Yanor doesn't want to waste uses of his produce flame. He will wait for opponents that matter.

Julen plunges his sword through the archer's heart. They wake up for a brief moment and then die.

Tomas executes the remaining giant frogs.

Nothing else emerges from the village.

Tomas breathes heavily. "Yanor, can you—"

Yanor walks over and taps him on the shoulder. His most dire wounds close.

Wand out! Tap. "That should suffice for anything we happen across. One more charge if we wish to fight the hydra, to ensure you are near full health."

Tomas heals some more from the wand. "I'm not sure if we should fight the hydra today. You wanted to scout it first?"

"I want to scout it. If it has five or six heads—" He's still resistant. Which is reasonable, but she is increasingly convinced the humans in this party would do better giving her input and letting her make the decisions. Being shown to be correct about this being a low-risk fight to have helps get them in the habit of just listening to her when she makes a decision, and that's starting to look like the right habit for everyone.

"Tomas, your caution makes sense alone. As one person, a single unlucky moment can leave you bleeding on the floor. To survive alone as an adventurer means never taking those risks. But remember, we are four. We can recover from a single bad moment. Prepared, we can defeat an entire village. We are more than each of us alone. Together, we can do impossible things. Together, we can do the merely difficult with ease. If we are prepared for its breath, if I blind it at first, if we begin Invisible, this is our fight.

"A fire-breathing hydra is a mighty foe. If it comes upon us at a bad time, its breaths can leave one of us dead before we can hope to respond. This will not be that. If we prepare, its breath will be useless. If it is blinded, its bites will be wild and inaccurate. And with it disabled, unable to defend itself, it will not last. Beneath your rapier, Jonas's blades, and our spells, a hydra will fall, and fall rapidly.

"Unchecked, it may be a threat. If we prepare, if we know the fight is coming, it is a momentary impediment. And the wealth which has let the boggards and the troglodytes purchase their weapons, their belt and cloak, has come from something here, and my guess is shipwrecks. Hydras have some taste for shiny objects. If nothing else, that wealth is nearly certain, and we would be fools to pass it up."

Some of the stories of cooperation are harder to use, but the theme is pretty obvious. She could do better with time. In the space of a minute, waiting for the Infernal Healing to finish while she focuses on Detecting anything on the corpses? This will have to do.

He sighs. "You're right. However, invisibility might not help much. Hydras have an excellent sense of smell."

The ranger and the chieftain both have magic weapons. One of them is a longbow. The other is a massive hammer.

Nod. "We can go over this later. Right now, we need to escape before the Entangle drops. We have three minutes or so, maybe two and a half. The archer's bow is magic, and so is the other one's hammer. I see nothing else on them under a Detect."

The party grab the magic weapons and run away! It's not long before the boggard village fades into the marsh. It's not obvious if anyone is following them.

They stop a few thousand feet northeast. The hydra cave is within a few minutes walk from here.

"So, scouting. I have Invisibility, and if the cavern is the size of the troglodytes' we could simply stay too distant to scent. That works until we encounter it around a corner, and it has already smelled us coming. All we need is a good look at it, and it does hunt. We could kill something and leave the corpse outside its cave, and wait for it to emerge. If we had a wizard, Clairvoyance can observe at little risk, but I do not know it to be god-granted. Yanor, if you have it available, that would work, if expensively. Other options? I know a second-circle spell can block sound, is there any similar way to block scent available to us? Does anyone have a dose of that scent blocker I saw at an alchemist's back in town? I'm sure I have overlooked something."

"I can prepare clairvoyance. I only have two third circle spells per day, and one of them is always sylvan hideaway, but I think it would work. I don't have any spells or alchemical items that negate scent."

"The other spell I think necessary is Resist Energy, but it is second circle. Can you cast the Communal version? That would be a more useful third."

"I can do communal resist energy but not on the same day as clairvoyance. Do we care more about scouting the place or killing the hydra today?"

"I would rather be quick and have all our resources available to enter the tower tomorrow, so better to save it for the Communal Resist and be capable of the fight today. Tribute, then? Kill a beast, lay it out, set a Ghost Sound on a delay, flee, and hope it comes out and eats the corpse for long enough to give us a good view?"

"Sounds good to me. It will take fifteen minutes to prepare the spell."

"Better to give it some time after eating anyway. Some beasts rest after a meal, and if it is one we should take advantage. Julen, apologies for imposing on you once more. Would you catch us something within hydra edibility? —ah, Tomas, you should check the bow, I expect it's simply magic but I didn't get a good enough look to be certain. Perhaps it will prove helpful here."

She's confident the hammer-thing the other boggard used is nothing but magic, but nobody had a use for it. And it is heavy. They should probably find somewhere to bury it before going in, it will only slow them down.

Tomas looks over the bow. "It's a magic composite longbow. Well-made and of human origin."

Julen leaves in search of game.

Yanor enters his usual meditation for preparing spells. 

She roams around searching for a good position to see the cave's mouth from, and eventually unfolds her Anytool into a telescope again. They need to be far enough out that the hydra won't see them — that shouldn't be hard, but distance helps.

A wide cave entrance yawns at the base of a stony outcropping overlooking a wide bog. The cave is nearly forty feet wide and twenty feet high, and slopes up into darkness. A wide assortment of bones lies scattered about in front of the cave itself, and here and there something shiny glitters among the bones.