It wasn’t reasonable to expect the caster half of the team to become proficient melee warriors in a handful of days, but Sorin drilled them hard anyway. They hunted, they practiced, and they rested. Sorin made Nemari join Rue in hacking goblins apart with a sword. He also made her start using Water Bond for more than just refilling their canteens, even though she complained bitterly that pure fire was far more effective than scalding steam.

  Odric wasn’t happy about his training either, but he kept his grumbling to a minimum. The logic was unassailable, and when Sorin presented him with a thick cudgel carved out of oak, he dutifully followed instructions for training with it.

  The weapon’s size and weight were both its strength and its weakness. It was bulky and created huge blind spots that a quick and intelligent opponent could exploit. Sorin showed Odric how to use it to minimize those zones and how to predict where a monster he couldn’t see might find a vulnerability. It didn’t take long for their healer to pick up the basics, and then it was just a matter of drilling until it was ingrained.

  That was hardly the extent of their lessons. Dodging was a far higher priority, since there was no amount of armor that could save a climber from anima drain. Sorin made them both practice simply staying ahead of him while he tried to chase them down with his bare hands. Every touch was a point for him, and when he reached ten, he declared them dead.

  Rue snickered from the sidelines the first time, a mistake which drew Sorin’s attention. Citing the need for more practice, he drew her into the rotation and crushed her twice as fast as he’d done to Nemari. Pouting, Rue protested the fairness of him using Speed Burst.

  “Oh, sorry,” Sorin said. “I forgot that monsters handicap themselves in the name of fairness.”

  He still didn’t consider any of them to be viable long-term members of his climbing team, but for the first ten floors or so, they’d do. After this whole mess with Samael and his gang was finished, he was planning on cutting them loose if they didn’t shape up. It wasn’t even that they were novices who still needed to figure things out and make their mistakes. It was that he didn’t see the drive in them.

  They wanted to climb, yes, but only to be strong enough to have an easy life, to fend off other climbers threatening them, and to be secure back on Floor 0. That was fine, but it wasn’t what Sorin wanted. He’d obsessed about climbing, about seeing the next floor and learning secrets nobody had ever known, and he’d learned to recognize that obsession in others. With the possible exception of Rue, this team didn’t have that.

  They slowly worked their way across the foothills and into a dustbowl of a valley on the west end of the mountains. By the time they arrived at the edge, everyone was pushing their maximum limit for anima. The builds weren’t as well-rounded as Sorin would have liked, but he’d done what he could to keep them pointed in the right direction.

  The valley was about four miles wide and consisted of almost nothing but barren ground, devoid of even grass. It had no trees anywhere that Sorin could see. There wasn’t even any moss to break up the dull stretch of brown and gray. The only variation was the occasional jutting stone ledge cutting across the bowl’s general downward slope.

  In the center, too far for them to see from where they stood, was a pointed black stone. It was a marker of sorts, something to draw in teams of climbers who thought they were prepared to overcome Floor 2’s ultimate obstacle. That was the final goal, but not the immediate one.

  “The good news is there aren’t many hiding spots,” Sorin said as they surveyed the valley. “We’ll do a lap around the outside edge first, then work our way in. Remember, we need to spot any other climbers before they spot us. We can’t afford to get ambushed by a full team of rank 10s.”

  They set off, Sorin speeding ahead while the others moved at a steady jog. If anything popped up, he was best prepared to handle it, and now that he was faux-rank 4, he didn’t think there was much left on the floor that could challenge him. Other climbers were the only real concern.

  He’d already sprinted past a nondescript stretch of dirt when Blind Sense caught movement behind him. Spinning in place, he charged back thirty feet just in time to meet an ambulatory skeleton dragging itself free of the ground. The Climber’s Union forgot to mention those, he thought darkly.

  It wasn’t necessarily a surprise, given the nature of the floor guardian, but he was once again annoyed that he’d paid for a membership to access subpar and oftentimes wrong information. It was no wonder this whole tower was struggling and thought a rank 10 climber was something to be in awe of. They needed the Climber’s Society from his home tower, not the garbage, money-grubbing organization he’d come to know here.

  Getting off-track again, he reminded himself as he closed in on the skeleton.

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  Undead generally required special soulprints to put down quickly. Otherwise they just absorbed seemingly endless amounts of punishment and kept going. His sword and ice blades were almost the worst possible match up, but Radiant Purge was near perfect. Admittedly, Nemari’s fire would have been better, if only because it wouldn’t hurt her to use it.

  This was still a good test case, though, so Sorin got close, dropped a kick down on its skull to knock it back down to the ground before it could finish climbing to its feet, and triggered the rush of anima that would turn the monster to dust.

  Light erupted from him in a corona, weak in the center where he stood, then growing more powerful about a foot out from its body. It bled off for another ten feet or so in every direction until it faded away completely, which wasn’t bad for a soulprint that had been completely empty of anima only a few days ago.

  The skeleton crumbled to ash in a matter of seconds, and Sorin cut the ability just in case there was anyone around to notice it. His skin tingled uncomfortably, somewhat like a mild sunburn, but it would only take a few minutes to heal from that. Everything worked together just like he’d wanted it to.

  Sorin backtracked to the rest of the group, who were steadily jogging along with Rue in the lead. Gathering them together, he said, “Just found a random animated skeleton about a mile ahead. It’s the only one I’ve seen, so maybe it’s a one-off. The Union archives didn’t say anything about undead in this valley, but considering the floor boss is a dust ghoul, I’m not really that surprised. Be on guard for more undead attacks, just in case. If there end up being a lot of them, we’ll consider it a good thing.”

  “We will?” Rue asked.

  “Because if the place is swarming with undead, it’ll be that much harder for a team from the Black Hellions to build a camp in the valley. They’d be getting constantly attacked,” Nemari told her.

  “That might not necessarily slow them down. The skeletons are only rank 2,” Odric said.

  “No, but it does make it harder for them to hide, which is the real concern. Whether they’re watching the place or not doesn’t matter, only whether they find us. They could have dozens of climbers positioned around the valley, but if we swoop in, kill the floor guardian, and disappear into the Antechamber before they can reach us, what are they going to do about it? After that, we’re running free on Floor 3, and they’ve lost their chance to find us for another few weeks until we’re ready to go to Floor 4.”

  Sorin got back out in front of the team again, this time moving a bit slower to make sure he didn’t bypass some half-buried skeleton before it could get up to fight. The anima gains weren’t great, but considering that the ‘fight’ consisted of walking up to them and pulsing his new soulprint for all of three seconds, he couldn’t complain.

  On the other hand, I’ve been hurt more from my own soulprint than from ninety percent of all monsters I’ve fought in this tower, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison.

  He completed the first circuit, having covered probably five times as much distance as the rest of his team with his wide, zigzagging pattern that took him a hundred feet or more off to either side of the straight line the rest of them were jogging. By the time they returned to the valley’s southeast entrance, the others were all huffing and puffing, but Sorin’s chest rose and fell easily.

  “I think I hate you,” Nemari told him.

  “This is why I said you should have a balanced build,” he told her pitilessly.

  “Let’s just go hunt a few more of those giant ogres down. I wouldn’t complain about having endless energy.”

  That had actually been the plan, but the better part of a week in the foothills hadn’t been good enough to find a single one of the massive monsters. That was how it normally went for climbers, though, so none of them were surprised. They’d lucked into a rare monster and then obtained an even rarer soulprint from it. None had argued that Sorin would get the most use out of it even if they weren’t stacking soulprints to help make him as strong as possible.

  “Did you see any skeletons?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Just one, but you’d already destroyed it,” Odric said.

  Sorin frowned. “I didn’t leave remains behind.”

  That gave them all pause. Eventually, Odric said, “Someone killed it, and recently enough that the tower hasn’t reclaimed it.”

  “That’s confirmation. They’re here, somewhere,” Sorin said. “We can’t advance until we find and take them out.”

  “We can set up camp in the mountains and watch the entrance,” Nemari said. “Eventually supplies have to come in. We’ll follow them to wherever they’re camped.”

  “Their boss has the same soulprint I do,” Sorin reminded her. “All they need is a solid-enough slab of rock.”

  “Wouldn’t he have to come out himself to carve it though?” Rue asked.

  They’d tried having someone else carve the sign for Sorin to use. It hadn’t worked, which was frustrating because it seemed to fly in the face of the rules as he understood them. He hadn’t carved the one in the cave on Floor 1, but he’d found that connection when he’d first ventured onto the liminal path. The only thing he could think of was that it had to be someone with the soulprint who carved it, but not necessarily him.

  “Probably, but I think his version can do a lot that mine can’t yet,” Sorin said. “The sign might have already been here. Even if it wasn’t, someone at his rank could come all the way out here in the matter of an hour or less. We can’t afford to assume we’ll spot their supply run if we just wait.”

  “Which means proactively hunting a climbing team that’s a higher rank than we are, and with none of us being specialized for stealth or scouting,” Nemari said.

  “Yep. It’s a problem, no denying it.”

  He didn’t hate their chances of finding the hideout. The valley wasn’t that big; they’d stumble across it eventually. No, the issue was figuring out where it was without the climbers who were already here realizing they had company. Pulling off an ambush was going to be difficult, to say the least.

  Unless we change the rules of the game. We’re operating under the idea that we need to find and kill the surveillance team before we can challenge the floor boss, but that’s not really true. We just need to prevent them from interfering long enough to finish the fight and get out.

  “Alright, I think I’ve got this figured out,” he announced. “Here’s how it’s going to go down.”