Book 3, Chapter 41

“What if we just go get it ourselves?”

“Get what from where?” Yoru asked.

“I don’t know, but we know people who should, in theory, know what soulprints show up, and from which monsters on which floors. Somebody has to know where to find what we need.”

Healing magic was most often found from monsters that had strong natural themes of growth and recovery—making Floor 22 a likely candidate—or from intelligent monsters with their own civilizations. If such a soulprint even existed, Sorin could go farm for it.

“It’s worth following up on,” he decided, “but it’s still not guaranteed. I’m certain there are several healing soulprints among all the plant monsters on Floor 22. Whether or not they’re useful to this situation is a different story.”

Considering that he’d gone through some of the most prominent healers in the city, none of whom actually had the capability to help Odric, never mind the willingness, it was entirely possible that what they needed simply didn’t exist. Finding a dedicated healer with a lifetime of experience learning every facet of how their soulprints worked and combining them together to make new ones might be the only way to properly heal Odric’s injuries.

Except the most likely candidate up and died on us a few months ago, and he didn’t leave behind any apprentices or notes on his work.

“We’ve still got the Floor 10 market to look at, as well,” Yoru said. “Just because it wasn’t available down here doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are plenty of soulprints from the upper floors that simply never make it back to the city.”

“Look for a D or C-rank regeneration soulprint while you’re there. Even if we can’t outright heal him, at least he won’t be bedridden for the rest of his life if we can get him something like that.”

Sorin left it unsaid that D-rank wouldn’t be strong enough to overcome Odric’s injuries, and C-rank might not even exist in the first quarter of the red tower. If their latest ideas didn’t pan out, the only thing left to do would be for Odric to learn how to properly merge soulprints—powerful, complex ones, not the F-ranks he’d been playing with—so that he could eventually save himself.

In that scenario, he wouldn’t be climbing with the rest of the team anymore. It would be months at best before he could do anything more than feed himself and maybe walk around the house. Sorin couldn’t wait for him, and neither could anyone else. He needed them on the front line with him, working together to push back the void.

“We’ll go to the portal hub and check out what’s on the higher floors,” Nemari said.

Sorin nodded. “And I’ll go dig through Samael’s leftovers to see if there’s anything relevant that I didn’t take the first time.”

“I, uh, would like to come with you,” Azlo told Sorin. “I haven’t really been checking in with my boss. I should probably make some time to talk to him.”

“I don’t think your boss is in the city,” Sorin said. “You’re welcome to tag along, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to be up on Floor 24.”

“That’s alright. The seneschal can pass along the message for me.”

It took Sorin a moment to realize Azlo was referring to Urd, but he supposed the title made sense. Prior to Samael’s demise, Urd had kind of been in charge of taking care of the day-to-day of running the Black Hellions. Sorin had thought of him more as a vice commander, but he didn’t really know what things had looked like inside the organization six months ago.

They set off, this time leaving just Rue behind to keep an eye on Odric while he slept. Sorin led Azlo in a roundabout route, mostly to dodge the Galdyrin retainers still out looking for him. Azlo realized almost immediately that something was going on, but it wasn’t until the third detour that he finally spoke up.

“Where are you going? I thought we were heading toward the main headquarters.”

“Pissed off a high family this afternoon. I don’t feel like fighting my way through them,” Sorin said absently. He was more focused on parsing all the information Observer was feeding him than on Azlo. Even with Second Mind, the city was so densely packed with such a wide variety of people that it was a strain to sort it for a specific demographic.

It didn’t help that the retainers weren’t all the same rank. That forced Sorin to resort to finer details—in this case, the family emblem they all wore as cloak pins to proclaim their allegiance—to identify them. He gave the higher ranked ones a wide radius on the assumption that they’d have strong sensory abilities, which resulted in their crooked path.

“Maybe we should split up,” Azlo suggested. “I can walk straight there, and you can stop pretending you can’t move a hundred times faster without me slowing you down.”

“Not a hundred...” But Sorin smiled as he said it. “Good idea. See you there?”

He didn’t think the Galdyrins would be looking for anyone but him, but there was no way to be certain. I should have warned Nemari and Yoru. They’re known associates, and while none of these guards are strong enough to subdue them individually, they can still turn it into a fight if they built up enough numbers.

Thankfully, his teammates weren’t quite out of his range yet. Or, more specifically, they were beyond his passive senses, but since he knew which direction they were going, he could stretch Observer in that direction to pinpoint their location.

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He paid special attention to their movements and the people near them right up until they vanished through the portal. The instant they disappeared, a bit of tension drained out of his shoulders, and he let out a long, relieved sigh.

Urd was not at the base, much to Sorin’s annoyance. It wasn’t that he gave a crap about Azlo’s desire to report in, but that the top lieutenants of Samael’s old gang were the most potent source of information he had access to. If they didn’t know of a soulprint that could patch up major organ damage, the only other option was the high families. For obvious reasons, Sorin preferred not to ask there.

That didn’t stop him from ghosting through the building and returning to Samael’s workshop to pillage it a second time. Sorin’s memory was good, and he’d already taken everything he wanted a month ago, but his hope was that by looking at what remained with different priorities, he’d come up with a way to use it that hadn’t occurred to him before.

That, and now that I have access to this tower-anima, I think I understand a bit more of what Samael was doing. Paranoid bastard could have written down that he wasn’t using normal anima in his notes. No fucking wonder I couldn’t replicate anything he described.

Sorin hadn’t mentioned that as a possible backup plan if all else failed. It was so much of a long shot that he suspected Odric would have better odds of merging healing soulprints together himself. Sorin could merge C-ranks together, sure, but he wasn’t a healer. He knew enough to keep himself alive and in the fight, to limp off the field afterward, and that was it. His strategy had always been to rely on outside assistance whenever he needed anything specialized.

But getting Odric back in fighting shape was important enough that Sorin was willing to take a crack at mixing a custom soulprint together. It was a skill he wanted to master anyway, and while healing soulprints were never cheap, he was rich enough that scooping up some F-ranks to experiment on wasn’t a real financial burden anymore.

He noticed Azlo arriving a few minutes after he had reached Samael’s workshop. Observer was made up primarily of sight and touch-based sensory abilities, which made it difficult to make out sounds, so he couldn’t quite understand the conversation their front-liner was having with some random Hellion guy, but he didn’t really need to hear the words to get the gist of it.

Azlo wanted to talk to Lanir, who wasn’t on Floor 0. He’d come here with the intention of having Urd pass along whatever report he had to give—Sorin would have been more worried about sharing information with the enemy, but Samael was gone, and the Hellions were more of a reluctant ally of convenience at this point—only to find out that Urd also wasn’t in.

Sorin finished sweeping the shelves of Samael’s vault clean of every soulprint he thought might be useful in some way and eyeballed the remaining books. Even with dimensional storage, he didn’t have the capacity to claim everything. There probably wasn’t anything useful to him in the books. He’d already browsed the collection once, and even with what he knew about tower-anima now, he didn’t expect to find the key to soulprint crafting among those pages.

It'll still be here later if I need it, he reasoned as he glanced around the vault one final time. And it’s safer locked up here than it would be unattended in a rented house.

It took about half a minute to reach the ground floor where Azlo was. He arrived in time to hear the Hellion guard say, “—can’t summon him if I don’t know where he is, now can I, sir?”

Despite his easy-going personality, Azlo looked ready to strangle the man. “I’m not asking you to! But someone has to know where he went. Leaders don’t just up and vanish into thin air!”

“Urd or Lanir?” Sorin asked, stepping out of Stealth Phase.

The Hellion guard practically jumped out of his armor, but Azlo just gave Sorin a quick glance before returning his glare to the unfortunate man. “Either? Both? I don’t care which.”

“L-lord Sorin,” the guard stammered.

“Don’t call me that. I’m not anybody’s lord.”

“Uh, right. Yes, of course, Lo—er, sir.”

It was an effort of will to keep himself from groaning out loud. I am never going to get them to stop. No matter how many of them I tell or how many times I do it, they just keep ‘forgetting.’

“Now, what’s this about not knowing where any of the people in charge are?”

“I’m just a door guard,” the Hellion said, a hint of his own frustration creeping into his voice as he gestured toward Azlo. “I keep trying to tell him I don’t know. I’m rank 7, for God’s sake. You think they’re inviting someone like me to their meetings?”

Kind of impressive how well he’s keeping his cool arguing with a rank 23. He has to know Azlo could wad him up into a meatball and throw him in the garbage in less time than it takes to blink. I think I like this guy, as long as he stops calling me ‘Lord.’

“Hey, that’s fair. Who would know, though?”

“The quartermaster, maybe? If they’re out on some job, she’d be the one to give them whatever gear and supplies they needed from the armory.”

Sorin doubted that. Sure, rank 7s probably got specialized equipment from the armory. Rank 20 gang leaders had their own gear that nobody but them got to use. Urd might have the quartermaster pack up basic supplies like food and water for him, but at best, that would just indicate how long he was planning to be gone, not where he went.

“Anyone else? Who did Urd leave in charge when he left?” Sorin asked.

“I don’t think anyone else is in overall command,” the guard said. He frowned and scratched at his chin, then added a belated, “Sir.”

“There’s a chain of command, though,” Azlo insisted. “Boss Lanir and Hantso were right below Urd, but I’m not sure who sits where in the local ranks. I’m not even sure who all is still alive after everything.”

Sorin felt the surge of anima before he heard the explosion. In a blink, he was out the door and leaping straight up to land on Hellion HQ’s roof. Literal tons of stone and wood shrapnel were arcing through the air to rain down on the city, and a plume of smoke thicker than a house was rising from one of the estates over in the climber’s district.

Fire climbed walls that should have been incapable of burning, clearly visible to Sorin despite being miles away. Something about the scene niggled at the back of his mind, something that told him this was important and maybe relevant to him.

He surveyed the city, trying to line up the streets with his mental map. It didn’t take long. By the time Azlo landed on the roof next to him, Sorin was swearing under his breath.

“What is it? Does it have anything to do with us?” Azlo asked.

“Hopefully not, but also yes.”

Azlo regarded him blankly. “I don’t understand.”

“That is the Telpike family estate. Specifically, it’s the main building where Yoru’s direct family lives. Whatever is happening over there, he’s going to want to be part of it. Do me a favor. Forget what we’re doing right now. Get over to the portal hub and take it to Floor 10. Bring the rest of the team back. I’ll meet you all at the house.”

“And what will you be doing in the meantime?”

“Finding out what’s going on,” Sorin told him. He stepped off the roof, landed lightly on the street, and started running.