Moving through the dense jungle was by no means an easy task.
Finding possible paths through the thickets, avoiding the suspicious vines hanging from the branches of the bigger trees, trying to move around the patches of suspiciously wet and glistening terrain…
There was no single rule I could adopt to figure out how to move through this dense forest area in a safe manner.
Heck, this place was the very opposite of safe, an environment so hostile, it was likely one of the culprits of coding the desire for safety so damn deeply into humans' genetic code, it remained one of the prime needs even when humans, with their brains, clawed their way to the very top of the planetary food chain.
Thankfully, not all was lost.
With the sword saintess treading the path for me, all I had to do was carefully follow in her steps, making sure to only step in places she did, to bend down if she did, to spit over my left shoulder if she did.
I didn't have to understand why, all that mattered was that she did it. And there was no doubt in my mind she was doing it for a reason.
As for whether that reason had anything to do with safely passing through this place or if she was just doing it all to mess with me and see how far I would go before finally questioning her motives…
Who cares?
In the first case, I merely did as much as I could to keep myself safe. And in the latter case?
'Well, keeping her happy and intrigued is my best bet to have her stick to the current scenario.'
And stick, the sword saintess did.
Even though there were moments when I could spot the annoyed looks here and there, she generally kept her pace slow enough for me to follow.
It was by no means slow, though! In fact, I had to constantly push myself just to keep up!
'Thank God I decided that I've slacked enough in my life and picked up some cardio before the whole transmigration thingy…'
I was by no means ripped, jacked or chadded-out. If anything, I used to be much closer to the other end of the athletic spectrum, with my form only ever reaching mediocre levels over my own fear of dying to a heart attack before turning forty.
Right now, however, every tiniest bit of strength I could muster, every breath that filled my burning lungs with the precious oxygen, every step that my legs completed, I was grateful for all of them.
Because if that transmigration thing happened a year ago?
Then it would be some hours since the moment I would've collapsed and just died on the spot from the exhaustion.
Thankfully, today, I kept on going.
No matter the pain, no matter the exhaustion and desire to just keel over and go to sleep.
I pressed on, determined to reach safety before it would be too late.
And the forest around? Oh, it just loved to keep reminding me of how foolish I was thinking I could somehow luck out and cross it!
Every few minutes or so, the saintess would slow down. Most of the time, she would merely glance towards the tree-tops, maybe even take a step towards the nearby thicket of bushes.
Most of the time, that would be it.
But every now and then, she would pull her sword out of its scabbard or even go as far as to swing it…
And send a wave of crushing force flying through the woods, quickly convincing whatever monster lurked in that direction they were not its target for today's dinner.
'It's almost like that joke from that popular grimdark series,' desperate to lift my mood with something, I recalled quite the once popular passage. 'Enemies in that direction!' I pantomimed a commander's voice in my head, only to then switch to a much more monotone, robotic one, 'roger, removing that direction! Ha… ha… ha…'
The dry humor behind my silent laugh had to catch the girl's attention, yet failed to intrigue her enough to go ahead and ask about it.
Or maybe she was simply too focused on keeping us both alive to care about my silly humor?
Whichever was the case, I saw no reason to try to find out.
Then, at a moment that felt the most random, the saintess suddenly stopped.
"We shall camp the night here," she announced, only to reach out to the small belt wrapped low on her waist before pushing… her whole arm into a fist-sized pouch!
"There you go," she muttered a moment later as she swung her hand out of the dimensional pouch, dragging a whole-ass tent with her. "Here," she threw the entire bag of parts, cloths and pins at my chest before reaching into her pouch again. "Get the tent. I'm going to set the barrier in the meantime."
This order alone was enough to address some of my concerns before I could even voice them out.
Still, as I looked around, this place?
Out of all the places we've passed by, it was on the slightly thinner side, with the growth of the bushes at the tree-bed level hampered by the overgrown canopies of the nearby, huge trees.
Looking up, I could swear those trees grew impossibly high, maybe even reaching beyond the lower limit of the atmosphere and reaching heights no human could survive at without specialized equipment.
"Hey!" the saintess called out, snapping me out of my daze. "Tent," she pointed her hand at the package in my arms. "Get to it," she ordered before turning back to her own task of gently, carefully burying a small, green stone directly in the ground.
Once again, I had my past to thank for a bit of a saving grace in this unexpected moment.
Setting up a tent?
Sure, it followed none of the conventions I was used to… Or so I thought during the first few moments of inspecting the inner workings of the piece.
And after making a few guesses, I've managed to figure it all out, quickly turning a jumbled bunch of strings, cloth and sticks into a perfectly set-up tent!
That wasn't enough for me, though.
Once done, I made sure to gather up some loose foliage, lighter branches and even a wide, thin rock I could use as a makeshift shovel. And after decorating the tent with the spare parts I've just scavenged and then adding a bit of freshly excavated ground before splattering it all over the construction, I've managed to successfully transform it.
Before, it was just an extremely conspicuous tent, with all of its right angles and pragmatic solutions.
But for the exact same reason that made it a good tent, it was also something that any nearby beast would spot instantly and thus associate with a possible meal, regardless of the saintess' barrier or not.
Now, after I've completed my work, though?
The tent transformed into what looked like a natural, perfectly ordinary bump on the ground, with some herbs growing out of its sloped walls.
"That's… nice," the saintess said, bringing me back from my drive down the memory lane of all the camping I did in the past and into the current and unforgiving present.
While I was busy, she wasn't slacking off either.
After dealing with the barrier that created a bubble of safety in the otherwise hostile jungle, she ventured out to gather some dry sticks and other easily burnable parts of the forest. Yet, rather than stacking up a pile to burn first, she started by setting a bunch of stones into a circle, creating this most basic yet effective method of limiting the fire's reach.
It was a method used thousands upon thousands of years ago as well as right in the modern, civilized future, proving its mantle and effectiveness.
Then and only then did the saintess gather her materials before stacking them up into a small pyramid, with thicker branches at the bottom, thinner ones securing the middle and the overall structure and then the lightest and driest of them all sitting proudly at the top.
Before I could even offer a lighter that I hoped with all my soul I had in my backpack, though, the girl simply leaned over the cold fireplace.
She first brought her hands together, clasping them into a cup right at the level of her mouth. Then, a strange sound escaped from her throat, only for her hands to suddenly light up with some sort of a weird power.
And then, by squeezing the open end closed and pulling open a new hole on the other end of her hand-based cup, she unleashed a considerable tongue of fire upon the pile of fuel.
The fire took to the fuel, greedily consuming the driest of the parts while actively drying out all the rest. And before long, with the fire slowly climbing down the pile as it grew hotter, stronger and more intense, the whole thing went up in flames, finally bringing some warmth to the two weary travelers.