i ended up giving up and looking it up after several hours of trying. and i see why i didn't figure it out! it's fuckin arcane as shit!!
so u gotta do the following:
- go into a cave and go to one end of it
- kill four chipmunk bandit guys
- that gives u a bow for some reason
- there's something called a "metaball" blocking another path in the cave. well, there's two metaballs, but apparently the following only works on one of them. you have to press L to switch weapons to the bow that was dropped to do damage to this one specific metaball. there's no other way to damage it. i had already spent several minutes trying to kill it using my staff and using magic and those did zero damage so i thought it was just an invulnerable obstacle and the path forward must be elsewhere
