Sympathetic nodding. "Yeah. Going back into the room with the necromancer in it is a lot less scary knowing you will do it if necessary, though. Appreciate that about you even though I really hope you do not have to." 

"Well, I'm glad I could give you that, at least." Jojo rubs the back of his neck. "My divine powers have been coming in... atypically. I'm pretty sure I won't get to be immune to fear. So I guess I'd better be brave on my own."

Immune to -

Hob stares at Jojo for several seconds, recontextualizing that thing Jojo said about paladins and fear with respect to Aribeth a while back. 

"....huh. Well, you do seem very qualified to do that. Do you think you're going to end up with something else similar? Immunity to... anger... or something?" 

"If I did, I think it would've happened by now. My spells came in, and they're supposed to come after. So... whatever it is, it's something I didn't notice."

"That'll happen. In retrospect I'm almost certain I had my thing for like twenty-six years before I realized." 

Jojo smiles a little slyly. "Some people do go twenty-six years without dying even once."

"Only rarely, in your line of work," the Reaper points out.

Delighted cackle. 

He is a little tempted to counter that his record is probably at least, like, sixty, but he's not actually sure he didn't sleep off at least one counterfactual death by liver poisoning somewhere in the early 1600s and anyway he is still at least mostly succeeding at not outright admitting to anyone here that he is not a number of years old it is physically possible for a human to be, even if the people who can see through his soul have probably figured it out. 

"Thrice in two days really is way worse than usual, I swear. The problem is there's all these evil wizards, see."

Speaking of which! How inconveniently unexploded is the necromancer who last saw them subjectively zero seconds ago? 

As it happens, she's pretty badly off. One side of her has withered unpleasantly, leaving her in a sort of Two-Face situation.

She's still got that shiny scimitar, though, and she starts casting something while Jojo flees at lightning speed.

Okay, take #4021 or some shit, live, no take-backs this time. 

Hob's mental picture of her exact location relative to him has drifted in memory over time but not by that far. He was in melee range before and he's in melee range now and he promised Jojo he'd run if it seems like a lost cause after he first does his best to be an attention-getting threat for at least the duration of her trying to cast one spell. "Whatever that is, stop it," he snarls, swinging as hard as he can. 

Gulnan hisses in a decidedly unhappy way, and the glow around her hands flickers out as she tries to regain her footing!

It's tempting to try again to tackle her but that's actually stupid, it will make it way harder to run if further bullshit occurs and what is the point of having a reach weapon if you don't use it to outrange an enemy with a scimitar. He'll just continue to try to murder her. It's fair play, she murdered him first. 

This can be accomplished with perhaps a surprisingly small amount of fuss.

Gulnan screams when she dies, a hair-raising noise made worse by the gurgling of blood in her throat. Then, once the echoes fade, it's all very quiet.

And she is definitely actually dead and not just waiting for him to relax, right, he's checking. This involves pulling out his dagger just in case and then checking for a pulse where you'd find one on a human, and then consulting his rusty and limited knowledge of snake anatomy, turning up 'hearts located somewhat further south of head compared to mammals due to Swallow Whole behavior?' and prodding somewhat dubiously along her ribcage for signs of additional nonsense. 

While he's doing that-- where's Jojo? Is he okay? 

Jojo stopped sprinting in the opposite direction when Gulnan screamed, that being if not an unambiguous signal of victory then certainly a strong one. He arrives in the central chamber a few standard combat moments later, and immediately checks for his own part whether Hob is alive and well.

He is alive and increasingly also well as he breathes off the adrenaline and determines that nothing else is actively aflame. "D'you remember what exactly Aribeth needs off her? Blood, scales, bone?" Can he just take off a couple of fingers or are they doing a messy dissection. 

"Blood," Jojo says.

Gently, he closes her eyes. Then, he produces a glass phial for Hob to work with.

Welp.  

He wouldn't have any difficulty doing avoiding getting covered in blood if this was, say, a deer (that being a critical component of not getting hanged for poaching), and he knows where humans have arteries (that being a critical component of keeping your friend who just got shot from bleeding out), but he's not sure whether those things will combine usefully in this situation. He'll do his best, he guesses.  

How dramatically inhuman is Gulnan's circulatory system? She does have blood, which at least puts a ceiling on it, right. 

She seems to have her arteries and veins in the same general places as a human, and the significantly reduced blood pressure from being dead helps reduce the spray. The blood is gathered in short order. (It's maybe slightly darker than human? Could be the light.)

Good good. Okay. Pocket the vial. "Should we burn the body to make sure she doesn't turn into a ghoul or something, or is that only a problem if there is a live necromancer to hand?" 

Jojo hesitates for a moment, but just a moment. "I think it's a good idea to burn her, yes. Won't stop her from leaving a ghost, but that's pretty rare for non-kith anyway."

He removes another phial from his pack and douses the body with a substance that seems to act on the same principle as napalm, then stands over the resulting fire, rolling beads through his hands with his head bowed in prayer.

Yeah, all right. He doesn't regret killing her but you don't have to, to hope someone has a better next life than this one. 

This might be the first time Jojo's seen Hob's rosary, which he's been wearing under his shirt. The shape of the thing is different, for a different god-- different counts of beads between markers, an unfamiliar upside-down T symbol trailing off the end-- but they are, recognizably, prayer beads.  

(... si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, quis sustinebit...) 

Okay. Now nothing is actively aflame nor in need of being so. Time to search the room for signs of additional bullshit that should be handed over to the wizard exorcism team or whatever, anything that might be useful or can be turned into money to exchange for something useful, et cetera, and then head back Aribethwards, yes? 

There are, indeed, some scattered treasures: a golden flask full of luminescent clear liquid, a few vials on Gulnan's person which fluoresce under Hob's lenses, and of course the witch's scimitar, a touch brighter in its magic than Hob's polearm. He can also find a journal of vaguely Brahmic-looking scratchings, and the chunks of shattered onyx if he feels like cleaning those up.

Excellent. Potions into pockets and/or Jojo's bag ("D'you recognize any of these?"), journal very carefully wrapped in a torn bit off the edge of Gulnan's robe and pocketed ("I can't read this but I bet Eltoora can, and she seems the type to feel she's being done a favor rather than asked one if I hand it to her..."), sword experimentally swung around to get a feel for it ("nnnot for me but quartermaster'll find a use for it, yeah?"). 

He squints around at the onyx crystals. 

"...so normally I would not figure it's worth picking all that up, onyx isn't all that valuable, but apparently my existing knowledge of the relative value of shiny rocks is not reliable on the planet of the magic rocks?" 

"I think they're mostly for healing," Jojo says of the potions, and "yes, the quartermaster will probably be quite pleased" of the blade, and a genteel wince at the onyx. "Onyx is valuable almost exclusively for necromancers. It might be worth getting the larger pieces so they can be ground to uselessness, I'll do my best to get those."