After searching the woods for a while, the party stumbled on an area of wild magic. While The Warlock and The Fighter had no idea what this meant. The Sorcerer had a very uncomfortable expression on her face.

"How bad?"

The Fighter broke the momentary silence that fell over the group after the proclamation.

"Very bad. Wild magic causes problems with spells. Think random extra effects or even large-scale changes with more powerful spells. The more magic piles up, the bigger the effect. Also, these zones are apparently rather rare. There was a book in my initiation about these things, but not much as it was not a studied phenomenon. Actually, there wasn't much written about them at all, my whole initiation was kind of."

"Think it's the cause of the infection/corruption here?" The Warlock butted into the conversation. It was not like she was rude; she was just focussed on the task at hand. That was definitely it, she wasn't rude, right?

"Probably. It means that the source is also magical. It will likely also affect us if we stay in the territory for too long."

"I have a better idea." The Fighter interrupted. He had been feeling a bit inadequate during this talk about magic. His class didn't give him any direct magical powers. Sure, his recovery time and second wind ability felt like magic, but it wasn't the same as spellcasting. He had trying to find some way to help with this and had arrived at an idea.

"We don't need more than 1 trip if we can make one assumption. If the area of magic is circular, we can use math and some walking to determine the distance and point of the centre. It would save a lot of time. If we find the boundary at 2 or 3 points, we can calculate the rough circumference and therefore get the radius of the circle. The radius in this case is the distance we would need to travel to get to the centre. If it's not too much, we might be able to do it in a day once we know the direction."

The Warlock was impressed. It was good plan, she had initially dismissed him as a muscle head due to his title, but that obviously wasn't the case. His plan might work, and it would definitely be a whole lot better than wandering blindly through the woods hoping to stumble into something.

"The area should be circular. Magic effects generally don't stop due thick vegetation or anything short of another magical source. It's a better plan than walking aimlessly, let's do it." The Sorcerer was a lot more upbeat at the prospect of an actual plan. She had been going from one insane mess into another and was afraid that she was going to be stuck here for a week or more. If this worked, they could be back home as soon as tomorrow.

The plan was easy, but not simple. They had to do some complex math with imprecise measurements. The Fighter had asked the two magic users to walk a couple meters in each direction until they felt the zone again and was himself using a stick to write the math out in the dirt. He tried to simplify the equation as much as possible, so it took him a while to rearrange and double check everything. In the end it had taken them all a solid couple of hour of measuring, calculating, and checking their work. They wanted to be sure of this. During this procedure they had found that the circle was expanding. Not much, but the markers they had set were always a little off after another round of rechecking.

The Fighter spoke while rubbing his temples. All this math had made his head hurt more than he would normally like to admit. "So, we need to walk about 3 km in that direction." He pointed his finger deeper into the woods. "The area is expanding but not that fast. We need to mark this area here and find our way back to base. Tomorrow we go immediately in the morning and try to take care of at least the source that day. Since it a bonus objective I'm assuming we'll find the creatures either on our way there or relatively easy after. Any ideas or objections?"

"No, but I have a way to mark the area. I can enchant our weapons with fire. Not sure how long it will last, but if we clear away a lot of trees, this area should be easy to find."

"You want to start a forest fire?" The eyebrow height of The Sorcerer showed what she thought of that idea.

"Yes. It's a fantasy forest, right? Also, the fire should be temporary. maybe so it should be too big on an issue. Do you have a better idea?" The Warlock looked over, with crossed arms.

"I can mark it with magic. I just have to use... well, I have to spill some blood here. Sorcerers use magic from their own blood so if I leave a large enough supply here, I can probably find it the next morning. It should be relatively easy."

An argument started at this point. It mainly focused on whether or not blood or fire was a better idea. Eventually woman decided to just do their own plan at this same time. It worked out better than it had any right to in any case.