Elden Ring: Dog, O friend

[Part of my Elden Ring journal]

It's back to scouting mode in the opposite direction of disease land where I'm treated to some nice but very rainy scenery as I sneak past some soldiers and steal some armor pieces, get ambushed by ninja sky wolves, evade reanimating skeletons and defeat knight invader Henricus as I snake my way around the heavily fortified Stormveil Castle. This leads me down to a huge flooded zone inhabited by spider people and giant lobsters.

Here servant girl Rya gives me an invitation to Volcano Manor (wherever that is) after I retrieve her necklace from a lobster cooking Blackguard whom I befriend, and then proceed onto the sinking academy which again has magic seals blocking my progress. There is a narrow river that leads to a gigantic climb through a mine and giant bat nests (where I also learn bat queens sing in opera) but the top is guarded by a pretty tough magma wyrm so I decide to explore elsewhere, including a valley of living vikings and another well house that leads to a giant ant nest.

I don't get very far in any of those and decide to explore near the start again and come across a merchant who tells me about the werewolf who giga bear forest so I go to meet Blade, the half vampire daywalker Blaidd the half-wolf who is hunting some bloodhound knight whom I already found much earlier stuck in an "Evergaol". As Blaidd says "imprisonment isn't true punishment" so we go in there and wreck that creep easily with the power of team work!

He's a half giant, which tracks given the sizes of some of the wolves in this game.