Over the gray skies, the Silver Moon recruits got to work. With a prayer, Gwyn brought healing light upon Muu’s face, the Blade Dancer’s flesh seeming to dissolve and then smooth over. Despite the horrific pain and the loss of her vision, the damage dealt by the giant toad’s poison had been largely superficial. Terribly, painfully superficial, but still superficial. Soon enough, Muu was able to open her eyes once more, her previous trials appearing as if it was nothing more than a bad dream.

But like all bad dreams, the phantom agony lingered.

Ash, on the other hand, as the highest performing member of the original trio, further proved her usefulness. First the tracking, then landing an actual arrow, and now being given the masked warrior’s trust in appraising the value of the corpse. She was certainly moving up in the world, even if her importance was still largely based off her out-of-combat skills. The sheer mass of the toad meant that skinning it entirely would be an insufferably exhausting task, but that sheer size also meant that, if Ash chose to, she could certainly get large portions of leg meat from the toad. That was practically chicken if she butchered it carefully. The question of weight was always worth consideration though. The eyeball was heavy enough, and stank to high heavens. Unless the party was stopping right beside the toad’s corpse to eat a midday meal, was it really going to be worth it, lugging around more meat around with her? It wasn’t like there was a convenient stream nearby for her to clean the kill with either.

Those were just hunter things though, nothing for Matteo to consider.

The toad being covered in thick dirt was a blessing in disguise. Getting the poisonous slime off its skin would have been immensely dangerous with just the thin sleeves of his robes as protection, but with dirt caking it, prospects became much easier. All he had to do was clump up the dirt that laid right over the toad’s skin and then awkwardly force it through the narrow bottleneck…but Matteo liked to live dangerously. He was a gambling man, after all, and the safety of toxin-infused dirt paled in comparison to the greater reward of pure toad toxin. Standing over the toad’s split face, with brains and organs and blood and fat and bone all mixing together like a gory ice cream cake, the thief did the best he could with his sleeves and with his bottle, trying to extract what fluids he could. But blood got in. Mucus got in. Grisly fat and meat got in. Everything got in, alongside the slimy, translucent fluid that had been upon the toad’s skin.

He got something, at least. Collecting slime, it turns out, was much less dangerous compared to mixing poison. For his reckless behavior, all Matteo got were strange rashes upon the palm of his hands, as well as sleeves that had been contaminated to the point that they were in desperate need of soap and water.