ust as the adventurers and Governor Nighthill are rallying the army of villagers and preparing to move out, a murmur starts in the crowd, and some of them start to question their motive: if the goal was to rescue the adventurers who were trapped in the Old Greenest Inn, and they are now here, what exactly is the purpose of this fight? One tall, dark-haired villager calls out from the back, "we can't beat these dragon guys, we shouldn't even fight them", and some of the others murmur that he has a point. As the villager army spills out of the gates, sixteen of them decide not to join the fight, and stay behind. Forty-two head toward the Inn.

They charge in the most direct way, hoping that their show of force will intimidate the cultists, but meanwhile Hooflepoof peels off about half the force and leads them around the back. The other half attacks the mob of cultists and their allies frontally, and when they have drawn all the enemies into the battle, Hooflepoof and his battalion charge in from behind, taking them by surprise. Without this tactic, the adventurers very well may have lost, because the armies turn out to be very well matched; almost every time a cultist or kobold or dragonclaw falls, a villager falls as well. Both armies are down to less than a dozen men when the cultists finally make the call to fall back and flee. The adventurers manage to survive with only minimal damage, but the toll on the village is heavy; thirty-four villagers are killed. The bodies of about forty cultists, kobolds, and dragonclaws lie strewn around the Inn.

The adventurers pick up their cart and ponies, which had been tied up outside the Inn, and go back to the Keep. Leosin is still there, having sat out the fight, feeling like he wasn't well enough to be an asset. He still seems quite fixated on the cave; he's sure there is more there to be found. Karat asks him if he knows of any other ways to get to the cave, and he says no he doesn't, as far as he knows the only entrance is in the camp.

It's very late now, and everybody is tired, so they roll out their sleeping bags and spend the night in the Keep. The cultists don't return.

In the morning, they awaken to the smell of bacon, and Governor Nighthill and Kaspar the innkeeper have made them an awesome breakfast. Nighthill is obviously heavy of heart, having lost so many of his villagers in the battle last night - on top of the ones that they lost just a couple days before. "I'm really afraid, with their camp so close, that the attacks will never stop," he says. That's why I supported you last night, I was hoping with your help that we could chase them away. Hopefully, for all that we've lost, we've at least done some damage to their forces. Maybe they will move along."

The rest of the breakfast, they are making plans with Leosin about how to get back into the cave. They decide to try disguising themselves as cultists, in their salvaged cultist uniforms. They only have enough uniforms for everybody except Leosin, so Hooflepoof loans his uniform to Leosin, since he can just be invisible. Leaving their cart with Kaspar, along with Beans and the wolves, they head out toward the camp. When they get close, they don their cultist uniforms, and Hooflepoof his Cloak of Invisibility. In order to act like confident cultists who obviously belong there, they walk directly up to the front gate, which they are surprised to find completely unguarded.

The camp has been abandoned. The ground is stomped from many feet, and there are small bits of refuse strewn about on the ground, but all the tents are gone except one, a rather oily leather one. Sitting outside the leather tent are a couple of hunters, whom they met before, cooking some small bits of meat with sticks over a fire. Elbolin approaches them and asks, where did everybody go?

One of the hunters answers, "They started packing up yesterday, taking down their tents and loading up their carts. They worked on it well into the night, and by this morning they're all vamoosed."

"What about in the cave?" Elbolin inquires.

"I don't know about that," answers the hunter. "I saw some of 'em going in there, but I don't know if they left too, or what. I wasn't about to go snooping around in there. I'm a hunter, not a spleen-dunker." He laughs.

So the adventurers walk over to the cave, and walk in confidently. They find two dragonclaws, about 30 feet inside the cave, one of whom approaches them with an air of authority. Before he has a chance to question them, Hooflepoof pipes up, "where did everybody go?"

The dragonclaw is suspicious. "Well where have you been?"

"We were fighting in Greenest last night. After the battle, we hid in the woods for the night."

Elbolin chimes in, "has everything been cleared out of the cave?"

"If you don't know your orders," says the dragonclaw, "you should ask your commanding officer."

"He was killed in the battle last night."

"All right. Well, wait here then, I'll go figure out what you are supposed to do."

He signals to the other dragonclaw with a look like 'keep an eye on these guys', and the other dragonclaw acknowledges with a glance. But before he can walk away, Elfo conjures up a Charm Person spell on the first dragonclaw, and he becomes much more friendly.

"I'd be guessing that you guys should head over to Beregost, you can probably catch the horde before they turn northward But, just give me a sec, I'll go ask Anamith, she'll know what to do."

"Anamith?" somebody asks, before realizing that perhaps a true cultist should know who that is. Fortunately the Charm spell is strong enough that the dragonclaw doesn't suspect anything. "Yeah, Rezmir left her in charge, since  - did you hear - both Landedrosa and Frulam Mondath got killed."

"No kidding!" mutters Bilbo, acting surprised.

"Well no need to bother her," says Elbolin, beckoning deeper into the cave, "can we just go in?"

"Sure," says the dragonclaw, "I don't see why not, friends."

They push on past the friendly dragonclaw, and the other dragonclaw is a little confused but makes no move to stop them. Deeper in the cave, they find a stairway down to a lower cavern, and sort of behind them and to the right, a narrow passage. They explore the narrow passage, and when it branches, they take a path to the right. There they find a nearly empty room that appears to have been recently used for storage. There are some broken boxes and pieces of pottery and fresh wineskins strewn about, but clearly anything that was left here, was left because it wasn't worth taking.