Moving fast, you kick off towards the wolfbeast while grabbing at your ammo pouch, yanking it to break the strap free of your belt, and swinging the pouch hard at the wolfbeast's face. The movement distracts it from Frederic, and seeing the bag approaching it, it reflexively chomps down on your bag.

You dive to the ground on top of Frederic, who grunts in pain.
Frederic: "WHAT ARE YOU-"
Then everything gets tossed sideways and a moment later becomes very loud.


A ringing fills your ears, erasing any other sound. Your skin feels tight and cool. As you remember the situation, you think to look around. You're on the ground. Frederic is mostly over you, leaning on one arm and blocking anything from above. He glances down at you with his teeth clenched and scowls, then looks back over his shoulder.
Behind him, you see the wolfbeast stagger around, arms alternating between swinging wildly and clutching at its face. You also notice that its face is horrifically damaged, with the lower jaw in tatters and half detached, while the upper has all its fur scorched away and several fangs broken or missing. There's blood pouring from its ruined mouth, and numerous small wounds on its chest leaking more.

You try to push yourself up, but the combination of your body feeling stiff, Frederic being over you, and a sudden burst of dizziness as you move your head more than a couple inches forces you to stop immediately. You call up your basic heal in your mind, aiming it at yourself, and feel relief spread over your body, bit by bit. And then the stiffness of your skin turns to pain, but the slow relief continues bit by bit.

From where you are, you keep an eye on the wolfbeast as it continues to stagger and flail, but also seems to be getting its wits back. After a few more seconds, it turns its face toward you, and you see that despite that damage, its eyes are both locked on to you and Frederic.

Then, a flash of light and a fireball hits the beast. Then a bright line of jagged energy. Then several projectiles, dark or clear. The wolfbeast takes the first few with annoyance, but each one seems to hit harder than the last, the wolfbeast staggering or being forced to defend more and more. Its attention slips entirely over to the left, behind Frederic's body, while the attacks keep going without stop.
Frederic finally sits upright again, letting you go and turning to watch the beast. As he does, you can see a lot of red skin around the side of his back. You also see the wolfbeast crouching low, one leg behind the other, but both digging in like they're readying to push off, while both arms focus on protecting its face.

Testing your head movements again, the dizziness is, well not gone, but abated. You can move.

Healing yourself more won't help much. Your low level spell has done all it can.
Shooting however, is something you can do.

You're dizzy, stiff, and disoriented, but you're also on the ground, not moving, and your target has gone still for a moment. You've trained to hit worse shots than this.
One shot left in your gun. A quick moment to aim, a trigger squeeze, a flash of thunder, and a bloom of red bursts from the wolfbeast's face, right around its eye. You've got a bad angle to hit it dead center in the forehead, but it looks like you scored a hit on the eye itself instead.

Even through the ringing in your ears, you can hear the wolfbeast degenerate into what you can only describe as absolutely ungodly sounds. Howls mixed with gurgles mixed with shrieks of pain and rage. It rolls and thrashes blindly on the ground, any remnants of composure it had after eating an exploding ammo bag gone.
Frederic gets to his feet next to you, picking up his massive sword as he does, and quickly pushes himself from a walk into a dead run towards the beast, before vaulting using his sword, and then swinging it midair to come down hard on the beast's chest. The sword cleaves through again, burying itself into the earth, while the wolfbeast gives one last strangled cry before going still and silent.
Frederic then releases the grip on his sword, and slumps down to his knees next to the beast.

As you let yourself slump down in relief, you see Karina dashing over to Frederic, clutching her staff.
A few seconds later, a shadow looms over you, which reveals itself to be Leon.

Leon: "aah oo oouah"

Ah, your hearing is still messed up.
Oh, but you see Frederic and Karina walking back over to you, with Karina helping Frederic walk. Or, well with the size difference it's more of Karina trying to help and Frederic mostly handling it himself.

You cup your right ear and cast your healing spell again, focusing it on your head and ear. The spell takes the last of your mana, so it seems like 3 healing spells is your limit for now, but you do have a mana stone in your gear that is roughly equal to your current capacity.
For a bit nothing happens, but then the right side grows into sharp clarity very quickly, along with a new ringing in your ear again.
As you cast, Karina cups her hand over your other ear, but even after a minute it stays muffled. You guess that it's too busted for a low grade healing spell to fix.

Karina: "How about now?"

Frederic: "I think we should avoid the island for a bit. You couldn't hear it but after I finished the wolfbeast, something big made a noise from that cave at the center of the island. We should go."
Leon: "Also all the other wolves ran back into the cave when the noise happened. I agree with Fred."

Frederic: "No, but we can carve it on the ship. I'll grab the main body, you three grab any, uh... parts, lying around."

Karina pales slightly.

Karina: "Wait, but, Fred y-you're hurt! You can't be lifting-"
Frederic: "I'm fine. It's my job to get hurt instead of other people. I'm good at it. Don't worry.
Come on, let's collect all we can."

He turns and begins moving toward the wolfbeast's body, still with a slight limp.

While Frederic retrieves the wolfbeast, you look around for any parts that fell off. There are a few scattered teeth, chunks of fur, splatters of red, and miscellaneous chunks of wolf meat laying around. You take the intact teeth, but there isn't much-
Ah. That's the wolfbeast's jaw. It fell all the way off.
Great.
You gingerly take that as well, and join up with the others on your way back to the ship.


The four of you reach the upper rim of the island where the ship is moored, and take a moment to let Frederic recover.

Leon: "Holy-
Guys, the cave. The something big we heard earlier came out."
Karina gives a quiet gasp as you look over.

At the cave entrance, sniffing the air and blinking in the sunlight, is a gargantuan wolf. It is easily larger than your ship, around twice as tall as Frederic is and what must be 25 feet long. You can tell from here that it has a lot of weight on it for a wolf, definitely not the form of the svelt hunter beasts you've fought so far. Despite its weight, it ambles around sniffing the area with impressive grace, making its way towards where you four fought the wolfbeast.

Frederic: "Enough gawking, come on."
You turn back to the ship and the knight is already on board with your quarry.