"Are you sure you all have everything you need?" Ava asked for the seven hundredth and ninety third time.

"I believe we do, Ms. Holmes. Much better packed than my last saunter through the woods," I said, pointing over my shoulder at the hiking pack stuffed with supplies.

"From what I hear, that shouldn't be reassuring at all, Ronan. And please, just call me Ava. You were right. You are no longer children, and I should also reciprocate the respect you all have always given me." She crouched lower in an attempt to whisper to me alone. It wasn't at a level that our enhanced senses wouldn't have picked up, but I was sure that was deliberate. "But you keep them safe, or you'll make me go out there."

She'd said that like she had access to magic or firearms much more powerful than what we had, but I had no doubt she would come after us if it came to it. We'd planned to be out overnight, two at most, so the bar for returning was set.

"You kids have fun!" Ben said, casually holding a rifle up on his shoulder. Daniela's mother was similarly armed.

"Benjamin! They aren't going to go watch a movie or out to a restaurant!" Ava said, outraged.

"True, but what would you rather them do? Be miserable?" he said, smirking in the dawn light. Ava mumbled a number of expletives in his direction. Me and Daniela laughed as we walked closer to where she'd been clearcutting trees.

"Come on, veg head. We are burning daylight!" Danny said, patting Anthony's head as the ant walked towards the pair of Landfall survivors. She assured me the fire ant wanted to accompany us, but she'd instructed him to protect Ben and her mom. For the first time I noticed how much larger he's grown as he stood next to Ben. Still dog sized, but possibly a bigger breed like a Labrador or German Shepard. As I frowned in its direction, strings of information populated in my vision.

Why didn't I think to try to inspect him before? His Quotient is higher. It also shows his name, curious. Good to know that we can somehow get domesticated creatures to grow in lev-- “Samuel!" Daniela shouted right by my ear. I turned to see our blonde headed friend speaking feverishly fast to Ben, all the while walking in reverse.

"And make sure Ray gets at least two handfuls a day. If he looks ornery just give him an extra one. Oh, and make sure to mend the fence on the south. One of the--"

"I got it, Sam. Shouldn't be a problem to deal with the herd while you are away," Ben said. I could hear the exasperation in his tone. Knowing how neurotic Sam could be, I pitied the amount of tasks he'd left our old teacher. Sam eventually turned around, and both Ben and Ava waved in our direction. Anthony flicked his antenna from side to side.

"Did my mom tell you about the medical titanium stuff?" Danny asked as she took the lead. It looked like a straight shot for most of the way, so I just made sure to keep an eye on either side of the cut path.

"Something about medical grade kits and Ti-6Al-4VELI?" I said.

"Wow, you really do know how to pay attention," Danny said.

"I think that's more a selective memory type issue than an attention issue, Danny. If you recall, Ronan is very good at many things and very bad at others." Sam took the opportunity to throw out a barb.

"Oy! I would say I am mediocre to decent at least. We just have different interests," I said, crossing my arms.

"Right. I don't know if I could even call your cooking skills mediocre, though. Doubt that you'd be able to muster something even if the Entity put the knowledge straight into your head as a Skill." Danny laughed along with Sam.

I kept my mouth shut. This was one of those exchanges where the more I talked, the more flustered I would get and they would just end up winning. None of that so early into the trip. We all walked in silence for several minutes before Sam threw out the most impatient sentence known to road trip movies. "Are we there yet?"

"Samuel, we've been walking for less than fifteen minutes. Sure it's only about a mile to the road, but we aren't in a rush to get anywhere. We don't even know if there is anywhere to get to," Danny said, glaring in his direction.

"But, Raymond and the farm--"

"Will be fine. Ben and my mom are adults, they can handle some responsibility."

"Unlike someone I know," I mumbled under my breath to Sam.

"Hey, I heard--" When she turned around, a Flame burst manifested immediately in her hand. Instinctively, Sam and I threw ourselves to the side in clumsy rolls. The ball of fire traveled in a slight arc to splash against the side of a tree not far behind us.

As much as I knew she might have wanted to splash us with the fire attack, I knew she would never actually hurt us. Instead of questioning why she lobbed magic behind us, we turned and poised at the ready. A spell chain appeared in my left hand while I unslung the pickaxe from my back. It was clumsy and slow, but I still kept my eyes trained on where the attack had landed. When the flames cleared, I saw the tell tale yellow of a banana spider as it scurried into the woods. Then it was gone.

"I must have cut through their territory. This is the third or fourth I've seen, but they run every time I hit them with magic." Daniela had pulled out one of the Haze Wolf fangs and was gripping it as a dagger. Sam had pulled out the Infused shovel. I wasn't sure what he planned to do with that, but at least he also had a Skill at the ready in hand.

"That would have been nice to know, Danny!" I said, frowning as I turned back to look at the flames. She didn't reply right away, instead she put away the fang and used her passive magic to snuff the flames. They'd been starting to spread. I resisted the urge to ask her how her heating ability worked like that. Instead I stared at her expectantly.

"They never did anything but run away! Plus, with us three I didn't think it would even be an issue. There've never been more than two that I've seen," she said. She crossed her arms and huffed.

"I agree with Ron on this. That would have been good information to have," Sam said, crossing his own arms. "I think we need to be on the same page moving forward with combat. As much as I am sure he dreads thinking about it, he's got the most experience with the spiders."

My body shivered involuntarily as I remembered how close I got to being a meal. However, I agreed with Daniela's assessment. "I don't think you are wrong, Danny. Avoiding a direct encounter with the spiders is also really high up on my list, and if they avoid your fire then we should take advantage of that. As for telling us... that is part of why you were scouting. To tell us the good and the bad."

Daniela looked properly mollified, so I took the lead as she hung back. It was rare that I was the strict one in our group, but I knew Daniela could be a bit flippant about such things. The rest of the walk went on in silence and without any new encounters. When I spotted the broken fragments of roadway, a skip entered my step and I was the first to arrive on the asphalt.

It was indeed a road, but the earth had moved fiercely to reclaim it. Of what I knew was probably a near thirty foot wide road, possibly ten feet remained in the middle. It ended abruptly and stretched into the distance to the North where I could see an overgrown structure. I scanned the area around the road. Black colored rocks littered all around the trees where the shoulders of the road would have been. Even the portion at the center was rabbled and cracked by tree roots and tough grasses that couldn't care less that humans had once tread there.

When my friends reached me, I was running the rocks through my finger and poking the sections of road that had held together through the quarter century after Landfall.

"That's the building I told you about. Should only take a few minutes to get there," Danny said, pointing to the overgrown mess of vines and moss. She'd definitely lost some of her enthusiasm after our encounter with the spider, but I only felt a bit guilty. It was important information.

The three of us still discussed what the building could be from a distance. It didn't look like a warehouse, or a house-house for that matter. When we were less than a hundred feet away, it became obvious what we were looking at.

"It's a gas station," Sam said. I agreed. Six overgrown fuel pumps rose out of the ground. Most of the metal was rusted and the sections not covered in plant matter had chunks missing. The front windows of the building were missing, but we could see a long counter inside as well as several tipped shelves and displays.

The soft crunch of the asphalt changed as I walked onto the concrete slabs of the gas station's foundation. There wasn't a single one that had escaped untouched, but the concrete had held up much better to the test of time than the asphalt. The three of us kept our weapons at the ready as we walked closer to the building. It was unlikely that anything would make their home inside something so covered in rust and, from what I could tell, spilled oils and chemicals.

I wasn't sure how mana reacted with chemicals, but my hunch was explosively or poisonly. Neither appealed to me, so I stayed outside of the building proper. The gas station looked like one big room with another far in the back corner. I eyed some of the metal scattered around the place and made a note to possibly try to collect it in the future. Most of it would probably not be usable, but I didn't think there were still metal mines left on the surface anywhere. Especially not in post-apocalypse Florida.

When I explained my reasoning, my friends agreed that it would be a good place to try to grab materials in the future. Daniela took some time to clear the plant matter away with her Skill, exposing the remains of a red and yellow paint pattern before it flaked off under the heat. Once that was done, there wasn't much more to the area so we continued to follow the road east.

"How far is the town of Wildwood?" I asked, trying to gauge the distance using my implant while also paying attention to the road. I wasn't very successful.

"Give me a sec, I'll look it up. Keep an eye out for me." Sam placed his arm on my shoulder and spaced out. Still concentrated on looking at the LPS, he used me to guide his steps.

"This road doesn't show up on the pre-Landfall map. Based on where the map shows us, we are about a mile and a half from the main road, 301, which runs north-south. The city seems pretty evenly split with The Villages to the north and the actual city of Wildwood more to the south along the main road."

"Okay, we should get to the main road and then we'll decide what to do from there," I said, tapping Sam on the shoulder to signal him to leave the map for now. With a semblance of a direction, we headed east on the road.

As we walked, I could hear creatures off in the woods to either side but nothing jumped out to attack us. The whole time I focused on trying to identify some of the creatures. Several didn't appear to be attuned, but three I spotted were. One was an air squirrel like we'd seen. In fact, that's what I saw the most. Mostly blurs of gray that I was fairly sure were the critters traversing the woods. The other two were completely new.

An Earth Attuned Deer plowed right through a tree with ease, froze on the spot when it saw us, then bolted back the way it'd come. The creature had barely been within view long enough for me to notice it was Quotient Level 3. The last, a Quotient 1 Death Attuned Skunk strolled across the road with not a care in the world. Even without being born on the surface, we'd been raised with media from before Landfall. Skunks were at the very top of the list of animals not to mess with on a primal level.

Both of the creatures, and the way we'd encountered them, once again reminded us that to them we were just another group of animals moving through the forest. A potential prey for another predator. Daniela's movements lost some of the comfort she'd been moving with, even after being rebuked about the spider's presence. She now kept her hand on her pistol and her head swiveled to the side more often. While it wasn't exactly the reaction I'd hoped to incite in her, I wouldn't complain about it.

Not long after encountering the Skunk, the road widened. Even with the strength of the forest reclaiming most of the road, a much wider swath of asphalt remained in the center. Some ways north I could see the crumbled ruins of several buildings. Many looked like they'd been hit by more than age, erosion and overgrown trees. That was certainly a concern, but they could prove to be good sources of materials for our growing fort.

To the south, maybe a thousand feet away, I could see a road median split the asphalt. While the north remained a consistent width more or less, the median provided yet another avenue for the trees to tear up the road. What immediately made me decide that I wanted nothing to do with going south was the information that populated in my eyesight.

A tree taller than the others swayed gently in the wind. I could see several clusters of coconuts at the top of the palm, each glimmering like hidden pearls. My friends were deep into discussing which direction we should try to go by the time I was able to gather enough of my wits to join them.

"North. Yep. North."

"What? Why?" Sam asked, confused. All I did was point to the tree in the distance. He started walking in the tree's direction. I was surprised we'd not seen any Attuned plants, but if this was going to be how we found them then I wasn't sure I wanted to find any.

"Fair. North's got my vote," Samuel said, stiffening then walking deliberately slow back towards me.

"What are you two hemming and hawing about?" Daniela had to walk a full fifty feet closer to the tree before she stopped, turned around, and dashed to our group. "Never mind. Let's go."

With the frightening prospect that a tree could kill us, and had probably killed more things than the three of us, we made terrible progress along the road. With the appearance of our first attuned tree, I grew suspicious of every other tree we encountered. We were in a forest after all, surely there had to be more Attuned plants.

I tried to keep a mental tally of all the structures we encountered. However, few if any looked accessible. Most of them looked like they would be more trouble than they’re worth at the moment, so I just filed them away in the back of my mind.

When the sun reached its zenith, we made camp in the shade of a standard tree. Still paranoid, I checked all the nearby trees by stabbing them with a before I set up an outward facing ring of spikes to surround our camp. It wouldn't do much against some of the bigger creatures we'd encountered, but I hoped it would deter or at least give us a chance to respond to any threat.

While we were eating lunch, we discussed what we hoped to find.

"I think updating the map should be a priority," Danny said. "Like that tree, we need to know what we need to watch out for. Maybe I can get my mom to help update the map whenever she goes down below ground."

"That's a good idea. I also think gathering materials should be a focus for us. I know this is just getting a look at what's around us, but getting more titanium and other metals to use back at the Bunker will be important," I said, washing down the Insta-meal with a swig of water. It was important not to get a proper taste of it.

"Didn't know you were an aspiring Blacksmith, Ron?" Sam said, repeating a similar procedure with his food. I was glad he was able to magically boost those tomatoes more and more each time I ate one of the Insta-meals.

"I'm not, but I think we'll need the metal for equipment and tools. Maybe even a proper cart for Raymond. The titanium is for the Implants obviously."

"Should we be focused on finding some of that? None of the people in the Bunker really want to come to the surface," Danny said.

"True, but I want them to have the option. Plus, it is only a matter of time before we go looking for the other Bunkers. Having Implants ready for those people to come topside will be the key in having multiple camps."

"You really are being ambitious. Are you sure we shouldn't temper our expectations a bit, Ron? What's to say the other Bunkers survived? What's to say there even are other people our age? You heard them down in the Bunker, Ava only survived with the help of a crystal. What are we--"

"We can't think like that. We'll figure something out. Plus, there is always the possibility that--" I cut myself off as a wave of nausea rippled through me. My friends didn't notice it. I jumped to my feet, abandoning the last of my meal. A moment later, the sensation traveled up my legs and into my gut. It was very similar to the discomfort I'd felt when I overdrew my mana, and I was not soon to forget that feeling. "Something's coming."

My friends set down their meals and moved to flank me on either side. Already my pickaxe had found its way to my hands. I pressed tightly against my stone spike wall, watching the trees around us and the road to our left. A quartet of shadowy shapes walked purposefully down the road, barely paying attention to its surroundings. My blood pumped loudly in my ears as I considered the possibility that one of my biggest hopes would be a reality.

When the twisted features of two humanoids, a wolfhound and a rolling gelatinous mass became clearly visible, my heart sank. When the wolfhound turned pitch black eyes in my direction, it jumped back into my throat.