Actually, they could have just killed those duergar right then and there, and then waited for Nere to suffocate before taking his head to the Sovereign of the Myconids. They just hadn't expected to see a wobbly purple sphere flying through the air. Ethemon sensed the feeling of being watched coming from it—a scrying eye. Not wanting to be discovered here making trouble by whoever was pulling the strings behind the scenes, they needed to deal with this damn orb first.
The underground area was vast, so Ethemon decided to split the group up to search for the path leading to the Shadow Curse lands, as well as have everyone look for high ground so they could take advantage of the terrain when a fight broke out.
Just as the others left with the little cyan snake Ethemon had summoned, Ethemon felt a sense of surveillance coming from a corner—it wasn't the scrying eye from earlier. Ethemon turned his head, only to catch a glimpse of clothing vanishing around the bend. When Ethemon pursued, he only saw duergar disposing of the bodies of gnomes and a drow, laboriously kicking the corpses into the lake, along with a duergar loudly complaining that his spider had gone missing.
Chapter 75