IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4

When Ulfric found that the slab would not budge, he tried forcing it with mana, and while he did succeed in making my beetles skid backward a few inches, he failed to really move the door aside, and gave up when his fingers gouged out a piece of the slab.

I had multiple samples of the equipment I needed to pull off this trick sitting in the bug chutes at strategic points, and could assemble it in under a minute if I needed to.

“Okay, fine,” he chuckled with a shake of his head. “You win this round.”

“Maybe you can just bust through with your axe?” Karjn suggested.

“I can give it a shot,” he grunted, taking his axe off his back––how was that thing sticking there?––then took a deep breath, raised his axe and––

“HAAAH!”

…chopped it straight down from overhead. The axe head nicked my ceiling, then burrowed itself halfway through into the slab… and stopped.

“This thing is tough,” Ulfric noted admiringly while pulling his axe back like a lumberjack cutting a log. Little bits of white web clung to it, and some strands of the internal mesh even bounced back to their original position, completely unharmed by the weapon’s edge. He raised an eyebrow.

The bees on the other side of the slab immediately started pouring wax into the hole. Within seconds, it was patched up, although the new material would take some time to fully harden, and was notably not covered in dirt.

He chuckled. “Looks like she really doesn’t want us going down that way.”