“Did you see how he just appeared out of nowhere?” one of the archers was saying to the other as Sorin and Calder approached.

  Now that he was close enough to make out fine detail, he saw that they were definitely sisters, possibly even twins. They had the exact same height, hair color, and similar enough facial features, though the one with her hair in braids was significantly more muscular than the other one. That could easily be dismissed as the result of a particular build or even just one of them being a dedicated physical fitness junkie.

  “Had to be an ability. No way we’d have missed the approach, even with the distracting monster trying to eat our brainless mage,” the other one said.

  “You could ask him yourself,” the front liner told them. “He’s coming this way.”

  “Giev! It’s so rude to ask a stranger about his build.”

  “Everyone!” Calder said, prompting the two climbers who were working on the scorpion’s corpse to stop working and look over. “This is Vanir, the guy who threw that chunk of ice that saved my life. He’s out here by himself right now, so I invited him to travel with us for a few days until we reach the portal hub.”

  The man who was perched on the scorpion’s head cocked an eyebrow at the declaration and gave Sorin a long, searching look, but then shrugged and went back to sawing through the carapace. Everyone else introduced themselves, quickly overwhelming Sorin with names.

  The sisters were Shara and Enare, and the third woman of the team was Ostelle. She was their utility specialist, which included soulprint harvesting. After a quick greeting, she joined their scout, the one who hadn’t bothered to introduce himself.

  “That’s Womak. He’s not all that talkative,” Giev told Sorin. “Don’t take it personally. He’s like that with everybody.”

  Sorin nodded along, but he didn’t see much need to try to remember the names. Given that he’d likely never see any of these people again, it just wasn’t a priority for him. Instead, he stood off to the side and spoke with Calder while the other climbers got things finished up.

  “The scorpions are the dominant predator of the floor, no doubt,” the mage said eagerly. “I mean, look at them. They’re huge. They’re armored. They can swim through sand faster than you or I could run on top of it. Fortunately, they’re territorial and rare. We’ve only seen one other one the whole time we’ve been here, and it was a lot smaller than this one.”

  Sorin nodded along and was glad he didn’t have to pretend to be impressed. Calder was a bit overeager and perhaps a touch too oblivious to pay much attention to his conversation partner. As long as Sorin responded, even with just a grunt of agreement, the mage just kept going.

  “We’ve mostly been hunting sand stingers. Those are giant wasps, by the way. They get up to a foot long, but they’re lightweight and fragile enough that my wind magic just cuts right through them.”

  “Always good to match up with monsters you have the advantage over,” Sorin agreed.

  “Exactly! It’s just smart work. That’s why I was so worried when you said your team wasn’t ready for the floor. And then you got separated from them, too! That’s a disaster that could get somebody killed. I don’t mean to lecture you, but you know those Antechamber rewards are a trap. Don’t get greedy and go jumping through that portal when you’re not prepared for what’s on the other side. Boy, you’re sure lucky you ran into us, huh?”

  Did he seriously forget that I was the one who saved him already?

  But Sorin just chuckled and let Calder keep rambling. Giev stifled a laugh twenty feet away, only the motion of his shoulders giving it away. That one, at least, had caught the absurdity of the mage’s statement. Judging by the smirks the two archers were tossing at each other, Giev wasn’t the only one.

  Calder plowed on, just as oblivious now as he’d been ten minutes ago. “Now when you find an oasis, it’s tempting to rush right in. Even knowing where they are, we’ve had some trouble with water rationing ourselves. I suppose being able to conjure up ice like that would make that less of an issue in your case, huh? But still, plenty of monsters at an oasis, and I don’t just mean the ones living in the water!”

  It took a full twenty minutes for the team to finish their work on the scorpion, though that was mostly due to them harvesting the biggest plates of its carapace. Extracting the venom glands only took a minute, and chopping off the pointed tip of the stinger was accomplished with a simple axe strike that sheered through it. Once they were finally done and had the haul bagged up, Ostelle announced that it was time to go.

  Sorin was a bit surprised to find that she was the leader of their group, if only because people who had support builds tended to be a bit too passive to want the role. It was by no means a hard rule, however, and the others deferred to her without question.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The heavy carapace plates got split between Giev and the more muscular of the two archers, though Sorin caught her eyeing up his shoulders. He was sure they would have been asking him to help carry the loot if he wasn’t already weighed down with three packs of his own.

  “Right, where was I?” Calder asked as he fell into place beside Sorin. “Oh! Cactus elementals! That was a nasty surprise, let me tell you. Even though I knew they were here, it’s maybe one in a hundred cacti that actually has an elemental spirit in it, but I guess I’m just unlucky, because…”

  * * *

  Ostelle made their camp for them using a bit of earth magic to tamp down the sand. They had an enchanted lump of what looked like melted brass that radiated heat just as well as any campfire, but which cast only a minor glow so as not to spoil anyone’s night vision.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Calder passed out almost as soon as he was done with dessert. He’d had a big day, almost getting killed by a monster and delivering a well-meaning, but somewhat condescending, lecture to Sorin that spanned several hours. It wasn’t until he was snoring on top of a sleeping bag he hadn’t even bothered to crawl into that it really hit Sorin just how young the mage looked.

  And it’s not just him. This whole team is the same age.

  Ostelle might be twenty-three or twenty-four, but nobody else was past twenty. They all seemed… innocent, he decided, like climbers who hadn’t yet had to endure the worst the tower had to offer. It was endearing in a way, but it couldn’t last. If there was one certainty, it was that the tower took. It took lives and health and peace. Sooner or later, it got everyone one way or another. It was just a matter of time.

  The thinner of the two archer girls and the silent scout had first watch. Neither seemed predisposed to talk, instead just taking positions opposite each other with the rest of their team in the middle. Sorin laid on the sand and stared up at the nighttime stars while he wondered if they were real or just an illusion created by the tower.

  They reminded him of the silver-gray dust that made up the liminal path he walked, shimmering in the dark and pushing back the encroaching void. That thought gave him pause. The rasping sound of a witch’s voice came to his memory.

  ‘Darkening void encroaches,’ it hissed in his mind—one line in six from the mysterious message the tower itself had apparently arranged for him to hear. Of course, it couldn’t be bothered to explain what any of those cryptic lines meant, so Sorin had done his best to put them out of his thoughts.

  Every now and then, one of them poked its head up anyway.

  And I still don’t have a clue what—hey, wait a minute. I never did get around to checking my soulspace after hitting rank 5.

  In all fairness, leaving himself insensate to the world around him while in a desert where a giant scorpion could pop up out of the sands at any moment wasn’t a good idea, but he was probably safe enough in the camp. A ten-second peek wouldn’t hurt anything, just to see what had changed.

  Entering his soulspace was an act of will more than anything else. All it really took was wanting to be there and reaching for that core of anima with his mind. The desert disappeared along with all its attendant sensations. Inside his soulspace, there was no scorching heat or bone-chilling cold. He could no longer feel the sand under his cloak or hear the light snores coming from Calder nearby.

  That also meant that if one of the climbers around him decided to stab him, he wouldn’t ever know. He’d just die, blissfully unaware of what had happened. Paranoia was a survival skill at the level Sorin operated at, so he was acutely aware of the potential for disaster leaving himself vulnerable brought with it.

  There were all the oil paintings that represented his soulprints, of course. Ice Blade was there, right next to Warrior’s Vigilance, Iron Body, Blind Sense, Blood of the Mountain, and Radiant purge. Those took up the majority of the space, all being E-rank now. Speed Burst and Heat Resistance were still F-ranked, and Sorin was tempted to tap into some of the empty space he’d just gained to upgrade them.

  He'd need more anima first, but more importantly, holding off would allow him to free cast magic to mimic F-ranked soulprints and maybe E-ranked if he was careful and precise. It would also give him the space to push one soulprint up to D-rank once he hit rank 6, which would be a more substantial boost to his capabilities than simply filling up the empty space with half a dozen F-ranks.

  None of that was what he was here for. The real change was under his feet. There, bare, black stone had been replaced with an incredibly detailed tile mosaic that depicted him wading through water to reach a doorway with the Liminal Gateway soulprint in the center of it. Unlike his other soulprints, this one had come from the tower directly and couldn’t be grown at his direction. It seemed to be becoming stronger as he increased his rank, but not in any way that was explained. That would have been too easy, apparently, so the tower had left him to figure it out himself.

  The mosaic had expanded again. At rank 0, it had just shown Sorin reaching toward a—at the time empty—doorway. Now it showed the outline of the red tower behind that door, as well as five other towers. Silhouettes of the rest of his former climbing team were shown going into the other ones, all except the indigo tower. Behind them, at the bottom of the mosaic, was the hint of the blue tower they’d all climbed together originally.

  His last rank up had mostly shown the border of the image, leaving Sorin to wonder if this was all the hint he was going to get, but he was pleased to see that this rank up had revealed the edges of six new mosaics surrounding the original one on all sides. It was too soon to tell what any of them were supposed to be, but it implied that if he kept climbing, more information would be forthcoming.

  And… more soulprints like Liminal Gateway in the center? he wondered. What would they even do?

  He could only hope that somewhere in there was the power to reach out to his real team, to find them in the other versions of the tower they’d been sent to. Whatever it was the tower wanted, it’d be a lot easier to face it with them all together again.