[h3]Jaelnec, Freagon, Irah, Lhirin, Nabi, Yanin, Jordan and Madara – Forest north of Borstown, Bandit Farm[/h3]
“Yeh, seems things are... [I]mostly[/I] under control,” replied Vela's voice to Madara's suggestion to relocate, though her tone suggested that she was far from at ease just yet. Just as nimbly as she had bounded from the ground into the tree, the elderly penin simply dropped straight back down again, landing on her feet with an audible thud, bending her knees to absorb the impact.
A small grunt escaped her as she moved her crossbow – string still drawn and a bolt still loaded – to her left hand while her right one went down to rub the outside of her knee. A couple of seconds later she straightened back up, stretched and twisted her back and rolled her shoulders, before finally resuming a proper grip on her weapon and moving to follow Madara.

Over by the farmhouse itself Freagon stepped aside to allow Lhirin to enter, all while staring at Irah with his usual blank expression while listening to her explanation, all while internally bemoaning once again how much this woman talked. Once she finished speaking by calling the bandits “cowards,” the old knight simply shrugged and turned away, offering no opinion on what she had just said. Truly, the only way he could care less about what happened to these ruffians was if he had never met them at all; as long as they were rendered harmless somehow, be that through magical means, by binding them with rope, by disabling all their limbs or just by slitting their throats meant nothing to him. He also did not react at all to his own experience of being trapped by the power of a swaigh.

When Yanin asked about the falchion-wielding bandit from his wounded prisoner.
“Wha-... urgh...” The bandit groaned, squirming in place to turn and see who his captor was talking about. Upon laying eyes on the all but certainly dead bandage-clad brute, the man's eyes instantly widened in shock. “K-, f-, ugh, [I]shit[/I]! You're damn right he's important, he's our commander!”

As she approached along with Madara, Vela heard Yanin's deliberations regarding what to do with the surviving bandits. “Restrain them if you think it's safe, kill them if you can't,” she instructed them, the coldness in her voice tinged with a hint of worry as her eyes scanned the battlefield, looking for – but not yet spotting – Bren. “I wanna know if these [abbr=Mountainspeak insult translating essentially to “pieces of shit”]g'vassin[/abbr] have friends I need to worry about. [I]Then[/I] I'll decide whether we'll hang them from the tree after we've gotten these poor people out of it.”
Sure enough, now that things had calmed down and there was time to take in their surroundings, any of them might notice the sizable  oak in the middle of the farm, almost equidistant to the farmstead, the barn and the tool shed Caleb was still hiding in. It was quite noticeable on its own, standing nearly nine meters tall and boasting a broad and thick canopy, enough so that one might not even notice anything unusual about it at a glance. It took a closer look to notice the motionless bodies hanging in there, with the leaves mostly obscuring most of them.

Inside the farmstead, Lhirin would make the same observations as Freagon had previously while additionally confirming that there were no traces of magical wards. He took the time to move slowly, scanning the space meticulously as he did and making abundantly to identify any threats that might reveal themselves, but it seemed as though the danger had passed... at least until the catatonic bandits managed to escape the mental prisons the Angel of Fear had put them in.
The chest, likewise, seemed entirely mundane and quite safe to interact with. Even the most superficial examination would reveal that it not only did not have a keyhole for a built-in locking mechanism, but did not even have a hasp and staple to attach a padlock to. It seemed to serve simply as a container, and not theft-prevention. It also seemed rather old, worn and relatively cheap.
Opening the chest would reveal no mechanisms more nefarious than hinges that were in severe need of maintenance. As the interior was revealed, the immediately most obvious thing he would find, laying on top of everything and mostly obscuring the rest of its contents, was a large cuirass of plate armor that looked rather scratched and dented in a way that clearly suggested that it had seen battle before. With his keen eye and intimate knowledge of metallurgy, Lhirin would be able to tell that it was fairly well-cared for but far from the most impressive piece of craftsmanship he had seen. Its steel was not hardened nor tempered, and looked like it had fairly average carbon-content.
Past the cuirass he would notice it what appeared to be a bundle of scarlet cloth.