Rudra Kapadia had never really understood the appeal of rock climbing—or any other type of recreational climbing, for that matter. He’d dealt with heights back in his time as a construction worker on Earth and had learned that they were something to be respected; he preferred to not think about all the coworkers, usually the newer workers who had not yet internalized the truth that construction could be a dangerous industry, who’d suffered terrible injury or even died falling from a roof, scaffold, or the like. Those that instead thought of height as a game of sorts, or something to be conquered, would always be labeled weirdos in his mind. It was little wonder then, as he clung to the side of a stupidly humongous tree, several kilometers of open air between him and solid ground, that he was not exactly having the time of his life.

They had been ascending for many hours now, and even Rudra’s empowered body was starting to feel it. His muscles ached from hours of crawling against gravity. His fingers felt like they had no skin left on them, all of it scraped off by the rough, hard bark that was their climbing surface. The wind buffeted him constantly, getting worse as they climbed higher so that he felt like he could never relax. It also seemed to delight in whipping the rope that connected the four of them into his face whenever it could. The bulky pack he wore chafed against his back. Oh, and how could he forget Pari’s sack, which the child refused to leave behind, tied around his shoulders, pulling on his neck like a noose tugging in the wrong direction? Together with the pack, it shifted his center of balance backward, meaning he was always fighting the pull of gravity threatening to tip him back and away from the tree.

Speaking of things pulling him off the tree, as he pushed and pulled himself up another meter, the safety line leading beneath him went taut. He continued anyway, despite the whine of protest from below. With his strength, the added weight of a small child might as well be nonexistent. Still, just to be sure, he took a peek below.

As expected, he saw Pari hanging from the rope tied around her torso without a single hand or foot touching the bark, completely unconcerned for her own safety. Like the dozens of other times this had happened tonight, she was far more concerned with stuffing the latest bug, fungus, or whatever had caught her interest into one of the many pockets lining her clothes. Each pocket appeared to be stuff to its limits, the two dozen or so of them bulging out from her shirt and pants like relatively massive tumors. With other people and in other situations, Rudra would have found it bizarre, but Pari was very much not other people. Pari was... to put it politely, ‘unique.’

This time, the child seemed to be dealing with a conundrum—she’d run out of empty pockets. Quickly and nimbly, she pulled various things from the many lumps protruding from her shirt like tumors and sniffed each, searching for something that only she knew. A moment later, she seemed to find whatever she was looking for. With a smile, she refilled the empty pockets until the only material left in her hands was the winning item—some sort of mushroom, it seemed. ‘Winning’ quickly proved to be a mislabel, however, as she then unceremoniously discarded the poor fungi, sending it on a multi-kilometer plunge to its doom.

“Hey! Careful!” General Bloodflower weakly complained from a few meters below her as the mushroom flew past, missing him by a few centimeters.

With both of them in view at the same time, Rudra found the juxtaposition of the two almost comical. The beastkin child, lumpy clothing aside, appeared fresh and energetic, quite the contrast to the red-faced and wheezing Caprakan. The Stragman, as proud and boastful of his strength as any of his people, looked like he was barely holding on, while Pari appeared dry, spry, and ready to climb for another day if needed. Part of this could be explained by the catgirl’s youthful energy, the general’s recent recovery, and the fact that he was an Observer rather than a Feeler. Most of it, however, was because Pari showed absolutely no shame, taking numerous breaks where she let Rudra do all the work. Caprakan Bloodflower, however, was a Hono, one of the most powerful and influential members of his nation and the husband of the nation’s ruler. Though he could also have taken advantage of Rudra’s strength, Rudra knew that his pride would not allow him to rely on another—especially not during a rite such as this, and especially not when that person was a Shell. And so, shackled thusly, the man was working himself to exhaustion instead.

Rudra mentally shrugged. If that was how the man wanted to be, Rudra wasn’t going to get in the way. In fact, a worn out Caprakan might be preferable in this case; Rudra couldn’t trust the man without knowing the motives for his unexpected presence, and he probably wouldn’t even if he did know them.

The rite had begun immediately after the ceremony, as the glow of the Mother Tree provided more than enough illumination for their climb, so they hadn’t had the chance to question him about it yet. Perhaps they would get the opportunity soon. They’d taken the occasional break to eat and rest, but they couldn’t continue like this forever. They had to be stopping for the day soon, right?

A drop of wetness splashed against the top of his head, then another. He sighed.

He turned his gaze back upward, first to the next handhold and then further up to the sight of their “illustrious” leader. Gabriela cut a strange figure, especially now. The way her sword, encased in thick cloth and tied flat against the outside of her pack with what looked like a hundred loops of rope, overshadowed the pack and stuck out from the bottom like a diving board made her look almost comical—or it would have, were she not raining a veritable downpour of sweat down upon him.

There were times when she seemed almost put-together—relative to right now, at least. Like many trees, Ruresni’s bark was not uniformly smooth and whole. Cracks tall enough for them to stand inside and up to two meters deep intermittently wound through it, and it was sometimes possible to climb the slopes they formed rather than go straight up. Even when the crack went straight up, it helped just to know that their fall would be a few dozen meters at most, as opposed to the alternative. Between the easier movement, the added safety, and the decreased psychological burden on their leader, most of their altitude gain had come from these sections. The rest of the time, however, was when things turned especially ugly. For somewhere between half and a third of the time, they’d had no option but to do things the hard way and climb.

In some ways, he had to respect her drive and determination. He could imagine just how torturous having to free-climb a mountainous tree might be for somebody with a phobia of heights, but he didn’t have to—he could see it manifest in her. Her whole body trembled, her movements lacking even a hint of smoothness, rather coming in sudden spurts of blurred action. Sometimes, he thought he’d catch a wisp of crimson haze in the glow of the tree or hear her mutter some sort of mantra under her breath. And then, as previously mentioned, there was the sweat—far more sweat than he thought could exist in a single person. This wasn’t the sweat of exertion; this was the sweat of panic and terror.

He couldn’t help but think that none of this should be happening—that this woman should, in absolutely zero circumstances, be a participant in this, let alone be leading it. He found it not just cruel but just plain unwise; if she had to be a part of this insanity, it would at least be better if she could take the spot at the bottom of the chain and let the rest of them do the work of leading. Yet, it could not be; the rules of the rite dictated that she, as the challenger, had to lead her team not just figuratively but in a very literal and physical sense. She was not cut out for the burdens of leadership in this scenario and they all knew it. With all this stress, it was only a matter of time before something snapped.

A moment later, something did. The loud “CRACK!” and an earsplitting shriek alerted Rudra as he reached for a new handhold with his left arm. He immediately pulled himself as close to the trunk as he could, returning his left hand to its previous location and making sure that his grip was as solid and unshakable as possible. The periphery of his vision caught a chunk of brown falling by his side, while his ears told him all he needed to know of Gabriela’s quickly declining altitude. As the scream whizzed past somewhere behind him, he braced himself for the coming tug.

Gabriela’s screech terminated abruptly a moment later and Rudra felt the now-familiar pull on the rope. Holding fast, he looked down and watched her swing back and forth. The fall had lowered her all the way to hanging just above Pari, who looked on with confused concern as the nigh-unkillable warrior flailed and scrabbled almost ferally for the bark just out of reach. Below them, a tangle of thin branches jutted out from the formerly unadorned trunk.

With a sigh, he seized the taut rope with one hand and pulled it closer to the tree. Gabriela grabbed hold immediately and almost threw herself against the bark, practically wrapping her body around it like a sailor clutching flotsam after a shipwreck in stormy seas. Seeing that she wasn’t going to be climbing back up right now, Rudra worked his way down to the pair. As he did, part of him wanted to ask whose stupid idea this whole ordeal might be but held off because then he’d have to reckon with the fact that it was his.

“This can’t go on any longer,” he sternly told her when he got there. “We need to stop.”

“I-I can keep going,” she managed to gasp out between panicked exhalations.

“No, you can’t,” he snapped, his patience coming to an end. There was no way that she would make such an absurd claim if she could see herself—her pale face, wet from tears even more than sweat, said more than enough. “This is the third time you’ve fallen off!”

“I climbed the Divide, I can climb this,” she insisted.

“Well, the rest of us can’t. We’ve pushed ourselves to the limit today, and we’ve climbed a third of the way up at most. We need to rest. We need to sleep.”

She let out a few deliberate breaths, looking around at their surroundings as if she was realizing just now how long they’d been climbing and how late—or early—in the day it was. Doing so made her tense up again, but she quickly closed her eyes and steadied herself.

“Right... right. I saw another gap up ahead that might work. It’s close. We can stop there, maybe.” She reached out and began to climb. Rudra followed after making sure the rope wasn’t going to get wrapped around itself. As he did, he passed by the spot with the broken bark and shook his head. Ruresni’s bark wasn’t as strong as its seemingly indestructible wood, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t durable. He’d tested it before the climb began, and even pulling at his full strength, he’d been unable to do more than bend it slightly. Only Gabriela and her explosive burst of power could do something as seemingly impossible as breaking off a large piece with a single hand.

Just as she’d said, not more than fifty meters above them but just out of sight from where he’d been when she fell, there was a crevice in the trunk where the wood folded in on itself. Relative to the size of the rest of Ruresni, it was so minuscule that it wouldn’t even count as a wrinkle, but for them, it meant a wooden cave of sorts a good ten meters deep and three meters high. Such formations weren’t entirely rare. They’d come across others like it several times tonight and rested at each one, though this particular indentation was the largest so far by a wide margin.

After frantically heaving the rest of them up, Gabriela immediately retreated as far away from the edge as possible. Rudra pulled Pari’s bag off his shoulders and set it next to her before removing his pack and slipping out of the safety rope looped around him. Finally free, he went off to find his own space. In the center left of the “cave”, the uneven floor rose to form a smooth mound of sorts about half his height. Perfect. With a weary groan, he settled down beside it, letting it act as a backrest. It wasn’t the height of comfort, but anything was better than what he’d had to deal with in that stupid cell.

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He took a deep breath and wiped his brow. His whole body ached from the hours of climbing, his hands worst of all. This had been the hardest he’d physically labored in his life. The idea of doing it again tomorrow—or later that day, technically—held little appeal.

Rudra could tell that General Bloodflower agreed. The man had barely moved from the edge, having chosen to splay out on his back not two steps from oblivion. His chest heaved desperately up and down like a bicycle pump trying to inflate a leaky tire, and he gazed skyward with eyes glazed and unfocused. Once again, in part thanks to the fiery hair matted to his head and neck, Rudra noted just how heavily the Stragman was sweating. The man was in dire need of a drink, and now that Rudra thought of it, he needed one himself.

Reluctantly, he pushed himself back to his feet and turned towards Gabriela and his discarded pack, where his waterskin was. Pari had joined the woman while he hadn’t been looking. The child pulled something out and held it up to the quaking woman. Out shot a plume of translucent smoke that enveloped the pair. Rudra watched as the manic, mind-rending tension seemed to melt right off of Gabriela like butter on a hot summer’s day.

Rudra frowned, making sure to stay out of the dispersing cloud.

The woman calmly turned her head his way and noticed him staring. “Makes the screaming go away,” she finally said. Her words slurred ever so slightly, but she seemed lucid enough.

“Why didn’t you use that earlier, then, instead of trying to force everything? You don’t seem that intoxicated.”

“Wouldn’t work. I can still think, mostly, but it makes everything all... blurry.” She waved her hand slowly in front of her face, staring at it blankly, then looked back at him. “You, too.”

“We could just pull you along.”

She frowned. “I told you, no. The rules say I have to lead or we lose. I won’t risk it.”

“We’re, what, three kilometers above the camp? Four? There’s no way they would ever know.”

“I won’t risk it,” she repeated emphatically.

Rudra sighed in defeat. He didn’t have the energy to argue with her right now. Instead, he grabbed two waterskins and retreated to his resting place. He took a much-needed gulp from one and tossed the other onto the general’s chest. The man responded with what he assumed to be an appreciative groan.

Taking a swig, he settled back down on his spot. It tasted terrible, but he’d never loved water more than he did right now. His eye closed.

When Rudra’s eye opened again, the day seemed to be in full swing. He groaned and stretched his stiff and aching limbs. Several gulps of water brought life back to his parched throat.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“It’s not much past noon...” Gabriela said. She shrugged. “...I think. I slept for some of it too.”

Finally, Rudra’s nose seemed to shake off the last of its slumber, and he noticed a strange smell in the air. He couldn’t quite make sense of the scent with just his nose. Part of his brain thought it smelled good, almost appetizing, even; another thought it smelled acrid and a bit repugnant, like heated vomit. Where was it coming from?

He looked around and found that their little camp had changed in a few notable ways. The most obvious, thanks to the shadows cast, were what he could only describe as thick tree branches—for normal, Earth trees, not the monsters here—sticking up out of the floor like support posts for a railing. They ran from one end of the ledge to the other and tapered off at around the level of his chest. A makeshift safety fence, he realized, and one that could only have been created by... Down by the fence, propped against the ‘wall’ of this indentation of theirs, snored one General Bloodflower.

“He grew those right after you went to sleep, then conked out himself,” Gabriela offered from somewhere behind him.

Well, that explained the improvised barrier—a wise idea, he had to admit—but not the smell. Looking around some more, he quickly spotted the source. Near the center of the space sat the catgirl child, a long, thin stick in hand. Speared on the end of that stick and roasting over a flame far bigger than the candle it erupted from, was what appeared to his bleary eye to be a white grub as big as a kidney. The child hummed merrily as she slowly spun the grub over the heat, drawing crackles from the presumably dead insect’s body. She pulled it back, blew on it, sniffed it, and finally bit off a large chunk with gusto.

“They taste better than they look,” Gabriela told him, and only then did he realize that she held her own larva, hers mostly consumed. She gestured towards a third stick leaning on a pack beside Pari, its baby insect still sizzling over the flame. “We got one for you, too. Just go wake up Mister Shady first, please.”

Rudra woke Caprakan via a light toe kick to the ribs and returned to the others, sitting down near the flame. An unattended stick with a grub skewered atop rested beside the fire. He picked it up and eyed the so-called ‘food’ warily. It wasn’t like they lacked food right now. Their packs had enough food for the whole climb in ideal conditions—were anything to go wrong, they’d have to scavenge when they ran out, but that would still be a long way off. Water, on the other hand, was something they’d have to find soon—within a day or two if the rate they were going through their supplies stayed steady.

His stomach grumbled, but he resisted the call; he’d rather not chow down on giant larvae if he could help it. He thought of grabbing something from his pack, but before he could, the final straggler joined them.

“A tap on the shoulder would have worked just fine,” Caprakan grumbled. “Was that really necessary?”

“You tell me, husband of the Chos,” Gabriela replied. “It’s time we got some answers.”

He surveyed the scene and frowned in mock outrage. “Where’s my grub?”

“Get your own,” Gabriela told him, pointing towards the back of the cave. At the very back, Rudra could see a section where the bark had been cut out, revealing the impenetrable wood beneath, and the many grubs feasting on the bark’s softer inner side.

“How did you know about that?” Rudra wondered.

“Pari sniffed it out,” Gabriela confided.

“Really?”

He looked over to the girl, who nodded energetically and swallowed her mouthful of insect. She puffed out her chest proudly and declared, “Pari is best sniffer! Pari sniff and snoof better than even Grandfather!”

All Rudra managed was a confused “huh.” He didn’t know why having a better sense of smell than an old man was something to be proud of.

“What a delightful surprise,” General Bloodflower stated, plopping down beside the still-flaming candle with a stick in each hand—freshly grown, no doubt—and a still-wriggling grub on each. “I had no idea that such treats could be found so low. You truly are talented, little one.”

Pari giggled and preened at the praise.

“This low?” Rudra questioned.

“Once we’ve gone a little higher, we will start trespassing through the various territories of the wildlife that make the Mother Tree their home,” the Stragman explained, bringing his catches over the flame. “Only this lowest section is so empty, though it seems perhaps that this is simply because they reside within instead.”

Gabriela tensed up. “By ‘trespassing’, you mean we...”

“Will be attacked, yes. Absolutely. The denizens of this place are strong—up there with the strongest of all who dwell beneath the Great Mother’s shade. Someone fit to lead our people should be able to survive that much, should they not?”

She gulped, her gaze flickering momentarily towards Pari, who was too busy chomping down on her grub to pay attention to the current conversation. She sighed. “I never should have agreed to this.”

Rudra decided to change the subject before she fell too deep into her doubts. Besides, he could see what the Stragman was trying to do, and he didn’t like it. “Enough with the distractions. Explain why you volunteered to join us.”

The general brought a grub to his mouth and bit down. “Mmm! So juicy!”

“Now.”

The man scoffed. “Or what, pacifist? Threats mean litter when everybody knows you can’t turn them from words to action.”

“He doesn’t have to—I will,” Gabriela growled. “Spill it! Why are you here?”

Bloodflower took another bite in lieu of answering, chewing without hurry or any apparent fear.

“To help you win. Why else?” he finally returned.

Now, it was Rudra and Gabriela’s turn to scoff.

“Ridiculous,” Rudra declared.

“I don’t believe you,” Gabriela added.

“Why else would I be here?”

“To sabotage us,” Gabriela proposed.

“To what end? To make you fail? If I wanted that to happen, I would have let you fail during the selection. Then, I wouldn’t have to do any of this exhausting work.”

“Maybe you want the Chos to win, but she has to win for real instead of by technicality,” Rudra considered. “Victory in this ordeal would improve her standing in the eyes of the other elites and the people.”

Caprakan snorted. “Her standing is fine as it is. Nobody doubts her strength or her rule since she got you to stop making trouble. If anything, the rite failing at the selection would only hurt your reputation. You two are the reason we all had to take a sudden, long, and arduous detour, after all.”

“Then, why?” Rudra reiterated. “You saw how furious you made her last night. She would have bashed my head in if she could have reached me then.”

“Ooh, yeah, I saw. Hard to miss, really,” the Stragman agreed, taking another bite.

“That look she gave us is the only reason I’ve let you go so far, Bloodflower,” Gabriela warned. “It’s the only reason I doubt she wasn’t in on whatever crud you’re trying to pull.”

“Oh, of course, she had no idea. She’d never have agreed to it, and she’d have just knocked me cold before the ceremony if I had told her. Sadly, that came at the cost of infuriating her instead. She probably thinks you forced me into it or something.”

“And now, thanks to you, she’s extra pissed,” Gabriela pointed out.

“Well, that won’t change much, I imagine. We need to make sure to always be prepared for her assault in the upcoming days.”

“She’s going to try to attack us because of you?” Gabriela frowned.

“Oh, she was almost definitely going to try something either way. My actions merely made a near certainty into a certainty.”

Gabriela looked puzzled. “She’d have to catch up to us, though, wouldn’t she? Or do you mean on the way back down?”

Caprakan shook his head. “Oh, no. Barring some unforeseen disaster, they’re surely above us already.”

“W-what?! But—!”

“My wife has climbed Ruresni twice before. Unlike the rest of us, she has ample experience in doing this and knew just the right people with the right skills to add to her team. I have little doubt that, in a straight race, her team would win. So, I suppose it’s a good thing that she’s angry enough that she’ll slow down and ambush you.”

“But, Tepin told me that even approaching Ruresni is forbidden outside of special times like this,” Rudra objected.

“Well, this was back in her teen years when rules didn’t mean too much to her,” Caprakan explained. “She was just bored and looking for anything to provide her with a challenge. At least she told me all about it, so I have some idea of what we’re in for. Better than going in blind.”

“Still, this is bad,” Rudra lamented. “Did we really come this far just to lose a stupid race at the end?”

“The outcome is not even close to fully bloomed,” the Stragman insisted. “Anything can happen up here. Anything.”

With one last bite, the first of his pair of grubs was no more. He pulled the second, crispier one off of the heat and turned it over, inspecting it with a practiced eye. Rudra looked at his own, inspecting the browned carapace. It remained unappetizing.

“And when this attack you’re sure is coming actually comes, whose side will you be on?”

“As I said, I am here to aid you in your upcoming victory.”

“Even if it means fighting your woman? Hurting her? Killing her?”

The general laughed. “Of course not. What sort of person do you take me for?”

“The kind of person who I know has been up to something behind everybody’s back,” Rudra told him. “The kind who insists he’s here to help us but won’t tell us why or what he gets out of it. The kind that, I can’t help but suspect, just ‘happened’ to randomly mention the Challenge of Ruresni in conversation with me in the hopes that I’d invoke it later, leading to us being right here, right now. That sort.”

“You flatter me,” the man said, tucking into his second grub. The roasted insect let out a satisfying crunch as he bit into it. “But, I’m nowhere near crafty enough for such things.”

Rudra didn’t believe that for a second.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Gabriela told Caprakan with a scathing glare. “I’m tired of you avoiding the question. Give me a straight answer or you’re heading back down, either climbing on your own or the other way.”

“No.” General Bloodflower chewed vigorously, enjoying his meal far more than Rudra felt he should given the situation. He smiled, unbothered by the heat of the woman’s anger. “You need me for all sorts of reasons, and I doubt you have what it takes to throw me off the edge.”

He paused for a moment, thinking. “I’ll say this, I suppose. I’m doing this for personal reasons—not for the country or that sort of thing, but for me. I readily admit that I’m using you for my own gain, but I swear that I bear no sinister intentions toward any of you. This is merely me grabbing hold of an opportunity before it slips away. I’ll get what I want in the course of you doing what you’re going to do when you win anyway.”

“Even when you say that...”

“Alright, how about this? I do have one thing I want to ensure you do for me. I’ll say it to you now, and then, when this is over, if you think that I’ve kept my word, you will do it. Does that sound fair?”

“...perhaps,” Gabriela allowed, however warily. “What is it?”

He told them.

Rudra rocked back in surprise. “You’re... you can’t mean that.”

“I am entirely serious.”

“B-but, but... why?” Gabriela demanded to know.

“That’s my business. You don’t need to know. I remind you that you agreed to our arrangement just now. Are you going to back out or do you have a shred of honor?”

The two locked gazes for a tense moment, neither willing to budge.

“...fine,” Gabriela eventually relented.

“Glad that we see eye to eye on this. Now—” He stood up and stretched, his spine letting out several loud pops. “—we need to get going. We won’t stand a chance if we dawdle while my honey climbs.”

Minutes later, they were on the move again, having quickly eaten, drank, and packed.

The grub turned out to be pretty tasty, after all.