Chapter 172: The Heavy Void
In the morning, Coop was treated to a simple breakfast made by someone with nearly 500 levels in cooking. They gave him two plates. The first had scrambled eggs, refried beans, and a salsa on the side, while the other had a small stack of warm flour tortillas. The cook warned him to take it easy with the salsa as it might be too spicy for him. Naturally, Coop treated the warning as a challenge.
The meal sounded basic, but once he took the first bite he practically lost control of his body, shoveling the food into his mouth with the tortillas. His mouth was numb halfway through the meal, and he was sweating, but he couldn’t even slow down. The meal was perfect in its simplicity, but the citrusy hot sauce with habaneros, garlic, onions, carrots, and he guessed orange juice transformed the delicious meal into an actual masterpiece that rivaled the food created with the extraordinary experience of Desmond back in the Clumsy Shark. There was something to be said about native Earthling cooking that he hoped to share with the contracted residents in Ghost Reef.
After Coop finished his meal, barely holding himself back from licking the plates to the amusement of the residents, the tracker led him on the first leg of their journey into the jungle. Leaving the town behind, they headed inland, away from the coast.
At first they followed the main road exiting Corozal, where cars would have driven in the past, but after only a brief time, they veered off the worn pavement. The tracker followed access roads that only a local would know were public or private, spread between what were previously farm fields and were now populated by dense brush taller than Coop’s head. Islands of even taller trees crowded the fields, overlapping in some areas, and demonstrating how the forest would reclaim the land and provide the Primal Constructs with an avenue to further encroach on the outpost’s territory. The intertwining canopies were thick with sturdy branches for the monsters to latch their arms to, and the tracker warned him to keep his eyes up when they were near the trees.
The paths that the two walked were composed of reddish brown crusted mud. The trail was filled with steady footprints that eventually had Coop wondering about the traffic. They overlapped such that Coop would have guessed crowds of people were frequently making the same trip that they were, but the tracker dispelled Coop’s theory by claiming them as his own.
“My regular route.” The man briefly explained after Coop had noticed the tracks.
They were following the man’s frequent stomping grounds. Previously, he used to travel the winding farm roads while avoiding monsters, but in the recent weeks he had been leaving less frequently and when he did, much shorter distances. Things had grown too dangerous in the region, and there were few destinations worth visiting that he had the capacity to reach.
It didn’t take long for the pair to leave the wider path and enter thicker and thicker forest. Apparently, they had once been more farms, specializing in various fruits and trees, and they had been ripe for mana to empower the trees for the forest to reclaim. A few miles out and they were already on hiking trails that were only wide enough for them to move in single file, with the more dangerous canopies on both sides. The Tracker took the lead, trusting his senses even more than Coop believed in Presence of Mind.
As the sun rose, so did the temperature. By the late morning, it was hot enough that Coop was daydreaming about the beach while he followed in the other man’s footsteps. As fast as they moved, it wasn’t enough to counteract the lack of a comfortable breeze. All of the wind was smothered by the leafy vegetation around them. The heat blurred the trail in front of them, evaporating whatever was left of the night’s rain and turning the humidity into something Coop was willing to curse. Their footprints were baked into the surface as they moved, adding to the tracker’s past footsteps.
The trail may have been bordered by tall grasses and broad-leafed plants, but it was in direct sunlight as far as the eye could see. In fact, the tracker had specifically selected the route due to that gap in the canopy. The Tracker preferred lanes where the trees did not encroach the trail, minimizing the threat of Primal Construct ambush. Coop thought it made sense for the non-combatant.
Apparently, most of the Yucatan peninsula was occupied by the relatively predictable Ruin Nebulas, but elsewhere, the jungles had stalkers that hunted people. The tracker’s lesson was simple. The jungle was always dangerous. Coop took the warning for what it was, minimizing how much like a tourist he behaved, but secretly, he felt excitement at the potential variety of monsters. It meant that different areas had different environments worth being cautious towards, but also that there was a chance for Coop to work on more Slayer titles.
The tracker wore a loose poncho with a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off and a pair of frayed hiking boots that kept him moving forward at a brisk pace. Coop was sweating to keep up, but he wasn’t particularly pressed. It wasn’t anything like doing hours of suicide sprints on the sandy beaches of Ghost Reef, but he still wondered if Salvation would conjure up a parasol to protect his skin as he followed along, wiping the sweat from his brow.