...And the foliage wacks back
Balrok one way, Nikolai and Alexandru other ways, Ovi with muley, Khalid, Candlewick and Sabu all in the middle-ish...
The slog through the jungle takes it's toll as they press from the edge of the cultivation fields, swallowed up as swiftly and completely as a stepping through velvet curtains, the faint trappings of civilization left swiftly behind.
As the sun creeps ever higher, the heat and humidity increase; the biting insects grow hungrier, and the sweat mixed with dirt and detrius forms a thin hot mud that seeps into every crease and fold, clothes stuck to skin, and armor steadily rubbing skin to raw.
It's somewhere near a half-day, with the canopy filtering the blazing sun into swathes of dim, dark, and darker. Absolute thickets are interspersed with sections of fallen trees, the thin, nearly invisible paths made only slightly more open from the disturbances of those scouting.
One thing that the scouts do discover; that moving quietly and blazing a trail are not both possible.
And it's Balrok's bad luck to hack at an obstructing sheet of beautiful yellow and black creeper vines only to disturb, nay - surprise - a beetle of such size and magnificance that can hardly be described. Three upwardly curving horns from it's comparatively small face - but wicked sharp, scissor-like mandibles, and a large black body nearly twice the size of a horse are good indications of the danger it presents.
It charges.