Sorin pulled on every scrap of anima he had left. Most of it went to a speed burst, which was the only way he was going to close the distance without getting tangled up in that animated whip or dismembered by razor-edged water discs. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he suspected that might be a D-ranked soulprint generating those, because they were way too destructive for how weak they appeared.

  He appeared right in front of Scraggly, sword already coming down to split open the man’s skull. That didn’t work, of course. While it would have been nice to score a simple, clean hit that ended the fight, he hadn’t been expecting things to be that easy. Speed Burst wasn’t teleportation, and the whip was already reacting to him. It snaked around his arm, firmly halting it and sparing Scraggly’s brains from spilling out into the dirt.

  The man’s eyes widened in shock, but he didn’t hesitate. His empty hand came up to form a water disc, and Sorin spent another sliver of what little anima he’d been able to muster destroying it with an ice blade. Undeterred, Scraggly forced the whip to pull Sorin off balance, spinning him slightly so that his free hand was pointed out at nothing.

  “Got you now,” he growled as he formed a second disc over his open palm.

  That was when an ice blade appeared in front of Sorin’s chest and drove straight up through the bottom of Scraggly’s jaw, piercing his tongue, then the roof of his mouth. The water disc fell apart before it could finish forming, and the man spasmed in place for a second. Then he slowly toppled over, losing his grip on the whip in the process and freeing Sorin from its grip.

  Two more to go, and I’m basically running on empty.

  His best chance of cinching victory was to work with the rest of his team. If he could keep the attention on him, it would give them a chance to lay down some damage. Maybe, if they were really lucky, that earth mage wouldn’t have any good defensive soulprints. It was possible, considering that Sorin hadn’t seen him use anything but floating chunks of stone and temporary walls to block Nemari’s firebolts.

  Before he could do anything, though, he needed to get there. A few hundred feet didn’t seem like a lot, but it was right now. Without anima reserves, his passives were also winding down, which left him with his normal amount of endurance, normal healing speed, and normal skin. He was in good shape, and knocking thirty years off the clock helped a lot, too, but he needed to cover that distance in a second or two, not ten or fifteen.

  This is going to hurt.

  A soulspace was, in a very real sense, a box made of anima that contained even more of the same. Using that loose anima was fine. Every climber did that every day. Tearing anima out of the box itself was a different story, and that wasn’t even touching on the added unknown that was the tile mosaic his soulspace now held.

  He could try to run. Rue, Odric, and Nemari would almost certainly die or worse, but Sorin could flee. He had enough of a head start that he might even escape. There were trees not an hour away that he could quickly carve a seven-tower sign into.

  He didn’t like that idea for a few different reasons. It was short-sighted, just pushing a problem down the road and locking himself to Floor 2, which would dramatically slow his growth. Already, he was getting pitiful, fractional amounts of anima from even the strongest monsters he could find in any real number. He needed to move up to Floor 3 or 4 at minimum if he wanted to make meaningful progress again.

  So, despite that fraction of a second’s hesitation, Sorin committed himself to finishing the battle. He scratched at the walls of his soulspace, tearing anima free like flowing lifeblood, and then he repurposed that anima to empower his soulprints. Immediately, his breathing evened out as Blood of the Mountain started working again, the strain in his muscles and the ache of his wounds fading into dull, background pain.

  Sorin leaped forward, a single Speed Burst enough to put him in range. It took only a moment to assess the situation. The man he assumed was Raf—the same man he’d seen at the Climber’s Union—was bleeding fiercely and glaring at Rue with eyes that promised a slow, messy, painful death. The Hellions had turned the pain of a rank up against his team, briefly incapacitating all of them by killing the ghoul. What remained of its body had oozed out of a fissure in the ground.

  The earth mage looked about as tired as Sorin felt, which was a minor blessing. If the man had still been fresh, the battle would have been over before it got started. Unfortunately, it was still two-against-one, and Sorin’s soulspace was aching from the fragment of power he’d ripped free. Even the thought of channeling more anima made the walls wobble and stabbed fragments of fiery obsidian shards into his soul.

  Get the team free, first. Odric can break through this if I can give him an opportunity, and he’ll get the others free. I just need to distract Raf and his buddy.

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  Even exhausted, the mage was the more dangerous of the two. Raf felt like he was around rank 6 or 7, and, if Rue had been kicking his ass, probably not a very combat-oriented climber either. Sorin almost committed to killing him first, just to prevent him from acting as a distraction and maybe a little bit because Rue was bloodied and Sorin knew it was Raf who’d done it.

  The earth mage decided the issue for him. As Sorin came out of Speed Burst, he immediately threw himself sideways to avoid two stone bullets tearing through him. Pain flared across his whole body again as Blood of the Mountain consumed the last of his anima and started trying to leach away what little was flowing out of the wound in his soulspace.

  “Don’t kill that one!” Raf shouted. “Boss wants him alive!”

  “I know that,” the earth mage snapped back.

  Sorin lunged forward, his sword leading the way, but rocks tore themselves out of the ground beneath his feet in rapid succession. He pivoted and recovered his momentum after dodging the first one, but the second and then third fully broke his charge. At the same time, Raf pulled out a set of needles from a pocket inside his coat and started throwing them.

  Just like Needle Nose. You guys copy each other’s build?

  But he knew that wasn’t true. Needle Nose had been a pushover. Raf was faster, more accurate, and had better timing. He needed all those advantages, though, because there was no way he had as much ammunition to burn through.

  “Watch out for the poisons,” Rue called out.

  Sorin had taken an anti-toxin, just like the rest of them, but he’d prefer not to stress test it if he didn’t have to. He dodged left, then back, then left again, each step taking him farther and farther from his goal as the two Hellions worked in concert to corral him. It was frustrating. Sorin knew he could go faster, even without Speed Burst, but he was functionally operating at baseline without any real anima to power his soulprints.

  Then it got worse.

  It turned out there was a reason Raf had so few needles. The damn things were enchanted to return to him after he threw them. The first one nearly caught Sorin from behind, but he heard it whistling through the air for a split second and threw himself into a roll.

  Really missing Blind Sense right now!

  The earth mage would have caught Sorin right then and there if he’d still been fresh. He tried, summoning up bars of stone, but he’d slowed down too much over the course of the fight. One clipped Sorin’s leg as it rose up, but he was already past them before they could curl closed overhead.

  Just a few more seconds. Come on, Odric. You can’t be dry already. Put those fists to good use.

  A sudden crack announced that Odric had done exactly that. His fist, colored the gray of Stone Skin, had smashed through a bar with a solid jab. A moment later, he snapped another one. Then he wiggled a foot up to brace it against the broken bars and shoved. Stone wasn’t like metal. No amount of force would cause it to bend.

  Instead, it shattered. Small flakes blew out in every direction, pelting the earth mage and causing the rank 10 to whirl in place. He was probably intending to fix the cage before Odric could fully break free, but in his haste, he’d forgotten that he had no one standing between him and his enemy.

  Mistake, Sorin thought with a feral, savage grin.

  Sorin closed in, a shark finally done circling his prey, and his blade bit deep into the man’s back. At the same time, two poisoned needles slammed into his side. One got caught in the armor, but the other hit Sorin’s hip just below it. He grunted at the new pain layered onto all the rest, but ignored it to drive his sword in deeper.

  Not Stone Skin, but something similar. Need more anima to Warrior’s Vigilance for the strength boost.

  That pain made the needle pumping poison into his veins feel like a paper cut, but Sorin endured. He’d come too far and overcome odds too long to just give up now that he’d gotten a blade into the last rank 10’s skin. With a sudden surge of motion, he roared and drove the blade another six inches deep.

  A second needle hit him, this time in Sorin’s arm. Then a third. Sorin’s vision swam, but he pushed harder. The earth mage had to die, then they’d take care of Raf. Odric could cleanse the poison after, if it proved to be too much for the anti-toxin to handle.

  Raf started screaming, but Sorin didn’t have time to figure out why. Hopefully, it was something someone on his side had done. If another monster had shown up, he’d just count himself lucky it had gone for Raf first. For the moment, all his focus was on killing the earth mage, who was desperately trying to summon a wall of stone between him and Sorin while pawing at a pouch on his hip that was suspiciously sized to hold a standard set of potions.

  For Sorin’s sake, he hoped that was what was in there. He could use a pick-me-up once the fight ended. In the meantime, he didn’t need the Hellion gangster getting back in the fight, so he shot the man’s elbow with an ice blade. It didn’t do half the damage it would have against a rank 0, but it was enough to screw the joint up. His screams joined Raf’s.

  And then the blade slipped the last few inches, cleanly bisecting a kidney, hacking off part of a lung, and piercing the heart. At that point, it was all over. Sorin gave the sword a vicious twist, then jerked it free and let the mage collapse.

  Wearily, he turned to see Raf, who had one of Rue’s swords sticking out of his side. The other was laying on the ground, covered in Raf’s blood. With a grimace, he pulled the blade free and cast it aside.

  “You… fucking rank 2s. This isn’t possible. You’re… cheating,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. His hand patted down his pocket, digging in for something—perhaps a much-needed healing potion. “You can’t do this.”

  With a single, drunken, staggering step, Raf fell forward on his face. Sorin watched him for a moment, but he didn’t get back up. Blood pooled steadily around the corpse, leaking out of more than a few wounds, but that last one really seemed to have done him in.

  In the end, climbers were human, too. And humans, beneath all the magic their soulspaces could hold, were fragile, insignificant creatures.

  The fight was over. With a pained groan, Sorin plopped down and tried to catch his breath.