"Yeah. But she can't do it anymore, so. That's... not nothing." And he does look, at the man she killed before they got there, and. Well. That's also a damn shame, isn't it.

At least Murder Victim Guy probably gets an okay afterlife. Not that Lucea doesn't understand how incentives work, but you know how they don't work? How sad she personally feels. So. 

"--I think I recognize him," Anevia says, hobbling closer and holding one of the torches. "Aravashnial. He hung out at the library a lot. Kind of stuck up, but he didn't deserve this." 

"May his next life be kinder than this one." And with that cheering thought, Veron will get back to standing up, thank you. He can.... mostly do it on his own this time, though he does almost tip over and fall on his face.

Anevia checks Aravashnial's body for useful objects too and turns up a better dagger than was in the chest. 

Eh. He's good. He'll stick with his shiny new rapier and shortsword combo for now. And Anevia should have something to defend herself if she gets jumped.

Sure. No complaints from her about that. 

A short while later those with darkvision will spot a fuckoff-huge centipede. 

"Centipede. Watch its bite, it’s venomous."

But they can probably take it just fine without him needing to do much. He'll hang by Seelah and be prepared to sneak attack.

Lucea...is a song-sorceress. 

She doesn't do much in the way of direct damage, but even leaving aside the fact that Seelah hits 5% more often, she is, actually, just good at singing. 

Yeah, they're fine. It occurred to him to do the standard rogue thing and sneak ahead and stab and whatnot, but uh, he probably should hold back and try to recover from... whatever's going on with him.

The (giant) centipede dies without him needing to touch it at all.

"Well done," he says, immediately doing the sensible thing and poisoning his weapons via the centipede's mandibles.

Lucea does not do that because she only mostly trusts herself not to accidentally poke any friendlies with her spear. 

Continuing through the caves, they encounter:

Several more examples of large, aggressive cave fauna

A couple more lootable corpses, none of them recently murdered like Aravashnial

And, finally, what seems to be an actual constructed room of some kind--albeit damaged and rubble-strewn--from which voices can be heard. 

"No I can't just walk away, it's got to be here somewhere!" a young man's voice says, frustrated. 

"What're you looking for?" asks the man who hadn't been there before, and who takes joy in the little things in life.

A man who looks like someone splashed Oil Of Turn Into Lizard all over his left side and a woman covered in fur with spider legs growing from her back jump and now he has two nocked arrows pointed at him. 

This is to be expected, really. Also, tactically speaking, the arrows being pointed at him means that the rest of his party is free to get the drop on them. They are unlikely to do that, but he can pretend that's the reason why he made the choices he did regardless.

He gives a wave, far more at ease being threatened than most people would be.

"Hey. Fell down from above, looking for the way back up that doesn't involve climbing. Maybe we can help each other out?"

...The man lowers his bow. The woman emphatically does not. 

"What's been happening on the surface?" the man asks. 

"Demons. Lots of 'em. It's, uh, it's bad."

"Deskari himself showed up and killed Terendelev." 

The man draws in a hissing breath. "If things are as bad as you say, we've got to hurry." 

The woman starts muttering to herself about something called the Shield Maze. 

If Deekin were here, the two of them would share a look of understanding about how, yes, this Shield Maze probably is the only way out of here, and that, yes, it’s very dumb. Alas, Deekin is not here. (And will probably be pissed that Veron tripped into an adventure without him. Oops.)

“Hurry finding your thing?” clarifies Veron, who wants to keep the plot hooks separate for now.

"Sure," says the man. "We're looking for a holy sword. Some of our kids ran off into the Shield Maze, and our Chief is dragging his heels on going after them--like usual. If we find the angel's sword, we can use it to rally the tribe and save the kids. Except it's supposed to be in a rock in the center of the room, and it's not." 

"This is a fool's errand," the woman hisses. "That sword is made of holy flame! Nobody has been able to touch it, and you won't either." 

"Ah. Sword of holy flame, to rally your people to work together. Gotcha." Of course, the clear thing to do when kids have stupidly run off into the deadly dungeon thing, is to send in a professional adventurer of some kind to go get them. Dungeons don't really yield to numbers like many other problems, they just get more people dead. So while he's not against the whole 'rally the tribe in times of strife' thing, he is definitely against sending the tribe in first. Clearly, he's going to need to be the one to do that.

(Damn it, this is how he always gets into these messes.)

This decided, he gets to looking. The room's partially collapsed, and 'middle' is relative. Middle of the room now is not necessarily middle of the room before things started getting crumbly. So... looking at the construction of this place, which part would kind of seem like it would be the center of the room, if the room hadn't been earthquaked? What rubble is the most recent, and is it easily amenable to searching?

The rubble is highly amenable to searching and contains an appealing selection of objects that would be valuable on the surface but pretty much worthless when you're barely-subsistence-level hunter-gatherer tribes with approximately zero trade with anyone else. 

The center of the room is...probably over there-ish, aaaand the most recent rubble is...probably one of those piles?

He doesn't have a bag anymore, but he does have pockets, so. Sure, why not, he'll also pick up the shiny gemstones and whatnot while he's looking. And he will be looking in one of those piles, over there.

While he's seen angelic weapons before, usually in use for their intended purpose, he's never actually gone and directly touched one. Still, there's a bit of an... aura... to this pile of rubble right here, of warmth and sunlight and certainty and of a good deed done. It's subtle and tricky to pick out, but in the gloom of this broken and forgotten reliquary of the past, it's enough to work from. Once he's on the right track, it's pretty easy to follow, and soon enough, one of his fingers brushes against something that feels like... hope. Hidden from the world, waiting for its time to shine, because the last wielder of it couldn't manage to bear the torch any longer. This being strange magic bullshit, he's not clear on the particulars, but... he thinks the last one to hold this weapon was in a lot of trouble. Up against something terrible, and losing. And instead of letting this little light darken forever, it was hidden, so that one day, someone else could pick it up. In context, that someone is him. The sword comes smoothly out of the rubble and into his hand like a pet that's been kept waiting for far too long, and in a way, it kind of is. How long has this poor, beautiful sword been stuck down here, irrelevant, just waiting for someone that understands what it's about? He doesn't know.

What he does know is that there is now a bit of a light show. A literal one. Golden glow of Heaven upon him or, uh, something. A celebration of at last, someone who gets it, someone who can go on with my mission. It is the first time this place has seen sunlight in a long, long time.