"Well, that explains that," Elyse snorted. "Let's feed him some wolfsbane and be done with it. Poison his food or something."
"You also know, " I said, wanting to head off the 'easy answer' quickly and not set them up to fail with it. "That wolfsbane isn't an ingestible poison. When made into a paste it can be used to coat a weapon to help cut through supernaturally tough hides."
"I still say we just shove a bunch of it down his throat," Elyse smirked.
The girls spent the next forty minutes arguing over tactics, with me as the DM, or as Fergus, only occasionally needing to chip in to make sure they weren't making plans that had an obvious hole in them that their characters would understand being 'in' the situation as opposed to imagining it as the players. Fergus, being a woodsman who had been scouting the area to make sure he knew their potential escape routes if things went bad, would be able to get them some Monk's Hood flowers to turn into the paste - of course, that was only going to help Olivia with her sword. Jade's primary way of dealing with people was kicking, and while they wondered if coating her feet or soaking her footwraps in the paste would have any effect, they felt it was unlikely. And they didn't have any ideas on how to incorporate it into Renee's magic (though, to be fair, I knew that Renee's magic would have the best chance at cutting through his resistances anyway.)
The real problem for them was finding a time and place to ambush the gang leader. Alexander was spending almost all of his time either cooped up in that throne room he'd occupied, with his gang in the front room of the building or showing his face in the Alehouse chamber to remind everyone that he was the reason they were all there. Either way, he was frequently surrounded by at least a half dozen of his own gang, if not
several
dozen of the various bandits.
"Shit!" Elyse finally exclaimed. But not in a 'Fuck!' sort of frustrated way. More like a 'Eureka!'
"Well, spill," Tori chuckled.
"Literally, shit," Elyse said. "The guy didn't have buckets in there to take a shit in, so he has to leave at some point to go take a shit, right? So we just need to figure out where the Risen Wolf Gang is doin' their business and that's where we ambush him."
And that's how they ended up with their plan to kill a werewolf while he was taking a shit.
Chapter 51
"There he is, the fucker," Olivia murmured to Jade.
"You sure it's him?" Jade asked quietly.
"Oh, it's definitely him. Who else would come down to the outhouse with two friends?"
She was proven right as the trio of men sauntering down from the two standing ruins approached the hastily erected outhouses. Someone had dug a pit and stretched old timber planks over it forming a platform with holes, and the smell was being kept down by some sort of weed clippings the gang members were liberally spreading over it on the regular. It was crude, but it was better than the latrine setups most of the other gangs were using.
It hadn't been covered in the actual roleplay - who wanted to roleplay their character needing to go to the bathroom? - but since it had come up, the girls now realised that they'd been shitting in holes in the woods themselves.
"We weren't counting on guards," Jade grumbled under her breath.
"We'll just have to take them out quickly. Maybe Renee can do something."
The sorceress was currently stalking down the small hill behind the trio, about thirty yards back and keeping to the shadows. Since Renee could play the 'I was just looking for you' flirtation card if she got caught hanging around, she'd been on duty making sure the gang leader didn't disappear on them by heading off somewhere unexpected. Now she was going to take up a position on the rise with a clear view of the outhouse latrines but far enough back that the werewolf wouldn't be able to just reach out and nab her.
Jade and Olivia slowly began to creep from the west. One of Alexander's companions went into another of the outhouses while the second one took up a post outside, leaning on a spear and blowing at a breath. Already bored.
It was late evening, the heat of the sun already cooling on the horizon and the stars blinking in between thick swathes of black clouds that blotted out the moon for long stretches. They had the cover of that darkness, and the sounds echoing down from the Alehouse, to help cover their approach. Jade was the much more stealthy of the two, both because of her natural dexterity but also because Olivia wore her heavier armour, so she took the lead, her long ears drooping to the side instead of upright and her little bobtail twitching whenever she hesitated for a moment to pick her next few steps.
Then, on cue, she took off running as quietly as she could. She was a dark form on a dark night, sprinting on legs built for crossing hundreds of miles of plains in the migrations of her people. Renee almost missed
her
cue, the hare-folk woman was so fast.
Jade reached the guard a split second after Renee's firebolt came soaring out of the darkness with a purple flash. The burst of fire splashed across the guard's chest but he didn't even have the time to cry out in pain from the burn before Jade leapt with a flying knee driven into the side of his head and a punch to make sure he was going to sleep in a flurry of blows before he collapsed.
Behind the outhouse, the three shitholes given privacy by some stretched hides on frames, Olivia drove her sword through the hide of the one with the guard and was rewarded with the shocked cry of pain from the man within.
"Alright," I said, setting my hands down on the table. "That's your surprise round. Nice job! Now, roll initiative."
Whether it was the dice, or maybe the gods of the world favouring Alexander over them, things started to downhill quickly. Alexander, smelling magical fire and blood, let out a snarling roar from within his outhouse followed by the horrible cracking sound of his bones breaking as he transformed - quite possibly mid-shit, but he was still doing it.
Olivia, meanwhile, had no idea if she'd gotten the second guard with a clean shot or not. He definitely wasn't dead as a doornail, though, and leaving him alive could be a big problem if he was still capable of anything. That meant she had to finish him off, and that meant she had to
get
to him, so she started sawing her sword through the tough hide to cut her way through.
Jade and Renee, both looking at the fronts of the outhouses, didn't have a clear shot at anything.
"Don't let him howl," Renee called to her compatriot as she prepared her Shadow Darts spell for when the werewolf emerged.
Jade grunted and winced before nodding and rushing to the outhouse 'door,' which was just a length of fabric slung over a pole. She ripped it aside and jumped forward, wanting to try and grab Alexander Houndsfang and clamp her hands over his mouth - or muzzle, depending on his change - to keep him from howling and calling for reinforcements.
What Jade wasn't prepared for was getting swatted right back out of the outhouse by a gnarled, bony claw that was quickly followed by a snarling snout.
The Houndsfang, stalker of the forest and would-be King, emerged from the shitter as his transformation was just finishing, her limbs still snapping into place and the fur growing shaggier as he took on a mostly wolf-like form with a barrel chest and a lean, corded muscles under a thick hide. He lunged for Jade, who hopped backwards but not nearly far enough - the only thing that saved her from his raking claws catching hold of her and shredding her guts was the impact of Renee's shadow darts as she released her spell and the magical needles soared through the night and stabbed into the beast-man.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Olivia grunted still sawing at the hide until she finally had enough room to get head and shoulder in - she found the bandit she'd stabbed scrambling on the floorboard, one foot down in the shithole as he pulled a dirk from his belt. She slashed at him and her sword sunk into his shoulder, an arterial spray splashing up the cloth hanging and quickly started to pool as he gasped his last breath.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Renee was muttering in between the magic words that helped her focus her magic. The shadow darts had pierced the werewolf's defences but hadn't had the impact they'd had on other creatures. It was going to take a lot more to bring him down. She summoned another barrage, sending them spinning into the night, and glanced over her shoulder in worry - no one was coming to check on the commotion yet, but as soon as the alarm sounded they were all dead women.
"Fuckityfuckityfuckfuckfuuuuck," Jade swore, dancing backwards on the balls of her powerful feet as she ducked and dipped around the grasping claws of the werewolf. She found an opening and snapped a powerful double kick - the first missed, but the second crunched into his snout and should have sent him reeling back, at least in shock.
Alexander Houndsfang barely reacted to the kick, licking his chops like a hungry wolf eyeing a little rabbit, before getting distracted by Renee's shadow darts striking up his back again.
He snarled and turned, finding Renee at the edge of the battle, his eyes focusing on her. Then he began to draw in an immense breath.
"Don't you fucking do it," Olivia snarled, coming around the outhouse after extricating herself from the leather hides. She swiped her sword through the handful of the wolfsbane paste they'd made - getting the wolfsbane had been the easy part with Fergus on their side. He'd been scouting their escape routes for a couple of days and had remembered a general area where he'd seen some of the purple-blue flowers. It had been turning it into the right
kind
of paste that had been the difficult part. Elyse had almost gone to ask her dwarf friends for help, but couldn't guarantee they were actually trustworthy. So they'd muddled through and boiled the flowers while Jade had found and 'borrowed' a clay bowl from someone in camp before they used the pommel of Olivia's dagger as a pestle. The resulting paste was a little chunky, but they'd half-filled Olivia's belt pouch and now she could palm it out and apply it to her blade.
