There was no nice way to put it. Gremlins were fucking ugly. Rue had thought that about a lot of monsters over the last few weeks, but these ones were in a league of their own. Sorin had assured her that the nightmare bats were even worse, but she couldn’t make herself believe it.

  The floppy-eared little shits were everywhere inside the fortress. They lurked in the shadows. They hid in the walls. They waited under the floors and clung to the ceilings. Forget hundreds, there had to be thousands of the monsters filling the fortress. The team was barely fifty feet past the door and they’d already killed dozens of gremlins.

  The only upside was they were incredibly easy to kill. They had no strategy beyond waves of numbers, and the gremlins were just as likely to get in each other’s way as they were to work together. Rue’s blades flowed almost independently, working to maim and bleed the endless tide of monster flesh threatening to drown them all.

  It wasn’t even that hard. Sorin was the wall the gremlins broke against, and even though he couldn’t be everywhere at once, those shards of ice that appeared out of nothing to lance out in all directions did an excellent job of corralling the monsters. So Rue fought, and she held her side of the formation to keep the gremlins from circling behind Sorin, and the floors grew slick with blood.

  Opposite her, Od took a different approach. He simply lashed out with his hands and feet, displaying his martial prowess with every blow. Once, she’d been impressed by the sheer power of his blows, but Sorin was so smooth that he made Od look like an amateur. Hell, he made Rue look like one, too.

  How the hell doesn’t he lose his balance? The floor is practically gravel, and the blood just makes it worse!

  But she didn’t have time to watch beyond what Aura Sense told her. The gremlins came in waves, crawling out of holes in the walls or digging their way up through loose stone. More of them dropped from the ceiling twenty feet overhead, a somewhat suicidal tactic that left more than one gasping and mewling in pain on the floor until someone could spare a second to put them out of their misery.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, everything went quiet. Sorin thrust his sword through the throat of the last gremlin, then retracted it with a wet, rasping sound. The monster fell over, and there was none left to take its place.

  “Hmm. About fifty or so,” Sorin said, studying the ruined foyer they’d been fighting in. “Do you sense anything else lurking around?”

  “Nothing nearby, but I still haven’t capped Aura Sense yet. A few more fights like this might be enough, though.”

  She’d been focusing her anima gains on Pierce and Bloodlet, but Sorin had insisted that they needed her scouting capabilities more than anything else right now. With their team so small, they couldn’t risk falling into an ambush, and he’d be relying on her to make sure that didn’t happen.

  “Keep it up. Let me know when it’s full. I’ll walk you through controlling what direction it grows in once you have room to rank it up again.”

  Rue hadn’t even known that was possible, but Sorin assured her it wasn’t difficult. Od had just nodded in the background like it was the most obvious thing in the world, making her feel stupid for once again somehow missing a very basic piece of climbing knowledge.

  “Will do,” she said, faking a smile.

  “How’re your reserves, Odric?” Sorin asked.

  “Three-quarters, maybe a bit more. Things got a bit dicey in the middle when their numbers surged, but once the reinforcements started slowing down, I got myself stable. Venom Strike hardly uses anything, so that was no issue.”

  Sorin grunted but nodded along. “Need armor for both of you,” he muttered.

  Armor was, unfortunately, expensive. At least, good armor was. Sorin had bypassed that by harvesting the materials himself, but he hadn’t bothered to let anyone know. Rue would have done the same thing if she’d realized what was happening, but she’d had no idea. None of them had realized he was collecting ingredients for some alchemical strengthening solution.

  “No soulprints,” he said, looking around at the results of the slaughter.

  “Not an auspicious beginning,” Od added.

  Sorin shrugged. “Couple hundred more of them to go through. I’m sure we’ll find something.”

  Rue looked down at the little bodies and shuddered. Their too-wide toothy mouths hung slack in death, thick, swollen black tongues lolling out the sides. Somehow, despite having reptilian skin, bristly white hairs stuck out of them in random tufts, especially around their noses, ears, and chins. Their spindly limbs and short stature made them almost appear child-like if not for the over-sized heads.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Aura Sense had given her the mental image of dozens of bobble-headed children swarming her, which was its own special kind of horrifying. Noticing them crawling out of holes halfway up the walls had been even worse, especially since it was dark enough inside that she couldn’t see them with her eyes. She could only imagine what the scene had looked like to Od.

  Sorin had explained how Blind Sense functioned, which sounded entirely inferior to her own soulprint, but then again, he hadn’t indebted himself to dangerous criminals to obtain it, so there was that. Either way, she wasn’t too worried about something coming at him in the dark. It was only her brother who was relying heavily on a light source to be functional.

  At the moment, that light source was the open door behind them and the holes in the ceiling. Neither were great for brightening the place up, but they’d prepared torches using a small bundle of rags slathered in tar that Sorin had purchased from an alchemist back at the hub. He claimed it would smell better and smoke less than normal torches.

  “Alright, let’s get a light up and advance deeper in,” he instructed.

  Od pulled one of the prepared torches out of his pack and untied the bag from around the end, then held it out for Sorin to strike a flint next to it.

  “Missing Nemari already,” Rue joked, but nobody laughed. Guess that’s still a touchy subject.

  Od held the torch over their heads so that it could light up the door at the far end of the foyer. Sorin shifted to the side to let the flickering torchlight past him, then started walking. Wordlessly, Rue and Od fell into formation behind him.

  * * *

  Sorin carved a bulbous eyeball out of the gremlin’s face while Rue tried not to look. How is he so casual about that? It’s super gross.

  “Here, hand me the jar,” he told Od, who obediently held it out for him. It was full of some clear preserving fluid. The eyeball fell into it without so much as a plop and just hung there, floating in the center.

  “What’s this one called?” Rue asked.

  “Shadow Eyes. It’s useful as a support perception soulprint if you’ve got something better you want to modify, but I wouldn’t recommend it on its own. It’s how gremlins see movement in the dark, but you can beat it just by standing still.”

  “And you don’t want to add that to Blind Sense? It kind of sounds like a similar ability. Maybe you could increase the range.”

  Sorin shook his head. “They sometimes have a better version that isn’t restricted by movement. No way I’d waste my limited build space on something like this when I could get the other one. Better to get fifteen or twenty danirs for it and let a merchant pass it off to someone else.”

  “Too bad it’s the only soulprint we’ve gotten so far,” Od said. “God, out of, what, two hundred gremlins? Three hundred?”

  “We’re mostly here for the anima,” Sorin reminded them. “Speaking of, how close are you to filling Aura Sense?”

  “Next pack for sure,” she said. “I can feel it. It’s right there. I just need one little push to cap it completely.”

  Even now, weeks later, she couldn’t get a read on him. Rue would have thought he’d be pleased by the news, but if he cared at all beyond calculating how it changed their team’s capabilities, nothing showed on his face. His aura, as always, was a block of cold, unchanging steel. Unlike most people’s, his seemed to spill out past his body, blurring the outline of his form slightly.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, it was growing, too. That was weird. Rue had been looking at auras for months and months, and his was the only one she’d ever seen do that. But then, everything about Sorin was weird, so she wasn’t all that surprised that this part of him didn’t behave properly either.

  A rumble passed through the room, shaking dust and small flecks of stone loose from the ceiling. All three of them looked up at the far doorway, but it remained dark and empty. Whatever door might have once been there, it had rotted away a long time ago. That was the case for most of the fortress’s interior, even deep inside where the rain shouldn’t have been able to wear down the wood quite so quickly.

  Rue figured the gremlins had just chewed the doors up and shit them back out. It made about as much sense as any other theories she could come up with. There were so damn many of them packed into the old building that she couldn’t imagine how they all kept themselves fed.

  “Something big?” Sorin asked quietly.

  “Not close enough for me to sense it if it is,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t be anything like that here.” Sorin shook his head. “Fucking Union. Can’t even keep their information on Floor 2 up to date. What the hell are they doing with the money they steal from us?”

  Rue was no fan of the Climber’s Union herself, but Sorin’s hatred for it seemed excessive. He’d probably had some bad experiences with it in the past, though she was at a loss as to what. He wasn’t that much older than her and was younger than Od. And she didn’t care what he said. That story about being a higher rank and somehow getting knocked back down to 0 was crap.

  Another tremor shook the room, stronger this time. Rue’s eyes darted back and forth, seeking some monster outside the range of Aura Sense.

  “Hand me the torch,” Sorin said, not taking his eyes off the darkened doorway as he climbed back to his feet. Od placed it into his waiting hands, and Sorin tossed it forward.

  Shadows danced where the torch fell, but the light extended out into the hallway. Rue squinted out into the darkness. Did… Did that wall just move?

  “Sorin,” she said, a warning note in her voice.

  “I saw it,” he said grimly. “Better get ready for a fight.”

  “What is it?” Od asked.

  The shadows shifted again. Something gray appeared for just a moment before it was swallowed back up by the darkness. Not the wall, just gray-skinned like the stone. And big.

  The floor shook.

  A foot stepped into the edge of the torch light, followed by a leg that went up and up. It took another step forward, shaking the room again. It had to be at least nine feet tall, maybe more. Rue still couldn’t see all of it in the darkness.

  The monster moved quicker now, each step shaking the floor more. A hand bigger than her whole head reached out and gripped the top of the doorway, and it ducked its head under before straightening back to its full height. Forget nine feet. That’s eleven or twelve!

  It had squished features, with a nose too wide and eyes too small for its head. Large, crooked, yellow teeth were visible between flabby lips. Its entire body was thick, easily three times bulkier than a person’s, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat to be found anywhere on its frame. If it weighed less than a thousand pounds, Rue would be surprised.

  “That,” Sorin said softly, “is a really big fucking ogre.”