Apefmhet: A Feast For Scarabs

[Sertor Potens]

Sertor had done a decent job scraping the crap off himself by the time Tagi returned, and was definitely back in the land of the sensory non-deprived, or however you'd like to think of it. His ears and nose were working again, anyway.

Sertor quietly agreed with everything Tagi said. Lights were a bad idea in general, the Kerostriarius thought, but the humans did seem to have a fixation on shadowless environments. In fact, with the resounding failure of his inspirational speech and his apparent status as social pariah because of the whole nose-blowing debacle, Sertor remained very quiet indeed while the others talked, even when Fariq had his little temper tantrum.

It was Ramon who expedited a solution to their festering Fariq problem. The henpecked merc muttered "Well then, it is simple: we shall make you an uncommon thief", then planted a solid punch to the back of Fariq's head, rattling the base of the petty man's sneering skull. As the accomplished complainer crumpled down in the darkness, Ramon added "Sorry, unconscious thief, not uncommon. I don't know how I got those two mixed up. Sertor, can you lug him around? None of us particularly want to touch him at present."

That was fair. That was just penance for drenching their expedition leader with a catastrophic crime against cleanliness. "Of courfe." Sertor hoisted the limp man over his broad shoulder like a wet towel. Ramon nodded to Tagi, assuming she could make out the motion in the dark. As Evren muttered "It is too fucking dark down here" Ramon spoke over the top of him "Well Tagi, you've got the lead from here on out. Sertor can bring up the rear." Mostly, Ramon figured, because it would be impossible for the civilians to lag behind with that currently-stinking behemoth lumbering forward behind them. In a nod to the truth of Evren's words, Ramon added "You got some way of signalling us to stop, quiet like if needed, given the rest of us can't see a damn thing down here?"

[Tagi]

"Em," Giacomo said after Tagi had finished talking. "Emm. . ." he'd said, a little more timidly, when Ramon started talking.

He flinched when Evren hit Fariq, but it didn't seem to phase him overmuch. He was still looking at the mercenaries with a hopeful, almost feverish look in his eyes. "Um, um!" while Sertor got the unconscious Fariq up over his shoulders and Ramon complained. Even Pinar was muttering something about bogeys in the dark. Giacomo was not swayed.

"Em. . ." he said, and flushed. "Wait!"

That had been too loud. Several eyes swiveled his way, and he straightened under their gazes. The last lamp went out, plunging them into darkness. He flinched. "I- I do not think the um. . .um, Tagi, is quite qualified to be deciphering where or where not such an artifact is likely to be. The truth of the matter is that these things tend to vary depending on both time period and sect, not to mention the following ages during which changes in --" someone coughed. Giacomo swallowed. "I will need to see each room to verify whether or not the artifact in question is there."

In the darkness, Tagi shrugged. "'Kay. But if there's dying, you'll be the one responsible. I'll hiss like this if something is wrong." She demonstrated. It was a sound that sounded more animalistic than any human-looking mouth should have been able to produce. "Let's move!"

Evren didn't even bother to say anything. There was a high probability he had covered his eyes with his hand.

Giacomo blinked, opened his mouth to protest -- after all, he was the expert and he needed to see. But someone pushed him from behind, and he stumbled forward, words swallowed by the unfortunate way his teeth closed over his tongue.


Tagi took them room to room. She'd sniff, and Ramon would enter the room. Tagi would wait outside, facing outwards with Evren while Sertor lumbered inside with the civvies. In and out, in and out, in and out. It was time consuming, and taxing on the nerves of the humans whose senses were not terribly spectacular even once adjusted to quiet and dark.

It seemed like hours had passed as they made their way to the last few rooms on the current floor, when Tagi hissed.

The others were deep inside a room. "Sertor," she whispered, knowing his hearing was sharp enough to catch it. "C'mere."

[Sertor Potens]

Have you ever tried to unlock a door in the dark? Ever fumbled around with your key, trying to get the damn thing into the lock and failing miserably, seething quietly with frustration as you try key after key and they don't quite fit? Well, I haven't, but I bet it would be pretty annoying. Almost as annoying, say as large doorways which are only just large enough to fit a Kerostriarius through. Hello lock, meet key. All eight hundred kilos of him.

There was a reason why Sertor was assigned to the vanguard. All good stealth operations work better with some kind of distraction from the main force, right? You keep telling Sertor that, because trust me when I say he can hear every scrape of his own armour against stone doorframe better than anyone. Except perhaps Tagi. Sertor was pretty damn sure he heard the sound of iron teeth grinding. Unless that was his armour again.

Eventually, it was definitely Tagi he heard, but it was her sub-vocalised summons to him. It was easier for Tagi to arrange a little covert tête-à-tête than she might have expected, given that Sertor was always half a room behind the rest of them. Sertor tried to whisper too. It didn't work. Apparently Kerostriarii vocal chords need a damn good bit of wind behind them to get them resonating properly for standard Eyropan. The things you learn when sneaking for your life under an abandoned temple surrounded by death on all sides. Now was the time to try a different language. She'd said she knew a lot of them, so it was worth a shot.

Half of the remote tribes of Mandinia communicated primarily by clicking noises, and those at least Sertor could manage. So he started there, cycling through variations of 'Can you understand me'. While he did, something caught his attention. Mostly due to how similar it was to his own clicking. He changed up the test message to "Can you hear scuttling? And can you understand me?" Look, cut him some slack, communication is hard when you are physically incapable of whispering at a level lower than an average person's bellow.

[Tagi]

Tagi was, thankfully, not burdened with an overabundance of sympathy. Or any. She understood the concept, of course, but felt only a mild hunger and dim eagerness (the urge to survive being felt most keenly by our djinn) to get a move on.

But all of that changed when he started clicking.

She clapped her hands together, bounced on her heels a few times. Tagi excited was almost as bad as Tagi in a feeding frenzy. But at least she wasn't flashing anything. That had to be a plus.

"You know, I haven't heard that being used yet! Now, I'm a little bit loose on some of the specifics, but it's always an experience to hear someone actually speaking to me and not just snatches of -- oh. Did you hear that?" Tagi was whispering in the common language, but even she stopped when the sound was made again.

"I'm telling you, something is slinking around, but if I bring it up everyone will shuffle and roll their eyes and mutter. Just because I detoured us once to check out a particular appetizing -- nevermind, the thought makes me salivate."

She paused. "I don't hear it any more, do you?"

[Sertor Potens]

It was a miracle. If Sertor had been a small human schoolgirl, he might have gone 'squee' and flailed a bit in excitement. As it was, you will have to make do with that mental image, because Sertor's actual reaction was a small sigh of relief. The language he finally settled on, after Tagi's recognition of it, was that of the Kabakuru tribe. "Yes, I heard it, though I too can hear it no more. A scuttling as of scorpion or scarab, but I could not smell anything. But then again, with their reek lingering in the air all around my armour, that tells me nothing. I smell them, us, stone, dust, ancient dead, pottery and webs." Sertor shifted Fariq into a more comfortable position. More comfortable for Sertor, anyway. Fariq was going to awaken with some odd pains and bruising.

Sertor's ears rotated around, as he tried to pinpoint the last location he had heard it coming from. Around them, the humans had gone still and quiet, wondering what the hell Sertor and Tagi's game was. Luckily, only Fariq would have been stupid enough to raucously demand an answer to that, and Ramon had seen to him. "It came from above."

Allow me to take this moment to apologise. Normally, under better cinematic circumstances, there'd be a slow-panning shot upwards to the shadowy recesses of the subterranean room. There would be a slight glint of hideous yellow eyes inexplicably glowing in the dark and an immediate jump-scare as the creature, all fangs and sharp angles, leaps towards your point of view. But you will get none of that. Because, let's face it, they'd have noticed something like that in the same room as them. That's the harsh reality of the anti-climax.

Sertor did, however, shift his grip on his shield "Move quietly, for we are being followed. Shieldf up and above your headf. Keep one eye clofed, one eye open. Ramon, have the lantern ready to light on Tagi'f command. We move flowly and carefully until we figure out where and what our ftalker if."

[Tagi]

Tagi was bouncing on the balls of her feet right up until Sertor identified the sound as having come from above him. She looked up, then looked back at him, eyebrows drawing together in concern. "Above?"

The rest had finished their inspection of the room. "It wasn't from above," Tagi grumbled to herself, sighing in defeat. "No one listens to me."

But that was muttered to herself in a voice low enough that only Sertor would hear her.

They finished the inspection of the floor they were on, and sure enough there was no artifact. Giacomo was lucky that Tagi didn't feel things such as smugness very strongly, or else he would have been getting an earful about how his idiocy had wasted time. As it was, she was still lingering on Sertor's words. Above. She'd heard it from the west. Were they coming down from above? Were they following them? How well could they track?

She picked up the pace. Not that it helped much, because once they reached the stairs there was a general air of malaise about the humans in the group, picked out in small bursts of whining. It was too dark to go down the stairs without light. Someone would fall and break a limb. Someone would do this or that or -- Tagi couldn't help it. She caved. "Give the limbless man to Sertor. Take the steps two at a time if you need to. We need to be down in under ten seconds. Give me that." She took the lantern, held it aloft, and shook it at them.

It was dark. They couldn't see it.

"If it takes you longer than ten seconds, I am blowing it out. Come."

Tagi took her own flint and steel, and struck it up. "Ten," she said.

Tagi's unique shapeshifting ability made speed easy for her. If she stumbled, well, shifting her form to account for the stumble was an easy (if grotesque) way of countering it. By the time she hit "five," she had reached the end. "Four," she said, expression calculating .

"Wait!" Giacomo, again. "Wait, bring back the light -- "

"Two," Tagi said.

"No, no not for that, there is writing --"

Tagi blew the light out. Five seconds later, Evren had taken it from her, lit it, and returned to where Giacomo hovered uncertainly on the stairs. She rolled her eyes, "One of you up top. If something comes to chew on you, just scream. I will scout ahead while you attend --" she waved her hands, and left them to it.

But she thought about Evren. There was no source of light down there; to the humans, eyes open or eyes shut would look entirely the same. Evren had taken the lamp from her hand without fumbling, and lit it without too much apparent effort. He was worth watching.

[Sertor Potens]

Sertor was confused, at first, by the nature of Tagi's instructions and only added "Make a gag for Omar. Thif will not be comfortable for him." Ramon saw the sense in the suggestion, and tore up some clean cloth for the crippled man to chew on instead of moaning or screaming. Sertor hauled him onto the same shoulder he had Fariq, guaranteeing the goateed bankroller more bruising when he eventually came to.

Finally Sertor realised, as Evren followed her order to 'Go up top' that Tagi had misunderstood his meaning. He supposed that was the disadvantage of using a language he hadn't needed to use in years. He'd probably messed up the directional context. He clicked a clarification "No, not Up Top. Above. Walls, Ceiling. You understand? Whatever is lurking on our perimeter is not using the floor. I only smell and hear the disturbance of ancient dust in our group's passage. But insects are known for disdaining the ground. Near Castrum Kerostriarii there is a species of arborial scorpion which hangs underneath the branches of the great trees and spears its prey from several metres above."

The clarification though, given amidst Giacomo's academic squawking, was too late to stop Evren from slipping back along the path they had come. Ostensibly the man was simply following Tagi's last instructions. But when had Evren ever willingly followed Tagi's instructions? Or really listened to her except when Ramon had agreed with her?

[Tagi]

"Oh." Tagi shifted in place, watching the light bob as Evren held the light up for Giocomo. She looked up. "Really, you should think about putting that out."

"It's important." Giocomo's voice was dreadfully whiny.

"Important enough to die?" Tagi shifted again, watching the ceiling.

"I will not take much longer," Giocomo snapped. Ooooh, someone was touchy.

Tagi walked away from them, face turned towards the ceiling. She had adapted her eyes, was very carefully watching it in the dark. She considered shifting into something that could crawl on the ceiling, but decided while there was light it was something better not done. "I don't see marks of passage," she said.

Giacomo had taken out paper and pen. He was writing something.

"But -- oh. That could be a problem. Sertor?" She gestured him closer, pointing up towards the ceiling. She had traveled a short distance away from the stairs by then, stood in the edge of the light.

It was possible he wouldn't see the hole in the ceiling. But he might smell the rank air that flowed through it.

[Sertor Potens]

Ramon and Sertor had finished getting Omar in place on the Kerostriarii's shoulder by the time Giacomo was finished with his sketches and notes. Sertor was in fact very curious about the ancient script and its language, but knew he wouldn't have enough time to learn much of it even if he did convince Giacomo not to hoard his secrets like giant ants hoarded food. Certainly, with his monocle lost, he wouldn't be able to read it. Hassan took over lantern duties as Evren slipped up top to act as the rearguard watch.

Tagi's aside focused his attention. Sertor's ears twitched and rotated slightly as he clicked "You are correct. I should have noticed that, but I thought it was Fariq's bad breath. What do you make of it?" Which, to be fair, was not exactly inaccurate. Sounds bounced weirdly at the source of the scent, but it was hard for Sertor to tell what kind of gap was there, whether a drop-through or exit for some kind of tunnel. The large mercenary grumbled "The sooner Giacomo finds out where the sceptre is, the sooner we can get it and leave this place. I want this contract finished up. My kind are not built for tunnels, but for battlefields." It was sheer good fortune, really, that Asari had needed large passageways when constructing Abdju. Though one had to wonder how large the ancient servant of Farahu's minions were to require it.

Sertor quietly ignored the sheer immensity of the problem attached to the notion of 'leaving', putting that down as a dilemma he could but heads with in a more physical fashion. The mercenary followed his earlier advice, moved to beneath the hole Tagi had spotted, and held his shield between it and his head. "We muft find the location of the feptre quickly. It if not wife to linger here too long." Ramon nodded his agreement, and Giacomo hissed "Well, if certain imbecile hirelings stopped interrupting my work, maybe this would not take so long!"

[Tagi]

"We're going to --" Tagi stopped, glanced askance past the bulk of the Kerostriarii towards the other mercs and charges. "Die," she clicked, her own use of the language sloppy and ill-formed. "If we don't get out of here soon." There was nothing overtly melodramatic in the way she spoke, or in her expression as she looked back up to the hole. It was matter-of-fact, relaxed; as simple a statement as anything widely known. "Although, well, I can likely get out alive, but you lot I am not so sure of, and I refuse to be held accountable for this wad of grave wrappings."

Her expression was a peculiar mix of thought and emptiness as she strove to keep herself acting appropriately as a facsimile of a living creature. The light that caught her horns and the paleness of her eyes was not helping; she looked faintly ghastly, though too like she belonged. If it was to become a tomb, then she'd certainly belong. This was only the preface, after all. She was well used to those.

Ramon was glaring at her. He didn't need more of an excuse to dislike her, but her casual habit of ignoring them when it suited her was not precisely the best way to build a friendly team environment. Alas, Tagi had never been particularly good at that. Giacomo, however, had resumed his task. He had moved from his original position, and given the broken progress of the writing on the wall, Tagi could only assume that meant he was nearly done.

"They are used to traveling through here," she said, voice gone soft. Even so, it was loud in the silence. Everyone but Giacomo was glancing about, their own natural unease amplified by the flickering light and the darkness just out of reach. They were, none of them, meant to be traipsing about tunnels. Except, perhaps, Tagi. But she wasn't exactly the most helpful person in the world. "They will be seeking us out. They will not tarry."

"I'm almost done," Giacomo was glaring, but he kept his eyes pinned to the wall.

A few breathless moments passed.

"There," Giacomo said, straightening.

Tagi glanced at Hassan, who snuffed the light.

Total darkness.

"Which way?" Hassan asked, voice steady.

"Down."

Of course.

[Sertor Potens]

Sertor found himself agreeing with Tagi's tactical analysis, and replied "It is possible some of us can survive if we can break through to the desert. In my homeland, there are flesh-eating beetles larger than these, and they find the sunlight hours unpleasant. If fortune favours us, once we have the sceptre, there may be a fighting chance for those of us who cannot change forms." But by the legions, he was not leaving without the sceptre.

Ramon was not having the best of times. Between Giacomo taking his sweet time, and the stifling atmosphere of the temple's bowels, he was regretting for the thousandth time ever having signed on with the expedition. He shifted his glare from Tagi to Sertor and back again, wrestled with silence a moment longer, then hissed out an irritated whisper "What is with the clicking?! Are things not bad enough without the two of you making stupid noises?"

He was interrupted though by Giacomo. And of course, they were heading down. It was too much to ask that the sceptre be found at the Oasis Caravanserai of nubile masseuses. It always had to be some horrible dusty pit full of unpleasantries. If he ever got out of this, he was going to BUILD an oasis caravanserai and hire nothing but pretty girls good at massage. Fuck the mercenary life.

And then it was lights out.

Pinar clung to Hassan in fright. Hassan felt it was far better than the woman snivelling, and sometimes gratitude took an interesting turn in the dark, so there was that.

Ramon had reacted swiftly enough to jam his eyes closed a moment before the light was snuffed. It wasn't much but, at least when he re-opened his eyes it didn't feel quite so oppressively dark. Just horribly fucking dark. A minor distinction, but one he could appreciate.

Sertor, all packed up with Fariq and Omar hoisted over his shoulder, resumed rear guard. Strange, he couldn't hear Evren following. But then, maybe that was because Giacomo had started up his whining about lack of illumination. "We know you cannot fee where you are going. What if important if that nothing can fee where we are. Tagi will lead the way, and I will follow. Be of good cheer. What could poffibly go wrong?"

Still no footsteps from behind him. Curious. Sertor whispered in his terribly loud fashion "Evren, are you there?"

There was no response from Evren.

Well then. Jolly good. That could go wrong, for starters.

[Tagi]

A distinct whine entered Tagi's tone. "You are always with the complaining that I am not cultured, and now that I display learning, now I am making stupid noises? Who is it now who --" the light went out. She did not lower her voice, though she had not been overloud to begin with. "-- is uncouth, or whatever insult you insist upon leveling at me?"

Ramon may or may not have muttered a particularly inventive insult. Tagi sharpened her hearing in response -- good to go anyways, considering the extreme lack of light, and carried on with the confidence that she had won that exchange and earned some measure of respect for herself. Such as it was. Tagi never had been very good at social subtleties, after all.

Tagi looked back at Sertor's whisper, mangled speech though it was, terribly loud to her newly sensitive hearing, when she noticed they were short a man. "Oh," she whispered, her voice much quieter than Sertor the Incomprehensible, "where'd Evren go?"

Silence.

There was shuffling.

Someone opened up to speak, inhaled a breath, and then there was a new sort of clicking of a sort that didn't originate from Sertor or herself, a sort that moved in a rhythmic click click click, click click click, soft as a baby's last breath. She almost didn't hear it -- but she did smell the papyrus dry, mulchy odor of scabies.

Too late.

Something hissed. Someone screamed. Tagi didn't have time to throw off her pack before she was shifting and leaping towards the back of the line. She felt a strap tear, and the whole thing fell to the side as she opened her mouth wide to rend and crunch and chew. Ambush.

[Sertor Potens]

Have you ever had a spider drop down on your head while walking underneath a branch or entryway in the dark? Experienced that unsettling sensation of multiple sharp little legs pressing down through your hair? Scurrying awkwardly along your scalp? Then there is that moment of panic where you try to figure out which is more likely to get you bitten: trying to smack it off, or leaving it alone while you curl up into a foetal position and whimper,

In hindsight, Pinar would have preferred spiders to what actually happened. Hassan, if asked his opinion, would concur. Pinar, unfortunately, was beneath the hole when the first Nehkhepera workers dropped down. Pinar's scream was cut short with a wet crunching sound as a pair of strong mandibles caved in her skull. Hassan, whose instincts pulled him out of the way with a hair's breadth to spare, cleaved into the beetle-like worker which clung to Pinar's shoulders.

The dog-sized worker caste of the Nehkhepera were much smaller than the warrior morphs the group had faced on the surface to be sure, and a lot closer in appearance to their original ant/beetle progenitors, but their mandibles were large and powerful. Now, to be clear, the workers were not normally aggressive creatures. They normally lived a content existence secreting chemical compounds which in turn melted then solidified sand and rock into functional tunnels and warrens. It wasn't their fault, strictly speaking, that half the people assembled in the rooms were doused in the pheromones of dead warriors giving off a silent command to all Nehkhepera to attack and destroy those coated in it.

Really, if you think about it, the Nehkhepera were the victims here: an endangered species being made even more endangered by the predation of the nasty mercenaries. What a travesty.

The next couple of minutes were pure and wretched chaos. Hassan, thanks to his proximity to the workers' entrance point, was in no position to be able to relight the lantern swiftly. Sertor laid about him with the gladius and stomps of his large armoured feet, crushing and splattering the small scaraboid creatures as they swarmed around him. Apparently, as the largest source of warrior caste aggression pheromones, he was to be the tasty treat for bugs to eat.

[Tagi]

It was probably a good bet that anyone would prefer spiders to having their head crunched into a useless pile of slimy meat. Unless they were into that thing, in which case Tagi would happily see them a few hundred years down the road after they'd gotten a little crunchier.

She'd decided she didn't particularly like scabies. She didn't mind their smell, because they reminded her of old musty things (which were her favorite), but their taste left much to be desired.

Crunch.

They did have a particularly delightful texture to them, though, almost but not quite like breaking open sarcophagi. It was sort of tickly in her hyena mouth, and all in all they weren't that much of a threat.

Not unless you were a blind, stupid human with a high pitched voice and flaily arms. Tagi would have been sure they were trying to make her look bad, but humans on the whole tended to be pretty desperate to cling to the whole life thing -- she didn't think they would die on purpose, but it didn't make her any less resentful. At least it was the squealer who'd died, and not anyone useful. Still, that meant less money.

Eventually, they fell into a rhythm, set to the sound of crunching and heavy breathing. They gained the upper hand, and then, all at once, it was over.

There was a lot of blood.

"Ramon," Tagi said, giving herself a working voice-box and disturbingly ape-like lips, "you're bleeding."

There was no light.

"Who's dead?" Someone said.

Tagi knew by smell. "Pinar."

"Fuck."

"We're close," Giacomo said, voice small.

"To what?"

"The scepter."

"Fuck," Ramon said, "I'm bleeding."

No one ever listened to Tagi.

[Sertor Potens]

The question on everyone's mind, if it weren't 'how badly is Ramon hurt' and 'what do we do about Pinar', might have been 'where is Evren? Is he alright?' And though such camaraderie and timely expressions of concern were lamentably lacking, Evren was indeed quite well. In fact it seems a shame that such a clean-shaven, capable, and level-headed man just happened to be responsible for all of the group's present woes. You can never trust the pretty ones, really.

The Cult of Asari, it has to be said, wasn't particularly numerous in the present day. Kind of a dwindling family affair more than a widespread organisation. Priestly knowledge passed down from parents to children, and so forth, through the generations. Lots of esoteric anecdotes about their ancient rites and ciphers. Not so forthcoming on answers to useful questions like 'where is the bloody sceptre anyway, father?'. Evren, as a practical minded youth, had realised that if generations of librarians and scholarly cultists hadn't found anything worth a damn, they'd obviously been in the wrong business or looking in the wrong places.

So Evren became a merc, signing on with any hare-brained treasure hunters with a reputation for finding things. Eventually he signed on with Haqim and Fariq whose reputation as collectors of antiquities preceded them. Joy of joys, they had an Apthoni academic on staff (Giacomo) who'd found an old reference to the Asari temple, and had hypothesised the likelihood of it being the resting place of said ancient artifact.

Everything had gone according to Evren's ad hoc plans to fulfil his family's ancient purpose. They had made the trip to Abdju. He'd quietly shed his own blood on the sand in the dark of night, drawn the ancient hieroglyphs of Asari's chosen, and whispered the words of summoning and protection.

And so it was that Asari's creations, the Nehkhepera had swarmed from their underground hives in response to the summons, and had somehow avoided killing Evren, thanks to the sympathetic energies emanating from the cult's tattoos on his stomach. That, however, was where everything had fallen to shit. Apparently Fariq and Haqim had hired a handful of truly capable mercenaries in amongst the regular sellswords, and they too had managed not to die. It was really unfair, if you think about it. Ancient destiny, generations in the waiting, and it was at risk because of a walking monstrosity and a hyena bitch? Utterly lacking in justice.

So Evren split from the main group to find the sceptre first, knowing all the ancient ciphers which would let him activate and avoid the traps leading into the Sceptre's resting place. He wasn't quite sure what the traps were, and he didn't want to find out. No, he wanted to make sure he could plan a little welcoming party for the bastards who had turned his neat little plan into an utter fucking mess.

It was, unfortunately enough, Hassan who discovered the traps.

The group had, in the aftermath of the small battle, decided to leave Pinar there. It was, as Ramon put it, '...close enough to a tomb anyway, and I'm not going to carry her, are you?' And in the aftermath of that rhetorical question they moved out. Hassan volunteered to take the lead, mostly because he didn't want anyone to see the expression on his grief-stricken face. He'd really hoped to ask Pinar to come visit his tribe after they were done.

That was why Hassan didn't really have his mind on the job when a section of rock beneath his foot sank with a click and a blade of spectral energy neatly severed his head. At least he had something in common with Pinar now, not that it would be of much help.

Suddenly, Ramon's bleeding didn't seem as much of a problem to the group. The beleaguered, not-bleeding-as-badly-as-Hassan, merc summed up his thoughts with a concise "Fuck."