The rats poured into the tunnel without end, coming at him from both directions in a rising tide of furry bodies. Then, as abruptly as the fight had begun, it was finished. Sorin’s clothes were shredded, and what was left was soaked through with the blood of a thousand monsters. His flesh was s...
2025-10-29 11:38:07 +0000 UTC View PostRue went scouting for something by the outer wall that was more defensible than the house they’d picked before. Ideally, it’d have a single entrance on the ground floor and some sort of exit out of reach from street level. That way, they’d only have to defend one spot and would still have a...
2025-10-28 11:23:00 +0000 UTC View Post“You do?” the man asked. He peered at Sorin, but there was no light of recognition in his eyes. Shrugging, he examined the rest of the team.
It wasn’t that unusual to run into other climbing teams, though having one show up to save them at the very last second was a bit suspicious. So...
2025-10-27 11:26:08 +0000 UTC View Post“What is it?” Sorin yelled back to Rue. “One of the monkeys?”
“No, it’s bigger,” she said.
He doubted it was some sort of ruin guardian. They tended to lurk near the center, or wherever the seed was. It might be a sort of region guardian though, something that ruled over...
2025-10-26 13:17:35 +0000 UTC View PostIt took another few minutes before everyone accepted that they were trapped. Truth be told, Sorin was confident that if they absolutely had to leave, if they were backed into a corner with monsters coming at them from every direction, he could find a way over the wall. He was even confident that ...
2025-10-25 12:53:10 +0000 UTC View PostThree more times in the next ten minutes, Sorin caught another of the gray-furred monkeys trying to beguile him with illusions. The spears were real, but their trajectory was masked to prevent anyone from tracing them back to their source. He didn’t have a good answer for why they were visible ...
2025-10-24 11:29:00 +0000 UTC View PostThere was something weird about this ruin. It took Sorin a few minutes to figure out what exactly it was that was bothering him, but eventually he realized what the problem was. We know this place is occupied. Something chucked a damn spear at me. But there’s no sign of anything or anyone b...
2025-10-23 13:19:09 +0000 UTC View PostSorin ran back across the woods to the trail to fetch Odric and Nemari. “Come with me,” he said as soon as he spotted them. “Rue went into a God damned ruin.”
“Are you sure?” Nemari asked sharply.
“Her tracks are in the area and someone went inside. I’m as sure as I ca...
2025-10-22 11:24:40 +0000 UTC View PostSorin took a few seconds to absorb the Iron Body soulprint he’d purchased once he was back at the relative safety of the camp. At F-rank, it would only passively toughen up his skin, but that would help immensely in giving him a wider margin of error for dodging attacks. If something scraped hi...
2025-10-21 11:24:26 +0000 UTC View PostIt was a short walk back to the market, made only slightly longer by having to slow his pace down to account for Rue having significantly shorter legs. The pair walked in silence for a minute or so until they were far enough away from camp that Sorin wasn’t worried about being overheard.
...
2025-10-20 11:29:11 +0000 UTC View Post“I guess we do,” Sorin said. “What are we going to do about it?”
He wasn’t ready to even attempt to climb solo. Maybe with a good defensive soulprint and some self-healing, he might have considered it. As it stood, if the team was breaking apart now, he’d have to go find some ne...
2025-10-19 12:10:13 +0000 UTC View PostIf he’d still been in his fifties, there was no way Sorin would have woken up without some kind of back pain. Even being back in the prime of his life, he was still a bit sore from laying on what was essentially a thinly padded board for six hours.
Should have gone back last night. To...
2025-10-18 12:05:57 +0000 UTC View PostThey set up their camp a quarter mile from the portal hub, far enough away to give them some privacy, but close enough to enjoy the safety a large group of humans clumped up together provided. There were no less than six other campfires studding the darkness within five hundred feet of them, and ...
2025-10-17 11:53:40 +0000 UTC View PostThe lobby to the Climber’s Union hadn’t changed in the last week. The only real difference was that rather than the young redhead he’d spoken to last time, now there was a portly middle-aged man who had too much fat hanging off his jowls to pull off the jawline beard he was sporting. It jus...
2025-10-16 11:24:32 +0000 UTC View PostThe hub was almost exactly what Sorin had expected. It seemed some things remained the same, regardless of the color of the tower. There was the portal in the center, an opaque disc of swirling red light surrounded by a stone archway. That stood in the intersection of four broad roads, each one n...
2025-10-15 11:29:31 +0000 UTC View PostThey made their camp in a small gully two miles away from where they’d been attacked. It had a row of trees growing across the upper banks, so thick that thousands of root ends stuck out of the walls and the canopy blocked out the sky. Sorin was confident nothing of any significant size could c...
2025-10-14 11:42:04 +0000 UTC View PostVoidlings weren’t monsters, or at least there were enough differences between them and normal monsters that climbers had agreed to classify them as something else. There were a few common traits they all shared despite coming in a seemingly infinite variety of sizes and shapes. First, voidlings...
2025-10-13 11:39:21 +0000 UTC View PostThe cave was shallow and dry, perfect for temporary camps. Climbing teams used it regularly, at least those bold enough to hunt for soulprints, reagents, and crafting materials in the Volwood did. The apex predator of the region, a manticore, was attributed with over a hundred kills already, and ...
2025-10-12 12:20:00 +0000 UTC View PostThree?! How is that possible?
Sorin’s mind whirled as he tried to come to terms with that. A monster on Floor 1 just did not have three soulprints, not ever. Their soulspaces weren’t like humans, but they still had limits. Three soulprints was pushing their maximum capacity, es...
2025-10-11 12:05:21 +0000 UTC View PostThe 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 ...
2025-10-10 11:27:05 +0000 UTC View PostAuthor's Note: The story is live on Royal Road today. I'd really appreciate a follow/favorite/rating to help propel the launch forward. Thanks for your help, and enjoy today's chapter!
Rue was the freshest in the group, largely due to the fact that she hadn’t actually fought in the previous fight. Sorin was taller and faster, but he was already wiped out both physically and mentally, so when their team’s youngest member sped off in Nemari’s direction, neither he nor Odric...
2025-10-08 11:42:58 +0000 UTC View PostA hail storm of ice struck the warbler in the face and throat, not because Sorin thought he could kill it that easily with such a weak soulprint, but because if he could damage its throat, that would remove most of the danger from this particular monster.
“Go!” he barked at his team. Th...
2025-10-07 11:42:33 +0000 UTC View PostThey decided to use the same ring of trees for camp that night, even though they had to go south four miles to reach it. Rather than fight their way through the branches, bushes, and vines of the forest, they strolled along the outside edge. That had the unfortunate side effect of occasionally dr...
2025-10-06 11:27:32 +0000 UTC View PostThe second day on Floor 1 went much the same as the first. Sorin was hunting for a very specific soulprint, one he knew he could get from a harpy, but his lack of success was making him wonder if these particular harpies even had it. How exactly monsters developed soulprints was widely speculated...
2025-10-05 12:02:35 +0000 UTC View PostThings were a bit crowded inside the ring of trees, but that was an acceptable trade off to the solid wall of foliage keeping them safe. Nothing bigger than a squirrel was going to get through, which was about as defensible as a makeshift camp could get. After a dinner of cold rations, they all s...
2025-10-04 12:15:39 +0000 UTC View PostAfter their twentieth kill, they decided to relocate rather than continuing to haul the bodies out of the way. The smell was starting to get to all of them at that point, except for maybe Sorin. Rue couldn’t tell. Nothing seemed to actually bother the man, but maybe he was just so good at hidin...
2025-10-03 11:09:02 +0000 UTC View PostOdric’s knowledge of Floor 1 was spotty, if Sorin was being generous. ‘Useless’ was perhaps the more accurate term. He didn’t know where they were, he’d never seen monsters like those disruption hounds, and he had only a general idea which direction the floor guardian was in. That would...
2025-10-02 11:44:23 +0000 UTC View PostEmerging onto a new floor was always a risk. The tower wasn’t so nice as to just dump climbers at the portal hub for that floor, not the first time. They had to go find it. And unfortunately, that wasn’t always easy. Within limits, a new team could arrive almost anywhere on the floor. Sorin h...
2025-10-01 11:41:05 +0000 UTC View PostTwo things happened when a portal guardian died. First, every climber involved in the fight—if they hadn’t already defeated that floor’s guardian—had their soulspace expanded, a sensation so subtle that it was easy to miss it even happening. They’d be able to hold more soulprints and pr...
2025-09-30 11:11:17 +0000 UTC View Post