No one spoke.
Until a sudden boisterous laugh shattered the silence.
"Bwahaha!"
All eyes turned as Girem, still half-drunk and sitting on a crate with his herb cigar and bottle in hand, slapped his knee.
"Ye all messed with the wrong lad here!" he cackled, his thick dwarven accent booming across the rest stop. "He survived alone in a damn poison swamp—for a flower! Not just any flower, but Chusi!
The guards blinked.
The adventurers looked at each other.
Girem kept going, eyes wide with amusement.
"Aye, and he even slipped right into one o' them poison pools—the kind that melts mithril—and he crawled back out alive… butt-naked!! Bwahahaha!"
Hazuki stopped mid-bite.
"Oi, don't tell that part."
"Naked as the day he was born!" Girem roared. "Came walkin' back like it was a morning bath!!"
One of the adventurers paled. "Wait, what…? Poison pool that melts mithril… and he lived?"
He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye, then added—without missing a beat:
