The thing about cutting trail was that it was never as easy as the movies made it. Not through a tropical forest, not when every other damn tree had thorns long enough to embed in flesh and scratch you up or worse. Not when cobwebs and vines and branches dotted the landscape, when uneven root systems and mud and leeches were all part of the jungle. Those individuals who had never actually walked through a proper tropical rainforest from Malaysia or other environs could never understand it, not when their idea of a proper forest were old growth land in North America and Europe.
Enough space to easily walk around trees or between them? Sure, there was space between trees. Most of that was filled with prickly bushes and secondary growth, all of them fertile and often filled with thorns or with leaves edged such that even brushing your hands along them would elecit light cuts.
Clear vision to the next stop or place ahead fifty feet ahead? Hah! You wished. If you had about twenty feet of clear vision, you were in a good spot.
Then, there were the insects and bugs and creepy crawlies. Not as many mosquitos, mostly because humans weren't around throwing their garbage and offering easy meal sources. Not that they didn't eat other creatures, but there generally were a higher volume when mankind chose to end up. Same with flies and other carrion beetles and the like. Yet, it didn't stop there being a constant and vast number of insects and ants and other tiny scavengers, crawling, flying and leaping onto you.
You got used to it, though keeping a pair of pants on helped as well as tight underwear. No loose boxers here, not unless you wanted to make intimate acquantince with tiny creatures.
Of course, that meant you were also hot. Hot, humid weather that drained stamina, that sapped the endurance of anyone unused to such exertions. A constant vigilance and the need to pick out the unusual, the strange meant that mentally you grew tired, even as animals and monsters that blended into the foliage waited for their chance to attack you.
Spiders the size of your hand, that had venom that were injected into you when they dropped down. Snakes that were nearly as broad as your thigh, landing on your shoulders, constricting your body. Leeches that crawled up your boots and into your pants and legs, between your toes and sucked you dry. Centipedes, lying on leaves, their skin and hairs poisonous and irritating.
Dozens of problems and always, always, the need to keep cutting, keep swinging a machete to get through the blockages. Trying to move in the right direction, hoping you were going the right way and not getting turned around by the twisting slope and shifting undergrowth.
Thankfully, by this point, Arthur was more than a little experienced at forest floors. Even if he would never be as versatile and comfortable as an orang asli who still existed in the forest, he was no neophyte. He knew how to step right, how to check for sinkholes, to avoid walking into seemingly shallow puddles and to watch for monsters or other tricks.
In its own way, without the regulated traps, cutting cross-country was also easier. He wondered, of course, how the wolves or the Tower equivalent of them, since wolves really weren't native to these lands, would do. He had fallen off the path after all. Would they leap down, chasing him? Back off and come around? Or did the Tower let them know where he was, to chase him onwards?
Hard to say, and he couldn't recall any particular passage describing his particular situation. He was sure he wasn't unique of course, but there was only so much one could read, what with multiple floors out there and climbers speaking and writing in three or four different languages. Even if English continued to be the main language of Climbers worldwide, the fact stood that many Malaysian's just didn't speak that good.
And while automated translations helped, it was still a pain and a half to use.
That being said, the first two days were relatively uneventful. For days on a Tower floor. Walk, fight, rest and cultivate, get up, walk, fght, fight, rest and cultivate and then walk more.
Repeated actions, one after the other, as he managed to cut through the landscape in the direction that he was sure would lead him to the next level, to the next 'floor' of this marathon.
Typical.
Except, of course, for the appearance of the broken stone ruins as he came up the rise. A place of broken masonry, overgrown roofless buildings and a pyramid-like structure reaching towards the heavens, its presence hidden till now by foliage and a trick of geography.
Suddenly, Arthur wondered, if anyone had ever found this before and they'd just kept it quiet. Or if he really had found something new.
And what to do about it.
***
He watched the ruins for a good twenty minutes before even trying to make a decision. Pacing along the edge slowly, trying to get an idea of the size and circumfrence on it. If he was seeing an actual ruined city or just a monastery or temple or otherwise, far-off fort. Maybe even a single building, since the Tower did not have to play by sensible rules.
After stalking the outside for about fifteen minutes, grumpily pushing his way through and getting caught on vines and thorns, he came to a conclusion that there really wasn't a lot that he could learn without moving much more stridently. Trying to circumvent the building was going to take a while, and it certainly was much larger than a single tower.
With everything overgrown, it was nearly impossible to tell if it was a city or complex, the surroundings blending in relatively well. No major outer walls though, so it wasn't a fort. More importantly, Arthur noticed no monsters or creatures lurking inside the ruins. There might be some, deeper within but thus far, he'd yet to spot them.
Which guided his next choice which was to cut through. Not only because there might be opportunity and treasure within but also to reduce the amount of time he would waste trying to find the limits of the path. His movement, however, did offer one advantage - a pathway that looked and felt significantly less overgrown. Fewer trees, more low hanging bush and tall grasses.
If he had to guess, it was an old road that had led to the complex itself. To confirm his guess, he dug into the earth and after about half a handspan in, finally hit the paving stones. Rain and time had thrown new dirt over the entire thing, but the changes to the environment was still sufficient to offer some degree of ease for travel.
He took it down into the abandoned ruins. Overgrown walls, pulled down by creepers and ivy, shrubbery growing out sideways or inside what were homes or other buildings. Sometimes, walls two, three stories tall jutted out randomly, somehow managing to survive the vagaries of time and nature. Mostly though, stone blocks randomly scattered around the walls they had fallen from or a foot or two high walls were left.
Not too surprising, but creatures, a myriad number of smaller ones lived in the ruins. What looked like a family of armadillos, rolling away the moment he neared. Smaller, darting rodents that boiled out of the ground, coming from what must have been a basement to launch themselves at Arthur.
A REED took care of them, the explosion from the energy dart leaving three dead and a half-dozen reeling. By the time they recovered, Arthur had speared and smashed another four, leaving the last few that tried to finish him to be stamped and crushed. One managed to get a bite into his calf, a flicker of notification appearing and disappearing as an attempt to poison him was enacted and wiped away.
The ruins themselves continued on, a full complex if not a city. By the time he had walked nearly thirty minutes in, heading towards the pyramid structure in the center, Arthur was certain that it was definitely a small city or an expansive complex. Checking the ruins showed nothing of worth to take. Any valuables either never having existed in the first place or buried deep beneath the earth that had formed.
"If there's a place to get anything, it's in that building," Arthur muttered to himself. It made sense, since it was the only building still mostly intact. On top of that, of course, there was the issue of how the Tower thought, and that too coincided with some degree of logic to its purposes. At least, sufficiently so, for Arthur to make that guess.
Question was, whether it was worth the rather significant risk of whatever lived inside those ruins to explore them.