>Status check.
>You are tired, battered, wet, chilled, and thoroughly miserable. Your head still pounds from its encounter with the falling rock and you feel bruised in multiple other places from the same episode. Or maybe some of that was from being hurled against the cave wall earlier? Or maybe the multiple shoals you've scraped against as you raced down the river blind... The cuts and scrapes and bruises all sort of blend together now.
>You left shoulder and right hand seem to be largely recovered from their envenomations, though they still have some residual stiffness and numbness respectively. The former bite is still tender, though the latter was too minute to be very painful even when it happened. The venom, on the other hand... You repress that very unpleasant memory for the moment.
>You have a moderately sized burn on your right arm, its sharp stinging reduced to a dull effusive throb by now. Perhaps the cold water may have been good for something, at least.
>You can feel bits of webbing and the remains of tethers stuck to you all over the place, though none in positions that notably restrain your movement at the moment.
>The bandages around your acid burn from earlier today feel rather looser than when they were applied, but are still holding. The wound itself is but a minor discomfort among all the other pains; you expect no small part of this is due to Minoriko's care.
>You feel deeply chilled from being in the cold water for so long, though you're managing not to shiver
too vigorously so far; maybe it's the adrenaline? On top of this, your muscles feel weary from the day's continuous exertion. Given the circumstances, you're sure you can keep pushing yourself for a while, if you have to, but you're definitely well past peak condition.
>Get on dry land, and light that torch if possible before she catches up to us. If not, then by all means, continue hiding in the river.
>You quickly retrieve the torch and striking stone from your pack, doing your best not to drip all over things. Then you tear off a couple small bits of paper from the packing around your rations to use for tinder and set to getting some light on the situation at long last.
>Striking sparks from your knife comes easily enough. As ever, the difficult part is coaxing those sparks into a sustaining flame, but you use the sound of the approaching youkai as motivation to work quickly and on the 6th or 7th attempt, the fire catches. The consuming darkness retreats from your surroundings as the flame of the torch grows brighter and bolder. It feels like long, painful ages, but you can see again!
>As you had suspected from the acoustics, you are in a very large chamber, stretching beyond sight in several directions. The river, wide and relatively slow at this point, cuts through the middle of it, meandering its way around to the northwest where it continues on into the dark. There are large flat banks on both sides of the river, though you can see the opposite one only faintly from this distance. The terrain on your side is fairly featureless and nondescript; there are scattered protuberances along the ground, though no spectacular geological formations. It extends further east than you can see, though you can dimly spot the cavern walls swooping in towards the river in the distance to the north, ending the shoreline decisively. To the southwest, the river issues forcefully through a narrow break in the cavern wall. And, almost faintly enough to miss, so does a certain brown-garbed figure, quickly disappearing upward among the stalactites lining the ceiling.
