[h2]Marxello Catchanale[/h2]
Of course they didn't eat plants. Why on Earth would they? Still, he'd received a name out of the exchange: Joshua Caldeyron. Mark made a mental note to ask Bart about that man later on.

Not that it mattered so much, because it turned out the ingredients were being used for wine. No, no, not some actual alchemical potion, but wine in some form or another. Knowing this man's bizarre nature, it was probably going to be some form of... demonic wine, perhaps. And blast the fact that it wasn't so easy to tell with plants like that- at best, he might be able to... maybe purify the wine with his sword once it was made, if he had access to it?

'...they'd best be human prostitutes,' was all Mark said on the matter, not bothering to try and make himself heard over Ian's own voice. '[i]Uncorrupted[/i] humans, mind.' He had no opinions on the matter of whether whoring oneself out was moral or not himself, beyond the fact that if a monster was mistaken for human within such a context, it could very easily lead to a nation's corruption into a demon realm, suggesting that thorough checks were required regardless.

Half an hour later, the warhounds finally moved on, and Ian continued rambling for a moment about how fragile the plants were, and how nice Mark was when in some cases he shouldn't be. If only he knew Mark's opinion about him right now... not bad enough to warrant murder, admittedly, but it was certainly less than positive.

Seconds later, one of the wardogs found him again. Because of course they did. Mark had just enough time to draw his sword and invoke the Ignis within to enhance his strength before the wardog was upon him; though surely very threatening to an ill-equipped man, Mark's armour was more than enough to keep its mouth off of his neck, and his magically-boosted strength more than sufficient to plant both feet into its gut and hurl it away over and beyond Ian.

'I'm doing just fine, thanks,' Mark offered, invoking the Undine in his weapon and snatching the dog out of the air with a tendril of liquid, then heaving it back over his head to slam hard into a tree a few meters away. After that, and since he was already invoking the fire-based spirit in his blade, he figured he might as well draw upon a bit more of its power, and manifested a sort of whip of controlled fire out of the sword's tip. Hot enough to blister any living flesh it touched- and he prepared to lash out at the Varjan wardog if it decided to charge him a second time- but with no real risk of setting anything ablaze. Ah, elemental magic, was there anything it couldn't assist with? Not that he wanted to [i]kill[/i] the creature, naturally, just drive it away, or at least fend it off for long enough to let Ian handle the matter of foraging.