Hog Wild

We were stopped in the middle of the muddy road, the lead guard/tracker of the group had his bow strung up (fun fact you normally don't keep your bow strung unless you're about to be in combat, it breaks the bow and string otherwise, I didn't know its not like Lorissia went over that fact with me or anything). It was raining and dark, so visibility was just about a couple feet from the road, but the tracker smelled something he didn't like and so we sat, the mud getting nastier every second we waited. I hate waiting as I've mentioned many times, so I crouched my way up to the guard, a man named Duz.

"What is it bandits?" It was my first guess, I mean what else could have us all crouching in ankle deep mud while rain soaked the rest.

"No, at least I don't think so, something smells off and I can't quite place it." I bit back my reply, we all smelled off, we'd been traveling for three days in the rain and the mud and probably half the valley could smell how terrible we were.  I was about to go back to my position on the caravan when I saw something move to my right, what I was about to say got caught in my throat as the creature lunged from the shadows and attempted to impale me.  If not for Duz being a strangely observant it might have got me, as it was I sidestepped and brought my sword through the hogs body cleanly, the force of its charge impaled itself on the blade, unfortunately it also took my sword with it as it crashed off to die feet behind me in the mud.

"HOGS!" Duz called out for the rest of the group and there looked to be five or six more of the bastards.  I had no idea how you usually dealt with a bunch of murderous charging beasts, but I knew how I planned on doing it. I was in the middle of a rainstorm which hindered my powers a bit (damn water from the sky), but the hogs were large enough targets and it had been a while since I last used any fire so I was a little charged up as it were.  I lashed out with a fire wave that scorched the crap out of our hog attackers, and the surrounding vegetation (thankfully the water quickly put out any small fires that sprung up).

"Who wants bacon?" I smirked and the rest of the caravan laughed a little bit, even Duz clapped me on the shoulder and told me good work. It was good feeling useful for a change instead of maligned for my tendency to make a bad situation worse (totally not my fault as always).  Unfortunately we couldn't eat the hogs, something about a worm or disease they had, so we just had to deal with the smell as we continued on (damn things stunk even when burned up, you think they'd smell nice, you'd be wrong).

The merchants were in high spirits, we were making good time to Zorn, we hadn't really run into any problems and aside from the weather things were going pretty good. Of course that meant something horrible was waiting for us just outside of Zorn, but that is a tale for next time little journal, too much adventure and you start to get all clingy.