Ambush at the Outhouse

“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.

Olivia’s charge ended in a wild slash that could have taken a man’s head off - unfortunately, they were well aware now, that Alexander Houndsfang was no mere man. He raised an arm to block the blow, letting out his massive lungful of air in a yelp of surprise when her blade bit deep into his clawed hand - not like slashing a man, but not simply caught like he seemed to think would happen.

The ladies took that as a good sign and redoubled their efforts.

The problem was that Renee only had so much magic, and Olivia could only get one good swing and then had to reapply her wolfsbane paste, which left her **** while she did it so close to the werewolf. Every slip, every break in their concentration, left wounds on Olivia and Jade. Houndsfang’s claws were sharp, yes, but he also battered them with backhands that felt like they could break bone. He snapped with his teeth, which they were thankfully able to dodge.

Forty seconds of fighting didn’t sound like much, but in that time Oliva had struck two more good blows, leaving gashes across the werewolves. In return, she’d earned back a slash across her chest that had broken mail links, been tossed on her ass painfully when he tripped her, and had her bell run when he backhanded her in the head in response to the slash to his side. Jade hadn’t fared any better, feeling like she had a few bruised ribs and sporting a long set of gashes from his claws down her side. An inch more and it would have been her guts on the ground instead of just some blood. Both of them were hurting, exhaustion starting to set in from the high-speed danger.

And Renee wasn’t much better. She’d already burned through almost all her more powerful spells and was firing off her shadowy bolts of fire.

“We are so fucked,” Rhia said as she grabbed her d20 as her turn started. “How is he looking?”

“Alexander is snarling and bleeding, but he doesn’t seem to be as winded as the two of you,” I said.

“Do I get the sense that he’s toying with us?”

“Roll insight,” I said.

She rolled. “Sixteen.”

“Your training as a Paladin may not have been as entirely martial as a Paladin of, say, Duty, but you got plenty of training from a variety of tutors,” I said. “And you trained with a variety of fellow students. You’ve seen teachers, and bullies, toying with people clearly unable to meet their skills. What you’re seeing in Alexander isn’t that, exactly. He doesn’t see you as inconsequential threats, he’s treating you carefully. But you feel like there’s something he’s not doing, too.”

“Fuck it,” Rhia sighed. “Alright. Olivia is going to use her bonus action to apply more Wolfsbane Paste to her blade, provoking the attack of opportunity.”

I rolled and winced. “Seventeen to hit.”

“Fuuu-ckuh,” Rhia groaned. “That’s my AC.”

I rolled the damage. “Sex points of slashing as he takes the opportunity of you dropping your guard to lash out and slash your arm.”

Rhia blew out a long breath, looking down at her character sheet.

“Wait, you’re still up, right?” Tori asked. “Right!?”

“One hit point,” Rhia said. “I’m at one.”

“Get out,” Tori said. “He’s already used his reaction, you can fall back. Use your Lay on Hands to heal up.”

“You can’t even really hurt him, you’re just fishing for crits,” Rhia argued.

“So? I can Dodge more, make it harder for him to hit me,” Tori said.

“Olivia wouldn’t back off and leave you fighting this guy,” Rhia decided, shaking her head. Then she turned back to me. “I spin with the strike, crying out from the slash, but I take my sword in both hands and use the spin to power into a two-handed slash.”

I nodded, keeping my face impassive, not wanting to influence her in any way. “Alright, roll your attack.”

Rhia held her d20 in her hands, shaking it as she closed her eyes and blew out a breath. “Revelry, guide my hand,” she murmured, then rolled. “It’s a… dirty 20!”

“Hit,” I nodded with a grin. They already knew that would hit from their earlier strikes, but all three girls seemed relieved.

“I’m going to dump a smite into this even though it’s not a critical hit,” Rhia said. “So that’ll be… eleven points of slashing damage with the wolfsbane, and another… seven points of radiant damage. Eighteen total.”

“Daaamn,” Elyse said. “That’s big.”

Olivia spun with the slash, crying out in pain as the claws ripped through her flesh, and came around within Alexander Houndsfang’s reach. “Revelry, guide my hand,” she murmured with a grimace as she plunged her wolfsbane-coated sword into the werewolf’s chest, and in that moment the sword flashed with an internal golden glow, like the warm amber of a cool ale on a hot day, and the warmth of a hearth on a winter night. The divine power coursed through the blade and rippled through the werewolf, making him snarl in pain as he yanked away and staggered back from the Paladin as he clutched at the sword stuck between his ribs.

“That’s what you fucking get,” Olivia of Parnassus snarled. “You fuck with-”

Alexander’s wet, hoarse bark sounded strange at first and was accompanied by a wheezing as one of his lungs struggled to work. It took the adventurers a moment to realise the sound was the wolfman… laughing.

Slowly, his clawed hands wrapping around the hilt of Olivia’s blade, he pulled it from his chest. Blood oozed from the wound, coating his sternum and stomach. He coughed, a sucking sound in his big chest, but laughed again.

And then he drew in a deep, rattling and wet breath and released a howl into the night that felt like it shook down to the very foundations of the ruins. They’d heard a howl like that before when they killed the magic-infused wolf at the farmyard. Every bandit within three miles had probably heard it, and there were a lot of them a lot closer than that.

“Run,” Renee said, looking at her friends from twenty feet behind the werewolf. “Run!”

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