Struggling to move at her full speed while the paralysis was still in effect, Miri slowly approached the scorpider’s corpse in order to check its status. She even took her staff and tried to poke at its body just to be extra certain, doing so in a way similar to how a person would poke at roadkill to see if it’s truly dead. Even though the notification of the experience she'd gained from killing it may be confirmation enough, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Once she’d made sure the creature was truly and definitely dead, she began scrounging around to see if the rune she came looking for in the first place was around here somewhere. From a brief glance, it seemed that there were no items of notable value around the area, though there were a bunch of spider webs lying pretty much everywhere.
Miri suspected that whatever loot was around must have been hidden underneath this thicket of webs. She groaned at the thought of doing more arduous labor of clearing the webs just to get the loot she’s after.
After brushing through layers upon layers of webbing, she finally found some sort of treasure chest underneath. Opening it, she found what appeared to be a large pile of various loot—one of which being a palm-sized runestone with glowing markings that matched the one in the picture on the job notice.
After pocketing that rune, she sifted through the other loot in the chest, picking out the most valuable ones from the rest—some enchanted weapons and armor, some talisman runes, some potions, and a whole bunch of gold. Hell fucking yeah! Now that’s what she’d call a reward! The amount of loot she found here almost made the whole “getting stung by a giant scorpider” thing worth it.
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However, right as she was scavenging around some more, she noticed something sitting at a dim corner of the chamber beside her—a large cocoon made of silk, seemingly large enough to fit a fully grown adult human inside. She suspected that some unlucky adventurer before her had probably tried to go up against the scorpider and ended up dying because of it, instead becoming another meal for the creature. She’d heard that scorpiders tend to preserve their food in these cocoon-like pods so that they could feast on them at a later time.
Deep in the back of Miri’s mind, she wondered if whoever’s corpse resided within that cocoon still had a bit of loot left on them. Shortly after, she thought about the moral implications of blatantly taking loot from a corpse, which was technically considered grave-robbing. While taking valuable loot from corpses may be frowned upon in real-life, it’s practically standard practice in most RPG games. Besides, it’s not like they could ever use it anyway; they’re already dead. Might as well use that loot to benefit the living.
Grabbing one of the daggers that was part of the loot from the treasure chest, she went to cut open the silk cocoon, careful in her cutting of the silk so as to not accidentally damage whatever loot was inside. After cutting it fully open, what she found inside had given her quite a surprise.
It was a young woman, about her age of 25, with a slightly petite build. She had blonde hair tied into a neatly braided bun behind her head, wore white robes that were typical of a cleric, and held a staff with a fist-sized pearl-like orb at one of its ends.
But perhaps the most surprising thing of all was that she was still very much alive, having merely fallen unconscious.
