>>5294807>>5294676>>5294685>>5294694>>5294689>>5294695>>5294727You take a moment to aim your bow, shutting one nictitating membrane as you squint your other eye and hold your breath. However, despite all your focus, you cannot draw a bead on the giant rust-monster’s injured head past the giant hump of its well-armoured back—not from your current angle. You put your bow away, and follow after your men instead. You will have to track this thing back to where it dens.
You do not hurry—there’s no point. The Devourer is moving at easily ten times your speed, thanks to its ability to ignore vertical hazards as easily as if it were walking across a flat horizontal plane. Of your party, only Glowie (or perhaps yourself, with a <Jump> spell) could have kept up with it. Either it will stop short and turn to face you, or you will be in for a long trek; in either case it is more important that your forces arrive intact and with the energy necessary to battle the beast than that you reach doom and death expediently.
“Infiltrator,” you address Paeris, “can you track it?”
“underground tracking is not my specialty,” he admits, “but it does not take an expert to track something this size, so soon after its passing.”
Indeed, this does seem to be the case. The Devourer is long gone by the time you and your allies reach the tunnel-mouth which it had fled towards, but once you are inside, it is simply a matter of Paeris identify which claw-marks or carapace-rubbing are freshest, mostly by the relative lack of erosion or the present of recent chips and dust. You think even you could manage, albeit not as surely or swiftly as the half-elf. It’s good, then, that you have him along: the Devourer has clearly been eating its way through veins of iron, and has left a network of maze-line burrows in its wake.
As you walk these burrow-halls, you keep an eye out for treasure. You see your first glimmer of gold in an inauspicious place: a strange, muddy pile of crumbled stone and mucky bones.
“Faeces?” you inquire, scrunching your nose slightly.
“We’re truly ‘in the shit’ now,” Oluwadamilare jokes, grinning. “Shall I?”
Since he volunteered, you see no reason to deny the eager-to-please half-human Degnerate his opportunity to ‘shine’. He plunges his hands into the muck, pursing his lips but not once retching, and pulls out several gold and silver coins. They have a thin patina of tarnish, but are quickly polished to a shine that brings joy to your three-chambered reptilian heart.
“Purest and most precious of metal does not rust,” you say aloud, repeating an old aphorism meant to refer allegorically to the purity of distinct bloodlines… But, in this instance, far more literally applicable.
“Looks like an alloy to me,” the Pit-Guard’s Apprentice says, uncertainly. He catches an elbow and a head-shake from his mentor.
