The S-Class Spire was even uglier up close.
It rose from the earth like a blackened bone, roughly three hundred feet tall and sixty feet wide at the base. Its surface was made of rough stone that looked like it had been forced upward from deep underground by something massive and angry. Dark veins of red energy pulsed beneath the surface, crawling up the tower like cracks in a dying battery.
The air around it was wrong too.
Team Soup stood at the entrance.
A massive pair of iron doors, fifteen feet tall, had been set into the base of the tower. They were already open, revealing a pitch-black interior that seemed to swallow the morning light around it.
A squad of Royal Guards stood to one side.
Ten of them, all wearing full dress armor. Their captain was a stocky man with a beard trimmed to a perfect point and the kind of confident smile worn by someone who knew he would never be the one walking into a dangerous place.
He gestured toward the entrance.
