Between the two of them, the reinforcements don't last long. Soon enough they stand, surrounded by death but still blessedly alive, and Jojo can finally let out a shaky breath of his own.

"...sorry," he says. "For..."

He doesn't seem to know what.

There's a brief pause, once they stop moving, while all the delayed thoughts catch up. 

Then Hob makes a sort of wheezing unsteady noise, holds up a shaking wait a sec finger, sits down abruptly in the muck, and puts his head between his knees. 

(he's wet and bleeding and cold and he can taste muddy water and there's silt in his eyes and he can't breathe he can't breathe he can't--) 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

okay. 

It's fine. He's fine. He can handle anything he can survive, and he can survive anything. 

"---you're sorry?" he repeats, blankly, some thirty seconds later, voice a little hoarse but more or less steady. "For what, getting ambushed by dead bullshit?" he waves vaguely around them at the pile of dead bullshit. 

"Well – for – you had to come get me," Jojo says miserably. "It wouldn't be a problem if I had been clever about it, those ghouls were barely even hiding."

"...okay, that's fair, I would be mad at myself in your position too, but..." 

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"...but I can't dwell on it. Not when there's evil to defeat."

He puts on a somewhat comically heroic look, and extends a hand to help Hob to his feet.

He is supposed to be saying something wise and professorial and reassuring right now about the difficult yet critical virtue of relying on other people, what is even the point of friends if it isn't to help each other with things, etc., but his ability to do this seems to be on vacation. Well. He'll have to do his own dwelling on that later, too-- Jojo's right. Evil to defeat. 

... carefully slow calibration of accepting the hand up such that if he starts to topple the tiny mouse onto the floor, due to having probably three or four times as much mass, he can immediately stop? 

Jojo is remarkably strong for his size, and has an excellent lifting stance. He does not topple.

Huh. 

Then he'll quite efficiently be upright and also impressed. 

Time to... venture further into the ominous underground grotto, hoping that four eyes is better than two at detecting impending ambush. 

The passage evens out as they travel, and picks up signs of stonework. Eventually they're walking through a flagstone-paved, level tunnel, which gradually transforms into an ossuary. Bones are mortared together in the walls, and skeletal murals blossom at every turn. And there are many turns, which Gulnan seems to have taken as randomly as she could – but the trail is fresh, and getting fresher.

Ah, just like Paris. <3

(as a native Londoner, Hob is legally obliged to hate Paris, but he's at peace with being roughly as heretical about that as he is about Catholicism.) 

Sneak sneak. Any signs of any other magic about, as they walk?

There's a faint but deepening haze of necromantically green light pollution as they advance!

Hob is admittedly really starting to see why people might be inclined to stereotype negative energy as Generally Not Good News. 

Wait, is necromancy the same thing as negative energy. He has the distinct sensation of a situation where subject matter experts are either like 'those are literally identical and I'm really annoyed that we have two different words because it causes arbitrary social bullshit' or they're like 'those are not the same thing at all and people treating them like they're even related drives me up thirty separate walls on a weekly basis' and it's frustratingly impossible to guess which it's going to be without actually asking one. 

Maybe Eltoora will explain. She seemed like a soothingly politically neutral sort of academic. 

Whatever it is it's a sign of zombies, so he'll try to remember how densely green the corpse pile looked right before it erupted and judge the ambient amount against that benchmark.