Lenn and Finn needed two more days to finish Sorin’s new armor. There was nothing he could do about it, but he didn’t dare hang around the portal hub for that long, not with the Black Hellions already having sent Jorn through the day before looking for him. He’d have to pick it up on a future supply run later, hopefully without anyone noticing.

  At the moment, the three of them were twenty miles away from the hub, slowly working their way west toward a massive—by Floor 2 standards—building stuffed to the brim with gremlins. Sorin’s reason for targeting it was two-fold: the monster density meant for quick anima farming, and he was hoping to get a sensory soulprint to enhance his night vision.

  “Gremlins are nasty little pieces of shit, though,” he told Rue and Odric while they walked. “They’re short, green and black things with pebbly skin like a lizard’s. They’re vicious ambush predators that jump climbers in groups, and once the fighting starts, it doesn’t stop until one side is wiped out. It doesn’t matter how badly they’re outmatched, they’ll fight down to the very last one.”

  “How hard are they to kill?” Odric asked.

  “That’s the great part. They’re relatively weak. Part of it is because they’re only three feet tall and maybe fifty pounds, so there just isn’t a lot of muscle to begin with. The other part is that all of their anima goes toward helping them track down prey and then hiding from it until they build up enough numbers to swarm it. If you can spot them before they make their move, you can trigger the fight in your favor, and they still won’t break and run.”

  Rue’s ability to see basically anything with anima in it was the whole reason Sorin had chosen the place. Most climbers avoided it because the constant ambushes inevitably killed someone, and by the time they had the tools to deal with that tactic, they were far beyond rank 2 gremlins. For all the problems associating with the Black Hellions had brought her, Rue really had gained a powerful soulprint, especially for how low its rank was.

  There were ways to trick it, of course. Nothing was infallible. But Sorin doubted they’d see anything that could do the job in the next five floors or so. That just left powerful climbers the Hellions might send after them, but his hope was that his team would be so far away from the portal hub that nobody could find them. Floor 2 was a circle two hundred miles wide; that was a lot of space to get lost in.

  I could have checked that in five minutes a month ago.

  The thought bubbled up out of nowhere, accompanied by a sharp pang of loss. Sorin had deliberately avoided thinking about how much he’d lost, not wanting to dwell on it, but having to think of the capacities of climbers that were higher ranked than him had opened up the door to those kinds of regrets.

  Sorin dismissed the stray thought and refocused on the conversation. Without Nemari to watch over, Odric was moving up into the melee. He’d added the manticore’s Venom Strike soulprint to his soulspace, and though he hadn’t found a good soulprint for bare-knuckle brawling, he did have the iron-handed glove they’d won in the ruin. It would allow him some measure of safety.

  The whole concept was dumb, in Sorin’s opinion. Odric was missing half the toolkit needed to make it work, and he should have bowed to the inevitable and gotten some sort of weapon. Then again, Venom Strike was extremely potent on its own. Combined with the rat fang ring he’d also claimed, they’d confirmed its power on a few test monsters while they traveled.

  Sorin’s problem was that the whole thing was both restricted and slow. Instead of ending an enemy in a single blow, it required Odric to strike them first by scratching them with the rat fang on his left hand, then hitting them again to activate Venom Strike. The soulprint started to work instantly, but it wasn’t lethal. It would hurt a monster, but not kill it, not right away.

  Worse, his right hand served more as a shield to block attacks or control the enemy. The glove made it impossible to activate Venom Strike, needing that bare skin contact to channel the soulprint. The whole build was messy, with poor synergy between the gear and the soulprint.

  Rue, on the other hand, was turning into a force to be reckoned with. All she lacked was experience, and she was getting better with her swords every day. Wielding two weapons made it difficult to put a lot of force into any single swing, but Pierce ensured that every strike did damage, and Bloodlet made sure that even nicks would quickly put a monster down. Bend Light made it so that most monsters didn’t even see the attack coming, affording her plenty of opportunities.

  She’d used her share from Floor 1 to buy a second enchanted sword after grumbling that only having one of them quickened was too unbalancing. Sorin whole heartedly supported that choice and had also recommended an emergency healing potion just in case Odric couldn’t get to her quick enough. She needed a set of extremely light armor enchanted for additional durability as well, but their funds weren’t unlimited.

  Something off the shelf for her when I go back for my custom order. It won’t be as perfect, but she’s not supposed to be on the front line anyway.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  This was the kind of stuff that had Nemari wanting to go slow. They could have stayed on Floor 1 and spent a week farming easy monsters for soulprints and materials to afford better weapons, armor, and various other survival necessities. That was the smart and safe way to do it. It was only because of the Hellions’ interference that they weren’t taking a few days at least to prepare.

  Their team was too small to take on any big challenges, too. That meant being careful, going slowly, fully scouting out every fight to make sure they weren’t in danger of being overwhelmed. That had always been how climbing teams operated, but now that Nemari was gone, the margin of error was that much thinner.

  Odric definitely didn’t have Nemari’s stopping power, and having him fighting also meant he was less reactive as a healer. On the other hand, him being up on the front line meant he could reach Sorin or Rue quicker if needed, since his healing soulprints still lacked range. In theory, it was to their advantage, but combat rarely worked out like that. Disengaging from an enemy to respond to an injury struck Sorin as unrealistic.

  “I know we’ve had this discussion before, but if we’re going to keep climbing, we need to round your toolkits out. Right now, Odric can heal himself easily and anyone else with difficulty in combat. He can fight, but he’s slow to finish off an enemy and burns anima healing himself because he doesn’t have good defenses. He’s vulnerable to ambushes because he’s got no sensory soulprints and no way to handle ranged attackers,” Sorin said.

  “We’re all vulnerable to ranged attackers,” Rue pointed out.

  “We are, yes. I’m the only one who can fire back at them, and that’s a lot harder to do when I’m trying to keep the melee from hitting you. As a group, we need to spend the next two or three ranks rounding out our builds.”

  If there was one good thing about Nemari abandoning them, it was that this time, nobody argued with the logic. Sorin hadn’t set out to take control of the team, and he wasn’t pleased that events had conspired to put him in the position. If not for the fact that Rue and Odric would still be in danger even with him gone, he probably would have risked a solo climb.

  That wasn’t the case, so Sorin swallowed any objections to the siblings tagging along and reminded himself that he wasn’t invulnerable, and that no matter how trivial the lower floors seemed, a single mistake could be the death of him. It might be slower, and it was definitely more work, but they were all coming out ahead.

  Just keep telling yourself that, he thought as he answered Rue’s questions.

  * * *

  “Well, that’s fucking creepy looking,” Rue said.

  The old fortress stuck out over the edge of a cliff, blocking the top of a winding trail cut through otherwise sheer walls that none of them were interested in trying to scale. It was battered and run down, complete with crumbling walls and collapsing roofs. Nothing moved, not even so much as a flicker in the shadows.

  The fortress was a strange contrast to the ruin they’d encountered on the first floor. Even without setting foot inside, Sorin was sure the layout would make sense. There’d be no random, purposeless rooms or walls, no winding hallways that went nowhere, and no staircases that terminated halfway to their destinations.

  At the same time, the fa?ade of being man-made was completely false. There was no way the tower would let people build something so huge. It simply couldn’t happen. That begged the obvious question—where had the fortress come from in the first place? If the tower hadn’t built it, and the humans hadn’t built it, what was left?

  From a practical standpoint, the important thing to know was that while the fortress was in ruins, it wasn’t a ruin. That meant they wouldn’t have to worry about any unpleasant surprises like being trapped inside or having ruin guardians to battle, but it also meant they weren’t guaranteed a cache of tower-forged loot or any powerful soulprints from defeating those guardians either.

  “The Union archives said there was nothing but gremlins in here, but all info is suspect. I expect there to be gremlins, but I also expect some other monsters to have established their own territories. It’s a big building, after all. Be prepared for unknown monster types to join in once the fun starts,” Sorin warned them.

  With everyone ready, they started the hike up the steep trail. It angled up sharply and had tight switchbacks, but what truly made it harrowing was that the wall frequently leaned outward, forcing them to cling to it as they shimmied across the trail since they couldn’t walk normally. Every time they encountered a new spot, Sorin’s imagination treated him to a vivid image of a pack of gremlins hurling stones down at his team.

  It never happened, but that didn’t make the climb any less nerve-wracking. The worst of it came when Odric slipped and almost went over the edge, but Rue caught his arm and tugged him back to safety. “Surely we could have gone around and approached this from a different angle,” the big man muttered.

  “The map said this cliff widens into a chasm to the south and continues up into a mountain slope to the north,” Sorin told him. “There are other ways to the far side, but they come with their own problems. This is probably the easiest way to get there, plus it has hundreds of monsters waiting for us to harvest their anima at the top.”

  Odric let out a great sigh and shook his head. “Sometimes a man just wants to complain, Sorin.”

  Rue poked her brother’s side with a finger. “Sometimes a man should complain a little less and move a little more.”

  She was trying not to show it, but her ribs still weren’t fully healed. That worried Sorin, but the simple truth of it was that the clock was against them. Since they weren’t inundated with choices, she’d just have to suffer and do her best. Gremlins weren’t terribly strong monsters, not individually, and Rue’s primary job was to be a spotter, so Sorin wasn’t too worried, but he still would have preferred her in top form.

  Eventually, they reached the great, rotting, wooden gates of the fortress. There were two of them, each ten feet tall and held together mostly by the iron bands tightened around the boards. Those bands were more rust than metal at this point, and any sort of locks they might have once sported had long since been destroyed by the ravages of time and the weather.

  “Stay sharp,” Sorin warned as he put his weight into one of the doors. It swung open with the tortured squeal of hinges that hadn’t been oiled in decades, no doubt alerting every monster nearby that dinner had delivered itself. “This is where it gets fun.”