"Nah, just do it. Once you accept something as your best option the exact details don't really matter to me."

"...all right, suit yourself."

Being made into a Follower involves, for some reason, levitating into the air and experiencing cosmic bliss, and then descending to the ground again with clothes newly dyed red and a brain newly dyed Lamb. Orienting to her is instinctive; her mood and opinions carry more weight than they should; she is Obviously Good And Important, and there is a draw to the idea of doing what she says that's like the draw to sleep when tired or eat when hungry.

He sneezes again.

"...Christ, that was a whole acid trip crammed into five seconds. Oof. Yeah, still not regretting this compared to the monsters. What do, boss?"

"First thing, I think, we gather materials to build you a bed. I don't need one when it's just me, but I want you to have somewhere comfortable to sleep. It should be safe enough as long as we stick close to each other so I can protect you if a monster shows up, but if you'd rather stay home, I can gather materials myself and then you can help build it when I get back—I'll show you how."

"-I'd be more comfortable going out there with some kind of armor or weapon but if I stick close 's prolly fine."

"I'll see about getting you armor and weapons after you have somewhere to sleep."

"So I'll stick close to you if we go gathering until that happens."

He's happy to carry stuff, for all that helps. It's not really much help compared to the crown's efforts.

Mostly she wants him along so she can explain what she's gathering and how and why. She is done doing things for people that they are helpless to try for themselves unless the things are literal magic they literally can't do. He won't be an expert in wilderness survival or anything by the time they get back, not on such short acquaintance, but he'll be starting to get the basic idea.

Then she cheats at bed construction with magic anyway, because she'd rather he have a pretty good bed he can't make for himself than a pretty bad bed that he can. She can always teach him to make the pretty bad bed later.

"If you don't want to be bothered building furniture, there might be intact stuff in some of the buildings. If it's not all... Monstery or rotten through with age."

"I think most of it is probably too rotten or monstery to be worth much except as raw materials, if that, but I can check."

This is approximately when the monster that was watching them earlier shrieks extremely loudly off in the distance, sending a herd of large, clammy cows stampeding in panic through the ruined streets in their general direction.

This is the Lamb's grumpy face!

She can kill as many cows as it takes to keep them off her Follower. If things start looking dicey she'll pocket him until the ruckus dies down.

Her Follower would rather run away back to the cabin, and starts to do that!

The cows are a stubborn mass that pushes forward like a solid wall of muscle. Even as she cuts twenty down, twenty more behind them threaten to trample her.

Yes, of course he is running away, the point at which she pockets him will be the point at which it starts looking like running away is not enough—which it does very shortly; if she's this occupied just slowing down the cows, she won't be able to protect him from the next thing. So she dashes to catch up with him, says "hold on, I'll get you to safety," and her crown extracts him from reality into its otherworldly pocket where time does not pass.

There. Now she can focus on making a fighting retreat back to the cabin.

Swarm of crows! Flying feathers and noise assails and distracts her!

That's very irritating of them, but you see, luckily she has this sword. And is pretty difficult to distract.

........So does that mean the long, snakey, sneaky thing slinking along the treeline to attack while she's distracted is not so sneaky?

It'll retreat if it realizes it's spotted. It can be patient.

She doesn't give off any incredibly obvious signs of having noticed a specific sneaky snakey thing snaking sneakily up on her. She just diligently murders whatever crosses her path, without seeming to be put much out of her way about it, and no matter how thunderously the crows may flap their wings she remains steadily capable of killing the ones in swording range and ignoring the rest.

Then it will attempt to slice her in two with a long, razor-sharp tongue, in a lightning-quick strike from well out of range of sword.

It turns out that her swording range was rather longer than she was letting on!

She blurs into motion to dodge, and swipes her sword at the tongue though she's a hair too slow to catch it, and blurs again twice to cross the distance between her and the new threat, the better to sword it with.

Up close, it's plenty as horrible as other things she's fought! An absurdly long body, many times what one would normally expect a sensible body plan to be, that can't seem to decide whether it's scaled, feathered, or leathery, interspersed at regular intervals with short clawed limbs like an infernal millipede, slicing at her if she gets too close. Its head is a face like a bird, but without a beak, instead having a circular maw from which that razor tongue occasionally lashes. It's bulky and tough, thrashing around to try and shake her off or crush her, splintering young trees and damaging older ones as it does so. The tail, too, ends in flexible whip with a dozen sharp tendrils that comes in to attack her from multiple angles when it can.

It is, in short, an awful bastard creature, but it's not that much worse of an awful bastard creature than the ones she's fought before, it's just different. She picks up a few scrapes in the process of learning how it moves and what its tricks are, but she is just as fast as it is and considerably more maneuverable and thoroughly dedicated to the project of cutting it into manageably sized pieces one slash at a time.

When she manages to cut a chunk out of its middle, the two parts both turn and flee towards the river, the front one bleeding vast amounts of gore from its ruined end and the back one quickly growing a new head.

This seems like the sort of enemy you pursue so it doesn't come back to (very literally!) bite you later. She takes off after it.

The front one slows down, bleeds out, and dies during the pursuit. The other one repeats this behavior in a smaller segment along the way, and the front part of that one dies too. But a quarter of an enormous snake monster makes it to the river and dives in without hesitation, swimming downstream in a great splash of ichorous water.