I hit the canopy hard, like being thrown naked through a brick wall. I punched through the outer layers in a moment, my armour protecting me from the worst of the impact. It still knocked the stuffing out of me. I smashed through layer after layer of the canopy, slamming through one thick branch after another, shearing them off their trunks. Each breaking branch threw me back and forth, knocking me out of my curled-up ball. My arms and legs flailed helplessly. All I could see was a green blur, with dark shapes rising swiftly up to hit me again and again.

I was still falling at a dangerous speed, trees and greenery whipping past me so fast I lost all track of which way was up. We Droods trust our armour to protect us from everything, but that's only because we haven't tested it against absolutely everything yet. It was entirely possible that the golden armour might survive the fall intact, but I'd be crushed to jelly inside it. The continuous impact of branch after branch was slowing my fall, and I grabbed at every passing branch as I fell, but they all broke off in my hands. I fought to turn myself over, so I was facing down, and the ground shot suddenly up and hit me in the face.

I don't think I've ever hit anything that hard in my life. Riding a collapsing hotel from the penthouse floor down to the lobby, from the inside, was nothing compared to this.? The ground hit me like a flyswatter, the impact jarred every bone in my body, and the world went away for a while. When I slowly came back to myself, I ached all over but… I was alive. I just lay there for a while, enjoying the idea of not being suddenly dead after all, my golden mask buried deep in the dirt of the jungle floor. I slowly got my breathing back under control, wriggled my toes and fingers to make sure everything was connected, and grinned stupidly. The armour had got me through again.

I pushed down hard with my golden arms, and slowly forced myself up and out of the hard compressed earth. Light returned as dirt fell away from my golden mask, and when I finally rose to my feet I found I was at the bottom of a deep crater. I'd hit the jungle floor like a meteor, and blown out enough earth to make a hole a good twenty feet in diameter. Steam was still rising from the smooth sides. I punched holes in the compacted dirt of the crater walls, and used them to climb up out of the hole.

The jungle pressed in close all around me, crowding right up to the rim of the crater. The trees were packed tightly together, stretching away in all directions, the space between them filled with hanging lianas from above, and thick bushy undergrowth. The only open space was the one I'd made, by falling through it. Broken branches and splintered stumps showed down the stripped sides of trees, and bits of broken vegetation were still floating slowly down. The thick overhead canopy blocked out most of the light, lending the jungle floor a gloomy, twilight ambience. Bright light streamed down through the hole I'd made, so that I seemed to be standing in a golden spotlight. Dust motes danced and swooped in the illuminated air.

I moved out of the spotlight. It made me feel like a target. I amped up the mask's sensory input, and the stench of the jungle hit me like a fist in the face; all rot and decay and thick unfamiliar smells. Out of the spotlight, I could see a long way into the twilight, but everything was packed? so closely together it was hard to make out any details. There were large animals out there, watching me silently from a cautious distance, but none of them seemed interested in bothering me. Inside my armour, I gave off no scent to mark me as prey.

The jungle was full of sound: growls and howls, cries and screams, coming from every direction at once as the jungle got on with life as usual. It was all eat or be eaten, with a hell of a lot of running in between. Higher up, there was a constant squalling of disturbed birds. I caught brief flashes of gorgeous colours, and the occasional rush of disturbed air, but the birds kept their distance. The loudest, closest sounds were the buzzings, clickings and rustlings of the millions of insects that swarmed all over the jungle floor. Any number of little darting things flicked through the air, while a great sea of motion swirled around my feet. There were ants and beetles and things I couldn't even put a name to, boiling all around me. I saw centipedes as long as my arm, rippling slowly as they moved, and tiptoeing spiders as big as my fist. Some tried to climb up onto my feet, but just slid back down again, unable to gain any purchase on the armour. The bigger ones kept well away; I think the armour upset them.

I turned the sensory levels back down again; it was all just too much to bear. And I'd already spotted what I was looking for. The Merlin Glass, for all its bloody-minded literalness, had delivered me to the right spot. I could see Doctor Delirium's secret base, not half a mile away, glowing brightly in the sun beyond the trees.

There was no track or trail, or anything like a path, so I just moved forward in a straight line, forcing my way through the thick masses of vegetation by sheer brute strength. I kicked through the undergrowth, broke protruding tree branches with my hands, and elbowed aside the smaller trees. Nothing in the jungle could stand against me. Sometimes, when I'm in the armour, it feels like I'm moving through a paper world. Through something less real than me. I try not to let it affect me. It's a dangerous thing to believe. The armour can make you feel like a god, but it's important to remember that it's only as good as the idiot inside it.

Hanging lianas slapped against my shoulders and tied to curl around my arms, but I just tore them away and continued on. The bushy undergrowth didn't even slow me down. Thorns three or four inches long, thick as spikes, clattered harmlessly against my armour. I could hear small things hissing and squealing under my feet, and made a point not to look down. The larger local wildlife continued to observe me, from a respectful distance.

A huge millipede, nine or ten feet long, fell on me from above, and I made a high-pitched startled sound despite myself. The millipede tried to coil around my head and shoulders, failed to find any footing, and dropped away. I cringed, even inside my armour. I've never liked insects. Especially ones big enough to have forgotten their proper place in the scheme of things.

A large spatter of bird poo hit my right arm, white against the gold. I flexed the muscle, and the poo flew away as though shot from a gun, leaving nothing of itself behind. It was such a familiar reaction, I didn't even have to think about it. (London is, after all, a city full of pigeons.)

The tree line came to a sudden halt, looking out across a vast earth clearing. I stopped in the shadow of the last trees, to take a good look at Doctor Delirium's base. The first thing that struck me was that there was no sign of movement anywhere. No guards, no people, nothing. And all the jungle sounds had died away. No living thing had followed me to the edge of the clearing. No birds sang, no wildlife stirred. Even the insects at my feet seemed strangely subdued. As though something about the base frightened them… I held my position, studying the characterless buildings carefully, looking as far down the empty dirt streets as I could. There was something unnatural about such stillness, such silence…

I stepped forward, leaving the jungle behind me, and moved out into the earth clearing. Immediately a powerful force field seized me and held me in place, brought into being by my presence. It pinned me to the spot, great waves of energy coruscating around my armoured form, while small stabbing lightnings crawled all over it, searching for a weak spot and a way in. The air shimmered like heat haze, and the dirt at my feet was scorched black by discharging energies. But powerful as the field was, it was no match for my armour. It couldn't touch me.