From my vantage point, I quickly noticed the changes. For one, the Arena had, once again, grown in size immensely.

Also, in addition to the environments that I already knew about from previous fights, I could now make out four gigantic landmarks in the distance.

In one direction, I could make out a mountain range with a tower whose top I couldn't make out. In the opposite direction, was a gigantic Pyramid in a newly added desert.

Then, there was the gigantic tree. Its trunk at least fifty meters in diameter and its canopy up in the clouds.

Last but not least, was the smallest one. At still over a hundred meters in height, stood majestically the fossil of a dragon.

As far as I had been told, these landmarks always appeared in the last fight, and they always contained one of several powerful artifacts that would almost guarantee you to win the fight.

That was if you could survive all the traps, monsters, and other dangers they were surrounded with.

Sadly, that information didn't help me much, since the layout of those places and the artifacts they contained were never the same.

Since that was the case, my best chance would be to hope that my opponent realized that, and would either die while exploring one of those places or at least give me a good chance to ambush them while they were at it.

I might have tried to get my hands on one of those artifacts if I could have kept it after the fight, but that was sadly not the case. Just as I was never injured and my equipment never damaged when I woke up, everything I picked up during the fights would just disappear. In the end, these fights were merely simulated and in no way real.

Now that I had taken a look, I quickly sat down on my branch, always keeping one hand on my pick that was deeply embedded into the wood. It was actually quite scary to be so far up in the tree. While the tree I was in was taller than the other trees around it, I still had to be far enough up to look over the top of the other trees.

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That meant, In the place where I was sitting, the tree trunk had already thinned out quite a bit, which also meant it was swaying a lot.

Really, when I climbed up here, I hadn't looked down a single time, but now that I did, I realized just how far away the ground really was.

Before anything really dangerous could happen, I took out one end of a long rope with a carabiner attached to it and wind it around the branch I was sitting on, the trunk, and another branch just to be extra sure and attach the carabiner to the rope itself.

Then, I take out a belay device and attach it to the safety harness integrated into the equipment I was wearing, also hooking myself into the rope in the process.

As a test, I pull on the rope a few times with quite some strength. Every time, the device quickly clamps down, preventing the rope from sliding through if I didn't press a button.

Now that I was secure, I pulled the pick from the tree and put it back into my Pocket Dimension.

Carefully, I started to let myself down from the branch, quickly hanging freely from the rope.

Honestly, even though I felt completely safe in the harness, it was still strangely scary. I had been wall climbing a few times in my life, so I wasn't unfamiliar with the feeling of hanging high up in the air, only held by a piece of metal attached to a rope. What made it more scary than normal was that most of the rope was still inside my Pocket dimension. Thanks to that, it constantly looked like the device would slide off the end of the rope right in the next moment.

Of course, I could clearly feel how much rope was still left inside my Pocket dimension, but I still wasn't used enough to it to not feel like I was basically sliding down an invisible rope.

Taking a deep breath to calm down, I carefully press the button on the device, slowly gliding down the rope.

Not a minute later, I was back on the ground and detached myself from the rope. Since it was now impossible to detach without climbing back up, I decided to simply leave it behind. It didn't matter much since I even had a spare.

First, I walked about a hundred meters towards the Pyramid, carefully paying attention to the color in the corner of my vision. Then, I turned ninety degrees to my right and continued walking for another hundred meters. Just to make sure, I repeated that process twice more, returning to the tree with the rope.

At that moment, I heard a deep rumbling and cracking sound. It was a sound I recognized. Not because it was something I heard recently, but because the sound of a tree toppling over, crashing through the canopy, was a pretty memorable sound.

Incidentally, it came from roughly the same direction as what I had determined my target to be in just previously.

Knowing that there may be wildlife, but no dangerous monsters outside the four ruins, that made me a little concerned. After all, it meant that my opponent could easily and quickly chop down these pretty big trees, as the quick repeat of the crashing sound made clear.

Now with the regular sound as my guide, I started to move towards it. Although, not before pulling out a semi-automatic AK-47. Sure, I could have taken a full-auto machinegun. But I felt distinctly uncomfortable shooting with something like that without any kind of training.

It just reminded me of that one story where a little girl killed her trainer because the guy thought it was a good idea to give a child a fully automatic UZI.