The path continued forward for a few dozen feet, and then took a sharp right turn.

From that point forward (when he lost sight of the room he was in) Kaldalis alternated furiously between wishing his sense of direction was a little better, and wishing he hadn’t gotten caught up in chasing that enhydra in the first place. The hallway here was much more narrow than it had been elsewhere, barely more than three feet wide, and it wound in a snakelike curve that cut his sightline down to barely a dozen feet at any time.

The whole thing made him anxious, and with every step he expected a tripwire or pressure plate or something to activate and murder him. Traditional traps had been few and far between so far in the dungeon, but now was the time for them. He almost wished it would happen just to get it over with.

Maybe, in spirit form, he could go back and walk through the portcullis and respawn over there. He would argue quite strenuously that the other side of that doorway had indeed been his last safe location, if he could reach a game master to make that argument.

Unfortunately, the floor didn’t click.

No trap doors opened, no scything blades ripped out of the walls, and there were no falling rocks.

As the narrow hallway wound its way deeper into the ground it became increasingly clear that the only way out was forward.

There was no going back even if he wanted to.

That wasn’t even the worst part. The doom and gloom, the death-oriented optimism, the low whine of Encroaching Fear building up in his ears… those were all mangeable. Growing up in modern society, he was accustomed to a bleak outlook and an uncertain future, and more than one horror game had prepared him to creep along an unlit hallway, expecting a violent death with every step.

But the worst part was the isolation. He kept expecting Balrim and Myrin to start sniping at each other. His brain attempted to come up with ways to wheedle the truth out of Haldir, and then played the conversation out like a midnight anxiety-fueled battle.

And he kept looking for a topic of discussion to break what felt like awkward silence.

But all alone, there was no one to break the silence with.

Kaldalis wasn’t even the social type. He could usually spend an entire weekend sitting on his couch button-mashing his way through an FPS with no character dialogue. It was like he had just started to get accustomed to having those dorks near at hand. He had allowed himself to become addicted to human contact, and he now resented their absence.

“This sucks,” he said to himself quietly. “I demand an undo button so that I can go back and avoid this. Nobody could be enjoying this. Not me, not the stream, nobody. This is absolutely the worst.”

Of course, right after he said that was when things found a way to get worse.

Kaldalis rounded a slightly sharper bend and found himself standing at the entrance to a larger room. His first instinct was to look around for other exits. There was only one door on the left side of the room - according to his minimap it went to the southwest - and so he was hopeful. This wasn’t a dead end, after all.

That moment of hope was short-lived when he finally processed the monsters there that were already staring back at him.

There were only two of them in the room, and they were roughly the size of deer or small horses. They hopped around on stunted-looking back legs but had hugely overdeveloped arms and hands that they used to balance and support. The creatures were covered in giant scales, looking sort of like mutant pangolins.

As he stared at them, he noticed that their forelimbs were supporting their weight on their fists like apes, but instead of humanlike fingers, each giant hand sported claws almost three feet long. The hands were obviously not useful for manipulating anything more complicated than a soft chunk of meat.

Their giant conical-ears were oriented on Kaldalis, obviously taking the time to identify him as a soft chunk of meat.

The last thing that made them go from strange to nightmarish was their faces. They had tiny beady little eyes, and a mouth marked by prominent snakelike fangs, but their noses were the worst. The scales on its face were at their thinnest, but with none on their nose it looked like a mess of raw red flesh, twisted into a shape that was almost hornlike, with the nostrils visible in a bowl-like formation at the front and the top extending up almost six inches off of the face to form a unicorn horn nose tip.

He would have guessed that the beasts had suffered some horrible accident instead of having that be their natural noses if both of them weren’t near-identical.

They started charging at him. Kaldalis would have thought to try and sneak past, but it was already too late.

He wondered if their giant ears would make them impossible to evade, or if he’d just gotten unlucky enough to blunder into the room right when they were facing towards him.

All he could do was get his spear out and ready for a fight.

Kaldalis expected them to swipe at him with their clawed hands, but the nearest of the pair came at him with unfolding fangs bared, snapping to bite. Even at the speed of its strike, he could see the dribble of milky fluid from the tips of the fangs, promising an unpleasant venom if it bit him.

He dove forward and past the creature to avoid the blow and to get into the room with the same motion. The large jaws clapped shut just behind him. He whirled and lashed out, smacking it with the head of his glaive. The blade skittered along the hard scales instead of biting in for a moment, but he forced his muscles against the weapon, shoving in until one of the giant scales cracked and broke off. At that point, he managed to hit it for damage, striking for sixty-two damage and applying a stack of gust.

His first instinct was to reach across that mob and strike the other as fast as possible, but he quickly realized there was no reason to. He’d started to get used to overextending to build aggro, and leaning on Balrim to correct for his mistakes. In fact, his second instinct was to stab the scramble-faced pangolin monster again in order to enable Haldir and Myrin, when the more prudent move was to back off and wait for a more promising opening.

He was alone, after all. He didn’t need to do the tank things anymore.

The thick-scaled creatures lunged for him again, and Kaldalis kept them moving by backing up, leading them in a slow circle around the small room. Despite the enormous claws on their forelimbs, their attacks seemed to be entirely based on their fanged snouts. It meant that their attacks were easy to avoid by keeping distance from them, though it made their attacks that much scarier, with their giant dripping fangs threatening to inflict some manner of poison on him. Kaldalis also feared that if one of them got a hit on him, it might establish a hold on him like the firemicids had, leaving him open to be chewed up by the other.

With his priorities in proper order for soloing, though, all he had to do was take his time. No one was counting on him here. He was in charge of the pace, and as the first time he - or anyone - had been in this dungeon alone, no one could fault him for taking it slow. After all, he only had a handful of healing potions to fall back on if things went sour.

The giant-clawed pangolin things were actually easier to fight solo than they would have been in a group. Being able to forgo attacking until the right openings meant he didn’t have to put himself at risk. He pecked away at the beasts bit by bit, dancing away whenever they moved in, and lunging in with a quick stab or slash whenever the pair of them bumped or jostled each other to jockey their way into a biting position.

The worst part was that he started to get a feel for the duration of the Gust debuff. He hadn’t had problems stacking it up when he was able to trade blows and fall back on Balrim’s healing, but now that he was focused on defense instead of offense, he wasn’t getting a proc. Sure, he was applying gust here and there, but the stacks just didn’t last long enough for him to get enough stacks for them to go off.

It felt like an age, but at long last, the first one of them fell. It was called a chiraptor, and worth 26 experience. From there, Kaldalis allowed himself to play way riskier, since he was only risking a single strike instead of two if he messed up. The skillful movement required was starting to feel like second nature, and he was almost looking forward to building up that skill.

He wondered if it would translate well to larger fights in the overworld, especially against the Infernal Horde, whose numerical advantages could be nullified by skillful movement to avoid letting their damage rack up.

The second chiraptor got a hit on him eventually, but despite his fears, it didn’t grip tight and drag him down. As expected, though, he suffered a poison debuff along with the seventy physical damage of the strike.

After seeing his health bar ticking down, he had the sobering realization that it was a non-renewable resource, and went back to avoiding subsequent strikes instead of playing riskier. It drew the fight out, and he ended up spending almost fifteen minutes from entering the room to the second beast falling.

It was an unthinkable amount of time to be running around in combat, and Kaldalis allowed himself to sag to the ground to catch his breath once it was done.

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, loudly, to no one in particular, “I’m ready for the path to meet up with my friends now.”

The smooth stone walls didn’t have anything to say about that. And Kaldalis could almost feel his stream judging him, if he concentrated hard enough.

Once he caught his breath, he had no choice but to force himself back to his feet and get moving again.

There was still only one way forward, and this hallway was just as narrow and winding as the earlier one. After fighting two monsters that would have been something out of a horror movie with no more preamble than the sudden realization they were there, Kaldalis found it easier to not let the tension get to him.

“I’m not going to do something stupid,” he said to himself, filling the silence by talking to himself, “like say that I can take on anything in here. Because that’s a good way to turn a corner into an army of duck-sized horses or something.”

He heard an angry chittering sound around the next corner, and realized that in the absence of any other noise, it was surprisingly difficult to modulate the volume of his voice, and he’d almost shouted his caution at himself.

“Or maybe I am going to do something stupid. But, at least it isn’t the result of a predictable, avoidable trope. Go me?”

Another chiraptor was rushing down the hall at him, its shoulders filling the narrow space. Behind it, a leviabeetle was skittering its way along the wall above it, bearing down on him with its giant pincers.

“Look at this,” he said, readying his spear, “bats and bugs finally found a common goal to motivate them to set aside their differences. And that goal is, unsurprisingly, murdering my dumb ass.”

With the monsters approaching, Kaldalis realized the narrow hallway was not going to make for a fun place to fight, but the previous room was a hundred yards or so back, and he hated the idea of losing time backtracking before losing even more time to a lengthy solo fight.

He needed a plan. And considering that any time saved around the fight was more time he could spend on the fight itself, he didn’t feel too picky about how smart the plan was at face value.