Not this time. You make it to the towns walls.

Over the hours of arduous travel through the flora, several times you begin to wonder if you're actually travelling in the correct direction. Each time, scrambling up one of the nearby trees reassures you that everything is correct, and you're worrying over nothing. About halfway through the remainder of your journey, you open one of the ration bars from your survival kit. It's just about the most bland thing you've ever eaten, but, you don't need to eat as much as most people anyway. Another one of the advantages that comes with being half artificial. Though it occurs to you that if you're stuck here for much longer, you'll need to find some source of power to recharge the batteries of your cybernetics. They're high capacity, but constant strenuous usage like you've been doing could shorten that significantly.

Opening your internal heads-up-display with a thought, a sheet of diagnostics fills your vision, reporting your power usage over the last twenty four hours. Down from 85% to 55%. With a quick calculation, you figure that means you can probably go for another two days at this level of activity before this becomes a serious issue, and you'll need to revert to emergency power.

Given what's already happened to you, and that emergency power means being reduced to the point of barely being able to move like a normal person, without access to any of your enhancement suite, you really don't want that to happen.

You put those thoughts aside and continue on the path. It takes you a few more hours, but you eventually make it to the outskirts of the settlement. Observing from the treeline about a hundred yards short of the towns walls, across a cleared plain and crossing road, the place seems even less impressive in person. A ragged junk wall crossing from the base one of the nearby high-rises to another, built from a combination of logs, rusted vehicles, and you think you can even see a few cubicle wall panels, all topped with loops of barbed wire.

A small structure lies outside, looking like a parking attendant's booth that's been extended into an enclosed building with welded sheet metal. In the middle of the wall, a two-piece wire gate ten yards across blocks access. On either side of it stand men with old model automatic rifles, wearing poorly maintained corporate security armor. On a raised platform behind the wall, several more guards are visible, talking to each other in a small huddle. One of them has a pair of binoculars around his neck.

Taking the situation in, you consider your options. You could just approach and talk to them, which is probably the best solution for getting what you want, but you don't know what kind of people these are. You don't see any women amongst the visible guards, which makes you uneasy. Any attempt at an attack across the clearing would be suicide, you'd be hit dozens of times on the way in. If you did survive, you could probably leap the wall in a single bound and get into a close quarters environment where your enhancements will provide a bigger advantage than their numbers. Maybe if things got bad when you close, you could try that?. But that comes up with another problem, you have no idea what's in those walls, or what implants the guards are packing. If some of them are ex-corporate security, they could be much bigger threats than their appearance suggests.

Going through one of the buildings on either side could be another option, but that's a complete unknown. They've probably secured them somehow, but exactly how, you don't know. Maybe automated defences?