Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen - Welcome to the Jungle

  The damned jungle sucked.

  If I went the rest of my life without seeing a tree, I'd be happy.

  The damned raptors kept coming. Or, rather, there were just so many of them around that even after putting a few down, whenever we moved in deeper, another would pop out of ambush.

  Fortunately, the big group we killed by the entrance to the jungle was the largest gathering of them. From then on, the only velociraptors we encountered were small pairs or alone, and it seemed like as long as we kept the wall to one side, they didn't have good spots to ambush us from.

  Which is how Fran and I made it all the way to the entrance to the boss room.

  It was, as I'd seen from the cliffs above, a gash cut into the side of the mountain. A deep cut that went in relatively deep, but there was light shining through from the hard end.

  It was basically a tunnel, then, into another area. I suppose it might have just been a continuation of the portal, but my gut told me it was the boss arena.

  "Reload," I suggested.

  Fran pulled the magazine out of her gun, then handed it over while I gave her my own rifle so that at least one of us was armed and ready to fight. Then I opened my pack and pulled out the case of ammo.

  It took a moment, crouched in the shadowy entrance of the tunnel, but soon enough I had three full magazines and one partway full one. "I'll keep this one," I muttered as I slid the near-empty into a pocket. We had used up just a bit too much ammo.

  Oh well. Bullets were cheap. Now that I knew the best practices a little more, I could plan better for next time. Maybe Jane had something like hollowpoints? Maybe she had a flamethrower? That'd be a nice way to clear the jungle area.

  Ah, but I was daydreaming. "Okay. Boss room. Do you know how to handle a portal boss?" I asked Fran.

  "Only what I learned from osmosis," she replied.

  "That's fair. The best way to handle them is overwhelming firepower." I handed her back her rifle. "Shoot, then keep shooting. We're not here to pick up any materials, so plug the boss full of holes."

  Fran stared at me for a moment. "That seems economical. I've heard plenty of stories about long, drawn-out battles with portal world bosses."

  "Yeah, because no one wants to talk about the boss that went down to one bullet to the forehead. It's boring. Besides, rankers, combat rankers at least, make their living fighting in places like these. If the penny pinchers knew how easy some bosses were to take out, they'd pinch even harder. It's a good thing that we can take out bosses with ease. The other option is that they're a pain in the ass to fight."

  Fran nodded along at that. It made some sense, right? Bosses were only easy because we had gear and technological superiority on our side. A team of E-rankers or even normal soldiers could have gotten to where Fran and I were now with just some coordination and the right training.

  We just had it slightly easier.

  But then there were bosses and portals where guns simply wouldn't cut it. In those, we'd need more than just guns.

  "Need anything before we head in?" I asked.

  "Water?"

  That was fair. I slung my bag around and pulled out a bottle that I handed over to Fran. She cracked it open and drank half, then closed it and handed it back. I opened it too, then downed the rest, only to notice Fran staring at me. "What?" I asked.

  "Nothing," she replied, eyes darting away.

  "Wait... because we shared a bottle?" I asked.

  "It's... nothing," she repeated.

  Wow, that was a weird hangup. I'd put my lips on far more sensitive things than a bottle she'd drunk out of, but maybe she just had a weird outlook on things? Whatever, it was fine. "Let's keep going," I said before tossing the bottle aside.

  "You're just going to litter?" she asked.

  "I mean, yeah," I said. "We left a scattering of shell casing all over the place, what's one more piece of trash left behind?"

  Fran pursed her lips, but didn't say anything as she followed me into the boss arena.

  As I'd kind of guessed earlier, it was a large, open space, with stone walls all around. A sort of bowl in the centre of a mountainous range with the only entrance or exit being the tunnel we'd just walked through.

  In the centre of that space, standing up from where they had been resting on a pile of boney carcases, was the boss.

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  Like the magic-using raptor from an earlier room, they were bigger than average. The boss had stripes of a deep green rushing across their skin, and their feathery ruff was far larger and more colourful, with purples and pale blues mixed in.

  They stared at us, then opened their mouth, and I felt myself tensing up as electrical sparks and motes of pure blackness gathered in their open maw.

  "Jump!" I shouted before I dove aside.

  A beam of actinic energy shot past, followed by jagged cuts of a black so pure they seemed almost unreal.

  I landed poorly, rolled around, almost got tangled in my poncho, then managed to get onto my feet and raise my rifle.

  Fran, who had jumped the other way, did the same, but with far more grace. She raised her own, and in the same moment, we started to fire.

  The boss screeched, then started to shift from side to side, each shot shoving it in a new direction.

  Eventually I clicked empty, then reloaded as quickly as I could, but it was already done.

  The boss stumbled to the side, then crashed to the ground with a hard thump that shook the earth a little. They had to have some twenty-odd holes punched into their chest, upper legs and face. Sure, the 7.62 rounds tended to overpen, but if you turned something into a sieve that didn't matter so much.

  "That was it?" Fran asked.

  "Yeah," I said as I looked around, just to be sure, but I didn't feel anything, and didn't see anything amiss either. There was a shift in the ambient magic in the air, then the exit portal ripped itself open. "Ah, there you go."

  "There's a chest," Fran said, pointing.

  I turned, then grinned. There was, indeed, a chest. "Neat!"

  Stomping over to it, I stood before the box and looked it over. It was definitely a chest, though it was also... well, made of stone, with a crude wooden top. It looked like it was carved out of a single large piece of rock by a thousand chisel strikes, and the cap was wooden, but it looked more like a rough plank shoved on top.

  I kicked the top off, then looked at the goodies within.

  There were three items.

  The first was a few long strips of meat, dried and... smoked, maybe? They were sitting on some leaves, and the faint scent of them made my stomach gurgle. The meat was very magical. D-rank magical meat? Heck yeah.

  Next to that was a long mantle. I scooped it out and held it up above me. No, not a mantle, a cloak. It was long and a dull brown, except for the fringe which was made of a panoply of colourful feathers, just like the feathers around the boss' scruff.

  I could tell, at a touch, that it was a magical item of some sort. "Enchanted," I said as I passed it on to Fran.

  She looked it over. "The cloak is crude, but the feathers are beautiful. The materials alone might be worth something, more if they're well enchanted."

  "We'll have to bring it to an appraiser," I said. "I can handle it, if you want. Though I might leave the sale of it up to you?"

  Finally, there was a little statue that looked to be carved out of some softer, smoother stone. It was shaped like one of the raptors. When I turned it around, I discovered a hole in the tail. A whistle? I... didn't blow on it, because it might be very studpid to use a magical item with a trigger without knowing what it did first.

  "Let's store all of this and head out?" Fran asked.

  "Yeah. Clean up a little first? Or as best we can?"

  We'd come out of this a little muddy and sweaty looking. There was nothing for it. Trekking through a jungle without getting messy would be hard. I was sure I could do a decent job of it, but... it wouldn't be easy.

  Still, I was happy. We'd done it!

  The next loop would maybe be the last? I could try a dozen more, perfect it all, but at this point, I really just wanted this weekend to be done.

  Fran and I packed things away, then cleaned up as best we could using the spare water bottle I had, and then we stepped through the portal.

  We were greeted by a team of vaguely familiar people, all of them seeming to be very unimpressed by us. I could tell, immediately, that some of them were C-rankers, the rest D. Dammit. The team that had come here to clear the portal, then?

  Behind them was a crowd. It seemed like they hadn't had as easy a time moving people back as the first time.

  Great. Now I had to see if I couldn't fumble my way through this.

  ***