Raf was stronger than Rue; there was no denying that. He wasn’t even using a weapon, but he easily turned aside her every strike with his bare hands. Her only real advantage was her Aura Sense showing her surges of anima shooting up through his limbs into his hands before he parried a strike. He had something to keep his hands safe from being cut open, but his soulspace was so much larger than hers that stalling didn’t seem like it would work.

  The sole advantage she saw was that, just like the rest of the Black Hellions, he wasn’t taking the fight seriously. It was obvious that he still saw her as a rank 0 he could squish like a bug, and all of her efforts and struggle meant nothing. It was fun to him, watching her desperately try to hold off his languid, half-assed swipes—just a game, nothing more.

  Fuck. That.

  She had Iron Body now, but she was under no illusions it would be enough to save her. Pierce and Bloodlet were worthless if she couldn’t hit the bastard, and it was far too late for Shadows to contribute to the encounter. But there was one trick left that Raf didn’t know about.

  The fight dragged on, seconds turning into minutes as he toyed with her. Every now and then, he’d tease her by dragging a nail across her arm or the back of her hand, drawing a thin line of blood. Then he’d withdraw, deliberately holding back the poison she knew he could have injected. It wasn’t as strong as the Venom Strike they’d gotten off that manticore, she didn’t think, but he’d cut her enough that she knew she’d be on the ground if he wanted her to be.

  Finally, the opening came. It wasn’t the one she wanted, but it was the best she was likely to get. She swung with her right hand, and he slapped it aside, but in doing so, he twisted at the waist to claw at her with his left hand. Accepting the strike, Rue stepped into it and felt the nails dig into the meat of her shoulder. At the same time, she activated Bend Light to shroud her other sword.

  It came around, unnoticed and driving deep into Raf’s side. Pierce and Bloodlet were eager to finally taste flesh, and Raf’s sudden agonized screech was delicious music. He tried to pull back, but Rue stepped with him while jerking the blade back and forth, tearing open the wound wider, sending blood dribbling away.

  Her shoulder ignited in flames as Raf finally activated the poison he should have used the whole time. “You bitch!” he screamed. “I’ll fucking kill you for that!”

  She ignored the howling, ignored the fire burning through her veins, ignored everything except the sensation of that length of steel sawing back and forth. This was her only chance, and she could only hope the anti-toxin helped as well against Raf’s poison as it had against the ghoul’s.

  Raf continued to scream and flail wildly. His other hand caught the side of Rue’s face, digging sharp furrows across her cheek and into the side of her nose. Every part of her wanted to recoil from the man, to trust that she’d delivered a death blow and to escape his range while he bled out and died.

  She didn’t flee. There was too much at stake. If Raf somehow lived, he’d come back with a vengeance, and next time, he wouldn’t be so sloppy. He’d already realized the poison wasn’t working and was carving long lines of blood into her flesh, each one a fiery line of pain that she could only imagine would be much deeper if not for Iron Body.

  “Kill it!” Raf screeched at his partner. “The ghoul!”

  The ghoul? Not ‘the girl?’

  A sudden surge of anima around the mage was all the warning she got. Then the earth opened like stone jaws to swallow the floor guardian. There was a loud, wet crunch, and a few seconds later, the paralyzing agony of a rank up swept through her.

  * * *

  The explosion was too much of a distraction for Board Face. He didn’t recover nearly as quickly as Sorin did, and it cost him. Specifically, it cost him the tip of a sword punching through his throat. Board Face’s reaction speed was great enough that he managed to slip away with a controlled Speed Burst and a shallow gash across his skin, but Sorin was right behind him.

  The best part of Board Face’s frantic retreat was that he was pulling the fight farther and farther away from Scraggly and Needle Nose, and neither of them were anywhere near fast enough to catch up. The downside was that they were also getting farther away from the main battle down by the floor guardian. Sorin was less worried about that, though, since he could close that distance in a hurry.

  The neck wound was still bleeding, but not the way Sorin was hoping it would. Board Face had some sort of regeneration, maybe, or possibly just a stabilization soulprint. Those were a lot more useful for combat builds to keep accumulated damage from piling up and crippling a climber before they could find a dedicated healer.

  “Damn it, what’s it going to take to put you down?” Board Face asked, panting as he regarded Sorin warily.

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  “Funny, I was thinking the same thing,” Sorin told him.

  They both triggered Speed Burst at the same time, with Board Face having the advantage in terms of raw power, but Sorin checked him with superior experience and fight prediction. Blind Sense helped, too. New climbers often ignored the importance of a powerful perception ability to feed them information, but its value couldn’t really be understated to Sorin’s mind.

  Board Face was strong, but it was a hollow sort of power, one gifted and not earned. He had soulprints that complemented each other. He had plenty of anima to fortify them. He’d probably killed thousands of monsters to reach that point, but Sorin was betting it was all from being carried, that every time Board Face could have faced a real challenge, someone much stronger had squashed it instead.

  That was why he lost.

  It barely took twenty seconds to wear down the gang enforcer’s passive defenses, and Sorin readily leaned into the fact that no one else seemed to have any sort of speed enhancing soulprint to keep up with them. Sorin killed the man by bleeding him from a dozen wounds, then taking advantage of the opening Board Face left to puncture a lung with an ice blade while distracting the man with his sword.

  Board Face lay gasping in the dirt, hands frantically clutched at the wound as he choked on nothing, but Sorin didn’t have time to watch him die. A single stroke of his sword finished the job he’d started, opening the man’s neck.

  The other two, who’d been chasing after the fight the whole time, slowed to a stop. “I thought he was supposed to be rank 2,” Scraggly said.

  “He is rank 2,” Needle Nose replied.

  “The hell he is! Look what he just did. No rank 2 can do that!”

  Sorin faced the two of them, bloody sword in one hand and ice forming in the other. He took a step forward, and the two men both took one back to match. Then he blurred out of sight, exploding with motion for a second. When their eyes focused on him again, he’d cut the distance between them in half. His hand was raised, the ice blade fully formed.

  “Shit!” Scraggly yelled, panicking and throwing himself to the side like he expected an ice blade lodged in his brain.

  Sorin wasn’t aiming for him. The blade hit Needle Nose instead, right between the eyes. For a rank 6, he wasn’t that tough. That was what happened when a climber specialized to the point of handicapping himself in every other aspect. In the end, he was barely stronger than a rank 0, which was of course why Sorin chose him.

  With a glance at the center of the valley to make sure everything was still under control there, he turned to square up with Scraggly. “That’s two,” he told the man. “Time to make it three.”

  Unlike Scraggly, the whip in his hand squirmed about like it was excited to fight. Hell, maybe it is. It’s got more spirit than its owner, at least. He looks ready to piss himself or pass out, maybe both.

  “Funny, you were a lot more confident when it was three on one. What’s the matter? I’m just a rank 2, right? This should be an easy victory for you.”

  “F-f-fuck you. I’m not sloppy like Herchel,” Scraggly said.

  “Was that his name? I didn’t stop to get it.”

  Sorin wasn’t talking because he liked the sound of his own voice. It was one part intimidation, one part stalling. The truth of the matter was that keeping up with a rank 10, no matter how unskilled, had pushed him to the limit. Even with two separate soulprints feeding into his endurance, he needed a minute to breathe.

  Scraggly didn’t give it to him. Somewhere, he dredged up the courage to act, and with a bellow, he charged forward. His whip lashed out, extending in length to reach Sorin from twenty feet away and trying to tangle itself around his sword arm. Sorin fell back a step and faded to one side, but the whip’s tip simply turned at a sharp angle to pursue him.

  This was a lot easier to avoid three minutes ago, he thought as the leather struck his arm.

  “Got you! Not so tough after all,” Scraggly crowed, his earlier fear forgotten.

  The whip looped around his left arm twice, then retracted and pulled Sorin forward. He kept his balance, but just barely. He was more focused on Scraggly’s left hand, which had pulled that sacrificial blade back out of its sheath. There was no dodging that attack, and Sorin couldn’t afford to let the man get it off. His healing wasn’t so strong that he could take continued shots like that.

  The blade’s magic activated, and Scraggly lifted it with an underhanded grip. He started to drive it down into his stomach again, only for an ice blade shot out of Sorin to strike Scraggly’s fingers. Pain flared across Sorin’s hand in the same spot as the magic redirected the damage, but it was still enough to send the iron dagger flying end over end into the dirt.

  Not one to let an advantage slip past him, he seized the leather and pulled. Scraggly stumbled two steps closer to Sorin before regaining his balance and flexing his arm to pull back. Despite everything, he was a rank 10, after all, and Sorin couldn’t match him in brute strength. So, he didn’t try. When Scraggly pulled, Sorin willingly went with it, and he brought his sword with him.

  “No you don’t!” Scraggly growled. His empty hand shot out, and a thin disc made of water appeared. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the disc spinning at Sorin.

  An ice blade cut through the attack, destroying the structure of the magic and turning a disc that could probably lop an arm off into nothing more than a sprinkle of water across the dirt. Undeterred, Scraggly spun up disc after disc.

  With his anima reserves still nearing empty, Sorin couldn’t go head-to-head in a battle of spell shots. What he could do was dodge for his life, though that was made more difficult by the fact that the animated whip could and was working of its own initiative to trip him up. Scraggly probably couldn’t have managed both at the same time, but he didn’t have to.

  I need to end this before I’m completely tapped out. No, I have to do even better than that, because I’m going right into another fight as soon as this one’s over. One last push then.

  Before he could start, a piercing scream cut through the battle. “Kill it! The ghoul!”

  Sorin’s head whipped around just in time to see the floor guardian pulled into the earth and crushed. There was a gap of about three seconds, then the rank up hit his teammates. They were only incapacitated for a second or two, but that was enough for stone cages to reach up around all of them, trapping them in place.

  That’s going to be a problem. Sorin looked back at Scraggly, who’d gotten caught up watching the end of the fight below, too. Time for this guy to die.