Not So Simple

Waking of Friday, April 14, 2017 ~ 6

Not So Simple

There seemed to be a rugged but fairly clear path straight up into the foothills and toward the tower. I followed it, but.... not for too long. I soon found myself vaulting over the knolls to the left, keeping to higher ground, wanting to skirt the bare open spaces. I didn’t like to make myself a welcome target.

Left was the wrong choice, though, I soon discovered. Not by any imminent attacking danger—but by hazard of the environment.

Unseeable from the river valley below, pools upon pools of sticky brown bogwater festered in these high sort of paddies or spills.... The land was depressed enough up here to hold them. The landscaping might even have been man-made, for there were ruins up here, too. This was the Military Training Camp....?

Hm, but I am hesitant to call them ruins exactly; everything seemed mostly made of wood. Which I don’t suppose disqualifies it, but.... Well, the majority of it seemed to have been smashed and scattered all over itself, but the thing was it looked as if it could have happened only days ago.

Ruin enough anyway, I suppose.... An enormous tangle of tilted boardwalks, listing platforms.... and deadly spills into the bubbling ooze.

It was also crawling with blue bokoblins, and peppered with high explosives.

I moved carefully, and progressed by my bow.

The bokoblins didn’t pose too much of a threat. But it was a little disheartening seeing so many spoils lost to the bog. There was simply no recovering them. I tried to use my arrows sparingly.

The camp was extensive, to put it mildly. Onward and upward the splintered woodwork and wonky boardwalks led, until I came to one very large brown bog at the crest of the whole dead hill. Rickety wooden spires and questionable platforms spread over its glistening surface in an unpleasantly sun-simmered complex that looked thick and navigable enough from the shore. But moving out amidst it, treading over its narrow planks and planting myself on its sorry little islands of scrap boxes and upturned bridge-segments made into ladders and walls....

No, the ways here were few and constricted. The avenues were sparse, and I’d only have one dimension to move around in. I could see a few blue moblins tromping around on patrol up on some of the higher levels.... and blue bokoblins camped out high on some of the towers.

We may as well have been moving through tunnels. There would be no skirting around these guys. Sooner or later, I would have to face them, and take them down.

Because the Sheikah Tower was jutting from this bog too. And if I could just make my way to that high, high platform beside it.... I could reach it, and scale it.

To make it even more interesting, there were two or three lizalfos churning through the mud below. Dratted reptiles, that they could swim in that muck....

With a little Magnesis to move a large metal box for an extra platform, I got just close enough to take out the lizalfos first, not giving them enough time between my arrows to spit back at me. But there were still plenty of bokoblins to get through on the scrapwood islands—and I did not want to upset any of their explosives!

The sun went down. Rain came and went. The trek was longer than I’d thought it would be. There were so many dead-ended platforms reachable only by paraglider, traps low in the mud.... For where could you go once you landed?

This place would be so much easier to shake down once the tower was activated....