The walk back was a bit more than a little awkward.

Madness had a feeling that Mitigation would end up lost on their first trip down to the furnace, but he really hoped that he feeling would be proven wrong. Alas, here he was walking the shorter courser back out of the dungeon after finding them hopelessly lost in a small set of corridors.

"So... what happened?" Madness tried to start a conversation, hoping that it would lighten up the mood.

"Dogs." Mitigation responded. Though it was just one word, Madness could hear the exhaustion in the other's voice.

He could understand it too, those hellhounds were definitely pieces of work if they weren't handled properly. At the very least Mitigation was in one piece, even if that one piece was extremely discouraged.

"Hey, it's alright. The hellhounds can be a bit much, even experienced dungeoneers have trouble with them-" Madness started to attempt to comfort Mitigation, but was interrupted before he could finish his sentence. "You didn't have any trouble with them."

Right... he had told them about the time he faced a pack of hellhounds and lived. In this moment he wished that they had forgotten. "Well, that was different! It's not like I really thought about what was going on, and I got lucky!"

"That's not how you talked about it to me when you told me about it."

Madness paused. He couldn't exactly argue that, but he found his face going a bit red- and it wasn't because of the fire around them. Thankfully, he noticed a set of stairs that would lead towards the entrance to the cavern, and therefor a path towards the surface. "Well, would you look at that, it's the exit! We can discuss this later but probably not and I really hope that you don't think about this too much because you're fine and this was a totally understandable experience-!"

He blabbered on as he continued forwards, avoiding any further conversation.

At least the silence would be less awkward than having to explain just how much he lied about how cool he was.