I groaned, slumping back onto the couch that Annalise's maids had brought out after the third hour of our little powwow. Alistair was lounging not far away, and Nat was on the other side of the couch next to Bethy, and all three of them looked as annoyed and drained as I probably did. Not physically exhausted, obviously, but mentally drained from literal HOURS of constant annoying back and forth.

We'd told our stories. Then we'd told them again. Then we'd told them in reverse order. Then we'd told them with our eyes closed (apparently to check for any scents we might have overlooked, though why that would be important I had zero clue). Annalise just sat there, constantly scribbling in her stupid little book, making us repeat things as she compared facts from both recitations.

Once that was done, she started asking us questions. Nonsense stuff mostly, asking us how we felt about individual word choices, what the undead's voice had sounded like at any given time, and a host of other weird things that didn't seem to mean anything. After an hour. AN HOUR. Of questions, she finally made her first wish, asking for confirmation of a yes or no question.

Which she wrote down. In her book. I hated that book. But that question seemed to act as a new lens through which to view every detail she'd dragged out of us, and she forced us to reexamine every comment, interaction, and minute pause before asking the next. That one didn't take an hour, only about forty minutes. Then we did it again. And again. EIGHTEEN TIMES. I got a solid deal on the wishes though, getting a geas for help with a future contract negotiation each time.

Finally, Annalise snapped her book shut. The second half of our little session hadn't just been us. She'd called Anna-Marie and grilled her on the legends she'd heard of Suvaya. Had her gather all her researchers and anyone she knew nearby that might have any understanding of the situation. Once all that was done she'd altered the questions somewhat, though kept them to yes or no.

It DID really bring down the cost of the wishes when she did that. Considering how absurdly expensive it had been the other times I'd tried fishing for secrets it was a relief. "So." I said with an exasperated huff. After she closed the book Annalise had closed her own eyes, then just kind of sat there.

No one else was nearby, the others had gotten bored and wandered off ages ago, some to go talk or drink or play games and some to explore the mountain, though my own crew stayed withing sight. Annalise opened her eyes. "Ah. Yes. Apologies, merely...sorting information."

She had to have some kind of investigative or information gathering Skill. Maybe some kind of nobility thing. Finally, she exhaled. Which I noticed easily, thanks to the twenty four points of Perception I'd gotten from her for the wishes she's made. At least there was one upside to this nonsense. "So...what did you figure out? Aside from the obvious stuff we already knew."

Shrugging, she tossed her thickly braided hair. "It was mostly confirmation of what we knew, as well as context for why this is all happening. You aren't stupid, your suppositions were accurate for the most part, though somewhat incomplete. You lacked some background information."

I'd gathered some of that listening to her questions but I suspected I'd missed some of it. "You know why she picked now to act?"

"Oh that one isn't a mystery." She laughed. "Bad luck. Her net has been cast far and wide, but part of the issue is that in order to utilize her 'conduits' as you call them, they had to be willing. She had to make them promises, her promise to make them gods has delayed things quite a bit."

I paused. "So she was really going to follow through on that?" She hadn't asked for that confirmation, so I wasn't sure where she got that bit of info.

"It's the only thing that makes sense." She said firmly. "Suvaya was a goddess, which means a full thousand Impact. That's the threshold for godhood. Among other things. Regardless, she had thirty three high priests bound to her, all of them powerful and high ranking Ascendants. B through S-rank. When the six destroyed her, part of her consciousness landed here, but it was too damaged to reconstitute."

"So she decided to farm Impact." I said impatiently. "Yeah, we gathered that. That was one of your questions, if all thirty-three survived to become conduits."

She nodded. "They didn't apparently, though we don't know how many did. That's where the local legends come in. Suvaya isn't just the moon goddess, she's the MOON as far as these people are concerned. The story about her seventeen stars is obviously a reference to the priests. Well, fifteen now."

"So you said she needed to honor her promise, does that mean she needed eighteen thousand Impact worth of Ascendants? Because...that's a LOT. Especially considering how many people never make it into the triple digits. Sure, the people who come here tend to be elites who usually make it higher, but still. And what happens if someone dies early? Does she still get their power?"

Annalise shrugged. "I have no idea. I'd assume so. Otherwise this would have taken much longer. Honestly the fact that she managed to make this place is absurd. She must have used the stripped stats from her priests to fuel its creation. No other way some damaged soul shard could manage it."

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"I'm guessing she couldn't strip them past F-rank." I said with a grimace. "Otherwise why limit the dungeon like that. My question is how the hell did the six not NOTICE. They've been sending us here for millennia."

Nat answered that one. "There's no end of weird shit out there, cuz. Since they were never able to actually come here themselves its no wonder they didn't notice. It's not like they have anything to compare it to. No reason to jump to the conclusion one of the vanished gods was somehow still around."

Put that way, I could kind of understand. The Universe was huge and weird. Belief warped whole worlds in unexplainable ways and constantly shifted what could be considered fact. The six, being at the top of that pyramid, probably saw crazy and unbelievable things daily. I just wished this particular issue hasn't been the thing that slipped their notice, considering it might kill me and everyone I cared about.

Moving on, Annalise continued enumerating her findings. "In any case. She's recently come close to stockpiling the needed Impact. Something about the process requires her to imbue it all at once, probably the limits on the dungeon itself. The actual ritual for her to reform and for all the priests to Ascend will take place relatively soon, though I wasn't able to confirm a specific date. We didn't have enough questions for me to even try."

I nodded. Aside from being a secret and therefore expensive as hell, something open ended like a date would basically be process of elimination.

"Ok. Do we know WHERE exactly the ritual will happen?" I asked hopefully. She'd clearly gleaned a lot more from the stories and questions than I had, and hadn't said most of it out loud. No wonder she'd been writing so much. It was a fascinating look at the potential uses of my power when combined with the right inputs, and I'd seen Callie watching us intently, clearly trying to learn something.

She looked at me archly. "You didn't figure it out?" I felt my stomach sink. I knew what she was going to say. I didn't even need to think about it after hearing her tone. Because OF COURSE she was. The world sucked and fate sense tended to push us to the most interesting possible

"This..." I grimaced before continuing. "This isn't a mountain, is it?" Which would explain the gravity and spatial warping. Because of COURSE the hand of a vanished god was just sticking out of the ground in the middle of this dungeon.

Her answering smile wasn't really happy so much as cynically amused. "No. No it is not."

"Should we leave?" I asked tensely, ready to book it off the edge and State of Grace my people to the ground if need be. I wasn't taking any chances with the safety of my friends. I cursed my damned fate sense for being so annoyingly inconsistent. Pushing me to the temple to figure out the problem then up here to what...die?

"Unnecessary." She said with a wave. "She can't interact at the moment or we'd already be dead. She's in stasis after using most of her energy to create this place. The sleep of the moon, as the locals call it. This isn't her ACTUAL hand, obviously. Just the spiritual representation of the fragment of her manifesting when she created this place. She's a goddess, but they don't randomly grow to thousands of miles tall."

Which meant it might be a decent idea to keep a presence here, especially since more of the teams might be coming to help. Leaving them to wander around up here and possibly die couldn't be a smart call. "You're the one who has to stay here when we leave, are you ok with that? And speaking of leaving, does this mean we have an actual plan that can help us stop this?"

Annalise nodded. "Yes to both. You were on the right track. Seventeen priests. Seventeen conduits. If we kill them, it disconnects the threads she's woven through all the possible Impact she could harvest. Granted, some of the dead ones might have been harvested early, but she'll need Impact to make herself a new body and reform, not to mention repair the damage from the severed connections. If we disconnect all the conduits before she manifests, she SHOULD come into being as an F-ranker."

"Ok, that shouldn't be too bad." I said with a relieved sigh. "We DID kill that undead with just two teams. We can take the others. Especially with so much help."

"If only it were that easy." She said wearily. "I told you the priests vary in strength. They're all severely weakened and damaged, but some of them had a higher starting point. None of them will be able to breach the E-rank, but some of them will be literal former S-rankers. Even damaged and stripped of much of their strength...I shudder to think what they might be capable of."

I shuddered too. That sound terrifying. Abel made it clear to me what advanced Skills and techniques could do at the same level. "So...what do we do? Can we even kill them? It sounds like we'd be fighting a Master Candidate on steroids. Are their souls still higher level?"

She nodded. "Much. It's the only way to explain the possibility of Ascension. Still even with absurd Skills and soul power, stats are the building blocks of abilities. Without the stats to back it up they won't be able to throw around high rank power. Just use what they have REALLY well. If we attack as a group and plan things well, we can manage. Also, the more of them we kill the more strain is placed on the others."

"So we off them in reverse order." I said thoughtfully. "Take the weakest and make sure the big dogs are under more pressure when we come for them. Can you identify which priests are which?" I wasn't sure how she'd be able to, I hadn't heard anything that might, but hey, didn't hurt to ask.

"Some of them." She said, to my surprise. "The three I suspect are S-rankers were mentioned more than the others. At the very least we ought to save them for last. But even then, there's going to be quite a bit of power disparity. We need more of the teams on this. Luckily, while I didn't identify when the ritual would be, I did identify when it will NOT. As in, it will not be taking place in the next month."

My shoulders relaxed. That helped a ton actually. "Alright." I said firmly. "So, the plan is to find and recruit more of the teams then. Once we have the forces we move in and wipe out all seventeen of them within the next month. Then we jump Suvaya a thousand to one and crush her with numbers so we can get the hell off this hellhole." I paused. "Plus...maybe get some more those drops after she's dead if we can." From the grim smiles on the others, I suspected I wasn't the only one thinking about the fight that was going to be, but we had time for that later. For now...I guess we needed to get ready to kill a god.