You take care of your injured mentor

The chimera is dead. You need a moment to progress this. You did it. You won. This beast, that defeated a fully educated and prepared mage died by your hand. This suddenly remembers you about your mentor. Tocar is still poisoned and needs you. You Look around and quickly find him sitting under a tree he has barely moved since the fight started. He still stares at the dead body of the chimera.

But despite the victory, he doesn't look good. His skin is so pale it is almost white and several violet vines are clearly visible. He covers his wound with his hands but his fingers shiver and he is unable to do anything else. The poison is very strong. Tocar has not much time left.

“Tocar, can you hear me?” you say while kneeling in front of him, “I'm with you. I … I can take you to the village. They must have a herbalist.”

“Antidote,” Tocar gasps, catching his breath. “Backpack. Hurry.”

You look around. You totally forgot about the backpack. Yours is on your back, but where is his one. He must have lost his during the fight or maybe he put it somewhere before entering the hideout. Luckily the backpack is not far. It is just a few meters on your right side. You hurry to it and roughly search for some vials. You find one with a green liquid and two with red liquid. The red ones are standard healing potions. You used them in the past on your missions and even tried to make some in alchemy lessons. But they only heal normal wounds and injuries, no poisonings. The green one must be the antidote.

You run back to Tocar and quickly open the small bottle. Tocar takes the bottle and drinks it completely empty. Tocar breaths heavy and forces himself to keep the antidote in his stomach. But after a while his heartbeat gets slower and some color comes back to his face. He still needs several minutes before he is even able to speak again. You use this to take care of all the small fires that still burn from his fight.

“I … told you to leave,” Tocar mumbles weak, “this … creature … I have never seen a chimera this ... smart and fast. How … how did you defeat it? I thought you were ... as good as dead.”

“Better take it easy a little longer,” you say carefully, “you were just dangerously close to the world of the dead.”

“Don't give me orders … little one!” Tocar says amused but laughing seems to hurt him, “but you are right. I need to recover. Give me a healing potion and … well, start looking for clues where this thing came from. And the potion brewers in the capital probably want the rest of it's venom. We still have work to do. Don't worry. I am fine here. Let the antidote do it's work.”

You smile. Tocar reminding you to be effective is clear evidence for you that he is out of the worst danger. The question where the chimera is from is very easy to answer. While searching it's dead body, you notice a metal shackle around one of it's legs. A single, rusted chain link is still there. This creature was created by a dark mage and then either hold captive to use it as a weapon or captured and sold to somebody. But the rusty chain ripped somehow and the chimera was able to flee. This happened several months ago. There is no chance to track the dark mage down now.

You heard once that some greedy nobles and rich criminals buy beasts from black marked hunters or dark mages to guard their treasures or threaten other people. Some very powerful nobles even want to have some of them in their armies to make them more dangerous. This is of course highly illegal. Dark magic is strictly monitored and both the mage as well as the customer get severely punished if they are discovered.

You tell Tocar about this and he agrees to inform the mage guild as well as the law enforcement about this. But with him injured like this, there is little more you can do. Afterwards you use a knife to cut the body open for the chimeras venom gland. It is bloody and smells terrible, but the dark magic venom is worth a lot a for potion makers, healer, researchers or assassins. You hope the guild sells it to one of the first three.