>>5336381“It makes sense that they behave this way,” the Novice notes as she attends to a few of your injuries—surface scrapes, unavoidable even in a ‘friendly’ sparring match with a great ape covered in spikes of keratin.
“How so?” you ask, aggrieved by their cowardice—one more complication to plan around.
“Think about it, Oh Hyperfocused One,” she teases you quietly, and she massages some of her healing salve around your wounds with surprising gentleness, to aid in her magic. “If—and I say ‘if’ but we both know I mean ‘when’—you are injured in battle, what do you do?”
“Deal with it, unflinchingly, as is worthy of my station,” you answer drolly.
She swats you with her tail, though she has to hide a rattle of laughter at your deadpan self-aggrandizement.
“You come to me,” she corrects you. “You go to a healer, and rest, and let others do what must be done while you recover. But a solitary hunter… Not a lion, but a tiger… What does such a mammal do?”
She meets your eyes, answering: “It dies. It fails to hunt, it starves. Its kin kill and eat it. Injury means death to these beasts.”
You sigh, acknowledging her point even as it continues to frustrate you. Still, it must be said that in spite of this deficiency, a pecking order of warriors has been established… And the cowardly, pain-averse bugbears mostly gravitated to the top of that pecking order, with only a few of your Reptilian warriors above them, and NONE of the dark elves able to best a spike-man in direct, unarmed combat. The bugbears are better-integrated into your forces… But the elves now seethe.
“They feel it was a pointless exercise,” Oluwadamilare explains, averting his eyes and bowing his head in respectful apology. “Humiliating and demeaning.”
You value the Degenerate Archer’s estimation of the elves, for—moreso than Paeris, and certainly moreso than the absent Elf-Specialist—he seems to have taken to them, and vice versa.
“The bugbears are ALWAYS armed, naturally, thanks to their spines, nails, and teeth, “ he explains. “They are bigger and stronger, with better reach. Likewise, most of OUR males. To the Drow, it seemed like an exercise design for them to fail, to be thus relegated to lower status.”
