06/09/5-10

Continuing though the plains and walking towards the forest, the large dinosaur towered over the trees ahead of them. They started riding to intercept while talking about potential plans for attack. About half a mile of riding later, they noticed it turn towards them and change course. Soon after they were face to face with the largest creature they had ever seen. Its run destroyed the ground it went past, leaving glowing fiery steps caused by the heat from its body.

In the fight, it bit and swallowed Milivoj, before killing his horse. Eventually the group killed it, but it managed to almost slay Shiek's pet displacer beast. After slaying it, Milivoj took one of its arms from the elbow down as well as a large incisor. To ensure that their credit isn't taken, Valeyo pinned a note to its corpse telling others that they claim the kill and any pretenders will have their minds searched for the truth. The group prepared to go after the original dinosaurs they were hunting, when they considered going to the place this creature had erupted from first. Sapphira pointed out that this was no burrower so something else must have dug the way up. Soon, the returned to the forest, where there was a 80ft crater with a mound of dirt in the middle. There weren't any other tracks, besides those of the huge creature itself. Cassini moved into the shallow crater to investigate the cause. The damage seemed to have been caused by something akin to a large explosion that fractured the earth, and likely caused the loud bang that had awoken him. Buried in the dirt, he found a piece of dark metal sticking partially out. He pointed it out to Valeyo, who tried to pick it up, but found it stuck. When Milivoj and Dobvorvnik attempted it, they quickly realized that it was much bigger and buried deep.

It was about 4 feet in length a foot wide and an inch thick, curling at it got deeper under the ground. It was bent and thorn, almost as if paper to a bigger creature. The metal was extraordinarily dense compared to other steel. Detect magic revealed that the metal had a weak residual transmutation aura. Valeyo looked at it and wondered if it could be part of the missing hellfire metal that was given to King Dragomir I, by Asmodeus. Nobody knew what hellfire metal looked like, but Shiek searched deep in the memory of the souls within his dagger and found that this was likely a different thing, as hellfire metal always felt hot to the touch, which this did not. He inspected it and determined that whatever bent it. Must have been extremely powerful.

While this was happening, Cassini said that it was possible that the creature he had detected wasn't the dinosaur, but rather whatever caused this. To check, he started casting his Commune with Nature again. Meanwhile, Valeyo suggested that Sapphira use her boots of the Xorn to go underground and check if there was a gap underground in the center of the tunnel. She detected a patch of loose earth in the middle and started digging down deeper. After a few minutes, it became clear that there was a column of this loose dirt that just kept going and going. She made her way back to the surface and shared what she had seen.

Cassini's spell finished, revealing no portals or powerful creatures. With Sapphira's findings, they considered that it was made by a worm, the loose dirt being caused by the churning of earth. Valeyo pointed out that it could have been done by a tactic similar to their own - the dinosaur was polymorphed and put into a metal canister fed to a worm. When the spell ran out, the creature burst out from the canister. They discussed other theories such as the creature being pushed up through the soil by something else, but ultimately decided to teleport the metal back to the Novograd storage room.

Dr Stanov sent Milivoj a message saying "I don’t know where you found this metal, but if you see a fire giant - do no engage."