ambush Tactics. Hmm. I suppose it’ll sell for fifteen or twenty danirs. Maybe if we can find two or three, we could get more for a whole set.

  The soulprint made it easier for the bearer to coordinate with others to make a decisive opening strike. The more members of the raiding party to use it, the more powerful it got. On its own, it wasn’t all that useful, but an assassin team would love to have enough of them for everybody.

  He pulled the dead gremlin’s fingers out straight, lined up his sword, and drove it down into the hand. Three fingers popped free, including the one with the soulprint in it. He scooped that one up and deposited it with the loot, then returned to his seat with a weary sigh.

  Definitely prioritizing temperature resistance soulprints if this is how it’s going to be. Hell, for all I know, I might need them soon anyway. I wouldn’t expect those kinds of environmental hazards until Floor 8 or 9 at the earliest, but I should probably adjust that estimate down to Floor 5 or 6 since it’s the red tower.

  Another gremlin moved at the edge of Blind Sense’s range, just an indistinct blur that caught in his mind for a fraction of a second before disappearing. It was joined by a second gremlin half a minute later, and soon their numbers started to build back up.

  Reminding himself once again that more anima meant faster healing, Sorin prepared to deal with the latest in a long string of ambushes.

  * * *

  “Holy crap!”

  Sorin looked up to see Rue standing a few hundred feet away, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide as they flicked back and forth. “One hundred and forty-two,” he said to save her the trouble of counting, not that there were that many left. The tower was already hard at work cleaning up the mess.

  “All at once?” she asked, aghast.

  “What? No, of course not. You know that’s not how gremlins operate. I never let a group get bigger than ten before I wiped them out.”

  “Damn. All that with you being too messed up to walk right.”

  “I killed them sitting down. It was easier that way.”

  Rue did a double take at the monster corpses, then smirked. “With Ice Blade? Has to be from the size of those stab wounds. Get anything good?”

  “One soulprint. Where’s Odric?”

  “He’s fine. We found Nemari. They’re maybe ten minutes behind me. What soulprint?”

  Sorin gave Rue the rundown on the finger he’d taken from the gremlin and explained why it was essentially worthless to their team even if they did get three more of them. They were well-equipped to spot an ambush at the moment, but not to execute their own. Though he could only estimate how much a full set of soulprints would fetch on the market, he got Rue to agree with his logic.

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  Shortly thereafter, Nemari and Odric appeared on the trail. She took one look at Sorin, her eyes flicking to the cuts still closing on his face and the burns on his exposed skin, then down to his arm that was splinted and wrapped, and she scrunched her eyes up tight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as soon as she got close. “This was my fault. I should have known… Well, I don’t know… I didn’t think…”

  “Should have known that your own family would make you a prisoner? Yeah, who doesn’t see that coming?”

  The pained look turned into a scowl quickly enough. “Don’t be a jerk about it,” Nemari mumbled half-heartedly.

  It turned out to be a combination of persistence and dumb luck that eventually led to them finding Nemari. Rue had noticed a burnt patch of grass, assumed Nemari was the culprit, and started scouring the nearest trail she could find. When there was no one there, she’d gone the other direction to try again. On the third attempt, she’d stumbled across Nemari hiding in a tree, about to turn her into charcoal.

  “I was pretty jumpy at first. Dant followed me through the portal, but I think he forgot that I wasn’t still rank 1, because he was a good minute or so behind me. Or maybe he just made a guess for which one I’d run to. Either way, it gave me a bit of a lead.”

  Sorin didn’t think it was a bad guess. Nemari would have been far safer in the wilds of Floor 1. If not for the fact that the rest of her team was on Floor 2, which was itself a bit unusual since they shouldn’t have had time to max out their soulprints already, she probably would have gone that way. Dant’s assumptions were wrong, but Sorin couldn’t fault the man for making them.

  “Hardest part was getting that damn belt off,” Nemari continued. “Some guy helped me with that, but he took my cloak as payment.”

  “Greedy bastard,” Rue muttered.

  “It was worth it. Just walking around with my hands chained like that was both humiliating and a chore. Oh, that reminds me! Guess what, Sorin?”

  Nemari didn’t wait for an answer. A tiny little ball of flame blossomed over her shoulder, a few inches from her face, then shot off toward the cliff wall to splash harmlessly against the stone.

  “You figured it out? Well done,” he congratulated her.

  “I can still only do one at a time, and if it’s anywhere other than my hands, I can’t add the other soulprints into the mix yet. Even without them, it’s half-strength at best. I don’t seem to be able to control it if I let it get any larger than that.”

  “Just takes practice,” Sorin said. “You’ll get it soon enough.”

  They finished catching up, both sides trading stories. Nemari’s drug-addled letter infuriated Odric, though the big man kept a tight rein on his emotions. Sorin could feel him practically vibrating in place with Blind Sense, and from the looks Rue was giving her brother, he suspected Odric’s aura was fluctuating violently as well.

  Eventually, they were done with the past and reached the present. “What’s the plan?” Nemari asked. “Obviously we’re not strong enough to take on the Black Hellions. You barely survived a tussle with my uncle, and he’s only rank 7.”

  “In my defense, the whole ‘not killing anyone’ thing was a real handicap. But yes, we need to grow stronger if we’re going to be punching up to people rank 10 and higher. I think we’re going to lurk around this fortress and kill gremlins for a few more days until I’m back in fighting shape.”

  “And then where?”

  Sorin almost smiled at the change in personality. Barring her one brief lapse when she’d thought her calls had almost gotten the team wiped out on Floor 1, Nemari had never wavered in her role as the team’s leader. But now, she wasn’t even trying to steer their course. All three of them were looking at him, waiting for him to unfurl his master plan.

  “Okay, well, our top priorities right now are healing downtime and getting Nemari some new gear. One of those is as easy as just waiting, but the other…”

  “Going back to the portal hub would be dangerous,” Nemari said with a frown. “But finding pieces suited for me out here is also unlikely.”

  “Unlikely, but not impossible. There are places to find tower-forged loot besides ruins, though I agree that it would be easier to gather materials and pay someone to build what you need. As it so happens, the next destination I have in mind is perfect for just that.”

  “The woods?” Rue asked. “Oh, of course! That is perfect.”

  “What woods?” Nemari asked, confused.

  “Anima-infused trees grow in a stretch of forest west of the Floor 2 portal hub, according to the Climber’s Union. Their branches are often harvested to be used as staves for new casters. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if your old staff originally came from there. But that’s not all. Because the anima density is so high there, we can also find a bunch of medicinal herbs and anima-infused water, and the monsters apparently have a higher-than-normal chance to be carrying soulprints.”

  Left unsaid was the fact that monsters with soulprints were more dangerous than their mundane counterparts. That wouldn’t be enough to deter any serious climber, and nobody in Sorin’s group thought twice about it either.

  “There is one problem,” Odric pointed out. “Your arm is still broken, and it’s not going to heal right with anything we can do right now. You’re out of commission as a front-liner.”

  “That’s true. I was thinking we might do well with a fifth if it’s someone we can trust. I also need to get back to the Meat Grinder to finish arranging for a fence and a resupply dead drop.”

  The key word there was ‘trust,’ something Sorin was unfortunately in short supply of. The Climber’s Union and Nemari’s family had already proven that plenty of people were either too afraid of the Black Hellions or too motivated by money to trust them. Finding one random climber to serve as their front line was going to be a challenge.

  “What do you think of Heldigar?” he asked the group.

  Nemari made a face. “That mercenary the Telpike guy hired? He’s probably under a new contract already, and even if he’s not, do we really want to bring in someone that… buyable?”

  “That depends on how well we can pay him, doesn’t it?”

  “We’re not exactly flush,” Rue pointed out.

  “Not with money, no. But come on, who’s climbing faster than us right now? You don’t think that might be worth something to him?”

  “I think we would be better off building up our resources to pay a higher-ranked climber to fix your arm,” Odric said.

  “And that’s certainly a choice, but it’s not one we can make right now. For the moment, I’d say our priorities are recovery time with gremlin farming, securing our supply line, and finding someone willing to take whatever we find off our hands. Then we’ll need to climb quickly if we want to survive this, because it’s only a matter of time before someone finds us.”

  No one argued. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the only one they had.