Kaldalis rushed straight forward into the oncoming enemies. It felt vaguely suicidal to move towards the enemies when he didn’t know where he was going to end up fighting them, but it was the only move he could think of under pressure.

They had to come from somewhere that could be a proper fighting arena, right? He just had to find that space and fight there. Sure, it might have been safer to retreat and fight where he knew he was fine, but that was…

It wouldn’t…

He had to-

Why was he doing this again?

Kaldalis realized too late that he was taking a stupid risk for the sake of convenience. But his Jump cooldown was rolling and he was already in the air. It wasn’t as if he could change his course now.

It was a narrow opening, with the two monsters filling the space, but it was just wide enough for his body as he tucked his legs in to clear the chiraptor. The leviabeetle on the wall barely missed snatching him out of the air with its pincers. He hit the stone floor on the other side and broke into a run.

An all-out sprint was impossible in the winding hallway unless he wanted to risk running face-first into a hard turn, an obstacle, or another enemy. Leaping through the monsters bought him some time; having to turn around in the narrow hallway slowed them down, giving him the opportunity to extend his lead. He knew he wasn’t going to get away - enemies chased forever, as far as he knew - but any lead he got on them was a little more time he’d have to pick his place to stand and fight.

Kaldalis realized he’d made a mistake when he found his place to fight. He burst out of the narrow hall into a room to find that there was another pack of enemies already here. It was just a leviabeetle and a vendragora, which would have been a pushover with a full group, but the room was on the smaller end, and the ground was uneven here. There were places in the floor where there were gaps and pits that looked like they once held some wooden construction in place. Something like a large table, maybe? A gate? Some elaborate exercise equipment? It was impossible to tell, since whatever it had been had rotted away to nothing, without even the rotted debris on hand to speculate with. It meant that in addition to having less space to maneuver, any movement he made needed to be careful, or he was likely to trip or twist his ankle.

Kaldalis focused his attention on the vendragora immediately. He was able to dance around it, smashing the blade of his glaive into it repeatedly as it unfolded from its resting position. Moving in a circle around it meant the leviabeetle couldn’t bring its pincers to bear on him directly, and focusing on getting as many hits in as possible early meant that he got a blast of gust before the creature had even gotten up. After leveling up earlier, Kaldalis’s strikes were doing a little more damage; instead of dealing sixty-seven physical damage per strike, he was now hitting for sixty-nine.

“Nice,” he said reflexively. He immediately grimaced, inwardly frustrated with himself for having been so thoroughly conditioned into that response that not even a fight for his life could break the reflex.

The blast of Gust hit for eighteen damage, and staggered the spiky plant, opening it up so that Kaldalis could continue to focus his attention on it. He kept dodging left and right around it, keeping the leviabeetle on the other side of it, unable to get around the spiky mass of bushes to get at him. He got two more solid hits in on it before the other leviabeetle and the chiraptor burst out of the hallway and into the room, turning the fight from a weird game of ring-around-the-rosie into all-out chaos.

Kaldalis struggled to keep ahead of the enemies as the fight unfolded. He needed, most of all, to avoid getting cornered. With two leviabeetles, he couldn’t afford to eat their damage, which was higher up-front with their combined physical and water damage. He also couldn’t afford to take the hits from the vendragora or chiraptor, because they did more damage overall when they procced their poison on him. If he accidentally dodged into a corner and got surrounded, he was going to be in trouble, just as surely as if he stepped in the wrong place and stuck his foot in a hole.

Fortunately, his first target - the vendragora - was the enemy with the farthest reach on its thorny claws. It took a minute or so of dancing around the room and focusing his attention exclusively on the spindly bramble monster before he was able to finish it off. He took a couple of unnecessary hits due to the cramped quarters, but he had hit points to spare. Taking seventy to eighty damage per hit was a tolerable sacrifice when you had one-thousand and sixty-six max health.

Once the vendragora was dealt with, the reduced number of enemies gave him the space to move to keep ahead of the incoming attacks. Snapping pincers and biting teeth couldn’t keep up with him as he circled the room, smashing his glaive into the fray, trying to take down the leviabeetles one strike at a time. His level-up increased his damage to them, as he was now applying sixty damage per hit instead of the forty-six he had been doing before. A considerable jump. He wished he knew more about the damage calculation formula so that he could try to interpret what that meant for their relative stats.

As before, the beetles seemed to be particularly vulnerable to the gust debuff, and he applied it with nearly every strike. Every few hits he got his blast of gust, giving him a moment of space when one of the beetled was blasted back by the small damage spike. He used one such gap to gulp down a healing potion, healing himself for two-hundred and thirteen health, not quite topping himself off, but as the only source of healing he had access to, he had to use it now or risk regretting it later. Any time he could sneak one in without any of it being wasted overhealing was a good application of the limited resource.

After a few long minutes of dancing in circles around the same four foot-sized potholes, he managed to finish the fight. He found himself breathing heavily even though he wasn’t really tired. He hadn’t felt like there was a lot of tension in the fight, but all the moving around and flailing about with a giant glaive seemed like he should feel like he just ran a marathon.

“Alright,” he said, allowing himself a few moments to rest, “I just have to keep doing that for an unknown amount of time. Maybe forever.” He looked up and around. “Wow. What if I am trapped in here indefinitely?”

He shook that thought away, focusing instead on mentally preparing to get up and move forward. It was only a matter of time before he got where he was going. The game wouldn’t force splitting the party for this long on purpose, right?

Right?

Twenty minutes later, Kaldalis found himself asking that question again after fighting three leviabeetles and a chiraptor in a larger rectangular room full of ominous-looking pillars of dark grey stone a down the next hall. Fifteen minutes later, he asked it again after fighting another vendragora and two chiraptors in a circular room with tiered steps like an amphitheater.

In the end, he wandered the halls alone for about an hour, fighting four packs of monsters and wandering what felt like a half-mile of claustrophobic hallways. He did his best to minimize the damage he took, but he couldn’t keep ahead of all of it. He ended up reaching for his inventory twice more for potions, putting him down at seven remaining. He also periodically stopped to watch the upper right corner of his vision, where his friends’ health bars still lived. Every few minutes, they started jumping up and down as they fought something, and at the end, Kaldalis found himself receiving a light dump of exp, along with a notification of what they were fighting. They fought leviabeetles and vendragoras, too, but no chiraptors. He also got notifications about monsters called trench ants that he wasn’t encountering on his path.

Ultimately, all he could do was hope they were doing alright.

And also hope that the hits he was taking weren’t causing Balrim too much anxiety in turn. He knew that, because he could see their HP bars in the corner of his vision, the talsar healer would be able to see his.

Kaldalis pressed forward, trying to keep his concerns in check by concentrating on getting as far as he could as fast as he could. This whole strategy was dependent on meeting back up with his friends by keeping his feet under himself, and keeping the stone hallways moving past him. The path didn’t fork, and none of the rooms had branching paths off of them, and so he knew he had encountered no wrong turns to take. He just had to keep moving.

The dungeon designers had to know it was possible for a group to get separated like this. There had to be a point where all the splitting paths met back up - especially those with traps that slammed shut fast enough to split a party. At the very least, they had to meet back up before they came to any truly frightening enemies. He was glad he hadn’t faced any firemicids, or else he would still be fighting the first swarm of summoned adds. Maybe that was by design. Perhaps these encounters had been limited in order to make them a bit more manageable solo.

He had just convinced himself of that when he got to a boss room.