Sorin decided not to follow Nemari back to the inn. It was an easy choice to make, mostly because he still had shopping to do. They’d sold most of the stuff they’d harvested to various merchants, but he’d kept a few choice pieces for his own use. He needed to find an alchemist good enough to process the ingredients, and he wanted a few gear upgrades to use the final result on.

  The latter were easy enough to find. Every climber needed a good weapon, and there were plenty of merchants eager to sell them. It was more of an issue finding a good sword at a reasonable price than it was finding any swords at all. It was incredibly obvious to anyone who knew anything at all about quality smithing that more than a few stalls were selling what could generously be described as apprentice work at master work prices.

  Sorin bypassed the merchants completely and went to the north edge of the hub, where a miniature crafting district had sprung up. There were three different blacksmiths working forges there, as well as a butcher, a tanner, a pair of scribes, and the sole alchemist in the entire portal hub. None of their work struck Sorin as particularly impressive, but then, if they were geniuses at their trades, they wouldn’t be rank 2.

  He did keep an eye out for some young up-and-comers, but those were rare, and he saw no one like that when he did his round. Instead, the crafters were all what he’d expected to find: people in their late 20s or early 30s, slowly working their way up the tower the same way everyone in their profession did.

  They created, they sold, they made money, and eventually they had a set of gear powerful enough to compensate for their lack of combat experience or soulprints suited to fighting monsters. Then they paid to be carried to the next floor, where they settled down to repeat the process with ready access to whatever new materials existed on that floor.

  Sorin doubted any of the people he met with that day would ever climb past Floor 10, but the truth of the matter was that he wasn’t looking to sponsor a young crafter’s talent. At best, he was hoping to take advantage of it, but he’d settle for an old pro’s well-crafted work instead. It would be quite a few floors before he needed anything crazy.

  He settled on a rather plain length of steel with a simple cross guard and a hilt wrapped in leather. The weight was well-balanced, the forging itself was skillfully done, and the sword itself was almost perfectly Sorin’s ideal length. The biggest problem was the price tag of forty danirs, a huge jump up from his original battered hand-me-down sword, and even a bit more expensive than the replacement he’d used and abused through Floor 1. But Sorin could afford it, and he had plans for enchantments, so he happily paid to have a better base weapon.

  The smith pointed him to the leatherworker across the street for a scabbard, which ended up costing another five danirs, but it fit the blade so well that Sorin suspected the pair of crafters probably worked together despite selling their products separately. Weird way to do business, but I guess if it works for them.

  “Anything else?” the leatherworker asked him.

  Sorin looked around the shop, which was a mixture of tools, tanning stations, and shelves displaying finished products. “Actually, what do you have for armor?”

  “You’d probably be better off with something actually made of metal,” the man said. He hesitated, then added, “Unless you’ve got some sort of soulprint or plans to fortify the armor in some way, not that you need to tell me the details!”

  Plenty of climbers were justifiably paranoid about the specifics of their builds and equipment getting out, but what Sorin was planning was basic stuff that he should have taken care of on Floor 1. He’d simply rushed through the floor too quickly to take the time to do it, but since they had a few days of downtime now, it was a good time to take care of the chore.

  “I’m planning on getting an alchemical lacquering added to it,” Sorin said. “The goal is flexibility and defense against light or grazing blows. I don’t need it to stand up to being gored by a charging boar or anything like that.”

  “Hmm. It depends on what kind of lacquering you want done. Tell you what, let’s go poke our heads in at Finn’s shop and see what he has to say.”

  “Finn?” Sorin asked.

  “Ah, the alchemist who set up down the road. My name’s Lenn, by the way.”

  “Sorin. Nice to meet you.”

  Lenn was surprisingly cavalier about the security of his workshop. There was no one there to watch over it while he was gone, and he didn’t even bother to lock the door. Upon closer inspection, Sorin realized that there actually was no lock, not even a drop bar. Either people were far, far more honest in the red tower than he’d been led to believe—unlikely to be the case—or Lenn was disturbingly na?ve about the realities of life as a climber.

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  Or he’s got some other security measure that’s not obvious to casual inspection.

  It was only a minute or two’s walk to the alchemist’s shop. Surprisingly, it was split into two parts. The front was the typical log cabin style that dominated the buildings in the portal hub, but the back half was actually brick and mortar with a few metal vents embedded into the walls.

  That’s a good sign, I think. This guy might just have a proper lab to work with.

  “Finn!” Lenn yelled as he walked through the door. “Got a customer that wants treated leather.”

  “I swear to God, I’m not doing another water-proofing!” a different voice yelled from the back. “No more! I’ve already done a hundred this month!”

  “No, it’s armor lacquering this time,” Lenn explained.

  There was a clatter of what sounded like tin and expensive glass works, then a rather scrawny man wearing goggles and a leather apron scrambled out of the back room. “That’s expensive work! You the customer?” he asked, facing Sorin.

  “Potentially, if you can do what I need.”

  “Great! Let’s talk about—” A boom came from the back room, shaking the floor and startling Finn. His eyes popped wide and he spun in place. “One moment, please!”

  Maybe I should have poked around inside the shops instead of just browsing the open-air work stations and stalls.

  Smoke came rolling out through the open door to crawl across the ceiling, where several more vents waited to let it outside. Sorin eyed it with a frown on his face. Lenn must have caught the expression, because he hastened to say, “Finn really is an excellent alchemist. He just also really likes to experiment with new materials and processes. Sometimes the experiments go well. Sometimes… uh… this happens.”

  “Right, sorry about that. I think the ratio of catalyst to binding agent was probably off,” Finn said, coming back out of his lab. “Something to tinker with for next time. Now, we were discussing your budget.”

  “We weren’t discussing that,” Sorin said flatly.

  “No?” Finn’s brow furrowed. “We were about to, though! I can’t tell you what kind of lacquering I can provide if you can’t tell me how much you’ve got to spend.”

  “I’ve got the reagents myself,” Sorin said. “I would only need you to supply basic chemicals and labor.”

  “That so? You don’t strike me as an alchemist. Usually our muscles aren’t quite so… pronounced.” Finn’s gaze lingered on Sorin’s arms for a moment before drifting down to the new sword belted at his hip. “But if you say so. Let’s see what you’ve got for me.”

  Sorin started pulling monster components out of his backpack. “Got a few fluid glands here from a pair of huge salamanders that tried to kill me near a river yesterday,” he said. “Oh, here’s a jar of eye hunter wasp mud. I crushed up blade leaf petals into a paste last week. Uh, what else… Raw bark elemental sapwood—didn’t have the tools to properly extract it, so I just brought the whole thing with me.”

  Finn’s eyes widened as Sorin produced an assortment of possible ingredients. By the time Sorin had emptied the supplies out of his bag, the alchemist was staring at the trove of supplies with naked greed on his face.

  Sorin cleared his throat to get the man’s attention and said, “My goal is to get a set of leather armor that’s lightweight and flexible, but that’s at least as strong as steel chain. Ideally, I’d like the lacquer to be self-regenerating so that I’m not coming back in to get it patched up constantly, but I couldn’t find any base materials with that property, so I figured I’d sacrifice a bit of flexibility for a few more layers than normal if you can manage it without them delaminating.”

  “Uh… yeah. Yeah, I can do that,” Finn told him. “Lenn, do you still have any of those jerkins made out of black-bar lizard hide?”

  “Yeah, one or two.”

  “That would be best for flexibility,” Finn said. “But… Hmm. With the wasp mud acting as a base layer, I think you could keep full range of motion and add at least two extra layers to the lacquering if we used nightmare bat leather instead.”

  “Oh, sure,” Lenn said sarcastically. “I’ve got a ton of that stuff. It’s all I keep in my storage chests.”

  “I’m just saying, given these ingredients, that’d be the best armor you could apply the lacquer too,” Finn said. “Not my fault you don’t have any in stock.”

  “Maybe there’s someone with a supply at the bazaar,” Sorin offered.

  “Doubt it,” Lenn said. “Nobody wants to pick a fight with those things. You’d think it would be more common, with how close they are, but everyone goes around the area.”

  Wait, is he saying they’ve got the bats here on Floor 2? I wouldn’t expect to see nightmare bats for another two floors at minimum. What is wrong with this tower?

  “Give me directions, and I might be able to secure it myself,” Sorin said.

  Lenn snorted. “Maybe with a group of real good ranged and an amazing scout or two to keep you from being ambushed. Otherwise, you’re just asking to get killed.”

  “You let me worry about that part,” Sorin said. “I’ll source the materials. How long will it take you to make the armor from it?”

  “A day, maybe. Depends if I have any new orders come in between now and then.”

  “If I start work tonight, I can have the lacquer ready to go in two days,” Finn added. “But… it’s a different recipe to use it on the bat leather than the lizard. If you aren’t able to get the bat, there won’t be enough to start over.”

  Rue and Odric were down for the next few days. Nemari could fight, but flame-slingers weren’t ideal for harvesting leather. Besides, Sorin was interested in farming anima for himself as well, and he knew how to kill a nightmare bat. They weren’t much harder to farm than harpies as long as he set things up properly. The biggest hitch was going to be not getting more bats than he could fight at once.

  “As long as the bats are there, I can handle it,” he said. “How much is it going to cost me to put you two to work?”

  “If you provide the leather,” Lenn said, “I can fashion the armor. Call it twenty-five danirs. Bring me back some extra leather for myself, and I’ll do it for free.”

  “Sixty danirs for my part,” Finn told him. “Half now, half when you come back. I’ll do up the lacquer right now, and if you fail to get the leather, you can just have that for the thirty.”

  That would eat away almost everything Sorin had left, but money was made to be spent. A new soulprint, a new sword, and some fantastic armor were all investments that were well worth the price. “You’ve got a deal,” he said. “Now, where can I find the nearest nightmare bat?”