I stopped in to talk to the other team. Their leader, Kagan, was polite enough, even if he clearly wasn't a fan. I spent four wishes on them, binding them to us. Sadly since the geas was the payment, I didn't GET anything for those wishes, and I only had two left for the day, but I felt better knowing they were locked in as being on our side. Once that was done Nat and I told them to go look around for any fields of flowers and report back with whatever they found.

We promised them half, which was enough that I suspected they wouldn't try too hard to shake the geas, and since they were the ones looking anyway it wasn't like we lost anything. Paying people with their own stuff was kind of a win win from my point of view.

Once that was done, the whole group headed out into the woods. We didn't use the goats, obviously, though the summerspark crystal and other snow counters weren't going to be completely useless. Anna-Marie informed us that several of the ruins we'd run across would have other biomes inside. Entire worlds could fit into some of them, so it was best to be prepared.

Standing outside the fortress I took a long, deep breath as I called out for Song of the Soil. My voice rose into a tempo of cascading vibration. The music was a medium, the resonance of my voice acting as a translator between my mind and the earth around me. Singing came from the mind, and vibrations bridged the gap between that and the ground

The skill formerly known as earthseeking would help me find minerals and metals, both of which would be large portions of any underground structures. I felt my consciousness spill out into the dirt, rolling through the earth like otters gamboling in a river. It was a weird sensation, my Perception sort of...dispersing.

I'd describe it as something like I imagine echolocation would be, except I wasn't using hearing to receive the feedback. I could feel every worm, every beetle, every rock for MILES. It was overwhelming and jarring, and I was pretty sure I could literally taste mud. I grimaced, forcing myself to concentrate. Song of the Soil was information overload, but after a few minutes of the song I was able to make some sense of things.

I started to walk. Not in a specific direction or toward anything, I just...walked. My eyes were closed, but I could feel the earth and had no problem avoiding obstacles. Trees and plants had their roots in the dirt, rocks were buried below the ground, I started to speed up, breaking into a jog and then a run.

Making sure not to flat out sprint and leave my friends behind, I raced through the jungle vaulting large boulders and bushes without ever opening my eyes. It was...glorious. I was lost in the song, one with nature, each step made me feel more free, and I poured that into my music and that made me more in tune with the world around me.

Finally after an uncertain amount of time, I felt...something. A spire of stone rising up into the air and plunging down into the ground. I turned and bolted for it. I heard yelps of surprise from behind me as I changed direction but I ignored them, I had other things to do, I needed to find this place.

I reached a clearing where the spire stood and stopped, letting my song come to an end as I breathed heavily, my lungs pumping like bellows and burning from exertion. That had been...hard. Harder than it should have been. I leaned against a tree, panting as I tried to regain my balance and rest up a bit.

Breaking branches heralded the approach of the others. "Damn." Said Abel as he jogged up. He wasn't winded, but he sounded annoyed. "A bit of warning next time? Running in the woods is irritating, all sorts of stuff in the way." He looked around, spotting the spire in the middle of the massive clearing. Above the earth it wasn't exactly towering. Maybe two or three hundred feet. The trees nearby were about that big, and easily obscured it.

Beneath the dirt it was MUCH larger. This spire was just the tip of the iceberg. "How far away are we from the fortress?" I said with a frown. I...had no clue where we were.

I heard a giggle behind me and turned to find Callie smirking at me. "I'm sure he has no idea honey, since you're the one carrying the self updating magic map."

Blinking, I froze for a second. "Oh. Shit I forgot about the map. Sorry my brain is kind of fritzing. Plus I still taste dirt. Which is objectively not pleasant." Reaching into my spatial ring I slipped out the map to glance over it. I wanted to know where we were in case we had to make a quick exit later.

We were....far. I must have been in that trance a while. We looked to be hundreds of miles into the core. Granted as even partial speeds that still meant we'd been going for an hour or two, but still, it was a hell of a trek.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

It still blew my mind the scale of distance Ascendants dealt with. When you could run more than a thousand miles per hour your definition of 'far' had some marked differences. Of course the core specifically and this entire planet in general were HUGE, as evidenced by the gravity here, so it kind of evened out.

"So." Said Benny. " Anyone have any idea what that is?" He pointed at the spire. "Like, I know it's a building...kind of. But there were a bunch of options for what we'd find. Is this a temple, ruins, a wizard's tower? Also, what are we dealing with if it IS a temple? Like...there are only six gods right?"

"Now." Said Nat firmly. "There are only six gods NOW. There have been others. Not a lot, as these things would be measured. But they've existed. It's kind of a mystery what happens to them. General consensus is that gods usually GO somewhere after ascending, though that's not universally agreed upon. Different religions have different opinions on where that might be."

"So there might be temples to vanished gods here?" I asked with concern. I'd dealt with the worshippers of gods a few times. The Red Revenant Church, the Black Sorrow Cult. Devotees of gods could do strange things. They sometimes had access to imitations of their patrons powers. "Will they have any vestiges of those deities in them?"

She looked troubled. "Maybe? Not many gods in the grand scheme of things is still hundreds over the millennia. Some predate the current six, some were contemporaries. Some people think the vanished gods were killed by the six. Whatever the case there might be remnants of their strength. You've seen power from gods manifested by worshippers without their intervention. Black Sorrow does it all the time. I can't promise we won't see something like that."

Left unsaid was that if we WERE going to run into that, it would be somewhere like this. Somewhere mainly beyond the control of the six and their organizations. As much as this little dungeon run felt like a carefully curated field trip, this was a good reminder that this place was ultimately wild. Just because the other humans we were meeting up with probably wouldn't try to kill us didn't mean nothing would.

I was suddenly feeling a lot less sanguine about this raid. "We need someone familiar with local lore." I said firmly. "Because Benny is right. Running headfirst into a building without knowing what it is would be stupid any time. If it's a wizard's tower we need to know so we can keep an eye out for...magic...traps...or whatever. I don't know shit about wizard protections. If it's a temple we might want to just avoid going in."

Callie nodded. "You're not wrong. So I take it we do our flower search first? Then make our way into the spire if we decide to do that?"

That sounded good to me. Sighing I closed my eyes and triggered Rhythm of the Wild. It was much less...primal, than Song of the Soil. Something about the musical aspect made the earth skill hit harder. Rhythm of the Wild was much more functional for quick and easy use.

Pulling out the map again, we pored over it. I saw dozens of tiny spots of plantlife, lots of them seemingly useful or valuable. Even if the flowers didn't grow, it was clear proximity to places like this made for a nice bump in plant effectiveness. To my disappointment, we didn't find a field of the flowers. It made sense, we'd gotten lucky before, but hitting a field the first time we found a place would be a bit over the top.

I put the map up. "Alright, call Anna-Marie. Have her gather her people and ask around about some of this. Take pictures of the spire, get close if you have to. I want to know exactly what we're walking into." Scan rings, aside from being connected to an overarching network usually, had walkie talkie functionality through a special short range (relatively speaking) signal that allowed them to communicate even without a network to piggy back off of.

While Anna-Marie hadn't had one when we arrived, I'd had Callie pass her one before we left just in case. With a nod, my girlfriend peeled off with Jessie and Randall to approach the spire. I turned to my cousin. "Nat. Take Perit and Valk and scout a perimeter? I'd have asked Callie, but she can use her shadow perception to get an idea what's inside without actually going in. Might help with the identification."

She nodded. "Solid thought. Yeah we can set up a cordon. Don't want to get snuck up on." She gestured for her guards to follow, vanishing into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Celine had started pacing off the trees, doing some kind of wood elf mojo I didn't ask about because she already had a job, and Benny went with her, leaving just me, Abel, and Mel.

"So..."I said slowly. "What do you guys think about all this?"

Mel shrugged. "We don't have much of a background with this nonsense. We're city dwellers. We can fight, but this adventure shit isn't our speed." She jerked a thumb at Abel. "This one will be happy if you find him something to punch. I'm...intrigued. This is fascinating stuff. Such a big world I hadn't been able to look into before." She chuckled. "But then, that's not what you're asking, is it?"

I shrugged. "Maybe not. I admit I'm curious how you think I'm doing. As a leader I mean." They'd both led their own factions, or at least Mel had. Abel...I wasn't sure he knew or cared much about leadership. He was kind of a loner, he was just often a loner with company. It was an odd thing to think about but it was the only way I could really describe him.

"Want to know a secret, kid?" She asked warmly. "No one is a good leader. You make decisions. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't, but it rarely has shit to do with you. A leader is just a fancy name for a person who has to deal with all the bullshit. Deal as best you can and move on. Unless people start dying you did your job. Sometimes even then."

That was a sobering thought, but...she wasn't wrong. That didn't mean I'd stop trying to be better, but maybe it meant I didn't have to take fuck ups quite so personally. Things could always be worse. I gave her a nod of thanks and turned back to the spire to watch my girlfriend and teammate send back their report. All I could do was my best.