The forest was silent. The team stared at each other in silence and despite the helmets, they could more or less guess what kind of faces they were having. It took them a while to understand what just happened.

Jennifer opened the bag and started looking through it. After a while, she started putting out its content on the ground. There was a black box, a holoscreen device, green capes and few MRE.

JJ took the device and activated it causing a holoscreen to come out of it. On it, a map appeared, it was easy to tell that it was depicting the area of the forest around them, it also had a red mark on it which most likely depicted where they were supposed to go.

“So where are we on it?” asked Jennifer looking on the map.

“I don’t think our location is on there. Maybe it’s part of the test?” said Leo.

“Well, there is a big lake north of the gathering point on the map. There is also this three symbol to the east. Maybe it’s some kind of special tree or something. And I think this is a mountain pass to the south.” He said moving the map with his finger and looking for something more worth notice. In the end, he didn’t find anything and closed the map. Considering something for a second he looked up. “Those trees are quite big aren’t they?”

“Well, duh.” said Jennifer.

“Couldn’t someone go up and maybe look from the top for those mountains or anything else that could help us find out where we are?”

“And who could do that?” questioned Jennifer. “I doubt that I would be even able to go a quarter of the way before falling down.”

“I wouldn’t expect that you could do it anyway. I feel much more confident on the ground too. Leo, do you think you could do it?” asked JJ. He didn’t even bother mentioning Black who was already sitting while leaning against a tree and looked as if he was asleep.

Leo looked up at the trees, he was sure that the lowest of them were at least few hundred yards high and the highest he couldn’t even tell. He wondered how long it would take to reach the top. “Maybe? I doubt it would be fast, probably would take a while. I will try though.”

“Okay in the meantime we will find out more about the things we were given and search the area in close proximity to get some idea what is here. For now, it seems things were made easy for us since nothing attacked us yet.” Said JJ.

“Don’t jinx it.” said Jennifer taking the black box into her hands and looking at it.

“I will go then.” Said Leo coming closer to the highest tree he could find.

Looking up he grabbed the trunk of the tree and automatically could tell that he wouldn’t be able to climb it conventionally. It was hard and also somewhat slippery with nothing to grab on to make climbing it easier.

Activating his magic he grabbed the tree and penetrated its bark with his fingers creating a handhold for himself. Bringing himself up he did that with other hand and supporting himself with his feet on the trunk he continued on like that.

As he passed about one hundred yards he looked down and saw Jennifer tinkering around with the items they had. JJ was not there. Thinking about it he wondered how he could climb and get so far away from the rest despite potentially still being in the same room. It was quite big but not that big.

The way up was quite uneventful. After ten minutes he got to the height where most of the trees ended and he could finally see the area around him clearly. Still, he couldn’t see any of the marks that they found on the map but he was only half way up so he decided to continue going forward. He would be able to see more if he got higher.

Continuing up he saw some white tops on the horizon on his right, reminding him that had he not been in the armor it would have probably been cold up this high. Thinking it was maybe the mountains he continued going upwards looking in that direction.

Slowly seeing more of them he was sure that it was them and he was sure they were at least few dozen miles away if not more.

Despite going around the tree he didn’t find anything else. Looking up he still had at least two hundred yards to go, hoping he would find something more he continued going up.

When he reached the top where the branches of the tree split he pulled himself onto one of them and slowly climbed them heading for the highest point. Despite it, he couldn’t see anything important other than the mountain pass but now that he was able to see it more clearly he was sure that it was a fair bit away, more than 50 miles and spanned for more than he could see further down the horizon.

Then he heard something behind him, it sounded similar to the sound of flapping wings. Turning around he saw green talons reaching out for him, instinctively he jumped backward avoiding them. Only when he did that and started feeling the force of gravity pulling him downwards he regretted his decision.

Falling downward he took a look at the creature. It looked like a green wyvern and it was already diving down for him. Not having much of a choice he got grabbed by it but before he did though he pulled out his weapon and hold it in his hand.

When being held by the wyvern he activated his spell and weapon. Using his full power he freed himself from its talons and quickly grabbed it by the ankle and pulled himself upwards.

The creature surprised screeched and started trashing in order to throw him off. Leo wouldn’t let go easily though end enforced his grip on the creature and swept his axe at its belly cutting into it.

Blood poured out of the wound and the wyvern screamed in pain. Using its confusion Leo brought himself up and grabbing its wing brought himself up onto the creature back.

It tried to throw him off but by grabbing the wyvern’s neck he prevented that from happening. Looking down he noticed that not only they were going higher but also were moving in the direction of the mountains.

He tried shaking the creature to make it come down but all it did was aggravate the creature and it started spinning in the air. Trying to make sure he wasn’t thrown off he strengthened the grip on the neck. Suddenly he heard something snap and the creature twitched and then stopped.

Leo looked at it worryingly, the creature head suddenly fell down and he wanted to swear at himself. Then he started to fall together with now a dead body of a wyvern.

It started spinning when falling downwards making him feel sick as it picked up speed. Not really knowing what to do he hugged the body of the creature and activated his spells to full power hoping it would protect him.

The ground was slowly getting closer and their speed slowed down somewhat as they broke through the branches only to speed up again as they passed them.

He closed his eyes and pushed his mana to its limits. Then he felt a sudden shockwave and everything went dark. ‘I’m starting to hate this.’ he thought.

-*-

Slowly opening his eyes all he saw was whiteness. He tried to move his right hand but he felt some resistance. It felt sticky, pulling his hand with more force it was freed from the sticky grasp and looking at it and looking at it, it was covered in white strings all over. Looking in front of him he noticed that the area around him was wholly covered in this material.

He tried to move his left hand and felt a jolt of pain forcing him to stop. He tested if he could use his fingers and was happy that he could but he felt even more pain when he tried too. Having no other choice he tore through what he guessed to be a web and freed his left arm with his right.

Now that he could take a look at it he was pretty convinced it was broken. It was swelled in the middle of his forearm and touching it caused him to feel pain.

Looking in front of him he wondered what he would find outside the web cocoon. He only hoped he wouldn’t be swarmed by spiders the second he got out.

Pulling on the inside of the cocoon he tried to tear it but it seemed that the outer layer was quite thick and wouldn’t budge. Pulling in more strength with his spell he slowly tore part of it away. Since he couldn’t get a good grip on it it was quite a hard task to do.

Forcing the threads apart he slowly dug himself out of it. Walking out covered in spider silk he looked around and saw gossamers all around him. It seemed that it was a nest.

There was also a big hole in the tight-packed webs, it seemed that he had fallen through it, there was also much bigger cocoon behind him that probably contained the body of the wyvern.

Holding his left arm he walked forward hoping to get out of here before anything found him.

Walking and tearing apart layers of web around him he missed his weapon. He lost it somewhere during the fall and probably had no way of finding it anywhere. That limited his fighting capabilities by quite a bit and the broken arm only worsened his situation.

Then he saw something move fastly for him on the edge of his vision. He jumped backward and barely dodged it as it struck the place where he was standing a moment ago.

It was a big stinger belonging to even bigger scorpion that looked menacingly at him. It had a green camouflage on its carapace but instead of claws, it had something that resembled long spider legs.

The scorpion brought its mouth up and released a stream of web at him, trying to catch him in a place.

Leo jumped back to avoid it, it seemed that it wasn’t the spiders whose nest it was.

The scorpion didn’t wait and charged straight at him and tried to catch him with its front legs. Leo jumped backward again but one of the legs caught him on his left shoulder and cut deeply into his armor causing him to grunt in pain from the injured arm.

Then the stinger of the creature attacked him again and he sidestepped it to the right and kicked it with all of his strength breaking of the creature gland together with its stinger. It reeled back and released an uncomfortable screech.

Something behind his back moved, looking in that direction he noticed tree more scorpions coming down from the trees seemingly agitated from its comrade scream, looking around there were even more of them gathering around.

Without waiting and terrified he jumped forward and tried to find a way to run away. Tearing through the web would take too much time and with the scorpions on his back would mean a suicide.

Looking around he found one way out, there was a big hole that was created during his fall and was only partially mended. He ran up to one of the trees and did his best to run vertically up it but after the fifth step, he was losing grip. Grabbing the tree with his right hand he looked down and saw that the scorpions already were climbing onto it. Looking up there was even a scorpion coming down for him, it was still high up though.

Wasting no time Leo pulled himself up with full strength and flying upwards a few feet he focused his strength in his legs and bounced off the tree in the direction of the hole.

Flying through the air he was barely on the trajectory leading to his escape route. As he passed through it one of his legs got stuck in the web and he fell with his head downwards getting stuck in the spider silk on the other side of the web wall.

Looking up he saw that a scorpion was right above him and was looking at him. He was sure that he saw it smirk but it could have been just his imagination.

He tried to free his leg with only his right hand but it was hard to do and the creature was already moving onto him. Having no other choice his left hand shined with golden light and he felt himself getting slightly weaker as his energy was siphoned away but fortunately the pain went away fast.

Empowering now both of his hands he freed his leg just before the stinger struck him and fell downwards, putting both of his arms to protect his head from the fall.

Landing on his back he fastly gathered himself and with now working arm he started running away hoping to get as far away from those things as he could.

After about ten minutes of running away he stopped and looked behind him, he doubted that those scorpions would leave their nest to chase him but it was better to be careful.

Calming down he slowly looked around and seeing only trees he wondered where the hell he was.

-*-

An engineer who monitored the simulation made sure that no one was watching him. He pressed one of the buttons on his console and watched as the illusion on his screen disappeared and chuckled as he saw one of the trainees trashing in the air in a single spot fighting against what was supposed to be an illusionary wyvern while the rest of his team, in reality, was only a few yards away.

“It’s alright to have fun but please monitor the simulation properly.”

Jumping upwards from his seats he saw Instructor Etan Hunter behind him. His cheeks turned slightly red and he bowed apologetically. “Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”