[center][h2][color=F0E68C]Asteria[/color][/h2][/center][hr][hr]
Asteria steadily dug alongside Ed, only speaking after his reply to her proposition of finding or making another exit. [color=F0E68C] “Oh, I didn’t mean so I could flee and leave the other people to the goblins. I simply thought having an extra exit only we, the humans that is, know about could prove to be helpful. Though making one would be quite the task and I don’t know if we’d manage to conceal it sufficiently…”[/color] she trailed off, considering the idea some more, continuing to shovel the earth and rocks from their position, making a hole for the mana crystals and eventually widening and deepening it into a trench.

Sometime during her work, Asteria suddenly received a system notification about gaining a new skill and she would have happily celebrated if she weren’t also getting tired. Gaining dexterity in her paws was quite the advancement, but at the first level, the skill wasn’t yet quite capable of everything she’d like to do. But it did open new possibilities, most importantly the ability to manipulate small tools. Asteria believed she might be able to make a more competent attempt at crafting a bone tool now. What was more, this skill helped in her current task; any small stones she came upon were now much easier to dislodge, pick up, and remove for her.
 
As she continued working, she realized she was becoming hungrier. First it was a vague feeling of wanting to eat but it soon became a painful clenching of her stomach, a loud grumbling from both herself and Mother making itself known. She was just considering suggesting a break, when three incoming poison spheres entered her line of sight. Asteria dashed to the side and outside the trench, landing to one side of the group, now flanking it. Although her dodge was fast, she had not noticed the lizards before she did their attack and so one of the poison globs caught the last third of her tail, harming it.
 
Before attacking the lizards, she hissed at them furiously, swinging her tail through the earth from one side to the other to wipe off the poison. Then she simply charged at the nearest lizard, being close enough that she worried about its teeth more than about its ranged attack. She used her speed advantage to quickly close the small distance between them, lifted herself very briefly on her hind-limbs then slammed down into the lizard, her left fore-paw landing on the top of its head and her right on its back. Asteria put all of her weight into the tentative hold, gripping tightly with her paws, then proceeded to try and bite several chunks out of the struggling mass beneath her. If all went well, she would quickly dispatch the first lizard and move onto the next. There was, of course, the danger of being attacked by another lizard right now, but she could only depend on her allies to distract the other two.