The tower Sorin had been born outside of, the one he’d grown up seeing standing over the shantytown slums of his version of Floor 0, was a monument to violence and death. Every floor boasted creative new ways to kill a man, whether it was from monsters stalking climbers in search of a taste of human flesh, traps that could do anything from rip their victims to pieces to melt them into steaming puddles, or even just environments so hostile that a weak climber would succumb to the intense cold, heat, or pressure.
For all of that, it felt less harsh than this new tower to Sorin. He had decades of surviving the tower’s ministrations behind him and had faced some truly lethal and unfair situations. But the problems they were running into on Floor 1 felt like they should be Floor 3 or 4 at minimum. A swarm of mind-altering monsters would have wiped out practically any climbing team, but to survive that and a mobile hive at the same time, only to come up against a manticore a few hours later?
Is it because of me? Is the tower targeting us specifically because I… I don’t know, had the temerity to reach its top floor? Is this some kind of punishment that the others are caught up in by virtue of proximity?
The only good thing Sorin could see about the situation was that this particular manticore looked to be something of a runt, comparatively speaking. It was only about ten feet long, not including the tail. Muscles so distinct that they popped even under its yellow fur rippled with each graceful step it took, and black hooks for claws scored the ground as it walked. A face the size of Sorin’s chest leered at him, its slitted eyes regarding him as nothing more than a meal to be caught and devoured.
The tail itself was as thick around as Sorin’s thigh, supremely flexible and capped with a few dozen more of those black spikes sticking out of Nemari’s chest. If its first two volleys were any indication of its skill, it would have no problem hitting a moving target when it flung them.
Finally, though it hardly seemed to need them, two leathery wings were folded against its back. Manticores were too heavy to fly, but the wings allowed them to fall from nearly any distance unharmed and aided them in changing direction mid-pounce if they needed to. They also served as a vector for wind-based anima abilities in the older and more powerful monsters.
All of that put together meant this was a fight that would challenge their entire team if they were fresh. It could very easily result in casualties. That was a best-case scenario, though. In reality, Nemari was already down, and Odric was going to be giving everything he had just to keep the poison from killing her, which meant it was one manticore against Sorin, whose anima was far from fully regenerated, and Rue, who had less than a week’s experience as a professional climber.
About the only thing that had gone right was that the manticore was focused on him now. Its tail lashed back and forth as it tamped down to pounce at him, every flick threatening to unleash more venomous spikes. It wouldn’t actually throw them until it attacked, the better to make sure it caught him.
There!
Four spikes practically teleported across the empty air between them, followed immediately by the manticore’s leaping form. Sorin threw himself backward into a roll, letting the spikes pass by to slam into a tree twenty feet behind him, and returned fire with a set of his own ice-formed spikes. Unprepared for the counter, the manticore could do nothing but take the damage head on.
It bulled through the attack to finish its leap, claws outstretched and mouth wide open to reveal teeth longer than Sorin’s fingers that were poised to clamp down on his head. Wings spread to help it adjust to his attempts at dodging, close to half a ton of monster came down on its prey, only to find a sharp length of steel stabbing up into its face.
The manticore aborted its pounce, twisting its whole body powerfully at the last second to avoid being impaled. Claws still flashed across Sorin’s arm, rending flesh and splattering the manticore’s yellow coat with his blood. It didn’t have it all its own way, though; Sorin’s sword dug a deep furrow across its face and through its left eye.
With a roar so loud that it shook the leaves from the nearby trees, the manticore lashed out with its claw again. Not this time, you fucker, Sorin thought. He was already bringing his sword around to parry the expected attack, and rather than the manticore’s cruelly hooked claws disemboweling him, its paw got caught on the blade and tore open.
“Watch the tail!” Sorin yelled to Rue when he saw her coming in from the corner of his eye.
She brought both of her own swords around, aiming to cripple the monster by hacking up one of its wings, but Sorin’s warning gave her the time she needed to dodge back from the unexpected attack. Black spikes slammed into the dirt mere inches away from her, but despite the manticore’s many deadly weapons, it wasn’t coordinated enough to use them all at the same time while focusing on two opponents.
Rue couldn’t get in close enough to score a hit, but she was nimble, and the manticore was smart enough to respect a blade when it saw one. Forced to divide its attention and blinded in one eye, it couldn’t wholly defend against either of the two climbers. Sorin drove it back several steps, even scored a few more hits on its legs and chest, but those were only flesh wounds.
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Things turned sour when Rue got smacked by one of the wings and knocked on her ass. Sensing a moment of vulnerability, the manticore whipped its tail around to throw spikes at her. “Rue! Roll!” Sorin ordered, knowing he couldn’t stop the manticore from killing her and hoping she had enough awareness left in her to realize how bad her position was.
Whether it was her soulprint that warned her or Sorin’s words, Rue abandoned her weapons to hurl herself sideways. She wasn’t quite fast enough, but that meant only one poisoned spike to the shoulder instead of six to the chest. Sorin winced anyway, knowing how bad the poison burned even before his teammate started screaming.
Without any of his own healing soulprints, there was nothing he could do for Rue except keep the manticore’s attention on him. They were vicious beasts, malicious and intelligent enough to realize exactly how much suffering their poisons caused their victims. If at all possible, the manticore would tag Rue with a few more spikes, then leave her alive and screaming while it watched.
That did not make the monsters stupid, however. Fighting four against one, and with Sorin at least still threatening it, the manticore would forgo whatever pleasure it got from torturing its prey to end the fight more quickly if it felt things were spiraling out of its control. Sorin needed to pull the monster away from Rue—and from Nemari and Odric—before it decided to kill either of its defenseless victims.
He dodged and weaved, deftly avoiding its raking claws and darting tail, occasionally blocking a thrown spike with his own enhanced ice darts, and slowly baited the monster a hundred feet deeper into the trees. The forest was so thin here that it was really more fields with a scattering of trees growing in them, but even that was enough to break line of sight with the rest of his team once they got far enough away.
And then, once he was sure the manticore wouldn’t turn on Rue to finish her off, when there was no one left to protect, Sorin unleashed everything he had left on the monster.
‘Dart’ was no longer the word to describe what his soulprint made. They were more like ice daggers. Each one was over a foot long and about two inches wide. Much like the manticore’s tail spikes, they tapered down to wickedly sharp points, easily capable of piercing even a monster’s thick hide and shattering inside their body, doing additional damage as they shredded delicate tissues and organs before vanishing.
Sorin fired off three of them every second, all while aggressively striking with his sword. The manticore tried to take back the offensive, but Sorin just punished its left side, forcing it to constantly turn to try to keep him out of its blind spot.
More spikes flashed through the air from its tail, but they were too predictably aimed, even if they were fast. Sorin dodged what he could, deflected what he couldn’t, and used the brief openings where the manticore had to brace all four legs in order to fling the spikes to drive his own ice blades into its flesh.
His sword flashed out, carving a furrow all the way down the manticore’s front leg from shoulder to paw. Blood poured from the wound in great spurts, and suddenly the manticore didn’t look so eager to play. It knew better than to break away and flee, not with Sorin already standing so close by, but its strategy switched from trying to claw him open or bite him to waving its tail threateningly to keep him back.
Sorin was ruthless, but he was also tiring. His anima was almost gone, something he was sure the manticore couldn’t sense, else it would be far bolder in its attempts to kill him. He’d avoided any serious wounds, but he was still losing blood from where it had gotten his arm at the start of the fight. One way or another, this battle was going to be decided soon.
The manticore feigned a rush, but with its injured leg, it couldn’t get up to speed, and it knew it. Sorin wasn’t fooled by the attempt. If it had been real, he’d have been forced to dodge or else be crushed, but all he did here was set his sword to strike the monster across the face as it closed in. Seeing that its plan hadn’t worked, the manticore charged right by Sorin in full flight instead.
That caught him off guard for a moment, but not so much that he didn’t leave a long slice across its flank. The manticore took the hit without flinching, eagerly accepting the trade to get away from a prey that had proven too stubborn and too strong to die. After all that effort, though, Sorin wasn’t about to let the monster escape.
Twin ice blades formed in front of him and struck both hind legs, bringing the manticore down to sprawl on the ground. Undaunted, it rose back up and resumed its run, only to find it was too slow to escape. Sorin chased it down, all the while peppering it with what little anima he had left. He targeted its limbs, its joints, and even its wings when it tried to flare those to make a long jump up into a tree.
The manticore collapsed, bleeding from thirty or forty wounds. Its tail flicked weakly and its chest heaved, but Sorin wasn’t eager to see if the monster was merely trying to draw him in.
From fifteen feet away, he shaped the rest of his anima into one enormous ice blade and sent it deep into the manticore’s remaining eye. The great beast gave one final shudder, then laid still in the blood-stained grass.
A trickle of the manticore’s anima flooded into Sorin’s soulprint, more than he’d gotten for anything else so far, even including the Floor 0 portal guardian. It was hardly worth the effort it had taken, but any reward was better than none. Besides, manticores were vengeful monsters, well known for their tenacity in hunting down prey if for some reason they failed to kill their victims on the first attempt. They didn’t need this thing stalking them through Floor 1 for the next few weeks.
The real prize would be whatever soulprint he could pry out of its corpse. Come on, let there be something. Anything, really. I’m not picky, but something this strong on Floor 1 has to be old enough to have developed one.
And there it was. The anima left in the body solidified in the manticore’s mane, specifically in a tuft of hair behind its ear. “Thank God,” Sorin murmured. Then he paused, frowning.
A second soulprint formed in the beast’s chest. That would be messy to extract and probably needed to be used immediately, as organs rarely maintained their structural integrity without special containers to house them, but still, two soulprints from a single kill was fantastic.
His surprise was complete when a third soulprint formed inside one of its tail spikes.
