Slaying a bodugii is not an easy task. At least that’s what Kasp had said. According to him, the bodugii was a very patient hunter. Its tail – which we had not seen yet – bore a series of spike-like quills it could fling with great accuracy and range. We had seen one of those quills pinning the severed forearm to the ground in the room with the wells. It had most likely made its lair close to the river that had once filled the chamber below that room. When the expedition first ventured down into that chamber to retrieve water, they must have woken it up. The beast had then used the opportunity of being woken up to feed on the intruders.

Kasp himself was a friendly man. He called himself a carpenter for the hurried, as he had overseen all wooden constructions for the expedition and its excavations, that’s how he knew to collapse the wooden scaffolding holding up the pillar to seal him and Fridolf in.

Fridolf was a human man with one of his legs missing below the knee, bitten cleanly off by the bodugii and hurriedly bandaged up by Kasp, but still the wound had gotten infected, made Fridolf feverish and delirious. Had Anne been with us, she might have been able to help much in this situation, but with the few medical supplies we had gathered from the camp, we could administer even a minimum of care. Taking off the old bandages revealed a festering wound. We washed it and applied fresh bandages, that was the most of what we could do.

After he had greedily demanded for some of the supplies we had brought, he quickly scoffed down drive vrata biscuit and hurried it on with entire cups of water. When he had finally satiated his thirst and hunger, he eagerly told us of an alternate route out he found but it would require magic to use. I informed him that my exertion had brought my veins close to the breaking point. I had achieved far more than I had thought in a far shorter time than usual. For the rest of the day, I was completely burnt out and needed rest. We decided to use the time to assess our situation and plan accordingly.

We had enough water and food to last the five of us several days in there. The chambers we were locked into were once someone’s storage cellar and connected the labyrinthine corridors of the lower levels with the living and business quartets we had traversed above. Apart from the long and narrow chamber we were in, there were two more, both square and small, one bearing a well down into a cistern that once held a private supply of fresh water, now dry. Kasp had used it for waste disposal. He said that he had not checked where this cistern would be filled from, presumably the underground river once filled it if a floodgate was opened. Levers and pulleys to operate such a floodgate were present in the room.

The other chamber bore another hallway to the rough tunnels below the city and Kasp had collapsed these too with a heavy boulder pried from the ceiling. This one, according to him, led further into the mines, a maze of criss-cross dug tunnels barely wide enough for a Gisrin to walk normally in places. He had collapsed it with a big rock from above purely out of fear the bodugii might find or dig a way through the soft limestone still. Apart from that tunnel, this chamber housed the remains of jugs and pots as well as the slit Kasp had used to talk to us was here, giving us a window to where the bodugii would emerge from below as well as all the fresh air circulation we had. The air in the chambers was disgusting and stale, but breathable.

A spiralling stairway led up and into the empty house above. The house was mostly collapsed, but a small pocket of air around the staircase remained. The bodugii could technically dig the staircase free from the outside, but not traverse it. It would be an easy route for us to use should we dug our way to the main street.

From this we could formulate a plan to kill the bodugii.

The most important tool in our arsenal was of course my magic gift, which had two limitations. The first limitation was how much energy per time I could draw upon from the surroundings. In our world above, this limitation instead was how much flux was available, but the rich atmosphere in the world below allowed technically infinite energy, if limited per time. This limit had significantly slowed the progress I could make in lifting the pillar by myself. The second limit was my own body’s capability. Every iota of energy my body channelled wore a tiny bit on it. If I strained it too much without resting, I could risk rupturing a blood vessel, potentially bleeding out to the inside. This limit could be raised through constant training and I had already felt myself becoming more enduring while down in the world below, but there was no time to train now. While the second limit remained, the first was the one limiting our action speed in a hectic situation. Therefore, we used a trick to circumvent the first one I knew from construction site.

A counterweight could be used to “store”, so to say, energy by lifting it up above and then a series of pullies be used to enact that force onto a weight to be lifted. Making, placing and securing such pullies was often lengthy, but if I used the formulae in the booklet I had been given, I could instead make my body take the place of those. I would still have to channel the energy through my body, but I would have to draw upon only minimal energies from the surroundings while the energy of the falling weight was transferred almost instantly. The pillar could then act as deadfall trap against the bodugii when it was directly below it, hopefully crushing its neck or at least trapping its head.

For this trap, we all looked on the tarp of the tent for the finest errors, tears or worn-out spots, then Sarita sewed them over with a patch. We could not afford the tarp tearing. Then we filled the tarp with rocks and rubble from the house above. This would also partially dig the way free out of the house as a backup plan. We then used a spare scaffolding Kasp had put up close to the door blocked by the fallen pillar to hoist the huge bag of rocks up on it. With united body strength, we managed to pull and heave the counterweight up on the scaffolding. This would allow us to engage the trap come the next day, when my body had recuperated from the exhaustion.

We also had to devise a plan to lure the bodugii to our position and hope he would not go around to the collapsed pile of rubble, now dangerously thin. Sarita, the fastest and smallest of us, would play bait. She had protested but eventually agreed. She would return to the room with the wells and try to get the monster’s attention. Once acquired, she would hurry back to our deadfall.

Sarita and me would be the last to leave our secure room, the rest by then would have dug free a way through the rubble onto the main streets of the once city ruin. It was unclear whether we could outrun the bodugii all the way to the tower in the large chamber, where we could collapse the makeshift bridge and dropped the boulder on the hole in the ground, but we had to try if all else failed.

The big issue at hand was Fridolf. He was in no condition to move and would have to be carried, most likely by Brad and Kasp. I could help them with the weight with my magic, but doing that during a hectic approach would be nigh impossible. We were torn whether to wait a few more days for his recouperation or risk having to abandon him should our plant to kill the bodugii fail.

There was another issue at hand: the original expedition had set out with ten members, two were here, six Kasp had assured us were confirmed dead. That left two more potential survivors. Kasp admitted with no shame that he was willing to assume them dead as long as we did our best to save Fridolf, but us others had more problems with that.

It was a lengthy discussion. Sarita was in favour of doing the bare minimum and nothing else. Brad and I appealed to the others' sense of duty to the Seekers if we wished to rely on their help in the future. We eventually had to concede that without Kasp, there was no way of confirming the two missing members unless we actually found them alive.

We tried to get him to come along and he eventually agreed to do a short sweeping search with us if we should be successful in dealing with the bodugii properly. We all had to agree that in light of the tremendous losses already taken, a quick and clean getaway with just one survivor would be preferable.

As for the second survivor, things looked much more dire. Fridolf was in no condition to move himself. At best, we could carry him if we had time, but this too hinged on dealing with the bodugii in time.

The plan had to continue either way. After the exertions of the day, all of us were sufficiently tired and we agreed to lay down to rest. Kasp seemed genuinely happy with the current state of events. He had all reason to. He finally had hope to get out of this ruined place, rather than just surviving a few more days.

I wished we could make those hopes mean something in the end.