We’re at the Lost City! Promising.
Getting to Mérida was four days of hot, sticky weather; boredom, punctured by the odd swarm of packs of birds too vicious to stay away, and too stupid to realize they were nine inches tall; and bugs that smelled worse than they looked when you popped one under your foot. But it was fast. Ten miles a day wasn’t just better than anybody had done, up to now; it was actual progress.
It was starting to worry me. Mérida wasn’t the Holy Grail of salvage archeology, but people in my field have been taking slaps at finding the place since the 28th Century. The Thornwood’s just too hard to get through by land, a featureless mass of tangled woods from the air, and any mage powerful enough to be able to burn a hole through is powerful enough to be fighting in the Great War. I really did believe that Bigwave had an angle to get us through, but I didn’t expect the way to be this easy.
The halflings didn’t pick up on this, probably because they weren’t used to Adventurers, salvage archeology, or Lost Cities. Even Jim shrugged the issue off. “So it’s an easy run,” he told me as we packed up for the last couple of miles of the trip. “I’ll work for pay, but I’ll half-ass it for pay, too. Customer’s always right, right?” He spit (one other thing the Thornwood was, was dusty). “Besides, once we get there, up goes the flare, and the rocriders know where we are. Once we build ‘em a landing nest, we’re done with the job and can all go home.”
“Ten miles a day wasn’t just better than anybody had done, up to now; it was actual progress.”
The comma is unnecessary, and the semicolon would be better as a period.