Emerging onto a new floor was always a risk. The tower wasn’t so nice as to just dump climbers at the portal hub for that floor, not the first time. They had to go find it. And unfortunately, that wasn’t always easy. Within limits, a new team could arrive almost anywhere on the floor. Sorin had never heard of anybody popping up in a river about to go over a waterfall or a thousand feet in the air on a lower floor, but then again, any teams that had entered a floor in that manner probably hadn’t had any survivors left to spread the tale.

  What did sometimes happen was coming into the floor in an underground cave network or a fortified ruin swarming with goblins or the like. It was entirely possible to get caught up in a life-or-death battle mere seconds after being dumped out of the portal, but that kind of stuff rarely happened on the lower floors.

  Unfortunately for Sorin’s team, ‘rarely’ and ‘never’ didn’t mean the same thing. By the time he’d followed the rest through the red circle of magic, there were already two monsters on the ground. They looked like great hounds, ones that could stare a grown man in the eye and with teeth that could rip an arm off in one bite.

  One of the bodies was covered in seared red flesh, Nemari’s work. Her spells were far more effective against flesh-and-blood enemies than they’d been against the golem on Floor 0, but Sorin was still surprised to see she’d killed a hound in mere seconds.

  The other one had similar burns, but its throat had been slit by one of Rue’s short, thin blades. Its legs kicked feebly as its lifeblood poured out into the dirt. It’d be dead in moments, and the girl had already moved on from it to face the rest of the pack.

  The portal had dropped them into some sort of underground den, brightly lit by the morning sun coming in from a wide opening on the east side. If they’d waited another hour or so, maybe the hounds would have already been out hunting for the day, but they hadn’t gotten so lucky.

  Then again, it looks like we surprised them while they were still sleeping. That’s probably how Nemari and Rue got the drop on those two. They attacked before anything realized we were here.

  It was too bad there were six more adult hounds and too many puppies to count. Chaos ruled, with some hounds circling the intruders while others chased the pups out and away from danger. A few juveniles, not quite adults but too big to be mistaken for children, joined their elders in cornering the four intruding humans.

  “Shit, go back,” Nemari ordered as she eyed up the monsters.

  Portals didn’t work like that, though. As soon as Sorin passed through, it closed behind him, cutting off the red light flooding the den. Even if it hadn’t, climbers couldn’t walk backward through them anyway. Climbing to a new floor was always a risk; they’d just gotten unlucky on their very first one.

  The hounds themselves had short, bristly fur, burgundy with small patches of black on their forelegs and faces. Muscles rippled under their skin, flexing as they stalked back and forth while Nemari and Rue retreated back toward where the portal had spat them out. Eyes that gleamed yellow followed each step they took. A rumbling started coming from one of them, deep and powerful. The other picked it up in chorus, making the entire den start to shake.

  Odric pivoted smoothly, trying to keep himself between the monsters and the girls, but his weapons were more last-resort options than something that would win him a fight. With a few specific soulprints, that could easily change. And on the day he got those upgrades, Sorin would be happy to let him take point.

  Today was not that day. Sorin drew his new sword—I never thought I’d feel this grateful just to have a proper sheath—and put a hand on Odric’s shoulder. “That’s my job,” he said. “Yours is to stand in the back and patch me back up when I’m done.”

  “You’re a bit outnumbered,” Odric replied. “Maybe you should let us help.”

  “Watch and learn,” Sorin said. He called back to Nemari, “Try not to set me on fire.”

  Then he was in the middle of the pack, his sword leading. It flicked out, slicing through ruffs of fur and thick skin, deep into muscle and back out before his victim could get ahold of him. Their size worked against them, and they lacked the ability to coordinate their attacks like humans would.

  Pack tactics worked better against larger opponents in open spaces, but they were no help against Sorin. For one thing, he wasn’t running. For another, they were so predictable that it was easy to interpose his sword to leave bleeding muzzles whenever one went in for a bite. The only problem was the rumbling vibration that was steadily increasing in intensity. He could feel it in his chest and coming up through the soles of his boots.

  Some sort of sonic attack using anima. Might make it harder to activate soulprints by disrupting anima flows. Could be useful as a countermeasure if we could acquire one, unless it requires the whole group to have and use them in sync.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The odds of getting even one soulprint off this pack of monsters were low. Getting four duplicate soulprints was a statistical impossibility. There could also be some problems with friendly fire, especially since his teammates weren’t all that practiced with fine anima control. No, if they got lucky enough to see a soulprint from this fight, it would be best to sell it.

  “Damn it!” Nemari cried out from behind him. A flicker of light flew by in his peripheral vision as a firebolt splashed harmlessly against the packed dirt ceiling of the den.

  Good thing these monsters are so big that they needed to dig a deep hole. This fight would be a lot harder if I couldn’t stand up straight. Looks like I was right about what that growl is doing, too.

  He drove two of the hounds back with a flurry of quick blows, but despite his best efforts, he couldn’t hold the entire line by himself, not with just clever swordplay. Inevitably, the hounds started trying to circle around him, to get past and attack the more vulnerable back line. Rue was there to intercept them, both blades out and ready to take on the next monster that got too close, but Sorin could see a tremble in her hands.

  Three ice darts shot out, expertly aimed at the eyes of the hounds that were trying to bypass him. At almost the exact same time, Nemari released another firebolt. This one didn’t miss, and one of the hounds went down, yelping in pain as its fur lit up. The monster turned out to be surprisingly flammable, which Sorin supposed explained how his team leader had managed to cook one in only a few seconds.

  It took twenty seconds after the fight started to cut the number of monsters left in the pack down to six—three adults and three juveniles, with the rest dead or fled. Odric had yet to need to do anything more than stay out of Nemari’s way, though he hovered closer to Rue than to the older woman. His sister had joined Sorin in holding the front line using the curve of the den’s wall to keep more than one monster at a time from attacking her.

  Sorin held back the other five, and he was in his element. The thrill of danger, of meeting new challenges and crushing them, was what drove him to climb in the first place. It had been a long time since he’d been given such a straightforward trial. It was all physical, just muscle and skill holding back simpleminded creatures with desires no more complex than defending their territory and securing their next meal.

  It was nostalgic, really.

  Another of the hound monsters fell dead at his feet, its flanks covered in bleeding gashes. All of them were moving slower now, not a single one uninjured as he alternated targets to hold them all back. Nemari provided supporting fire where she could, but Sorin got the sense that the hounds’ rumbling disruption ability was making her hesitate. She’d been far more aggressive against the golem even though her magic did practically nothing to it.

  “Come on, Nemari,” he said. “This is good practice for casting under an adverse condition.”

  “I’m trying not to hit you!” she said. “And you aren’t making it easy.”

  “I can hardly stand still, now, can I?”

  They made quick work of the rest of the monsters, though once the pressure was off, Sorin switched from lethal attacks to controlling the hounds’ movements to give Nemari and Rue some practice fighting. Rue didn’t have an active soulprint, not that Sorin could tell, anyway, so the disruption didn’t do much to slow her down. For her, it was more about getting some real combat experience.

  Though the encounter wasn’t particularly challenging, that didn’t mean they had it all their way. Rue got bit twice, both times mere nips relative to the powerful jaws that could have ripped her apart. Odric proved his value as soon as the fight ended by healing those wounds. His soulprint was still so weak that he needed physical contact to make it work, which meant he was relatively worthless until the battle was over.

  That also made him extremely inefficient mid-fight, since he did little besides stand around in the back and wait for someone to need help. If they were going to be a long-term climbing team, he’d need to fix that. A good weapon and some training in how to use it would go a long way. Something that took advantage of Odric’s size would be ideal—perhaps a heavy mace or axe that he could put some weight into.

  Two minutes after they arrived on Floor 1, their first encounter ended. Sorin was covered with blood spatter, and Rue wasn’t much better. Nemari and Odric were in better condition, but both had burned anima and would need time to replenish it naturally.

  With each hound killed, anima rushed into them and reinforced their own soulprints. It was a miniscule amount, less than a single percent of what they’d need to raise their abilities up from F-rank to E-rank, but it was a start. Nobody said anything about it, making Sorin wonder if they even realized what had happened. Then again, he’d done the majority of the work, so he’d gotten almost all of the anima.

  Perhaps he’d taken a bit too much onto his own shoulders, but it had been an unexpected battle that they’d been unable to prepare for. Once they were able to find a good grinding spot, he’d take more of a supportive role so that Nemari and Rue could grow. Maybe Odric could be convinced to get into the melee and put those gloves to use as well.

  “That was a fun start to the floor,” he announced. “Good thing these monsters weren’t that strong. Now, as I see it, we’ve got two priorities. One is to find the floor portal, which I’m hoping isn’t too far away, and the other is to scope out a spot we can prepare as a kill box to draw monsters into.”

  “Are you kidding?” Nemari gawked. “Just like that, and you’re over it? Like you didn’t just ride the line between life and death?”

  Sorin scoffed. “What? This little scuffle? It’ll get a lot worse than this once we go up a few floors.”

  Rue looked up from where she was squatting next to a dead hound, wiping her blades on a relatively clean patch of fur. “I’m going to need better soulprints,” she said.

  “Exactly! We all do. Thus: the kill box. Odric, you’re already rank 1. Do you have any firsthand experience on this floor?”

  “Some,” the big man said. “Not much.”

  “Better than nothing. Let’s get out of this hole and get a look around,” Sorin said.

  The siblings glanced back at Nemari, who just sighed and nodded. “Let’s do that.”

  Whoops. Forgot I’m not in charge. Sorry about that, boss.