Chapter 113 Jungle Tail Part 2
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Morning came, and as they ventured deeper into the jungle, Lily kept her senses sharp, scanning her surroundings for any signs of danger in the dark jungle. Despite their caution, they were still ambushed thrice, with Lhorne getting caught off-guard and carried piggyback by Nora after falling victim to hidden spiders.
"Sorry," Lhorne apologized, his bionic eyes failing to spot the motionless spiders concealed in the foliage. Lily and Nora couldn't hear them either, leading to the unfortunate situation of Nora having to carry the paralyzed Lhorne.
"It's fine! Now it's my turn to repay the favor!" Nora chirped as she followed closely behind Lily, keeping a watchful eye on her footsteps to avoid any more ambushes.
"Maybe we should just burn the whole forest down?" Nora suggested.
"As it would also destroy our food supply. I wouldn't recommend it," Lhorne replied. They had some food stocked up, but it wouldn't last long. Lily scanned the jungle again, this time from the vantage point of a tree she had climbed. She spotted a river in the distance and decided they should head there for the day. With the immediate need for food taken care of, they could afford to take it easy. Several spiders still lunged at them from time to time, but Lily detected them all and prevented their ambushes.
When they reached the river, I detected several alligators mimicking dead trees floating on the water. Lily told Lhorne, but he had already noticed something odd with the branches and warned them beforehand. Lily used her fireball to attack the alligators, and one of them surged toward them. Lhorne stepped away to let Nora do her thing. His paralysis had worn off a bit, but he could not yet fight. He now focused on staying away from the battle not to obstruct them.
Alligators were surprisingly solitary creatures; when I attacked one of them, the others didn't swarm them like the spiders did. Only one alligator came toward them. I barraged it with spells, and it swam faster. As it splashed out of the river, Nora flanked it. The riverbank was narrow, but it was enough for them to stay out of the water.
The alligator focused on Lily, as she was the deadliest of the three. But even though the creature was formidable, it soon perished into feystones with a few barrages of Lily's saber and Nora's scimitar.
"It was tough, wasn't it? It could withstand three direct hits from your fireballs," Nora muttered as they camped out on the riverbank near some massive rocks. They had cleared the nearby area of alligators by baiting them one by one, and two hours later, they had ten feystones from them.
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"I want meat..." Lily groaned as she ate another banana from their supplies.
"Yeah... we're grateful for these fruits, but those alligators looked like they had tasty bellies," Nora nodded wryly. Lhorne, who was not fond of meat, didn't protest much but didn't want to interrupt Lily either.
The jungle was always dark, but Lily's internal clock told her it was time to sleep. She had expended a lot of mana when fighting the alligators earlier, and her team knew that. Lhorne volunteered to be the night guard for the whole duration, but Nora strongly opposed it. Once again, they sent Lily to her bed while they took turns guarding outside with a bonfire made by Lily.
"What are we going to do next, Lily?" Lhorne asked after they had all rested and woken up.
"We will wander in this forest until we meet others," Lily said confidently. Her words baffled Lhorne and Nora, as they weren't even sure if others had survived.
"Huh? That's it?" Lhorne was dumbfounded. His earlier worries now seemed baseless as Lily was confident that others had survived. He now thought to himself that if he and Lily had managed to survive for this long, surely Lord Alistar and Edelweiss, who were more seasoned, had also survived. His worries were replaced with relief as he focused on a more pressing matter - their survival.
"If we do find them, we still need to backtrack to the Titan ore pocket, huh?" Nora said. "I've had enough of this dungeon. It's so depressing."
"Don't whine too much, Nora. You'll only trouble Lily. We need to push through this," Lhorne said.
"Yeah, I understand. So, where are we going next?"
"We'll make this our base, and then we'll spread out to other places each day. Maybe we should start heading north?" Lhorne suggested. The compass didn't work here, so he arbitrarily decided on his own definition of north. Lily nodded in agreement as Lhorne tried to make maps by carving on nearby stones. They only had leaves and sticks, but it was enough for camping. The jungle was always dark, and the temperature never dropped. They didn't need a roof either, as it didn't rain in this forest.
"We also need to procure other things, like wooden boards for making fences and base camps. If we keep sleeping in the open, we'll have to take turns doing guard duty. But if we can make some simple housing with doors, it would make our lives a lot easier. Animals wouldn't be able to get in, and if they did, we would be well awake by then."
"Yeah! But how do we make doors? We don't even have nails," Nora chimed in.
"We can manually strap the doors to the pillars using some vines as ropes. It doesn't have to be as elaborate as the real thing," Lhorne answered.
"Hmm... if this were an expedition sent by the official elven army, I would suggest we split into groups - one to handle building base camps while the other scouts the surrounding area."
"Yeah, we can't do that," Nora immediately denied. "We only have three people here, and with the dangers of monsters like those paralyzing spiders, who knows what might happen if we leave someone alone. They might get eaten by spiders."
"We marched on, following the river's flow, trying to find our lost comrade," Lhorne said, determined to continue their journey through the forest, uncertain of what lay ahead but resolved to survive and reunite with any other survivors they may come across.