Contract: Bovine Blues
While trekking across picturesque Toussaint, Geralt happened on the highly unusual Ardaiso Quarry. It appeared out of the ordinary as it seemed filled with the pieces of some mammoth statue, all hewn straight from the quarry's rock. Geralt arrived at the quarry to witness an argument between a group of workers and their foreman. He learned that the night before the quarry had been attacked by a falling… cow, which in crashing to the ground had crushed one of the quarry workers. The worker's colleagues had understandably insisted that they would not resume their labors until the matter was resolved. The witcher, as befits a professional of his caliber, agreed to look into the mystery.
Map
Pin numbers match the objectives below. Open it on the interactive map →
Objectives
11- 1Find the quarry foreman.Ardaiso Quarry
- 2Examine the cow carcass and the workman's body.Ardaiso Quarry
- 3Collect a reward for solving the cow mystery.Ardaiso Quarry
- 4Use your Witcher Senses to investigate how the crane was damaged.Ardaiso Quarry
- 5Use your Witcher Senses to look for clues by the abandoned still.Fort Ussar Ruins
- 6Use your Witcher Senses to follow the draconid's trail.Fort Ussar Ruins
- 7Defeat both slyzards.Fort Ussar Ruins
- 8Climb to the top of the hill to reach the slyzards.Fort Ussar Ruins
- 9Collect a trophy from the mother slyzard.On the map
- 10Using your Witcher Senses, follow the wounded draconid's trail.Ardaiso Quarry
- 11[Optional] Destroy the nest and the slyzard eggs.Fort Ussar Ruins
Journal
Having slain the two slyzards, Geralt also incinerated the nest full of slyzard eggs. For as the locals proclaim, "Lebioda helps those who help themselves."
Upon inspecting the cow's carcass and the worker's corpse, Geralt established that no plague had caused the incident (as the quarry workers had vehemently claimed), nor was it the result of a distorted portal (as Geralt himself had suspected). Instead, the witcher discovered the cause to be relatively banal. A draconid had been carrying the cow back to its nest. Yet the beast had either lost its grip of overestimated its strength, and the cow had landed in the quarry - and in doing so had crushed one of the workers.
With his hunt done, the witcher informed the quarry workers that he had removed the threat - said threat having been no more than a juvenile slyzard. The foreman breathed a sigh of relief, for his crew could get back to its job - erecting a gigantic statue of the Prophet Lebioda.
The witcher, an expert in all matters monstrous, was quick to divine that the draconid he sought was a slyzard. All signs seemed to suggest it was a relatively young specimen, that had not only lost its quarry but also been heavily wounded as it accidentally destroyed one of the cranes standing in the quarry. The wound meant the witcher could track the beast easily. He found it quickly, following the trail of its blood. Along the way it turned out the young slyzard's mother had come to help it. Unmoved by this evidence of affection between the beasts, admittedly rare among reptiles in general, Geralt reached the monsters' nest and slew them all.
As a well-known rhetorician once put it, one touched by bad luck is liable to break his finger while attempting to clear a nostril. The witcher, in passing through the Ardaiso Quarry, happened on a worker who had been crushed by a cow when it fell on him! Intrigued by the circumstances by which this had come to pass, He resolved to ask around about the details of the incident.
A witcher's life is never dull. If there ever comes a point when he's had his fill of cockatrices, strigas or nekkers, he can always count on the world throwing something unusual in his Path. As was the case on this occasion, when a bovine crashed to the ground from the sky, landing right on top of a quarry worker! At last, here was a contract that would surely tear the witcher free of the fetters of the quotidian that so often held him!