Silakan kembali lagi nanti.
The day began slowly. This is the diplomatic version. The less diplomatic version is that Nero was awake at the appropriate hour, assessed the status of his companions, and found them collectively committed to the position that morning was a suggestion rather than a fact. Sogong was horizontal and very still, which with Sogong can mean anything. Traxex was present but showed no signs of intent. Anaik was on his back, examining the ceiling with the unhurried attention of someone who has scheduled this as a primary activity.
Nanang was still asleep.
This distinction, between those who were awake and lying down and the one who was not awake, became, by collective agreement, the organizing axis of the morning. They decided that departure would occur when Nanang actually woke up. This was stated in the tone of people who have reached a resolution. Nero stated it in a different register, which was the first indication that the morning was going to move according to his schedule regardless.
I. The Preparation, and What Nanang Did Not Receive
Nero's suggestion was that they should go into town before departing. He said this with the brightness of someone presenting an idea he had already fully decided on. Some of the party understood immediately what he was implying. Others did not. Sogong, who understood, was already moving.
What followed was a quiet and productive morning, as mornings sometimes are when certain people are applying themselves to specific tasks without making too much noise about it. Sogong initiated conversations with the relevant parties. He has a facility for this: he can give a person his full attention in a way that makes them feel the exchange is going somewhere of mutual benefit. Whether this reflects genuine interest or practiced technique is a question the chronicle is not positioned to resolve, and Sogong has not offered clarification.
By the time the town portion of the morning concluded: Anaik had new armor. Sogong had new armor. Traxex had a new bow. Nero had an amulet and a ring, obtained by the method he prefers, which he did not describe and no one asked him to.
Nanang, who was still asleep when all of this occurred, received nothing.
II. The Spell, the Cow, and the Crab
He woke up eventually. The first thing he did was find Anaik.
He approached with the particular quality of movement of someone who has rehearsed a casual encounter and has not quite landed the casualness. He stopped in front of Anaik. He asked if Anaik wanted to see his new spell.
He had learned a new spell. Overnight. While the rest of the party had been occupied in town acquiring equipment and moving at the speed of people with a specific purpose, Nanang had been unconscious and had somehow returned to consciousness with new competencies. The mechanism by which this occurred was not raised. With Nanang, there are questions you do not pursue.
The spell was a charm: something designed to produce laughter in the target. He cast it at Anaik.
Anaik did not laugh.
The precise reason is not something the record can determine with confidence. It may be that the architecture of Anaik's humor is structured differently enough from the spell's assumptions that the magic found nothing to grip. It may be that he simply did not find it funny. Either way, nothing happened. Anaik stood there. The spell arrived. His expression made no movement toward amusement.
Nanang turned to Sogong. He cast the same spell. It landed; Sogong was, briefly, charmed. The charm produced no laughter because Sogong does not produce laughter easily, and a spell designed to extract something that is not immediately accessible will find the extraction difficult. The charm ran its course. Sogong looked at Nanang.
Nanang turned to a nearby cow.
He cast the spell at the cow. The cow was charmed. The cow did not laugh. It stood in its field, charmed and unresponsive, contributing nothing to the experiment.
Having tested the spell on a black dragonborn, a paladin, and a cow, and having received the same result from each, Nanang arrived at frustration. He summoned the crab. The crab, which has become something of a fixture of this company's operational portfolio, appeared and immediately applied itself to Anaik. Specifically: to Anaik's person, with intent. The wound was deeper than the situation called for. Anaik looked down at it. The party observed this.
Everyone laughed. The chronicle records this without judgment: it was genuinely funny. The situation had earned the response.
III. The Return of Nero, the Cape Dispute, and the Crow
Nero came running. He was moving with the specific quality of speed belonging to someone exiting an operation that did not go all the way through. Some distance behind him, people with unresolved interest in the matter were following. Nanang, still standing in the street with his crab and an expression of academic calm, assessed the situation and deployed an intervention: the crab moved to intercept, occupying the pursuit with the same focused commitment it had recently applied to Anaik's arm. The pursuit slowed.
In the recovery period that followed, Traxex raised the subject of the cape.
The heist had not gone all the way through, but it had produced one piece of intelligence: the location of a cape with specific properties, the kind that makes a person considerably harder to locate by anyone who might be looking. It was still there, unclaimed. The question of who it belonged to had not been resolved, which is how an argument about it became possible.
Traxex wanted it. Nero's position was that he was the one who had found it, that he was the kind of person it was made for, and that both of these facts pointed in the same direction. Traxex's position was that she wanted it. The argument had the shape of something that was not going to be settled by logic, because only one side was using logic and the other side was Traxex wanting a cape.
The argument concluded. Nero offered to steal her a different one. Whether this was genuine generosity or the expression of someone who had already decided the cape was his and found it more efficient to resolve the objection than to continue the argument, is a distinction the chronicle does not feel equipped to adjudicate. The offer was accepted. The cape remained where it was, for now.
Nanang, as the party was finally assembling itself to depart, summoned a crow.
He did this without announcement. The crow arrived, took the measure of the assembled company, and declined to be useful. It did not scout ahead. It did not carry information. It circled. It continued to circle as the party left the town. It circled along the road behind them. The party watched it. It circled some more. It was still circling when the road turned and the town was no longer visible: a small feathered question no one had asked, committed entirely to the shape of its own orbit.
IV. The Blighted Village and the Deployment of Grease
They arrived at the blighted village having already had a complete morning and now being asked to have an afternoon.
A goblin was at the entrance. Sogong stepped forward. There was a moment where this could have been a conversation; Sogong is capable of conversations, the morning had demonstrated this. He appeared to decide against one. The party read the direction before the goblin had finished its first sentence. Nanang saw it coming and moved to intervene. He was too late.
The fight began.
It was not the kind of fight with manageable dimensions. It had more participants than expected and better positioning than the party had time to assess. The enemy had grease. Barrels of it, placed and ready before the party had formed a response. The grease went down. It went under the party's feet and under the space where the party was committed to standing. Then the grease was ignited.
The explosion was thorough. The party absorbed it poorly.
Almost everyone. Nero was not where the rest of the party had been. He had gone somewhere else before the exchange had a name, to the flank, positioned with the efficiency of someone who has simply never accepted the logic of standing in the middle of things.
V. The Sequence of Falls
After the grease, the rest proceeded in the particular order of fights that have decided to take everything from you methodically.
Nanang was first. He went down in the way he tends to go down: as a statement about the limits of cloth armor in a situation involving direct violence. Anaik brought him up. Nanang went to the back of the engagement, which in retrospect was the correct interpretation of the information the grease had provided. From the back line he summoned a spider and sent it to the roof, to the goblin archer positioned there, to deliver its venom. The spider arrived. It bit the goblin. The venom failed to hold.
Nanang's expression communicated his assessment of this outcome clearly.
Traxex reached the edges of what she was able to absorb and stepped back. Anaik and Sogong held the front. Nero worked from the flank, cutting through numbers that were not quite decreasing fast enough. Then the goblin on the roof found Sogong. Sogong fell. The math stopped working.
Anaik fell back. Nero fell back. Nanang died. Traxex ran.
VI. The Roof, and What Nero Finished
Anaik did not run directly.
He went around. He moved through the edges of the field, past the main line, through the part of the map that everyone else had already cleared out of, and came out behind. He reached the high ground where the goblin archers had been operating. He found one. He put his longsword into its back. It did not survive. Anaik has made a habit of this; it bears noting each time because a longsword backstab is not the conventional application of the weapon, and he continues to find the geometry for it anyway.
The archers who remained found Anaik from their positions. They shot him. He fell.
This left Nero and Traxex. Traxex continued her commitment to survival through departure. Nero did not depart. He moved through the remaining enemies with the full inventory of available technique: every shadow, every angle, every approach the space allowed. The chronicle will not enumerate them. The result is the only relevant entry: the enemies were cleared. Sogong was revived. Nanang was revived.
Anaik remained where he had fallen. The party was out of scrolls.
VII. After: The Basement, the Gnome, and the Question of Priorities
The party spread through the village in the way parties spread after a fight: individually, in different directions, toward different objectives, without coordinating first.
Nanang found a basement. He began calling for the rest of the party to come look at the basement with the volume and persistence of someone who has found something significant and wants to ensure the group applies appropriate collective attention to it.
Traxex found a gnome strapped to a windmill. She began calling for the rest of the party to come look at the gnome. She did this with equal volume and equal persistence.
Sogong was not standing around. He had moved through the village with the quiet efficiency of someone who has already decided what the aftermath of a fight is for, and what it is for is searching the premises. He found a wall that was not a wall. An illusory surface, concealing something behind it. He stood in front of it and said, with apparent feeling: "bro thought bro's Miyazaki."
He said this more than once. He said it in the way of a person delivering a verdict that satisfies them deeply. The chronicle does not have a confident account of who Miyazaki is. The most probable interpretation, given the context of an illusory wall in a blighted and goblin-occupied village, is that Miyazaki is a figure of some note from the hells below, known perhaps for hidden passages and concealed architecture, and that finding his signature work here was either impressive or offensive to Sogong, possibly both. The chronicle records this interpretation with appropriate uncertainty and moves on.
Nero was calling about Anaik.
The result was the acoustic signature of a group that has survived something and is coping by raising the volume on its individual priorities. The basement case: Nanang. The gnome case: Traxex. The illusory wall case: Sogong, with evident personal investment. The case for the dead member of the party: Nero, with increasing specificity and decreasing patience. What was behind the illusory wall was not investigated. What was in the basement was not investigated. Anaik contributed nothing to anything.
Nero had enough. He went to town. He purchased the scroll. He returned. He used it. Anaik stood up.
Everyone was alive. The basement had not been investigated. The gnome remained strapped to its windmill. The illusory wall remained unexamined. The day was still long.
VIII. Anaik's Calculus
Anaik was alive. The party had attended to this as a procedural matter immediately after other priorities. Nero had resolved it. The day continued.
What the day continued into was the same debate that had been ongoing before the interruption of Anaik's temporary absence from the living: the basement, which Nanang held in strong regard, and the gnome, which Traxex had not let go of. The positions had not shifted in the interim. If anything, the fight had reinforced them, each party arriving at their preferred destination with the fresh conviction of people who have survived something and feel entitled to be heard about it.
Anaik assessed the situation. He did this in the way he tends to approach logistical problems: practically, without sentiment, looking at what was in front of him rather than what he would prefer.
The basement was probably important. Nanang's instincts, for all the difficulty of predicting what those instincts would produce, had not yet led the party somewhere without content. The basement had merit.
The gnome also had merit, primarily in the sense that it was the one Traxex wanted.
The chronicle will reproduce Anaik's reasoning faithfully and without editorializing: any decision that went against Traxex would not end with the decision. It would continue into a proceeding. A sulk, an argument, a grievance entered into the ledger of the ongoing saga of Traxex's wants against the party's tendency to not immediately address them. This was not a position against Traxex; it was an accounting of her. Nanang, by contrast, had the capacity to revisit. He had declared the basement interesting; he had not, to anyone's knowledge, declared that it would be uninteresting at a later hour. The basement could wait. Traxex's willingness to accept waiting was a matter of record.
Anaik told them they were going to the gnome.
He did not debate this. He said it with the volume a dragonborn has available when a dragonborn decides to use it, which is a volume that produces alignment through means other than argument. The party oriented toward the gnome. The basement remained where basements remain.
IX. The Position of the Frontliners, and Why the Goblins Were Not Neutral
The approach to the windmill revealed several things in sequence.
First: the gnome. He was there, strapped to the arm of the windmill, visibly distressed and in evident need of assistance. The party took note of this. Their note had the quality of people noting something interesting rather than people noting an emergency; the gnome received the kind of attention applied to curiosities and objects of study, not the kind applied to someone who was going to fall off a windmill if steps were not taken. The chronicle records this observation and moves on.
Second: the goblins. A group of them, a couple of bugbears alongside, arrayed in the space between the party and the windmill. Less fortified than what the village entrance had offered. The archers had a rock formation, which gave them height, but the height was not dramatic, and the rest of the positioning was manageable for a party that was paying attention. Coming off the village entrance, manageable had required some recalibration as a word, but it applied here.
Third: where everyone was, which the chronicle is obliged to record.
Traxex was on a nearby rooftop. This requires no elaboration; Traxex locates elevation and occupies it without needing to discuss the matter. Nero was already somewhere behind the windmill. The precise time at which he arrived there is not something the chronicle can establish with confidence. He is simply, sometimes, elsewhere before the party has finished arriving somewhere, and this is accepted as a feature of traveling with him.
The unconventional entries: both frontliners were in the enemy's backline. Sogong and Anaik, the two members of the party whose conventional assignment is to stand between the problem and everyone else, had apparently absorbed something from Nero's approach and applied it. Anaik was carrying his new greataxe, acquired from Nero through channels Nero had not described and Anaik had not asked about, because this is how equipment moves in this party and there is no alternative system anyone has proposed. The strategy was straightforward: Anaik would reach the archers on the high ground, and with the blood of Birch behind the swing, their prospects there were poor.
Nanang had moved forward to open a conversation. He had prepared for this. He had cast the spells that lend a person weight and credibility, the kind of preparation that turns a sentence into an argument. The goblins were reading as neutral; neutral was the foundation Nanang was building on.
What Nanang had not introduced into his calculation, or had chosen to set aside, was the scene behind his opening remarks: a full-armored dragonborn with a greataxe, and a paladin with his own intentions, moving quietly through the rear. The goblins shifted from neutral to hostile without a clear announcement, and in all honesty the chronicle cannot find this completely without explanation. Sogong offered the summary later, with the brevity of someone who considers the matter closed: "to be fair we were creeping up behind them."
Nanang spent some time furious about his spell slots.
X. The Archer, the Sanctuary, and What Nanang Cast (Unclear)
Anaik opened on the archer.
The greataxe connected with the full commitment of someone who does not pause to consider whether a swing is proportionate to the situation, and with the additional physics supplied by Birch blood running through dragonborn arms. The archer on the rock formation received this without preparation and without sufficient defenses. What she had before the swing and what remained after it were two different categories of object; the second category also included a bow, which Anaik picked up while the fight was still actively ongoing around him. He has the carrying capacity other party members do not share, and the habit of acting on it at the first available moment regardless of what else is happening. Both of these things remained true.
Sogong moved to the nearest goblin and applied his mace with the precision of a smite. The goblin did not absorb this well. Then Sogong cast sanctuary on himself.
Anaik registered this. There were goblins at multiple angles, a bugbear with unfinished business, and Sogong was not near any threshold that makes sanctuary the obvious call. Anaik filed the question in the category of things he did not have time to pursue and continued.
From above, Traxex addressed the front line with the efficiency she brings when she has the position she wants, which is high, removed from the immediate problem, and looking down at it with a clear angle. The front of the goblin formation largely resolved itself under this arrangement.
Nanang cast a spell.
The party noted it. The party was not certain what it was for. Something happened; the shape of what happened was not, in the middle of an ongoing fight, fully legible to anyone in a position to watch. The collective reconstruction afterward: "Nanang cast a spell, not sure what it's for." The chronicle accepts this as the record and does not press further.
XI. The Lever
Nero had found the windmill mechanism.
He engaged with it. The windmill stopped. The gnome, still attached to the arm, ceased its rotation. This was, considered narrowly, the favorable outcome; the fight was still ongoing around this development, but the objective was addressed. Nero's attention moved to the lever, which had further configurations he had not yet tested.
He tested them.
The windmill started again, faster than it had been moving before. The gnome contributed to this motion. Then the windmill stopped a second time. Then the gnome was no longer attached to the windmill; he was attached to a direction.
Anaik was in the middle of the engagement and had no obvious mechanism for raising the matter without losing his thread. He said "anyone else seeing this" to no one in particular. No one in particular responded.
The fight concluded. The goblins were dead. What remained near the windmill was, using the most accurate language available: the quest, technically complete, and the gnome, not available for debrief. A laugh came from near the lever. Nero's account, offered through it: "I don't know, I don't know, I was just testing my thief skill on the lever."
The chronicle considered this and arrived at the following reconstruction: Nero had not been attempting to save the gnome. He had been interested in the windmill. The gnome was attached to the windmill. These things connected in the way they connected, and the outcome followed from the connection.
Nero made his case that the quest was, in fact, finished. This was technically correct. The gnome had been separated from the windmill. The goblins were no longer a problem. Whether the separation met the parameters implied by the original framing is a judgment the chronicle declines to offer.
No one argued at length. The silence had the particular quality of people who have seen what they saw and are still determining what category it belongs to. Anaik had an objection; the objection, to the chronicle's reading, was more concerned with the loss of a reward than the loss of the gnome, but even Anaik kept it brief. The morning had already been full.
It was noon. The party moved on.
XII. The Trouble With Following Traxex
The party had intended to rest. This was reasonable: the fight at the village entrance, the gnome, the lever, and the general shape of the morning had constituted more than one morning's worth of events. The intention lasted until it became apparent that Traxex was no longer anywhere near the windmill.
The party has experience with this. The options are: find her, or do not. The second generates the kind of problem that is shared only in retrospect and unpleasantly. The first generates the kind that is shared in the present, which is still a problem, but navigable. They moved north.
They found a bridge. At the far end: an intersection. They did not turn left. To the right, dead bodies and the remains of a caravan. Around the wreck, a cluster of hyenas writhing on the ground, stomachs distended and visibly wrong.
Nero looked at them. "They're bloated," he said.
Anaik said: "What kind of animal is bloated."
This was delivered without the intonation of a question. Nero was disgruntled. The chronicle cannot determine, with available evidence, whether Anaik had not followed what Nero was pointing at, or had followed it perfectly and responded in that manner anyway. Both readings are consistent with what the chronicle knows of him.
Traxex shot one of the hyenas. Without announcement. Without apparent deliberation. Anaik and Sogong read the situation and charged forward. Not a word had been exchanged about this. The party's unanimous and unspoken position was to kill the bloated hyenas in pain, and this decision had been reached by a method that involved no one actually reaching it.
XIII. What Was Inside the Hyenas
Before they could finish, it became clear why the hyenas' stomachs were as they were.
The gnolls that emerged were newborn and soaked in blood. They howled on arrival. From the hill above, more gnolls heard this and came down. Another fight was already happening before the party had finished deciding about the first one.
The chronicle notes the positioning: four members of the party on lower ground, with the hill and its occupants converging in front of them. Yes, four. Nero had already reached the top of the hill, behind the gnolls, by the time the rest of the party had registered the shape of the situation.
XIV. Whirlwind
Anaik charged the newborns. They were grouped, he had the greataxe, and he announced his attack: "Whirlwind." What followed was, at best, a sweeping strike. The naming was an aspiration. The action was a large man swinging a large weapon through an arc and making contact; it accomplished what it needed to accomplish, which is its own kind of whirlwind if the definition is applied generously.
Sogong worked the newborns with his mace. Traxex offered support from the rear, if support is understood as the party member dealing the most damage while positioned at a comfortable remove from the problem. Nero worked the gnoll hunters on the hill with his daggers.
This last part did not hold. The previous fight had given Nero both flank and high ground; here it was a modest incline and gnolls with functional legs. Several from below redirected toward him. The frontliners were, again, deployed in a configuration that left the person most requiring their coverage without it.
Then Nanang summoned a frog.
It arrived in the middle of the engagement, between Anaik and Sogong and the gnolls. The gnolls mauled it immediately. It had not been alive long enough to demonstrate whatever Nanang had intended; Nanang was furious about this; and the brief confusion of its appearance and death opened a gap that Anaik used to strike. The frog had served a purpose. It was not the one Nanang had planned.
Two gnolls broke from the main fight and ran toward Traxex. Anaik went after them. Sogong assessed the hill, saw Nero approaching the point that demands action, cast sanctuary on himself, and moved toward Nero.
From further up the hill, the alpha came down: black-skinned, decorated in bones and skulls of animals the chronicle could not identify. It descended without hurry.
Sogong did not reach Nero in time. The alpha arrived first. Nero fell. The alpha turned its attention to Traxex.
Traxex had noticed a puddle trailing downhill from the wrecked caravan. She fired an ice arrow at the two gnolls closing on her; the ice caught the puddle and spread along it and stopped both of them where they stood. She turned to the alpha. The arrow landed cleanly. The alpha went down at once.
The chronicle will not editorialize. It will note simply that this is why the party keeps her, and set aside the fact that the fight began because of her. Anaik breathed fire onto the frozen gnolls. The chronicle can only imagine what Traxex's expression looked like in response to this.
XV. The Chronicle Does Not Believe in Greater Beings
Anaik ran uphill to assist Sogong. What remained below was left to Nanang and Traxex.
Nanang, watching Anaik charge up the hill, said: "Finally I'm not being targeted and I won't be."
The chronicle holds no belief in greater beings. If such things existed, they would have to be credited here; both gnoll hunters on the hill immediately turned and fired at Nanang, despite having Anaik and Sogong standing directly between them. Six arrows. He avoided five. He yelled "Sorry for being arrogant" while in the process of avoiding them, which is possibly the fastest acknowledgment of consequence this group has produced. The unfrozen gnoll charged him as well. Nanang cast the thick smoke he keeps for exactly this kind of moment, sealing himself and the gnoll inside it, blind to each other and to everything else. Including Nanang.
Uphill: Sogong cancelled his sanctuary and cast a heal on Anaik, returning him to full health. Anaik noticed that both gnoll hunters had eyes that glowed and moved with an erratic, unsettled quality. He registered this and moved on without following it further. An oversight.
The gnoll hunters opened fire on Sogong. Three shots in quick succession. Sogong is not nimble, and all three connected. He went down; not dead, but no longer a variable in the fight.
Anaik killed the hyena in one swing. He now had two glowing-eyed gnoll hunters and no support.
Downhill, Nanang stepped out of the smoke and found himself facing the newborn gnoll at arm's length. A sorcerer at close range is a specific kind of problem for the sorcerer. He reached into his pack and produced a potion of sleep, which he threw at the gnoll from the shortest possible distance. It did not work. He cast minor illusion. That also did not work. He ran. The gnoll hit him as he went; his concentration broke; the smoke dissolved. Traxex put an arrow through the gnoll before it could follow.
The two frenzied hunters turned. One fired at Anaik: three shots, same cadence, same result. Anaik fell. The other turned to Nanang, and this time Nanang's footwork did not save him. He fell as well.
Everyone was bleeding out. Traxex ran.
XVI. What Traxex Did
Whether Traxex had finally shown her true colors: this is the question the moment invited.
She had run to camp. At camp she found the lich the party had previously encountered in the crypt. She made the following arrangement: the lich would revive the full party; the price would be settled in gold. The lich agreed. Nero's chest at camp, which functions as a mobile treasury rather than personal luggage, covered the cost without difficulty.
All of them stood up. They returned to the hill. Full health, full resources; the remaining gnolls encountered neither for long.
This is the party at a pinch: not operating by the expected method, not selected for virtue, not the chosen and not the pure. They find their way through by whatever rules are available to them, and they carry no embarrassment about this. The altercation ended the way it ended. They won.
XVII. The Calculation
Anaik found an important-looking note in the wreck of the caravan and pointed it out. Nobody was interested. Anaik was also not interested; he had pointed it out, which was the necessary action, and the matter was complete.
Nero was yelling at Traxex.
The lich's fee had been six hundred gold. Traxex had taken six hundred from Nero's chest, which she presented as exact payment for the exact price. The issue Nero had identified: Traxex had been carrying six hundred and forty-six gold of her own at the time of the negotiation. Nero performed the calculation and arrived at the figure of one hundred and thirty-six gold owed back to him. He wrote this down. He presented the paper to Traxex. She did not engage with it. He presented it again. He continued presenting it, with specificity and persistence, until Traxex returned the figure and the matter was closed.
The chronicle notes: he had just been dead. He was still himself.
From the hill above came the sound of more gnolls, near the opening of a cave. The sensible reading was that the party needed rest before proceeding further. The party has occasionally operated on sensible readings. This did not appear to be one of those occasions.
They moved toward the cave.
XVIII. The Cave Mouth
An explosion from the cave announced itself before the party had closed the distance. Then voices. Human voices, which is the kind of detail that becomes significant in a location otherwise occupied by gnolls.
Nanang assessed what lay ahead. Seven gnolls and hyenas in total. Two humans. The arrangement: most of the gnolls positioned at the cave mouth, a gnoll hunter elevated on the rock formation to the left. Inside the cave, the two humans, who appeared to be the only surviving members of the caravan. They had established a barrier between themselves and the gnolls using throwable flasks that ignite on contact. The explosion the party had heard was that barrier holding.
The chronicle notes, for context: the party had just fought gnolls. They were here because they had followed Traxex north. They had full health only because of a lich and Nero's chest. This is the context in which the next decision was made.
XIX. Retreat
Nero's survival instinct is calibrated to different thresholds than the rest of the party's. He looked at the cave mouth. He assessed. He yelled: "Retreat! Flee!"
The party did not register the same signal. Traxex looked at the gnoll on the elevated rock formation and saw target practice. Nanang looked at the situation and saw an opportunity for his intellect to demonstrate itself. Birch blood ran through Anaik's assessment of the threat and arrived at a conclusion his philosophy would not have endorsed. Sogong was there, as Sogong is. Nero, reluctantly, stayed.
Traxex opened. She shot the gnoll on the elevated formation. It fell. One shot; the high ground cleared before the fight had a name. Everyone cheered. Nero did not cheer.
The chronicle must note: most of the gnolls had been positioned behind the slope of the rock formation. The only member of the party with line of sight to all of them was Nanang. When the gnolls began to move and the full number revealed itself, Nero's reasoning to flee became clear in the way things become clear when the window for acting on the clarity has already closed.
XX. Tic Tac Toe
Traxex moved immediately to the rear. Anaik held his position, visibly unbothered, and began asking the party "What's the plan?" with the strange, repeated quality of a question that is not quite a question. Nanang, observing Traxex's repositioning, said: "I'm a sorcerer and I'm not afraid being in front." Sogong turned to Nero and asked, with the flat directness that is either very calming or very alarming depending on the moment: "So do we run or fight?"
Nero was visibly angry at Nanang. The sorcerer either does not have eyes or has them and has decided they are optional equipment.
Anaik maintained that the situation was manageable; what they needed was a plan, a tactic, something to orient around. Nero asked what tactic. Anaik said: "Tic Tac Toe."
Nero's response to this is not recorded in words. Nanang filled the silence: "As a mage who has divine intellect, the tactic is simply to have no tactic." Somewhere inside the argument, Nero understood that he was going to see this fight through. He had known this since the retreat call. The argument had simply been the process of arriving at the knowing.
The gnolls charged. They moved past the caravan members entirely, which is how the party came to hear the following exchange from inside the cave: "Hear that? Someone's fighting the gnolls. We should help!" The second voice: "Don't be a fool, lad. Shut your mouth and keep your head down. Leave the heroics to them that don't value their own skin."
Anaik, having heard this, stated: "Let's kill that guy later." He said it in the tone of someone who has reached a conclusion and ended the subject in the same breath.
The party had names for both of them by this point. No one had asked. Someone had said Rungkad for the first and Olly for the second, and the rest had not objected, and that was the end of the matter. The chronicle adopts these without comment.
The full company of gnolls was now visible to the entire party. So was the issue. At the head of it: a Gnoll Warlord. Darkish brown hair. Armor in red accents. A cape. A headgear assembled from feathers of unidentifiable origin, alternating gold and brown, worn with the deliberateness of something that has dressed for the occasion of being a problem. It was going to be one. This was not an enemy the party was equipped to handle at their current capacity, and everyone present understood this simultaneously.
XXI. Hold Person
"Hold Person."
Quiet. Confident. Already done.
The Warlord stopped moving. The spell had landed. Nanang had been casting it while the rest of the party was debating Tic Tac Toe, which means either that he had identified the correct target and the correct spell while everyone else was still forming sentences, or that his relationship with group deliberation has always been entirely decorative. Both conclusions lead to the same outcome.
Sogong, positioned in front of the Warlord, felt something activate that had nothing to do with his training or his broken oath or anything he had chosen to carry. The tadpole. It responded to the Warlord's presence the way it responds to things it recognizes, and it pulled. The Warlord's left eye lit orange, its iris resolving into markings with no natural origin. Something was being communicated. Sogong's mind was not quiet. He held it anyway. He pushed back against what the tadpole was offering and met it on his own terms, and when he had it in hand, he used it: the Warlord's will bent. It obeyed.
The fight that had every dimension of a long and costly engagement ended without further casualties. Everyone breathed.
"See? It's fine," said Nanang.
The party, for once, did not argue with this. There was nothing to argue with. It had been fine. He had made it fine. They turned toward the cave and the caravan survivors.
XXII. What Nanang Did Next
A roar came from behind them.
Somehow, in the space between the fight ending and the party taking ten steps toward the cave, Nanang had found a way to re-aggro the Warlord. The mechanism by which this occurred was not explained. The roar was the explanation.
The chronicle does not hold strong opinions about the nature of fate. What it does hold is a long and well-maintained record of this party's patterns. What that record shows: they create solutions to their own problems, and problems to their completed solutions, with a consistency that has long since stopped being surprising and started being the only reliable thing about them.
The fight resumed.
XXIII. The Appropriate Response, With Suboptimal Timing
The Warlord that had been still was no longer still, and the reason was on the ground directly beneath it. Nanang. Dying. The evidence of a powerful attack was visible in the way powerful attacks make themselves visible: the large creature, the freshly cleared space on the ground, Nanang occupying that space.
Nero screamed about common sense and territory, repeatedly and with specificity. Traxex added that Nanang should have moved with lighter feet. Both responses were appropriate. Both arrived at a person whose hearing was currently competing with a serious wound for his available attention. The timing could have been better.
Anaik was not part of this exchange. Anaik was at the cave entrance, having gotten there ahead of everyone despite being the heaviest member of the party, his attention fixed entirely on the two surviving caravan members. He was also surrounded by two gnoll hunters, a gnoll warrior, and a hyena. He had not registered this.
A gnoll hunter put an arrow in him. His focus broke. Before he could fully process this the gnoll warrior charged and slashed. He was considerably battered. His response was a deep sigh.
One swing. The gnoll warrior dropped.
The hyena pounced and missed. The remaining hunter repositioned to the high ground; then, from behind it, Nero arrived, having traveled uphill at a speed no one had allocated him to, and punched the gnoll down. Anaik announced "Whirlwind" and swept both the hyena and the hunter. They were dead.
XXIV. The Scroll
The Warlord had been separated from the rest of the engagement and was standing on the acid from Traxex's earlier arrow. Nero, observing this, reached into his pack and produced a scroll of burning hands. The correct spell for a creature standing on acid, drawn from inventory with the smooth efficiency of someone who has been cataloguing advantages since the opening exchange. He had the right tool. He had the right target.
He threw the scroll at the Warlord.
Nothing happened.
Nanang, who was dying, began laughing. Figuratively and literally; the two were running simultaneously. The monastery in the land of bamboo had taught Nero many things. The operation of a scroll, it emerged, was not among them.
XXV. Shared Hatred
The fight had spread across more ground than anyone had planned for, which is to say: it had spread.
Traxex found herself the simultaneous concern of both the Warlord and a gnoll hunter's acid arrow. She handled this the way she handles situations she cannot fight through immediately: she ran. Not the calculated retreat Nero performs; she simply left, at speed, in a direction that was away from the problem. She emerged without a scratch. The hunter lost sight of her and turned toward Anaik.
From somewhere behind the party, a roar. Not gnoll. Something considerably larger, and angrier, and wrong in a way that briefly reorganized everyone's assumptions about what was sharing the hill with them.
"It's okay guys," Nanang said. "That was just Nero."
The relief was genuine. The strongbox the caravan members had been guarding inside the cave: the information had apparently reached Nero at the same time as his patience had run out. Whatever form his interest had taken, it was not something anyone present felt they needed to look at directly. They accepted the clarification and moved on.
Rungkad, still alive and newly committed to remedying this for the party, threw alchemist fire at Anaik. He caught. The two retreated to high ground. Near the cave entrance, the last gnoll hunter went into a frenzy and directed its remaining shots at Sogong. Sogong fell.
The hatred toward the caravan members that had until now been exclusively Anaik's began distributing itself across the party.
Olly approached. Before he could establish his intentions, the same gnoll hunter that had just dropped Sogong shot him. He was also dead.
XXVI. The Sigh
Anaik was hesitating, which is not something he does often enough to have a practiced look for it.
Traxex was in a pinch. Sogong was going to die if left unattended. Rungkad was within reach, and Anaik had been moving toward him for the last several minutes with a specific intent. He gripped the greataxe tighter. Then he set it aside. He ran toward Sogong, crossing the fire at the cave entrance a second time on the way.
Nero arrived by his own route and between them they got Sogong back up. Sogong, still severely wounded, had not fully found his bearing when the last gnoll hunter shot him again. He went down a second time. Rungkad added alchemist fire to this. Nero and Anaik survived the flame. Sogong, who had absorbed more damage than anyone still standing had absorbed, did not.
Sogong died.
XXVII. Think Kids, Think
Nanang had summoned a cat illusion beside the Warlord. It worked; the Warlord's attention split; Traxex used the opening to widen the distance and reach the high ground. The Warlord was still standing. Traxex had a proposal: "Can you just fog up the entire area?"
The chronicle notes that this is one of Nanang's preferred spells in chaotic situations. The request was contextually appropriate. It was, by any reading of the available options, exactly the right call.
Nanang paused. He cast something.
What arrived was the crow from that morning. The one that had circled the town on their departure without scouting ahead, carrying information, or performing any function except describing its own orbit. That crow. It circled.
"Dear Lolth," said Traxex.
Nanang cast again. The cat returned. Before Traxex could formulate a complaint, the Warlord made a decision: it attacked the crow and the cat. A powerful attack, directed at two illusions, from a creature that had Traxex standing on the high ground directly available to it.
"Think kids, think!" Nanang announced. "Had I casted the fog, you wouldn't be able to attack."
Traxex had no rebuttal. She attacked the Warlord instead. It bled. The first sign, across the entire length of this fight, that it could be killed.
XXVIII. Grilled Lizard
Anaik was still on fire. He reached down and set the blade of his greataxe alight from the flame engulfing his own armor, converting the problem into an instrument. He walked toward Rungkad. No announcement. No shout. One normal swing.
Rungkad died. Anaik turned to Nanang and helped him up.
Earlier in the fight Nanang had managed one clean piece of work: the laughing spell, aimed at Rungkad, which had landed. The man had burst into uncontrollable laughter. Nanang had smiled. Then the Warlord had shot Nanang rather than Traxex, who had the high ground; the concentration broke; the laughter ended; the smile went with it. The chronicle records this sequence because it is the most complete arc Nanang's magic has produced across both sessions: it worked, and then something happened anyway.
The party converged on the Warlord. What followed looked, by honest accounting, like an amateur first hunt, and this applied to both sides. Miss after miss. The Warlord swung; they moved. They swung; it moved. It was not reflecting well on anyone present.
Nanang was out of spells. Anaik was functionally a grilled lizard in plate armor. Nero's arms had been operating above capacity for longer than arms are built to sustain. Traxex's bowstring got heavier with each pull. Nero landed an unarmed strike.
"Just hit him again!" Traxex shouted.
They were hitting him again. That was the situation. The hitting had simply not yet resolved. Then Traxex's arrow found what it was looking for. The Warlord dropped.
The long fight was over.
XXIX. The Day Had Finally Ended
The hill was a bloody mess. Anaik revived Sogong. The party, without comment or ceremony, went straight to camp. They had nothing left that comment or ceremony would require.
Nero was last to leave. Nanang had observed him, at some point in the aftermath, in close proximity to the strongbox the caravan members had been guarding. He had seen Nero's hands near it. He had not seen what followed.
The day had finally ended.
The chronicle has now assembled the full record of this day. Before closing it, the chronicle notes what the record contains.
It contains a late start. A shopping trip conducted by the members who happened to be awake. A charm spell tested on a dragonborn, a paladin, and a cow, producing identical results from each. A gnome who was strapped to a windmill at the start of the afternoon and distributed across the landscape by the end of it. Two goblin engagements, the first of which required a purchased scroll and the second of which required a lich. A gnoll birth inside three separate hyenas. A Tic Tac Toe strategy session held at combat range. A scroll of burning hands thrown at a target and producing nothing. A crow summoned in lieu of fog. A Warlord that attacked two illusions rather than the ranger standing directly beside them, and a mage who had the correct explanation ready. One paladin who died twice. One party member who was still on fire when he delivered the final kill.
And at the end: camp. Rest. Nero, last to leave the hill, with his hands near a strongbox. What happened next, the chronicle does not know.
What the chronicle does know: this party survived a day that should not have been survivable by the methods they applied, and they did so in a manner that cannot be easily taught or replicated, because the manner is mostly them. They are not the chosen. They are not the pure. They are not operating from a doctrine that would recognize what they did today as coherent. But they reached camp. All of them reached camp. Even Sogong, who died twice in the reaching.
The chronicle will not offer a verdict on any of this. The record is the verdict.