As Din, Malo, Tangis, and the wardens hurry back from the ruined camp, Malo presses Din for his interpretation of the horror they found. Din concludes that the impostor likely assembled the fermentation device in the smugglers’ camp with their cooperation or trust, because such a complicated mechanism would have taken time to build and activate. Din reasons that the smugglers did not understand it was a weapon until the reaction spread too fast to escape, and he suspects the coded sign was not meant for the investigators but for someone connected to the case, likely Ghrelin. This leads Din to believe Ghrelin and Thelenai are withholding important information.

On the forest path, Din notices broken ferns and branches that were intact earlier and realizes someone has followed the party. He quietly warns Malo, but Malo immediately understands the larger danger: the hidden smugglers are not stalking the investigators themselves but heading for the boat, which would be an easier target and the group’s only reliable way out. Malo alerts the wardens, and they rush toward the river.

Before they reach the boat, a band of gaunt, desperate smugglers rises from the jungle and attacks. Din becomes separated and faces three men at once. Wanting living witnesses, Din tries to disable rather than kill; he cripples one attacker and deflects a thrown spear, but the blow knocks his warding helm out of place. Fighting half-blind, Din reacts from training and accidentally kills another attacker with a strike to the neck. A third man hesitates, and Malo kills him with an arrow before ordering Din forward.

After the skirmish, the group learns the smugglers had tried to seize the boat as a means of escape after the camp’s catastrophe. The two wardens left aboard had already pinned them down with arrows, and the rest of the party finished the fight from behind. In the aftermath, eleven smugglers are dead and four wounded, though Tangis expects most of the wounded to die. Din and Malo help carry the survivors back so Tangis can treat them.

When Din asks about burying the dead, Malo says the forest would reclaim any grave and that the bodies should be left to the jungle. Din is disturbed by leaving the slain where they fell, especially after having just killed men he had hoped to question. Before boarding the boat, Din silently prays for them, shaken both by the battle and by what it suggests about the impostor’s crime.