A Win at the Glow Pools

The Glow Pools fight opened badly enough to feel familiar.

The fake guard hit Ash hard, then stomped him while he was down before turning on Blastbelle. More Graven Scourge muscle pressed in through the narrow entrance, and a gnoll with a bone bow joined the ambush from the back. The party had walked into the route they chose, but the route was already trying to kill them.

For a moment, it looked like the old pattern was holding.

Ash was bleeding on the ground. Jonah was boxed in. Dhaz could barely find clear angles through the cramped terrain. The polluted water made movement miserable. The whole entrance became a knot of bodies, bad footing, and enemies who had arrived ready for violence.

Then the party started pulling the fight back.

Maine cast Aid, dragging Ash, Dhaz, and Jonah away from the edge of disaster by raising both their strength to stay standing and the room they had to survive. His telekinetic force shoved enemies into the water, turning bad terrain into a weapon. Nick answered the ambush with fire, landing brutal blasts that burned through the captain's confidence. Jonah struck back when he could and kept enough pressure on the front line to stop the fight from collapsing inward.

Ash got up.

He had been drunk, dropped, and stomped. None of that stopped him from throwing himself back into the fight. He closed with the captain and helped finish him, turning the same body that had been nearly killed into the force that broke the enemy's center.

Dhaz found the other important piece.

One thug, trying to survive, offered him a vial of Boost in exchange for being allowed to leave. Dhaz took the vial and still cut him on the way out, turning a desperate bribe into evidence. The drug was not rumor anymore. It was in Graven Scourge hands, close enough to the Glow Pools entrance to make the sewer route part of the larger Boost problem.

The gnoll tried to retreat.

The party did not let it carry the ambush away unfinished. Maine blasted. Victor harried it with mockery. Nick fired from range. Jonah used sacred force. Ash burned the last of his momentum to close the distance and kick the gnoll down, ending the fight with brutal certainty.

Blastbelle marked the moment plainly.

The party had said, more than once, that they lost every battle they entered. This time, they had not. They had won in the open, at the entrance to the route they needed, against Graven Scourge opposition that thought it controlled the door.

It was not clean.

Ash needed a healing potion. Everyone had spent resources they would have preferred to save. The sewers were still ahead.

But the Glow Pools entrance was theirs now.

And Boost had a trail.