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..." 

sage_advice.exe is still loading, please wait

"...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. 

The haze never quite rises to that point, though as they approach Gulnan's current location it gets pretty close, accompanied by a cold prickling of the skin.

There's a great domed chamber at the heart of the catacomb-maze, and from it echoes a sibilant chanting. The compass thinks Gulnan's in there. The necromantic fog density agrees.

Jojo looks to Hob anxiously.

Ah. Well that's probably... quite time-sensitive, isn't it. Ominous chanting either won't at any point do anything or should be assumed to be potentially about to do something in the next, like, thirty seconds, and they already know that their quarry is, in fact, magic.  

On the bright side it also makes a noise which can cover up a small amount of whispered planning. "If it's a lot of zombies we're going to have to go straight for kill the spellcaster but... if it's just her, try to get her attention long enough I can... grab her or something?" he suggests.

He does really want to at least try talking to Gulnan before going straight to stabbing if he can potentially avoid it by simply clamping a hand over her face long enough to stop her encanting. If she's, like, a human sized woman not wearing a helmet and doesn't have quite a lot of combat training he should be able to do that, especially if he can catch her by surprise. The attempted murder via horrible wet zombies was not, like, awesome, as a sign of ability to make friends, but who among us has not done some fairly horrible murders in response to being kidnapped to be experimented on for our blood, amirite, he doesn't super know how necromancy works, they might just be intrinsically hostile creatures and not constitute a specific murder attempt. 

"...yeah. See if we can knock her unconscious, maybe."

Jojo leads the way into the chamber, which... contains a large number of skeletons. And, on a raised central altar, a snake-lady weaving necromantic magics over a large black crystal, which spreads its tendrils through the bones in the walls and lashes together yet more skeletal warriors with each passing moment.

Well, shit. 

"Crystal's making the skeletons," Hob reports to Jojo, in case that fact is only visible through the glasses, as he takes off at a run toward Gulnan in hopes of beating her shambling minions into melee range. Jojo outputs bludgeoning damage and is better qualified than Hob for handling everything else in the room, so. 

He's not even trying to do any damage, there's no way he's getting off a sneak attack from this far across an open room. He's just going to try to tackle her off the altar. 

She slashes at him with a scimitar, almost absentmindedly. It's a flash of steel like lightning, and if he isn't careful it'll take his hand off.

Ah fuck it's one of the kinds of wizard that isn't basically just some guy if you stop them casting spells. 

"Hi hello sorry," he says, while he's hurriedly switching to squaring up with a reach weapon and hoping this addresses the fact that she might actually be a better melee combatant than him. (Either she'll turn around and he can try to keep presenting a threat without immediately dying or she won't, because Jojo is also here, and won't be adequately defending against being stabbed real hard.) "Uh, I know the cops were dicks to you but can we talk, I really would prefer nonviolence here--" 

Not that grapple attempts are nonviolent per se by modern standards but, well, by 'the alternative is swords' standards... 

She hisses, predictably. "You think to negotiate? Now, when I have the means to craft an army, when I am poised to crush this miserable warmblooded city once and for all?!"

That's so fair but also yikes. 

"Actually I'm very cold right now--" why are you like this "--sorry, I just got here so I could not really have tried sooner." 

She waves her hands mystically and calls down a pillar of searing flame centered a few feet behind him, positioned to catch him and not her in the blast.