>>5392146>>5392242>>5392260>>5392287You decide to take it slow and steady. There’s no vegetation to build a bridge from, not down in the underdark, but with concerted effort your group is able to find suitable stone slabs to begin to bridge the gap. Aided by your <Wall of Stone> spell, and binding the construction together, you are able to crawl your way through by feet and inches.
“I do not like it,” the Novice hisses as you work—she perhaps less than many of the others.
“Well, your caste and sex are not much used to physical exertion, I suppose,” you note, grunting slightly from your own labours.
She hisses and swats at you with her tail.
“Not THAT,” she snaps. “We are exposed! We are surely being watched.”
“Maybe,” you acknowledge, “but we are together, a united front. The bugbears would need to be quite bold, to the point of recklessness, to strike at us now.”
But the bugbears must, indeed, be bold to the point of recklessness, for the Novice’s anxieties prove prophetic. You are very nearly done the bridge when you hear the quiet sound of shifting pebbles and padlike leather moccasin brushing stone. It comes not from ahead, but from behind, and above—higher up the rockface.
“Move slowly,” you whisper-hiss to your party. “Forward.”
They begin to advance, Ivno and the Novice going first, then the Throat-singer. Olu draws his body, prepared to cover them if any beastly Bogbarri decides to leap to tear, while you guard the rear with the snarling, yammering Junior Novice.
“Look out! From above!”
You expect an attack, corralled and directed as you now are, but none of you could have expected the method and direction by which the attack comes: a bugbear leaps down from the stone above, hurling himself bodily at your crossing compatriots! Ivno, warned by Olu’s shout, manages to step back and narrowly avoid being grabbed and grappled, and the offending bugbear catches an arrow from the Archer in response… But reacts with stoic silence, continuing to flail and tumble without so much as a warcry or shriek of pain down into the darkness below.
