Yeah, no. It's a water laser it can chase him with. 

Well, it's a continuous torrent of water gushing out of its mouth, with enough force to push Elan back a few steps when it connects. And it really hurts, like he's going to have some seriously impressive bruises and possibly a cracked rib. 

Twilly waves his staff and summons the green glowing light of his healing magic.

"I gotcha, Elan!"

And now he's fine. Still soaking wet, but unbruised and ribs uncracked. 

Yay, healing!

"Thanks!"

And now it's time to do the head on the other side.

That one goes about the same, although with one head down they're being pelted with slightly less water. Then it's just the middle head left, rearing back to charge up another big blast of water. 

Can Elan jab his sword into its throat while it's charging up?

Sure! This won't kill it or anything, but it does interrupt the charge-up. It goes back to pelting him with gobbets of water while he tries to hack through its neck. 

Okay so he was hoping that this would make the water laser backfire and explode, but keeping the hydra from using it is the next-best thing. Does it at least seem like the neck-hacking will pay off any time soon?

This neck is thicker than the others, but not otherwise harder to cut through. It only takes a few more turns. Static sizzles, and the head falls.

Both head and neck sink into the river to join the rest of the hydra's corpse. The bridge is clear, although there's now a large hole in the middle that he'll have to edge around. 

Twilly gives Elan one more burst of leaf-green healing for good measure. His magic feels like the smell of freshly-cut grass, and wipes away Elan's aches and bruises. 

"Yay! We did it!" 

"Yay!"

Elan puts his arms out. After-battle hug?

Hug! 

Twilly continues to be extremely soft and fuzzy, and now proves to be a truly excellent hugger on top of that. He won't be the first to pull away. 

Double yay!

When Elan has had his fill, he stands up and looks at the bridge.

"Do you think there's enough pieces to fix the hole before we go?"

"Oh, right! With your Mending spell! ...didn't you already use it a bunch today? And the mana potion didn't work on it?" 

"Yeah, but it's a cantrip, which is the easiest kind of spell to cast. Uh, spells come in levels, and I get a number of each level of spell I can do every day, and that's a spell slot. Some spellcasters have to pick what spells they can cast for the day when they wake up in the morning, but bards can pick what spell we're gonna cast when we cast it. Oh, and I heard that you can use a higher level slot to cast a lower level spell, but I never tried it before today. So if I wanted to do nothing but fix stuff, I could do that with the slots that are for harder spells."

"Oh, okies! Maybes we can try putting some of the pieces of bridge back in place then. But I thinks some of them fell in the water..."

Elan nods.

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking… hey, Sir Pent!"

He turns around.

"Do you think that we'd be able to find enough pieces of the bridge to try and fix it, or would it be better to tell someone in Falconreach about it when we get there? Um, enough pieces is like if the bridge was your grandma's best vase and you got all the pieces to stick together magically, there wouldn't be any big obvious chips or holes."

Sure, Sir Pent will come over and look at the hole in the bridge. As they're standing around looking at it, one of the broken bits that was just dangling by a splinter falls off and splashes into the river. 

"...no, I'm not sure grandma would be too happy with that many pieces missing. Twilly is right, some of them must have fallen in the water! I'll head back to the keep and tell Captain Rolith it needs fixing, he'll make sure it gets done. Good work slaying the hydra!" 

"Thanks! Be careful on the way back, there are some bandits that set a trap by knocking over trees to block the path. We scared them away for a bit, but I don't know where they are now or if they'll come back."

Elan can then be careful to avoid falling into the hole when crossing the bridge.

He does not fall in the hole! Neither does Twilly, who has a much easier time of it, being smaller. 

They cross the bridge and carry on down the main road.

"We's almost there—look, you can see the top of the Guardian Tower over the trees!" If Elan looks where Twilly is pointing, he can see a tower topped with a stone falcon, wings spread wide.

Elan shades his eyes to look.

"Whoa, cool!"

Falconreach, here they come!