On that note, the five of them sped up as they moved through the trees, there was every chance they might run straight into some kind of very dangerous plant, but it was a chance they had to take at the moment, Harry assumed Aria would get them to slow down once the sounds of branches breaking had died down somewhat and they were in a safer position.
“Wait!” shouted Aria from up front and they all slid to a halt. “No one move.”
Harry froze as he took in the sight of what was in front of him. It was a very large and very brightly colored flower, that bad part was that it was also a flower he recognized from the list of things that could potentially kill a human. It didn’t look the part, with five large white petals accented in reds and purples in varying patterns. The large red stem didn’t even have any thorns. And yet from what the drone had seen, if they stepped too close to the flower, the carefully camouflaged parts of the flower’s stem which ran along the ground would snare them and push them against the trunk. The flower fed off of the large insects in the forest by slowly digesting them through whatever poisons it injected from the stem and then absorbing the fluids remaining from its roots. As horrible as it had been to see an insect undergoing that process, personally taking part in it would be far worse.
Then because the massive problem that was directly in their path wasn’t a big enough issue the sound of breaking branches started to get louder and more frequent.
“Well, it doesn’t look like we’re getting out of this one,” commented Ryan. “We’re trapped between whatever that is and this stupid plant.”
“Alright, no need to think this is the end of the world here,” said Aria, “we’ve come too far to give up now, I mean, once we’re outta this forest, we will be almost free, think about that, we’d have officially cleared the defenses of the actual prison, we just need to sneak through the town and get on the right transport outta here. I think what we need to do here is make a choice.”
“Choices, it doesn’t look like we have those,” said Kate. She looked pale enough to be a ghost as she said that.
“Oh we always have one of those,” said Aria, “what we have to decide is, do we try and dance around and escape this plant we already know a lot about, or do we risk having to fight something potentially dangerous we know nothing about.”
“Can we even escape this plant?” asked Daisy, “the roots here are pretty much invisible, I can’t tell which place is safe to step on and which place is not. I would honestly take the chance with whatever it is in front of us there, and just shoot anything if it attacks; shooting our way through a potential horde of creatures sounds far safer than tiptoeing around this plant.”
“Pity we can’t just shoot the plant, “said Ryan, “that would make life much easier.”
“Yeah, if only those poisons weren’t stored in the stem of this thing,” said Aria, “then we wouldn’t be standing here discussing our options, we would be out of this place and running towards the town.”
“Well, I vote we try to shoot the horde too,” said Ryan, “if somehow those things get here as we’re trying to sneak around the plant and set the traps off, they’ll be taken care of but so will we, I think we’re better off just trying to tackle them in a safer spot and take our chances.”
“That does seem like the best option,” said Aria, “Harry, Kate, what do you guys think?”
“Let’s go find out if there are mutant hostile monkeys,” said Harry.
“I guess, it definitely seems like the safest option, I can’t believe I’m saying this but, I’d take a horde of mutant monkeys over tiptoeing around this plant,” said Kate, with a determined nod.
“Okay then, everyone, keep your weapons hot, and let’s see what we can find, if my memory is working properly,” began Aria,” we’ve definitely at least made our way halfway across this forest by now, so the end is not too far off, maybe running off towards the monkeys means we find a safe detour without this plant anyway. Ahh, I wish we the canopy wasn’t so thick around here, we could have had a pre-planned route through this mess then.”
“Well, let’s just get moving then, we definitely want to try and get a headstar…” began Harry, as they heard several loud thumps echo across the forest around them.
“That’s not good,” said Kate.
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