Dylan tried to scream.

He tried to make any noise at all.

Giving chase to the group, he tried to get their attention, to distract them.

But nothing happened.

Again.

He couldn’t speak. Nor could he rustle leaves or throw rocks. He couldn’t smack the creatures or trip them or impede them.

There was nothing he could do.

At least, not from here.

His death timer was ticking down at around seventeen minutes remaining. He wasn’t sure if he would snap back to the place of his death, or if he would respawn in town, or if his ghost would need to run to a specific location to respawn.

But at this moment, that didn’t matter. He’d do it live and figure it out as he went.

Instead, the creature he’d fought had somehow sensed the encampment, and was now leading a raiding force.

Kaldalis had to do something - anything - to stop the impending massacre.

He racked his brain. Sure, he couldn’t talk, but it was possible that other PCs might be able to see him. He knew in other MMOs that, while ghosts couldn’t interact with the world, NPCs, or Monsters, while their spirits were separated from their bodies, other players could see them.

Maybe he could play charades well enough to get a message through. Or maybe real items - the sorts of things that could be put into an inventory - could be manipulated.

He could spell out a warning.

Something. Anything.

This was, after all, his fault.

The syncoresi set a relatively moderate pace. They weren’t running, but they were moving at faster than a walk. Kaldalis would have placed it as a brisk jog, which was quite a feat for the thick jungle.

As a ghost, though, Dylan couldn’t break his ankle. He didn’t really have an ankle. Just a spectral approximation of one.

Trees, stones, boulders… nothing could actually impede him. If it could, then he would have been able to use it to distract the monsters or get attention in camp. If the game was insistent on inconveniencing him with incorporeality, he was going to find an advantage in it.

He broke into a full-speed sprint, no holding back. What was there to hold back? He’d rest when he was…

Hm.

Well, at any rate, he’d rest later.

Ghost Dylan burst out of the jungle after only a few minutes. There was a moment of panic as he found himself barreling towards the town’s wooden wall. Hands were thrust up to catch himself on the wall and try not to flatten his face, but his hands passed right through it, shortly followed by the rest of his body.

When he recovered from that momentary confusion, he ran through the camp, waving his arms. He was trying to scream, but, as before, no sound came out.

There were people around the camp, but nobody saw him. Workers kept on working. Questgivers kept on accepting recovered tools and harvested materials. Adventurers kept milling around and chatting. All the while Kaldalis sprinted through them, waving his arms, desperate for even the slightest recognition of his presence.

Nothing.

No response.

Nobody noticed him at all.

He didn’t hear the alarm being called - it blended into the garbled distant sound of speech of those around him - but he knew when it happened. Everyone else stopped what they were doing and looked around, confused. Dylan wondered if there was some sound or system message. Something like “The Crossroads is under attack!” spammed a million times in chat.

He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he’d failed to carry his warning.

Dylan didn’t want to blame himself - he couldn’t exactly warn them when the game didn’t let him communicate at all as a ghost - but it was larger than just his failure to get someone’s attention. He’d first attracted this threat. He’d thought he would be able to just run away from it and lose it before he got back to town. It was his reckless chase that brought it within range of whatever senses let the syncoresi locate the camp.

The low grumbling of distorted speech grew louder as the battle started. The beasts seemed unable to scale the walls - their attack came from the gate-sized opening towards the forest - but their sudden appearance meant that they broke through any resistance there and spread through the camp with speed.

Chaos had overcome the camp in the time it took Kaldalis’s death timer to tick from eleven minutes to eight. He tried not to watch as the beasts ripped through the camp - they seemed more intent on creating generalized destruction and swiping at people here and there rather than actually allowing themselves to be locked down in individual fights. It meant that people were taking enormous chunks of their hit points as damage - for non-tanks, each hit was likely taking nearly half their hit points, considering what it dished out on Kaldalis - and then panicking, adding to the chaos and disorder.

It seemed like no one was taking leadership and imposing some order. Or, at least, if they were, it wasn’t having any effect. Grey-white beasts ran amok. Even when someone tried to defend themselves, they were alone - the chaos was stopping people from partying up and working together. He saw even people he knew to be alpha players being smacked around easily and sent scrambling for cover.

Inwardly, Dylan recognized the problems at work here. First of all, these were adventurers, not soldiers. There was no command structure. Everyone was trying to play this like a solo instance in Colossus when this was a raid encounter, and there was no raid leader who could establish control and fight the chaos.

Kaldalis had only met the expedition leader the previous day, and he didn’t even feel any particular allegiance towards her. If he was in this situation - suddenly under attack by an overwhelming force - and the strange woman ran up and tried shouting orders at him, he might get combative and belligerent with her, if he even had the discipline to keep his head on his shoulders to stand and fight instead of hiding in a nearby tent.

It didn’t help that there was no helpful construction to the camp. The walls penned the adventurers in instead of keeping the threat out. The tents and other structures were too densely packed. The narrow “streets” between things were too narrow to have a proper fight in, especially not against something with such deadly speed and claws to match. Not only did they need a complete wall, but they needed proper defenses and organized areas where they could handle threats like this.

His death timer ticked down to seven minutes, thirty seconds, and a little prompt with two buttons appeared in his vision. One was grayed out.

Warp to and respawn at your Home Point for 30 Aplomb.

Return to death location and respawn for 15 Aplomb.

This second button was grayed out.

Kaldalis started at the text. Home Point? He wasn’t sure what that meant. He also couldn’t ask Balrim or Myrin if that had been covered by the tutorial. The only place his could be was at whatever served for the default. Baimer, then? Two weeks over the sea, with no way to return? He supposed if the camp was overrun and everyone was killed, it would let him and the other PCs return to safety instead of being trapped here getting spawn camped forever.

Naturally, that wasn’t the option he wanted. He supposed the button being grayed out meant that he wouldn’t be warped to his death location. He had to run back himself.

Which meant that he had to go now.

It would take him a few minutes to get back there, and the sooner he was there, the sooner he could start his run back here to try and help the defense.

As if to enhance his sense of urgency, Balrim and Myrin ran past his ghostly self, rushing to the big red command tent, where Kaldalis could see a weak resistance starting to come together.

That solved it.

He had to get back to his body, or else his friends - and everyone else - were as good as dead.