“What is it?” Rue asked. She squeezed past Odric, who let out a tolerant sigh as he shuffled out of her way.

  “Are you familiar with elemental manipulation soulprints?” Sorin asked.

  “You mean like your Ice Dart and Nemari’s Firebolt.”

  “No. Those are manifestations with very narrow bands. Climber skill can account for some changes to size, shape, and speed, but ultimately, my soulprint is a projectile made of ice at its base. I can’t use it to create ice walls or anything like that.”

  “And this soulprint can?” Odric asked.

  “Well, not ice. It’s a water manipulation soulprint. It’s E-ranked, so it’s going to be of limited usage, but with proper cultivation, this could be the base for some rank 40’s Water Lord or a rank 60’s King of the Abyssal Tides.”

  “I’ve never heard of that last one,” Nemari said.

  “S-ranked soulprint,” Sorin muttered. His team had hired a water expert for Floor 72 who’d had that soulprint. She’d basically been a god in the ocean, even crushing the depths kraken floor guardian easily.

  Something like this was an investment. At the moment, it was of limited use, though he could probably weave it together with Ice Blade—not Ice Dart, as Rue had called it—to boost his offense and utility slightly. But if he wanted to dedicate himself to it, it would be a core component in his build.

  Alternatively, someone else could take it. Odric seemed to already know what he wanted, though, and it wasn’t this. Rue’s build was leaning more toward a melee generalist that might trend toward an ambush striker as it grew. Nemari was clearly fire-aligned, but then again, that had been a family build. Considering what they’d just done to her not a week ago, she might be open to some alternative build options.

  Fire and water, when properly managed, could be a potent combination. Fire already excelled at wide area damage. Turning it into clouds of scalding steam only made it worse. It would also shore up one of fire’s big weaknesses: waterborne monsters. With proper management, she could literally shoot jets of superheated water that would boil whatever it hit alive.

  “Please, nobody has an S-ranked soulprint,” Nemari scoffed.

  “I think you should take it,” Sorin told her.

  “You— What? Why would I—I’m a fire mage. That’s the opposite of…”

  “You’d get the most use out of it, followed by me. Then maybe Rue if she decides she wants to go in a completely different direction. I think Odric is pretty set on his choices, so it’s not that useful for him, though we could find a way to use it as a healing aid if we absolutely had to.”

  “If it’s as valuable as you think it is, the best thing to do would be to just take it in early and sell it,” Nemari said. “Better a big pile of money than a soulprint that, while excellent, is not useful for us.”

  “You’re vastly underestimating how useful this soulprint is for you in particular,” Sorin told her. “What are you going to do when we get to an all-water floor and your fire magic doesn’t work at all? Is that where you just give up and stop climbing? Go down a few floors and grind out weak monster kills to pick up a soulprint every few days?”

  “No, but I don’t want to be a water mage,” Nemari said.

  “So combine it with your fire magic.” Sorin took a minute to lay out some possibilities to her, specifically highlighting how the soulprint could give her the capacity to still do damage while underwater, never mind the defensive capabilities or the sheer utility of it.

  In the end, the only argument Nemari could offer was, “But that will require supporting soulprints we don’t have.”

  “It will,” Sorin agreed. “But that’s just how it goes. It’s not going to be any different for the rest of us. We’ll piece something coherent together from what we collect ourselves, then sell our leftovers or trade them until we get the parts we’re missing.”

  It took some convincing, but in the end, Sorin got Nemari to accept the soulprint, which was called Water Bond. She demonstrated it immediately by pulling water out of the stream. With a burst of effort, the water ripped itself upward and formed a crystal-clear orb, leaving all sorts of contaminants behind.

  “Don’t need to worry about drinking bad water anymore,” Odric said. “That’ll save me some work trying to take care of any bugs you pick up.”

  The orb wobbled, but pulled itself into a ring that Nemari flicked a small nodule of flame through. Then it fell apart completely and rained back into the stream. “That… is going to take some getting used to,” Nemari said, appearing slightly out of breath. “It’s a lot harder to use than my other soulprints.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  “I wouldn’t make it a priority just yet, but once it grows to D-rank, it’ll be a lot more versatile,” Sorin told her. “In the meantime, can you cremate this river troll so it doesn’t get back up?”

  “Maybe we should let it,” Rue said. “We could kill it again for more anima. If we get a few more of them, we could do it on rotation.”

  “No.” Sorin shook his head. “It won’t have any anima when it comes back. It’ll be days at minimum before it’s worth the effort to kill again.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Entirely. Trust me, it’s been tried with regenerating monsters. We either need to leave, or we need to burn it to ash. And if we just leave the body behind, there is a good chance it’ll start trying to track us when it gets back up.”

  “Vindictive bastards, aren’t they?” Rue noted.

  “Well, we did kill it. If I could come back from the dead, I’d be highly motivated to go after my murderer, too,” Sorin said.

  That’s an unpleasant thought. Did I actually die on Floor 100? Is this my afterlife?

  They watched the troll carcass burn for a few minutes, then abandoned the charred remains to resume their walk. It hadn’t been much of a break, but none of them felt like hanging around there any longer.

  “Welcome to the Witch Wood, I guess,” Rue said as they walked away.

  “Seems that way,” Sorin said. “Let’s get away from the water and find a dry spot to set up base camp, then look for kill boxes so we can start farming.”

  * * *

  “Alright, we have two main targets while we’re here,” Sorin announced. “The first is called a night thorn lasher. It’s a sentient plant that grows creeping vines. During the day, it just looks like a plant. At night, it comes to life and kills prey by grabbing them and dragging them back to the plant’s stalk. That’s where it shreds them and spills the blood into the dirt to use for nourishment. These things are plentiful, but they’re not particularly dangerous if you can spot them.

  “They’re good anima for us with minimal risk, so keep an eye out for them. They also occasionally have a soulprint called Floral Camouflage, which isn’t much use on its own and won’t sell for much down here. Culling this monster is mainly about overnight camp security and easy anima rewards while the sun is up.

  “The second main target is called a hagris. These are supposed to be common monsters that hunt in packs. They’re little hunchbacks, three or four feet tall and spindly. They can be difficult to spot because they look like a bundle of sticks and leaves, but Rue and I should have no issues with them. The Union archive says they’re abundant and worth a moderate amount of anima. There are no valuable soulprints on them, but I’m expecting to get two or three common ones anyway.”

  Sorin had gone over this before, but there was nothing wrong with taking a minute to reiterate the dangers. He rattled off six other local monsters, what they looked like, how they hunted, and what, if any, good soulprints they might have.

  “Lastly, I want to make note of one monster in particular. It’s called a lotus dancer. It’s a humanoid, maybe two feet tall, and it looks like a doll carved out of wood. These things are fast, but not particularly dangerous, and they’re prone to running as soon as they encounter any resistance. I’m not really expecting us to manage to kill one, but if we do, and we get incredibly lucky, we might find a soulprint called Wind Walk, which is an E-rank short-range teleport. This is by far the most valuable soulprint we could conceivably find in the Witch Wood, but don’t plan on us getting one.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Rue asked.

  “Not unless you go running off into the heart of the Witch Wood. I would not recommend that,” Sorin told her. “The heart witches are to be avoided at all costs. I’m not sure all of us together could kill just one alone, and it won’t be alone. The witches enthrall other monsters to use as meat shields when they bother to fight at all. Humans are by no means immune to their abilities.”

  “Now we know why nobody wants to come here,” Odric said softly and with a touch of nerves.

  “Yeah, but that’s part of what makes it perfect for us. We’ll collect some fairly rare—and thus expensive—resources, and no other climbers are going to bother us while we’re here. It’s not the fastest way to collect anima, but we should be safe from outside interference while we’re here.”

  The camp was set up with a few hours of daylight to spare. They used that time to go after every single night thorn lasher within a thousand feet, relying mostly on Rue to spot them. Even her ability to see auras was only minimally useful, as the plants remained perfectly motionless, and there was so much anima in everything that they almost blended in.

  Luck was with them, in a way. They found not one, but two Floral Camouflage soulprints. Sorin would have been ecstatic if it had been anything else. The only upside was that they were still good for a few danirs, and, since the anima was contained in part of the thorn lasher’s root structure, there was no danger of it breaking down anytime soon.

  They also killed a few hundred hagris, which were weirdly similar to the gremlins they’d been cutting down for the last week. They were a bit smaller and far more aggressive, but also much easier to locate and entirely too flammable for their own good. It was actually fantastic for Nemari, who was still a few days of farming behind the rest of the group and could lean heavily on the wood-monsters to help catch up.

  That night, they spent some time looking into their soulspaces to try to figure out exactly how much room they had left. Nobody was out of room for new soulprints, but their build options were limited at the moment. Bradford had a list of what Sorin wanted, not that it did them any good for a few more days at most.

  “Plenty of time for us to focus on the new soulprints once we get our hands on them,” Sorin reminded everyone. “And we’re still a day or two away from running out of room for anima in our current soulprints. And even if we do, you all have F-ranks that you can rank up. We’re not wasting our time here.”

  He gave it a week in the Witch Wood before they’d extracted all the power they could reasonably expect to take from the place. Then it would be either a challenge to the Floor 2 portal guardian, or off to another location to hunt for more soulprints. Sorin was more interested in the former, though mostly for the rest of his team. He could keep growing without ranking up, and he was getting desperate to do exactly that. Two more ranks ups, and he’d have enough free soulspace to twist his anima around and heal his arm.

  He had a feeling he was going to need two functioning arms for when the Hellions inevitably caught up with him, and he was afraid that was going to happen in the near future. Specifically, he suspected that Samael was smart enough to have someone watching the portal guardian, knowing that, if nothing else, the team would inevitably have to go there.

  They needed to be ready for that fight when it came.