Sorin’s mind immediately went to work classifying the monster stomping into the room. In the blue tower, ogres weren’t commonly seen on Floor 2, but they weren’t unusual to spot on Floor 4. However, that was for a normal ogre. This one had a veneer of stone across its skin, which meant its anima was being spent making it even tougher than normal.

  It was also a foot or two taller than the average ogre and far bulkier. All taken together, this thing was probably tougher than the ruin guardian that had taken five people to kill back on Floor 1, to say nothing of it being faster and stronger. Worse than that, they were in a relatively confined room with a dozen dead gremlins littering the floor for them to trip over.

  The conditions could hardly get much worse. The prudent move—the only smart move, really—was to call for the retreat. But Sorin knew they’d never outrun it. Plans whirled through his head, everything from luring it into tight hallways that it couldn’t freely move through to luring it off the cliff and letting it fall to its death, but they were defeated by one simple problem: the ogre wasn’t going to just let them walk away.

  “Get back into the big hall two rooms back,” he ordered. “We need more space to fight.”

  Rue and Odric scrambled to obey, only stopping when they realized Sorin hadn’t moved. He didn’t look back to check on them. Blind Sense and his own ears told him that they’d froze. “Move,” he snapped. “I’ll buy you a few seconds’ head start.”

  That got them running for the door, but Sorin didn’t have time to see if they made it there. The ogre advanced, each footstep shaking the room, and raised one stone-skin hand to grab at him. If there was one small blessing to this fight, it was that the damn thing didn’t have a weapon. A tree-trunk-sized club wouldn’t have looked out of place, and it would have made the fight exponentially more difficult.

  Instead, Sorin flicked his sword up, slashing at almost eye level to score a line across the ogre’s palm. It did about as much damage as slashing at a stone wall, too. That meant Sorin was either in for a long, tedious battle of attrition where he tried to run out the ogre’s anima reserves, or he’d have to get clever.

  The ogre ignored the blade, not even bothering to push it aside as it lunged forward to grab Sorin. Heavy footfalls shook the ground so much that they threatened to throw off Sorin’s balance, but he slipped to one side. The hand, easily large enough to grab his head like an egg and strong enough to crush it like one, too, shot past in a gray blur.

  The ogre was completely open to counter attacks. There were half a dozen places that would normally be vulnerable to a stabbing blade all within reach. Sorin wouldn’t even have to move his feet to strike kidneys, under the armpit, or between the ribs. He could even go after the ogre’s more… sensitive… anatomy, had he wanted to.

  He didn’t bother. The stone skin shell it had up would protect it, and the risk of staying this close for longer than he had to made it pointless to hack at its body. Knowing he wouldn’t accomplish anything, Sorin darted out of its range instead of trying to follow up. That proved to be the correct choice. The ogre, clearly expecting and perhaps even baiting an attack, swung his arm around in an attempt to backhand Sorin.

  It missed by three feet or more, not having bothered to aim its wild flailing limb. Instead of striking Sorin hard enough to perhaps kill him, its knuckles smashed into the stone wall, cracking it and sending small pebbles cascading down to bounce off the floor. Like I needed any more incentive not to let it hit me.

  With the other two out of the room, Sorin started backpedaling. Blind Sense was practically worthless for navigating the carpet of gremlin bodies behind him, which meant he had to go a lot slower than he wanted. The only consolation was that every time the ogre took a step, everything shook slightly, giving him a split-second window into where the corpses were. Still, it wasn’t the same as being able to see it in real time, and it took him a frantic ten seconds of dodging about before he finally backed through the doorway.

  Odric was frantically hefting corpses and chucking them into the corner in an attempt to clear the battlefield for them. Considering that the ogre didn’t even notice when its toes caught a dead gremlin and flung it away, whereas Sorin could break his neck tripping over one, that was probably the best possible use of Odric’s time right now.

  Rue, on the other hand, was waiting next to the wall, clearly planning on ambushing the ogre from behind as it chased Sorin through the door. That would have been an excellent plan—it was a strategy they’d used hundreds of times on various monsters already—except that he wasn’t at all sure she could actually cut through its skin.

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  Then again, with Pierce helping her, she’s probably got a better chance than me.

  “Simple plan,” Sorin announced. “Rue makes vulnerabilities for Odric to use. Don’t hold back; make every hit count. It’s going to be like stabbing a rock, and we’re not going to run it out of anima, so this is how we win. It’s not an animal. It may understand us, so don’t go yelling out what you’re going to do trying to coordinate.”

  Sorin wasn’t going to be able to do much to control such a powerful creature. Without the ability to cause even minor damage, and not being a fraction as strong, it could freely ignore him to go after Rue or Odric whenever it wanted. His only hope was that it was as stupid as ogres normally were, that it would focus on what was in front of it rather than what was hurting it.

  Ice blades formed out of nothing and threw themselves at the ogre’s eyes. If anywhere was vulnerable, it would be there. Sadly, the mere act of blinking was enough to protect them. It didn’t even care about the burrs of ice clinging to its face as it strode through the attack, one arm already reaching down for Sorin again.

  The ogre sped up suddenly, its reach turning into a full-body lunge. Sorin jumped away, only the vertical height in his leap allowing him to avoid being plowed over by the ogre. Even on its stomach, it was still close to three feet tall. Sorin’s boot came down on its head, all of his weight barely enough to budge it.

  Rue took advantage of the exact moment to drive her sword straight down into the ogre’s back, right where its kidneys would be if it were human. Sorin was no expert in ogre anatomy, but he felt like he’d read somewhere once that they didn’t have a standard organ arrangement. Either way, the point was to break skin, and in that, Rue succeeded.

  The blade went in maybe two inches before it got stuck. That was barely enough to count for a papercut against the massive creature, but it didn’t matter. The gash was a vector for Odric’s Venom Strike to activate. Before he got the chance to rush forward, though, the ogre got its hands and knees under itself, then threw all its weight up and back.

  Rue went tumbling away, and even Sorin got clipped as one hand smacked across his knee. Pain shot through him, pain so bad that he worried the monster had ripped the bottom half of his leg clean off. It took a visual confirmation before he reassured himself that the limb was still fully present.

  The ogre ignored him to spin toward Rue. Sorin couldn’t let it reach her, so he did the only thing he could. He rammed his sword into the back of its knee and sprayed ice blades across its skull. Neither attack broke skin, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. The ogre roared in annoyance and spun back around to face Sorin again.

  It raised a foot to stomp on him, forcing Sorin to throw himself to one side. He landed on his injured knee, sending another spike of disorienting pain through his body, and in the half a second he’d lost focus, the ogre bore down on him. This time, its foot flashed forward, cutting the distance down to nothing as toes the size of basilisk eggs crashed into his chest.

  Sorin went flying backward with enough momentum to hit the wall fifteen feet away. The inane thought that it was a good thing Warrior’s Vigilance was E-rank ran through his head, but he brushed it away to focus on the fight. Minor Regeneration wouldn’t heal these wounds, not in any sort of timely manner, so he needed to ignore the pain and get back on his feet.

  The ogre stomped across the hall, each step making the corpses in the radius of Blind Sense jerk around. It only took it three huge steps to reach Sorin, but that was long enough to get back on his feet and scoop up his sword. His knee screamed with every inch he moved, and his chest wasn’t doing much better, but the fight wasn’t done, so neither was he.

  That was when Odric stepped in behind it and thrust the fingers of his left hand into the gash Rue had made in the ogre’s back. It reacted instantly, stiffening for a second, then spinning about with a pained roar to swat at the human who’d dared to hurt it. Odric, while not an expert, had some amount of training in hand-to-hand combat, however, and he was already backpedaling even before the ogre swung at him.

  Black veins traced their way out from the wound now, evidence that the poison had taken hold. One dose probably wouldn’t be enough for a creature this massive, but it did seem to be moving at least a little bit slower. Good. That’ll make the next shot even easier. Now we just do this again a few more times, and that’ll be that.

  Unfortunately, there was no getting the ogre off Odric now. It knew who was dangerous and who could be ignored, and it trusted in its own soulprint enough to dismiss Sorin and Rue as threats. The next twenty seconds resembled nothing so much as an absurd game of tag on a macabre open grave of a playground.

  Rue proved the ogre had made a mistake ignoring her when she drove her sword into the same spot Sorin had hit right on the back of its knee. Unlike his attempt, however, she drew blood and the ogre stumbled. It took her sword with it on the way down, but, undeterred, she simply drew the other one and got back to work.

  Odric also took advantage of the opening to pump more venom into its body, and from there, the rest of the fight was a formality. The ogre was absolutely still dangerous, but with its leg crippled, it was even less mobile than Sorin was. They simply kept away from it while it limped after them, with Rue managing to put a third hole in its foot while scurrying past it.

  Odric got another Venom Strike off on the back wound again, and that was what caused the ogre to finally collapse. Anima rushed through Sorin’s body, so much that he felt a dam burst inside his soulspace. It unfolded, opening wider and elevating him to rank 3.

  Eyes wide, he stared down at the ogre’s corpse. It’s replicable. This changes everything.

  “What the fuck,” Rue said, her own eyes matching his. “What just happened to you?”

  “Uh… that’s a fantastic question,” he said. “I don’t really have a good answer.”

  “Well you’d better find one!” she told him. “Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you just ranked up.”