Sorin grunted in pain as the hagris landed on his sling. It didn’t weigh much, but twenty or thirty pounds was enough. The sharp, twig-like toes and fingers digging into his flesh did not help matters, but Iron Body kept him safe there. Still, he had an instant and visceral reaction to the hagris grabbing onto his bad arm.

  He blew its fucking head off with conjured ice.

  Three more monsters were taking turns pressuring him from different angles, darting in and out of the range of his sword in an attempt to get him to commit to chasing one of them. Rue was dealing with something similar, though in her case she was merely holding them off Nemari, who was busy igniting them one after another.

  It had been a big pack—probably twenty monsters. There were eight left now, or at least that was how many Sorin could see. Odric had gotten caught up dealing with a thorn lasher he’d stepped on while fending off his own hagris. It wasn’t quite evening yet, but apparently night was close enough because the damn thing had come to life and quickly entangled itself around Odric’s leg.

  “Nemari! Help Odric,” Sorin called out.

  She was already moving, having spotted the issue. Rue didn’t protest losing her backup, something Sorin was sure she would have complained about just a few weeks ago. Without a constant stream of firebolts to dodge, the hagris surged forward in an attempt to swarm Rue.

  Lacking the years of experience that Sorin had reading monsters, she was not well-equipped to conquer the challenge in front of her. The smart move usually was to backpedal and use the distance to stall for time, but they were in the Witch Wood, and Odric had already proven that blindly moving around could invite disaster.

  She started to fade backward anyway, hopefully because she could sense a lack of any thorn lasher auras behind her. If she also got entangled, Sorin would have to make some hard decisions about who to save and who to let the monsters have. For the moment, he had his hands full stabilizing his own battle, but as long as Rue didn’t get overwhelmed, he thought they’d be fine.

  Hagris were agile monsters, quick to dart away and equally quick to circle back around to resume the attack. That was fine when the whole team could work together to cut off their retreat and hit them from multiple angles, but this time, the monsters had come in with overwhelming numbers. They’d been forced into individual fights too quickly to coordinate, and it showed.

  Sorin caught a hagris out of formation with its brethren, advancing too far, too quickly, without waiting for the distraction from the other side. It paid for its carelessness with its life, and then there were two left in front of him. They both leaped to attack, perhaps realizing that their prior strategy would no longer work, or perhaps merely growing impatient with their lack of progress.

  It proved to be their undoing. He dropped one with an ice blade the instant its feet left the forest floor and caught the other with his sword before it could reach him. Twin pulses of anima hit him, confirming the final kills.

  Whirling toward Rue, he let out a trio of ice blades to take the pressure off her. It helped some, but she was seconds away from being overwhelmed. And since she still didn’t have a good defensive soulprint, when the hagris swarmed her, it was going to be bloody.

  Blind Sense told him Nemari and Odric were fine for a few more seconds, though that would change the instant Odric’s anima reserves ran dry. He was using Stone Skin to protect himself from the thorns for the moment, and even that was barely holding back the monster. It was doing nothing at all to prevent Odric from being dragged away from the fight.

  This is ridiculous. How the hell did everything go wrong in less than ten seconds? Just mistake after mistake.

  Sorin had been playing defensively. He’d forgotten—again—that this wasn’t the climbing team he’d been working with for years. They were young and fresh, inexperienced, and prone to mistakes. He couldn’t take for granted that they would always be able to take care of themselves.

  There better not be another fight after this.

  Dragging out all the anima he had left in him, Sorin smashed into Rue’s hagris in a blaze of swinging steel and flashing ice. It only took a few seconds to cut down the three monsters, freeing both of them to come to Nemari’s aid. Rue went after the hagris keeping her from burning the thorn lasher to ash, and Sorin darted past Odric to bring his sword down in a one-handed chop.

  It cut deep into the vine, but not through it. “Shit,” he swore.

  Before he could raise his blade back up to try again, the night thorn lasher countered. Four new vines emerged through the brush, this time making no attempt at stealth. Sorin danced back, safe only thanks to Blind Sense showing him movement behind him. A fifth vine tried to loop around his leg, but he jumped out of the snare before it could close on him.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Could really use some fire over here,” he called out. It took all the anima he had left just to throw a single ice blade down on a creeping vine. The magic pinned the vine to the dirt for all of two seconds before it ripped itself free, but that gave Sorin the time he needed to leap over it and slip out of the pincer the other vines were trying to trap him in.

  Firebolts lit up the forest, charring the vines and causing the thorn lasher to jerk them back. Unfortunately, that included the one holding Odric’s leg, but Rue raced after him and managed to finish the work Sorin had started. They didn’t chase after the lasher vines by unanimous agreement, nobody really wanting to tangle with another monster so soon after defeating the hagris pack.

  “Okay, that was a disaster,” Sorin said while he and Odric worked to unwrap the thorn-covered vine. “What went wrong?”

  He already knew, of course, but if the rest of them didn’t, they wouldn’t take the right lessons from the fight. In a way, the conversation was also a test to see if they were willing to own up to their mistakes.

  “Stepping on that vine was the big mistake of the fight,” Odric said immediately. “I lost control of the two hagris I was fighting and became a handicap to everyone else trying to save me—which I appreciate the effort! I was not getting out of that myself.”

  “I could take some blame, too,” Rue said. “I let myself get pushed back in the first wave, which dragged the fight closer to the lasher in the first place. If I hadn’t retreated, we wouldn’t have been within a hundred feet of it.”

  “No,” Sorin said. “That was the right call. It had an unintended side effect, but if we were to do the fight over again, you still would need to retreat.”

  “I didn’t see you retreating.”

  “I have an offensive magic I can weave into my melee fighting and a defensive soulprint that lets me be more aggressive without worrying about taking damage,” Sorin said. “You have neither of those things, yet.”

  He could tell Rue wasn’t satisfied with that. Good. She shouldn’t be. If she accepted that, she wouldn’t have any desire to grow stronger. She’s reasonably talented for her age and how long she’s been climbing, probably better than I was at that point, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

  “Didn’t see you having any trouble with your side of the front line,” she groused, shooting a pointed look at Sorin’s sling-bound left arm.

  “Moving on,” Nemari said, “I wasn’t as frugal with my anima as I should have been. I underestimated how many there were and took quite a few risky shots that I knew probably wouldn’t land just because I thought the fight would be over a lot sooner than it was. When things went sideways, I wasn’t in a good position to help us recover entirely because I didn’t think far enough ahead.”

  “And for myself, I overestimated how much strength I could bring to bear. I’m not fighting at my best, and it’s putting the whole team in danger. I failed to free Odric and made things worse when the lasher sent more vines at us,” Sorin said. “It would have been better if I’d helped Nemari and let Rue free Odric. I made a bad call because I was overconfident.”

  “It’s not your fault we can’t fix your arm,” Odric said. “It’s expensive, and besides, it’s not like you can just stroll around Floor 0 casually asking around for high-rank healers.”

  “No, but I still need to know my limits and operate within them.”

  The arm was as healed as it was going to get, which was actually something of a problem. When he finally could get it fixed, he was essentially going to have to rebreak it, and it would be far, far more difficult to put things back right now than it would have been a week ago. Unfortunately, that meant it still ached non-stop and that it was sensitive to any jarring impact or even moderate pressure, with no end in sight.

  “Okay, so that’s what went wrong,” Nemari said. “How about we talk about what went right instead?”

  “I fucking destroyed that first wave of hagris,” Rue immediately chimed in. “Did you see the leading edge coming in at me just get shredded? I killed four of them in under three seconds.”

  “Nemari was pivotal in breaking the first wave, too,” Odric said. “She might have run low on anima toward the end, but if she hadn’t been so aggressive at the start, we’d have been fighting twice as many hagris once they all got to the fight. A few firebolts going wide doesn’t lessen that.”

  They finished dissecting the near-disastrous fight. Overall, Sorin was satisfied. There’d been mistakes, but everyone recognized where they’d fallen short and had come up with good ideas for how to fix it. It was exactly the kind of growth a good team of climbers needed, growth unclouded by hubris or judgment.

  “Good,” Sorin said at the end of the five-minute conversation. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any soulprints to be collected, but let’s take a few more minutes to recover anyway. Rue, please keep an eye out for more thorn lashers trying to sneak vines over to us.”

  Things were going well, despite everything. The Witch Wood was a difficult area to work in; there was no doubt about that. But they were still growing. No other climbers had appeared, thankfully. Sorin had half-expected some rank 4s or 5s from the Black Hellions to hunt them down, but for the moment, at least, they were safe.

  For the moment, he reflected dourly. God, how am I going to keep these kids alive? They’re all so young and nowhere near prepared to face these kinds of problems. All I can do is forge them into stronger climbers, but that’s just a slow escalation of lethality. The tower could kill them long before the Hellions get anywhere near us.

  And Sorin didn’t have a solution, not here. Back in the blue tower, he could have done something. He’d had resources and connections, even down on the lower floors. Hell, back when he was rank 100, he could have simply taken three minutes to find the Hellions and squish them. Here, he had none of that power, and none of the attendant options it would have granted.

  All he could do was his best, but Sorin was very, very afraid it wouldn’t be good enough.