Sorin was annoyed about a great many things in his life lately. Losing a hundred floors worth of soulprints was a blow he hadn’t even thought was possible. It should have killed him. He still wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, let alone how he’d survived. But he was still alive, for the moment at least, which brought him to the most recent annoyance in his life: a three-ton giant black scorpion that was currently trying to kill him.

  Specifically, he was annoyed that it kept disappearing back under the sand every time he got close enough to take a swing at it. For the past two hours, it had been stalking him across the desert, appearing every few minutes in a failed ambush where it tried to crush him with its pincers or pierce him with a tail stinger so thick that it would probably rip him in half if it ever landed a hit.

  The first time it had appeared, he’d cut half of a pincer off. It had been a lot more cautious after that, but despite repeated failures to actually catch its prey, it hadn’t given up. That was why Sorin had diverted course away from the open sands to a stretch of barren, rocky land that he hoped was stable enough to prevent the burrowing monster from chasing him underground. It wasn’t that he minded fighting it; he just needed to remove its ability to run away.

  Either it wants me bad enough to stand its ground, or it’ll fuck off and leave me alone.

  Most monsters weren’t that smart, and monstrous animals tended to be even dumber. It was a dangerous assumption to make, because being proven wrong just once could result in someone dying, but Sorin was confident in his guess. Insectoid monsters rarely developed the kind of cunning instincts other animalistic monsters showed, and he was betting that such a large creature living in an environment so devoid of potential meals would risk losing its natural advantage to chase after him.

  A small, satisfied smile tugged at his lips when sand exploded a hundred feet into the air behind him. The massive scorpion trundled up into the open, its legs working to drag its bulk onto the stone slab Sorin had positioned himself on. It was only a few hundred feet across, but that gave him at least three or four seconds to get his licks in before the scorpion could flee back underground.

  It was faster than anything that size had a right to be. At over three times Sorin’s height, its pincers were almost the same size as him, and the hundred-foot-long tail that curled over its body could strike faster than a rank 0’s eyes could see.

  It was a good thing that he wasn’t a rank 0, then. Technically, he was a rank 3, but in reality his soulspace had expanded faster than was normally possible and he was now straddling the line between rank 4 and 5. He hoped to firmly cross over once he killed the scorpion, assuming it didn’t manage to escape.

  It scuttled toward him, pincers already extended and tail poised to come down. Sorin stood his ground, his sword looking like a solid bar of pale blue frost. If the scorpion was smart, it’d be wary of that blade. The fact that it ignored it just proved it was driven by nothing more than the desire to kill and consume.

  Sorin channeled anima through his soulspace, activating Speed Burst at the last moment. The scorpion’s stinger came down, a few hundred pounds of muscle backing a barbed point thicker than his waist, but it slammed into the ground where Sorin had been standing a moment ago rather than striking the man himself.

  A normal steel sword would have failed to cut the scorpion’s carapace, but Sorin’s sword was a reward from the tower’s Antechamber between Floors 2 and 3. It was laced with magic—and with something else he couldn’t quite identify—and it had no problem cutting through the stinger. Blue-black blood erupted in great spurts, and the scorpion’s mouth spasmed as it let out a great, creaking groan. It recoiled, aborting its attack just like it had every time Sorin carved off a piece of it, but this time its control over sand couldn’t save it.

  Sorin leaped forward, severing first one, then a second leg in a single burst of speed. Now lopsided, the monster crashed to the ground and started dragging itself sideways. Its body dragged great furrows as it moved, and despite the handicap, it was still terrifyingly fast. It could easily kill a human man just by rolling over him with its great bulk, and despite everything, Sorin respected how dangerous it was.

  That did not mean he was going to let it go, of course. There was anima to be harvested, and if he was really lucky, maybe a good soulprint. If the scorpion fled back under the sands, he’d lose out on those opportunities, so, keenly aware of how few seconds he had before it got away, he pressed the attack.

  Going over it wasn’t an option. Once it was dead, he could easily climb on its back, but at the moment, it was a terrible idea. Going under was even worse. That eliminated the option of hacking off the rest of its legs on the other side, though he did take the time to slash through the four-inch-thick shell that made up the final limb near him just to slow down its retreat a bit more.

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  Then he got to work destroying it. Sorin had no interest in preserving the carapace, nor in harvesting the undoubtedly massive poison glands. He was traveling light, and speed was of the essence. So he just started chopping into its side, tearing open the abdomen, and letting its innards slop out into the dirt.

  The rush of anima that announced its death was every bit as satisfying as Sorin had hoped it would be. A familiar twinge of pain rocked him, drawing a small wince as his soulspace tore open and expanded to rank 5. That gave him the space to advance Speed Burst and Heat Resistance to E-rank if he wanted to, but he was strongly considering leaving them both at F.

  Not only would that give him a small pool of anima to free cast pretty much any F-ranked soulprint spell, it would also be a step toward advancing something to D-ranked once he reached rank 6. Blood of the Mountain or Blind Sense were probably his most valuable choices, but which one took first place was dependent on the day.

  I can afford to put this off for a few days, he thought to himself as he checked the giant corpse for soulprints. I don’t think I’m going to find much that’s stronger than this thing on Floor 3, and it was more an annoyance than a real challenge.

  It would have been a lot more annoying if he hadn’t found a patch of stone big enough to lure it out of the sand, though. That was a stroke of luck, sort of. It had taken over an hour to find it, so it wasn’t like he’d just stumbled across the opportunity.

  “Ah,” he said happily, noting a knot of anima in its carapace. He used his sword to hack the section free, then got out a smaller, finer knife to cut the arm-length soulprint out. It was a mutation type, one that would actually change a climber’s skin to the same shiny black as the scorpion’s. Sorin wasn’t a fan, and not just because of the aesthetics.

  His personal biases aside, someone somewhere would pay a nice stack of danirs for the soulprint, and it was sturdy enough that he could just toss it in his pack without taking any special precautions. It was a nice find, and he was happy to waste a few minutes collecting it.

  Then he was back to jogging across the desert and thanking God that he’d gotten lucky acquiring a Heat Resistance soulprint back on Floor 2. Even with that, it was still unpleasantly warm, so he could only imagine how miserable Rue and Odric were without it. If they were lucky, they’d found their own. This was the floor they were commonly harvested from, after all.

  Floor 3 was a desert from one edge to the other. It seemingly went on without end, but that was probably just some quirk of the tower. It was either that, or the floor was just so overwhelmingly large that nobody had ever survived the harsh conditions long enough to see the far side of it. Sorin wasn’t sure, mostly because he’d never had the opportunity to research the floor.

  His status as a sort of fugitive from the criminal underworld kept him from going back to the Climber’s Union archives located on Floor 0, though the information there had been wrong often enough that he wasn’t sure how much to trust it anyway. Either way, he’d had very little to go on beyond the basics, which made it a bit difficult to plan out the best way to climb past the desert to Floor 4.

  With every step he took, he got a bit closer to the desert’s sole landmark. A moderately sized mountain rose up over the sands, at the top of which was the portal guardian that prevented climbers from escaping the scorching hot desert. Seeing as to how nobody wanted to spend any more time on Floor 3 than they had to, climbers tended to congregate around there.

  That was a problem for Sorin and the rest of his team. They’d gotten separated at the end of Floor 2 and now needed to find each other without the Black Hellions finding them first. Sorin was rushing for their agreed-upon meeting point, but that was more a general area than a specific spot.

  It had been a week since he’d last seen them, and while he wouldn’t say he was eager to join back up, he recognized the necessity. Though he was growing less and less dependent on their soulprints to round out his own, he wasn’t quite to that point where he was ready to strike out on his own yet. Besides, they had business to finish with the Black Hellion himself first.

  His musings were interrupted by a line of cacti, which were only infrequently seen in the first place and never in a straight line cutting across the sand like that. Huh. That’s… weird. Probably means something.

  Rather than investigate, Sorin simply swerved south around it, going a full mile out of his way to avoid being drawn into whatever tower bullshit the cacti represented. Another time, he might have gone straight for them in the hopes of finding something valuable, but right now, he valued his time too highly to risk getting sidetracked.

  Definitely a place to consider checking out again once I know the team isn’t dead under a layer of sand. They still need anima from this floor to prepare for the fight with the guardian.

  The sun started to set, and with its disappearance, temperatures quickly plummeted from uncomfortably warm to uncomfortably cold. Sorin had never understood the rationale behind that, but the tower seemed intent on punishing climbers any way it could. Lacking any sort of cold resistance soulprint to complement his heat resistance, he merely pulled his cloak out of his bag, slung it across his shoulders, and kept jogging.

  It wasn’t long before the first of the night’s monsters found him, exactly as they’d done the last few nights. This time, it was a pack of jackals, their hides spotted brown and orange except for a thick ruff of fur around their necks and shoulders. That was a deep, blazing red, the exact same shade as the liquid flames that dribbled between their teeth.

  Well, at least they’ll keep me warm for the next minute or two, he thought to himself as he drew his sword and veered directly at the pack.