There was good news and bad news. The good news was that leaving the light of the liminal path didn’t result in Sorin’s immediate disintegration by the void. That wasn’t to say there was no disintegration, just that he probably had a good twenty or thirty seconds before it ate him whole. A lot could happen in that amount of time.

  The bad news was that, while Sorin was alive and—for the moment—out of reach of the ring of tentacles that had tried to cage him in, the liminal pathway was sliding away from him. Like riding on the back of some massive beast, it was easy to forget he was moving at all, except in this case Sorin hadn’t known the path was moving. And he had no clue it would.

  But it was, and it was leaving him behind. Worse, the path was a sinuous curve and now there was nothing solid under his feet. Sorin twisted to see behind him and frantically threw himself down. The void did nothing to stop him from fleeing, thankfully. That made it better than the sentient void beast in one regard.

  He barely hit the dust of the path, mere inches from the edge, and even then, he was forced to roll sideways to keep from sliding off and back into the void. How he kept a grip on his sword, he’d never know.

  He regained his feet just in time to see the void beast barreling toward him, leaving Sorin bare seconds to make a decision. He could fight, or he could run. Even if he ran, there was no guarantee the thing wouldn’t follow him. It wouldn’t be the first time one had seeped through the sign and into the tower.

  Better to fight it out there than in here.

  Decision made, he darted for the nearest nub. There was barely enough time for him to tell what his destination was before he pushed through the sign and appeared at their abandoned camp near the old fortress. It was still light out, for what it was worth. If the void beast did follow him, he’d be glad for it.

  The first thing to do was a quick check of himself. Exposure to the void didn’t have healthy side effects, but other than his clothes looking a bit frayed and his skin feeling raw, he seemed to be fine. He’d lost a bit of anima, hardly anything noticeable, and thanks to his new soulprints, he felt good. There was no hint of exhaustion in his limbs, which was fortunate because he could already see the inky darkness of the void beast pushing through.

  Plenty of room. Solid ground. Should be a lot easier fight this time. Maybe if I get really lucky, I’ll find my bags intact after I kill this thing.

  Blood of the Mountain had him ready to go, still in peak condition despite everything, so when the void beast seeped out of the sign, Sorin was already hacking it apart before it even put itself together. Every strike was like cutting through a thick haunch of meat, but he knew what he was doing and limited himself to grazing strikes that peeled away the void beast’s mass a few pounds at a time.

  It came at him with a vengeance, tentacles flaring around and limbs flailing aggressively. They failed to find purchase. Now that Sorin had room to run, he was easily able to keep the void beast chasing him in a circle until he hacked it apart. Its size shrunk down to eight feet, then six, and by then, the tentacles were thin enough that he could cleanly slice through them with a single blow near the base. The void beast really started to fall apart there, and he cleanly dissected it shortly after.

  “Note to self,” he said as he casually inspected the damage to the world around him. “Next time, draw the damn thing off the path and back into the tower. Even if other monsters interfere, it’s still better than trying to fight something you can’t let touch you in a place with no room to dodge.”

  Now that he was relatively safe, Sorin took the time to wonder about the implications of voidlings showing up there. He’d never really thought of the space beyond Liminal Gateway as secure, but having the proof almost literally dropped on his head was disturbing. Voidlings were the worst—they attacked and permanently drained away anima with just a touch, and they weren’t worth anything when they died. There was no profit in fighting them, but it wasn’t often they gave up on their prey once they locked onto someone. I suppose not dying is a good reason to stand your ground.

  On the other hand, Liminal Gateway was both too useful to give up on and an obvious piece of the puzzle regarding this whole second tower experience. He couldn’t just abandon the soulprint, not if he wanted answers. So, it was with some trepidation that he cast himself into his soulspace to reactivate the seven-tower sign and stepped back onto the path.

  It was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Half the sand or dust or whatever the path was made out of was gone. The void beast had gouged out holes with every step. Some were just small divots, but plenty of them went all the way through to reveal swirling darkness below. Every step Sorin took was a tentative one, carefully placed to test his weight before committing to it.

  He didn’t fall through the liminal path, thankfully, and while it did strongly resemble a strip of highland goat cheese, there were enough solid patches left to get him to the other side. The biggest miracle of the whole debacle was that not a single one of the bags was damaged, something he’d have said was impossible twenty minutes ago. The anima coming from the soulprints should have caught the void beast’s attention, but Sorin supposed he was just a much juicier target.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Maybe it was afraid the smaller one would have all the fun if it took too long getting to me.

  Even after decades of experience and having killed hundreds of voidlings, void beasts, void titans, and all of their various other size categories, Sorin wasn’t willing to call himself an expert. He knew more than most, probably, but it was all practical knowledge. Their origins were unknown—at least back in the blue tower. He supposed he himself now knew that they hailed from the space beyond Liminal Gateway.

  Now if he could just figure out what exactly this place was, besides presumably the pathway between his old tower and the new one, he might be able to actually unravel some of the mystery of what had happened to him.

  * * *

  The dead drop went just as smoothly as the first time, though Bradford had failed abysmally at hunting down the rarities Sorin still wanted. Or rather, he’d found some, but the prices were too high for them to afford. That wasn’t really a surprise, considering Sorin was after some of the most powerful—and thus, the most popular and expensive—E-ranked soulprints he knew about.

  In one area, however, the old, retired climber had come through. Ice Blade was fine, as far as things went, but it was a rather basic elemental attack lacking in versatility. Sorin could fire off projectiles, and in a pinch, he could pack on some unshaped mass to something, but that was a far cry from what a dedicated ice mage could pull off. While he didn’t need the ability to craft whole palaces out of ice, he was hoping to turn the soulprint into a solid battlefield control option and find different, better offensive options.

  Working under the assumption that he’d be climbing by himself sometime in the near future, Radiant Purge was the first piece of his newly expanded toolkit. It caused his body to glow with an aura of scouring light that would injure anything standing in it. Naturally, he wasn’t immune to the effect himself, but that was where Heat Resistance came into play. It wasn’t quite the right type of mitigation, but there was some overlap between heat and disintegration effects. It would hurt him a lot less than it hurt anything else that got too close, and Blood of the Mountain would keep him running at full strength right through it anyway.

  If I’d had this back in the ruin, things would have been different.

  That was one more piece of his kit complete. Sorin immediately absorbed the preserved firefly body and watched it crumble to ash. Then he hefted the bags full of food, potable water, some medicine, and a rather outrageous collection of spices for someone to carry around mid-climb. As the beneficiary of said spice collection, however, he wasn’t going to complain about having to carry it half a mile or less.

  Satisfied, Sorin snuck back to the dilapidated house he’d placed the seven-tower sign in and crossed back over the liminal path again. He stopped to study it for a moment, silently wondering if it was going to recover on its own. Maybe the holes were a little smaller, the divots a little shallower. It was too soon to tell. Either way, the path wasn’t unusable, and he swiftly walked it before more voidlings could show up to attack him.

  That reminds me, I need to teach these guys how to fight a voidling just in case one of them goes through the sign at camp while I’m not there.

  Rue would be the only one who could do it. Odric and Nemari didn’t even have weapons to hurt a voidling without getting their anima drained. That was something else Sorin meant to fix, though he expected a great deal of resistance from them both. In fact, there was a short sword in one of the three bags he was bringing back specifically for Nemari to start practicing with, though he planned on offloading that training to Rue. She was competent enough to teach Nemari the basics.

  He stepped back off the path and appeared at the camp just in time to see the last slivers of the sun disappear in the western sky. “Any trouble while I was gone?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Nemari said. “You?”

  “Some. Nothing to worry about, just a few voidlings ambushing me while I was inside the Liminal Gateway. I killed them both, but…”

  “But it’s disturbing that it’s not safe there,” Nemari finished for him.

  “Exactly. We need it, so it’s not like I can just stay out, but we might want to limit our scheduled dead drops to every two or even three weeks, even if that means carrying more food on us and spending time foraging to supplement it.”

  Rue drifted over to join in the conversation. “Is it that big a deal? I mean, you killed them. How’s it any different than walking back to the portal hub for a normal climbing team?”

  “Because a voidling eats anima,” Odric answered. “You can’t use any sort of magic or soulprint ability on it. It’ll just make the voidling stronger. If one attacked Nemari, she’d be helpless against it.”

  “And if one attacked you, it’d drain you dead since you don’t have a weapon,” Sorin told him. “That’s not even considering your style of taking hits and then healing yourself. Both of you are a hindrance in a voidling attack. I’d like to say that encounters are rare and I should be able to handle them myself, but that’s the third one in the last few weeks. Something is going on, and we need to take steps to prepare for the worst, just in case.”

  “Oh, no,” Nemari said, catching sight of the sword sticking out of one of the bags.

  “Oh, yes. I told you, a rounded build is crucial to survival. That means knowing how to use a weapon in case you run out of anima or get into a fight where nothing you can do will help. A fire elemental would be just as deadly to you both as a voidling would.”

  “Yeah, but there aren’t any fire elementals on this floor,” Nemari protested.

  “So what? There are voidlings. And there will be fire elementals on the next floor. Might as well get started early.”

  Groaning and defeated, Nemari accepted the sword from Sorin. He’d specifically requested one that was light weight, and Bradford had delivered something so thin that it was closer to a stubby rapier than a shortsword. It was a good starter blade for training her muscles.

  “Rue, why don’t you show her some basic drills,” Sorin ordered. “Odric, I’ve got something else in mind for you.”

  “I… don’t like the way you’re looking at me, Sorin,” the healer said.

  Sorin’s grin widened.