Sorin had a lot of questions, but not a lot of time to find answers for them. At the moment, he had several packs and bags full of the raw materials and soulprints his team had gathered, and while it wasn’t worth his life, it would be a considerable blow to their finances if he lost it all. His top priority needed to be getting that to safety before he even considered duking it out with the voidlings.

  The problem with that was, of course, the voidlings themselves. The one that had started forming in front of him three seconds ago was already twice the size of the ones he’d fought on Floor 1 and still expanding. The second voidling behind him would probably be of similar composition.

  The good thing about voidlings was that they never displayed any sort of abilities like regular monsters did. The small ones and big ones were all alike in that manner, just creatures with limbs and tendrils doing their best to touch their prey. They didn’t have or need mouths to consume reality. Just coming into contact was enough. Hell, just being close would drain anima from him.

  However, there were surprising differences in speed, reach, and intelligence. It was generally accepted that the bigger a voidling got, the smarter and more dangerous it was. Pretty much without exception, Sorin had found that rule to be true. And so, while he wasn’t thrilled to be fighting on a pathway seemingly made of shimmering silver dust that was barely eight feet wide, he wasn’t especially worried about it, either.

  The implications of a pair of voidlings showing up here were a different matter, but he’d consider that after the immediate threat to his life was over. Sorin dropped the packs in place and silently cursed that the voidlings couldn’t have attacked twenty seconds earlier when he’d been passing by one of the still-intact exit nubs. Then, he could have at least deposited his expensive and heavy pack full of valuables there, if not passed through himself and fought the monsters in a much more stable environment.

  That was not the case, however, and these two were growing beyond his initial expectations. The first one was up to eight feet now and had, in addition to the four standard limbs of most bipedal creatures, no less than six tentacles growing out of its back. He didn’t fancy his odds of squeezing by that without getting mauled.

  It had been five seconds since the first voidling had started to form, time he could have used to go on the offensive before its buddy joined it in trying to rip every trace of anima out of his body. Sorin shook himself out of his stupor, pushed the questions to the back of his mind, and drew his sword. His main goal was to kill both voidlings. Of secondary importance was defending his cargo.

  Sorin took off at a dead sprint toward the voidling, which was somehow still growing. He felt its attention settle on him despite its lack of eyes, and tentacles erupted forward to grab at his body. Steel flashed through ethereal silver light, and the closest of those limbs fell free of the main body. The voidling gave no indication that it had even noticed, of course. They never did.

  Normally, this was where he’d start flinging ice shards into the monster’s face, but voidlings would just swallow the magic whole and grow that much stronger for it. Instead of wasting anima that way, Sorin relied on the tried-and-true method of self-enhancement soulprints. Steady strength coursed through his body courtesy of Blood of the Mountain, and he danced with the voidling over the next four seconds.

  Pieces of darkness fell away from its body as he cut it down, always inches ahead of its grasping tentacle limbs. He gave ground willingly to keep out of its grasp, knowing all the while that he needed to kill it before its partner hit him from behind. Running out of space to fight would be a death sentence.

  The tentacles actually made the whole process a lot easier, in a way. They magnified the danger, but they also gave him convenient targets to hack through. Speed Burst proved its worth as he chained activations of it repeatedly to keep moving beyond his maximum speed, turning his sword into a blur that he couldn’t even track with his eyes. Chunks of void fell away almost as fast as they’d rained down onto the pathway to begin with.

  And it wouldn’t be enough. He could already see that the second voidling was fully formed and closing in from behind. He needed to get around the voidling somehow, but every time he cut off a tentacle, more void-stuff just shifted out of its main body to rebuild it. Might have to take a hit or two just to slip past it. No, I can do this without getting touched. It doesn’t have enough range to stop a Speed Burst.

  The plan settled, Sorin deliberately dragged it to one side of the pathway. Tentacles lashed out as it pursued him, slapping against the pathway and sending little silver dust clouds up to around knee height. Sorin ducked under one that tried to slam into his face and cut off a grasping hand that reached in to grab his wrist, then he activated the soulprint and blurred to the side in a sudden lunge.

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  Two feet of open space, twelve-foot stretch to get out of its range.

  He darted forward, but immediately dropped into a roll under a new tentacle that emerged from the voidling’s side. He was back on his feet instantly, his blade working brilliantly as he pirouetted quickly to hack off encroaching limbs. The moment his feet touched back down, he activated Speed Burst again to get out of range.

  The first voidling was down to maybe five feet of height now, a significant reduction from its former stature, but that didn’t slow it down at all. If anything, it just made it more difficult to fight as tendrils of its body got thinner and faster. Worse than that, the second voidling behind it had grown to a massive ten feet before it finished, and the roiling darkness beyond the pathway seemed to almost stretch out to touch the creature.

  Probably not a good sign, that. At least they’re both on the same side of me now. Shame about the bags, though.

  Those were still in one piece for the moment, but the odds of them staying that way were minuscule. The second voidling was going to pass right by them and was almost certain to take a moment to tear them apart to get at the anima trapped in the soulprints inside. Sorin felt a brief pang of regret at the thought of losing that Stone Skin in there. It was by far the most valuable piece, one he could have at least temporarily used in his build if he’d known it was going to be destroyed.

  He refocused on the voidling surging after him, its every step gouging out chunks of the liminal pathway they stood on. Sorin wasn’t really sure how thick the ground was here, and he was treated to an unpleasant image of falling through it into the void below—another good reason to end the fight quickly before the voidlings could tear up too much more of the path.

  Between the improved Heart of the Mountain and Warrior’s Vigilance, he’d been going at full speed even with the strain of Speed Burst, though, so he was willing to call that particular combination a success. It had been less than thirty seconds of fighting, but moving five times faster than normal strained him worse than any other fight he’d gone through.

  Sorin rushed in, this time meeting the voidling rather than retreating from it. He worked his sword up and down, even tossing it from his right hand to his left when the creature suddenly sprouted three extra tentacles from that side. He hacked pieces of it away where he could and dodged backward when he had to.

  Halfway dead, he thought by the time it had lost another foot in height. But out of time. Shit.

  The other voidling had finished assembling itself and had, somewhat surprisingly, ignored the distraction offered by the bags. That was great, assuming Sorin survived. He might make his dead drop after all. Unfortunately, a now-ten-feet-tall slab of solid void given shape, will, and hunger, was barreling down a pathway that could just scarcely hold its bulk.

  The only saving grace to this new development was that while voidlings could work together, there was nothing forcing them to. The bigger eldritch abomination simply came up behind the one Sorin had been whittling down and slammed into it, engulfing the smaller one and settling into place for a few seconds while it incorporated the new void-stuff into its body.

  There was nothing Sorin could do to halt that process, but he most definitely could, and did, use that time to carve off large chunks of the voidling’s body. It didn’t even try to defend itself, not that they ever did, but usually he had to dodge some limbs trying to latch onto him. This was a rare moment of weakness to exploit, and Sorin carved off enough void-stuff to cut at least a foot or two off its body in those few seconds.

  That did not stop the creature from growing from ten feet to twelve. It had also lacked the tentacle spread of the smaller one, which it now corrected. Twenty-foot-long ropes of inky darkness sprouted from its body and wove around, all the more dangerous because they were difficult to spot against the background void.

  Wish Blind Sense worked on these bastards. That would make this a whole lot easier.

  He cut frantically even as the voidling, more of a void beast at this point, started moving again. Four fully articulated arms tried to snatch him up, prompting him to retreat lest he receive a death hug, and the second he backed out of the void beast’s reach, it slammed forward like a crashing wave of darkness.

  Silver-gray dust sprayed everywhere, confirming Sorin’s fear about the thinness of the path as the void beast ripped a two-foot-wide hole through it to reveal more darkness beneath. Strangely, it reared back up, now missing the arm that had dipped below the path. Of course, it just formed a new one a moment later, but that did make Sorin wonder if he could somehow tip the creature off the path completely and let it be swallowed up by the darkness.

  Unfortunately, it was hard to move something as insubstantial as paper and deadly to come into contact with. The void beast didn’t care if it got hit, and it didn’t retreat. It was all hungry aggression, and no matter how much Sorin made it pay for every inch, it kept advancing. A few hundred feet of open pathway behind him was quickly cut in half, and still the void beast loomed over ten feet tall.

  Then it did something Sorin wasn’t expecting. A tentacle burst out of the ground right in front of him, heading directly for his stomach. He shoved anima through Speed Burst to fuel his dodge and counterattack, which split the tentacle right down the middle. Safety was fleeting, however, as three more tentacles shot up around him on all sides.

  The void beast halted its advance for a moment, apparently satisfied that it had finally caught its prey. Caged in and with no way to escape being caught, Sorin was forced to admit that it might be right. He could cut his way free, but not without giving the void beast the chance to take some pretty big bites out of him. Iron Body wasn’t going to save him; neither would his armor.

  There was only one chance here, and he didn’t know exactly what would happen. It couldn’t be worse than being ripped apart by a void beast, however, so he crouched low, channeled Speed Burst, and leaped straight up beyond the silver-gray light of the path and into the void-blackened sky overhead.