Freshly resupplied, the team abandoned gremlin farming in the old fortress and moved deeper into Floor 2’s wilderness. That area had served its purpose: to fortify the soulprints they already had, and then later to give them something easy to do with their time while they finished healing up. Now, with the exception of Sorin’s left arm, the whole team was in top shape.

  “This area is called—rather unimaginatively—the anima forest,” Sorin explained, mostly for Nemari’s benefit. “It has a lot of plants that are thoroughly saturated with anima, making it an herbalist’s paradise. Or it would be, except that plenty of those plants are ambulatory, and the ones that aren’t generally have some sort of symbiotic bond with the local wildlife.

  “Our target is a smaller area inside the forest called the Witch Wood. It’s not a popular spot for a few reasons. It’s difficult to get to, and the monsters there are tough and numerous. Fire magic is going to be our strongest asset, but it doesn’t have any type of soulprint directly applicable to fire spells.”

  The general difficulty in reaching the Witch Wood was a selling point for Sorin. Having difficult monsters to fight generally meant better anima rewards as well, and his hope was that, since the area was so rarely visited, soulprints would be relatively plentiful.

  Getting there was the first obstacle. The underbrush west of the fortress was thick enough that the team had to navigate narrow, winding game trails, with Sorin leading and Rue in the back. That formation repeatedly proved to be the right one as various monsters tried to ambush them by springing out of the trees, only to be skewered by steel or ice magic. Only once did something come down from directly overhead, having somehow avoided Blind Sense to fall on Nemari.

  She lit it on fire before it could even reach her, then coolly stepped to the side and punted it back into the brush, where it got tangled up in a thorny bush. Long before it could free itself, it burned to death. Some creative use of Flare helped pull the air away from the fire, smothering it and preventing it from spreading throughout the forest.

  “Nice work,” Sorin said as he prodded the charred corpse. “No soulprint.”

  “Could have been one two minutes ago,” Rue muttered.

  “I’d rather have Nemari uninjured than potentially have a theoretical soulprint,” Sorin said. “We’re not going to survive this if we start making stupid decisions motivated by greed.”

  “What even was it?” Odric asked.

  “Some kind of lizard, I think. It definitely had four legs and a tail,” Nemari said. “I didn’t get a good look at it past that.”

  “String-tongue gecko, maybe,” Sorin said. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s keep moving.”

  They made it about halfway there the first day of travel, though they didn’t exactly make great time with Odric constantly stopping to collect samples. Nobody complained though, not when that was currently the only activity they were engaging in that would bring new money to the team. And since none of them liked foraging, but all of them liked eating, the moss and tuber collecting continued.

  Sorin pretended he didn’t hear the other three discussing him during watch when he was supposed to be asleep. It was the same old conversation anyway, but nothing had changed, and he wasn’t planning on spilling any secrets if he didn’t have to.

  They were free to speculate, as long as no one expected him to confirm anything and didn’t try to withhold their cooperation to pressure him. Sorin had made that very clear from the start, and all three of them had agreed with varying levels of reluctance. The irony was that if the Black Hellions hadn’t been pressuring the group, he was pretty sure Nemari would have walked away.

  The next day, things got worse. The forest thinned out a bit, but that just gave the monsters more openings. Massive snakes, poisonous spiders the size of Sorin’s face, various birds of prey, and a whole bevy of rodents in all sorts of shapes and sizes came sniffing around for a chance to take a bite out of the team.

  “Is this what the Witch Wood is like?” Rue asked. “It’s more annoying than threatening.”

  “No, this is still the outskirts where herbalists go scrounging around. We’re maybe an hour or two away from the really dangerous spots.”

  “Fantastic,” she muttered, smacking at a mosquito that had landed on her arm. “I already hate this place.”

  The Witch Wood, as it so happened, had a lot of standing water in it. It wasn’t enough for Sorin to consider it a bog or a swamp, but it did make for an excellent breeding ground for bugs. Nemari had immediately resorted to her Heat Flash soulprint to burn up anything that so much as thought about landing on her, but the rest of them weren’t so fortunate.

  Or really, Rue wasn’t so fortunate. Sorin’s Iron Body didn’t stop him from being a perch, but it did keep the bugs from successfully biting him. Odric also quickly learned how to modulate Stone Skin to give himself just a little bit more durability. It made him look a little bit sick as his skin paled slightly, but he claimed he could keep it up for an hour or two at least.

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  Rue had nothing to help her, not that she didn’t try. Bend Light, unfortunately, just wasn’t strong enough to get the job done, or maybe insects didn’t so much need sight to find their target in the first place. Whatever the reason, she was quickly covered in small bug bites and started whining to her brother to heal them.

  “Let’s stop here for a few minutes and rest,” Nemari suggested. They’d been walking along the bank of a small stream to get a break from having to blaze a path deeper into the woods, but the foliage had closed in again. If they wanted to move forward, they’d either have to find a new trail, or they’d have to swim upstream.

  Sorin didn’t love the idea, mostly for the very simple fact that he’d learned Blind Sense didn’t work too well with water. Rue could still read auras of anything swimming under the surface, but her range was more limited than Sorin’s. He could see when he was outvoted though, so the group quickly settled down for a short break.

  “That breeze feels nice,” Rue said as she accepted a chunk of bread, a fresh apple, and a small wedge of cheese from her brother. Making a face, she took a bite. “But the food’s already getting old.”

  “Better get used to it,” Nemari told her. “Even with Sorin’s ability to go back for more supplies every week, we still have to prioritize things that won’t go bad.”

  She didn’t specify why, but everyone knew. If Sorin died, they’d lose their access to Floor 0. No one wanted to starve out in the wilderness, so it was good business to store food that would last. He was more amused than offended, since he was pretty sure that if anything happened to the team, he’d be the last to die, not the first.

  “Shit!” Rue shouted. She lunged forward to grab Nemari’s arm and pulled back.

  The women tumbled away from the stream just in time to avoid being grabbed by two long, green arms. They were followed by a scaly, scabrous monster with dull black eyes, a long, droopy nose, and a mouth big enough to shove a person in whole. Perhaps inevitably, it was full of sharp little triangles for teeth.

  Its whole body was a dull green, perfect for camouflaging itself in river mud near the banks. Webbed hands scrabbled against the dirt as the monster heaved its bulk up after Nemari. Before it even pulled itself out of the water, Sorin was already pelting it with ice blades.

  “River troll,” he announced. “Nemari, hold off for a minute until we can cut it off from the water. I don’t want it retreating.”

  Famed for their regeneration, trolls as a species were both difficult to fight and highly sought after. The scraps of skin that had housed both Sorin and Rue’s Minor Regeneration soulprints had almost certainly been troll flesh, though probably not river troll. If there was one thing that trolls didn’t like dealing with, though, it was fire.

  Luckily for the team, trolls were not noted for their intelligence. It wasn’t difficult to circle around it, and they quickly formed a line cutting the troll off from the water. “Rue, make sure it doesn’t have backup,” Sorin ordered. “Nemari, light it up.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  Firebolts flashed into existence, two at a time, startling the troll and causing it to scramble back toward the water. Sorin met it with his sword and ice, but the troll didn’t even flinch. It did exactly what he’d expected and tried to shove its way through him, which was pretty typical troll behavior. They didn’t fear getting hurt and were always willing to take on wounds in the name of expediency. Adding fire to the mix only deepened that behavioral instinct.

  So he drove his sword into its knee. It wouldn’t matter in thirty seconds, but until it healed, the troll couldn’t ignore the injury. Rue matched Sorin’s strike, crippling its other leg, and Odric stepped up between them to crack a stone fist across its face.

  The whole time, Nemari blasted it with fire, causing the river troll to scream in pain and fear as it thrashed wildly. Claws flashed by Sorin, occasionally scratching the leather of his cuirass as he pushed past the flailing limb to renew the wounds on its legs. Rue was less lucky and caught a trailing claw on her arm. Blood poured freely from the wound, but she didn’t stop to tend to it.

  In a matter of seconds, the troll succumbed to Nemari’s magic and released anima into the team’s soulspaces. Odric rushed to heal Rue’s arm, and Sorin and Nemari crouched over the body to search it for soulprints.

  “I tried to keep the damage as contained as possible,” Nemari said.

  “You did fine. I don’t think it had one anyway,” Sorin told her. “It’s actually kind of hard to tell, even after it’s dead. The regeneration suffuses everything. It’s still trying to heal, except for the burns.”

  “Could it… come back?” Nemari asked hesitantly.

  “Absolutely,” Sorin said. “We’ll burn it to ash once I’ve confirmed—Ah, here’s something.”

  It wasn’t Minor Regeneration, which was fine by Sorin. There was apparently a whole troll village on Floor 4 that was heavily farmed by climbers for the soulprints. They weren’t terribly common on Floors 1 or 2, but they weren’t rare by any stretch. Sorin was sure he could find more of that particular soulprint for the rest of the group.

  “An organ?” Nemari asked, following Sorin’s hand to a spot above its chest. “Heart?”

  “Lung, I think. I’m guessing it’s some sort of water breathing, or maybe it’ll be some other organ and deal with filtering. Soulprints to make any water potable can be valuable, especially once you run into an all-saltwater floor.”

  “Keep or sell?”

  Normally, Sorin would have instantly said to sell it. They didn’t need it yet, but there were plenty of foundational soulprints still missing from all of their builds. One of those would have more immediate value. Unfortunately, organs containing soulprints tended to deteriorate far faster than claws, beaks, feathers, or hair. Even with preservation methods in place, a lung had a very limited shelf-life.

  By the time Sorin took it to the dead drop, it would have days at best to be used. It wasn’t hard to believe it would end up unraveling as the flesh bound by the magic decayed. “Keep, I think. But let’s get this thing’s chest open first so I can figure out what exactly the soulprint does. I could be wrong; it might be garbage that none of us wants.”

  Working together, they sliced open the troll’s flesh. Nemari cauterized the wound so it wouldn’t try to close up around Sorin’s arm, and he dug around with a knife to bring the organ in question up to the surface.

  “Oh!” he said, surprised. “That was not at all what I was expecting. This… This requires some thought.”