Kaldalis felt a wry smirk cross his face, unbidden. “Melodrama aside, we don’t have time to waste. The encampment is still in danger. That core does us no good if all the people and facilities to turn it into a new censer get burned to the ground.”

“Of course,” Haldir said, shaking his head to finally tear his eyes away from the core. “We should get moving.”

“And quick,” Balrim added, pointing up at the sky, where the column of black smoke was getting thicker. “We can only hope that the delay won’t be the difference between victory and defeat.”

“If it was that close that just the four of us would make the difference, then it was probably a fight we were meant to lose for story reasons,” Kaldalis said. “But if we’re what they need to turn the tide, then let's go find the tide and turn it.”

The quartet started off towards the town, first setting a brisk pace, and then picking it up into a run as Kaldalis realized that time might be an important factor. He found it hard to believe that four people at or around level six could be a big difference in a siege, but more outrageous things had happened before in MMO storytelling.

And was this really a pre-planned story? Everything here had felt so organic, minus a few obvious goalposts. Perhaps there was more to this Monsoon game than everything he’d previously come to expect from their storytelling.

“Is there anything we can do,” Kaldalis asked moments before they reached a true run, “to prepare the core to finish the censer when we arrive?”

“No way,” Haldir said. “Even if the preparations for the core could be done by hand while running, the other ingredients won’t be ready yet. We only gathered them yesterday, and they’ll take a few days to be properly processed and fermented.”

“Then I guess we have to do this on hard mode. Shit.”

They burst out of the treeline into the clearing that had been made outside of the encampment’s walls, and what they saw there made them all stop dead and stare.

This wasn’t a raiding party of a dozen infernal horde.

It was a full-blown siege.

If they hadn’t gotten the walls built, this would have been a one-sided battle. Over in minutes.

There were scores of Infernal Horde monsters arrayed against the walls. They were about evenly split between the shimmering gelatinous malum and the pale furred synchoresi, with a handful of boss-sized members among the throng.

The smoke was coming from the walls themselves, where the malum were smashing their fists against them, drawing splashes of flames. It obscured their view of the encampment proper, making it nearly impossible to see the extent of the damage.

Kaldalis tried to reassure himself that if the camp was entirely fallen, that the monsters would be inside the walls, not outside still trying to hammer their way in. It mostly helped his anxiety.

Of the boss-sized horde he could see, there were two giant malum and two giant syncoresi. He felt a little chagrined that they’d only handled a fraction of the total number of giant monsters when he’d hoped that there had been just the one boss-level mob leading the attack. But having trimmed off a fifth of their giant siege monsters was at least a little help.

As he watched, the two giant syncoresi were gesturing, trying to organize and coordinate the monsters around them, even if the gestures seemed to boil down to “spread out and try to surround the whole wall” rather than any more sophisticated plan of attack.

Of particular note to him was that the two giant syncoresi he could see both had five fingers per hand.

His nemesis, the four-fingered syncoresi, was unaccounted for.

“Shit,” Haldir said, dumbfounded.

That single word was what the group needed to shake free of their stunned silence.

“We have to get inside,” Balrim said. “We’re in trouble on the outside here. Easy to get surrounded and overwhelmed on our own like this.”

“It looks like we’d just be rushing to being surrounded and overwhelmed from the other side,” Myrin said, “but I don’t have any better suggestions so I’ll shut my damn mouth.”

“Fire!”

The bellowing call carried over the clearing to the quartet. Kaldalis was about to remark that it seemed a bit late for that alarm, but a flurry of arrows shot out of the smoke, raining down among the horde arrayed below. Damage scattered around the crowd, but it just wasn’t enough to discourage the sheer numbers waiting below.

They didn’t have any equipment to repel firepower of this magnitude. No vats of boiling oil or wall-mounted catapults. Though, Kaldalis’ meme-addled brain reminded him that the trebuchet was the superior siege weapon.

“They’re still fighting,” Kaldalis said, “and we’re still talking. Whatever plan we can make, it needs to start right now.”

“We get to the wall.” Balrim looked up at the structure, almost resolutely. “From there, we-”

But Kaldalis didn’t wait for an explanation. He broke away from the treeline and into a run.

“Come on, you sons of bitches!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Do you want to live forever?”

He didn’t look back to see if the battle cry spurred his friends to follow - or if it had been, perhaps, insensitive, given Haldir’s recent brush with permadeath - but looking ahead he saw that it was loud enough to get the attention of a handful of the Infernal Horde on this flank of the fight. About a half-dozen of the mixed malum and syncoresi nearest to him turned to face him, and either out of their natural aggro to see an unprotected adventurer, or frustration with being unable to get at the walls amid the crowd of their kin, raised claws and fists in his direction.

Kaldalis’s first instinct was to draw up short in front of the mass of terrifying monsters, but that wasn’t going to get him anywhere. His goals were threefold: first and foremost was to clear a path to the wall, but beyond that he needed to develop aggro on the enemies to keep his friends - and the encampment - safe from harm, and he needed to keep himself alive at the same time.

Paradoxically, he had to start with the second thing first. He lashed out with his glaive, delivering two quick thrusts two two different beasts. As before, the malum took sixteen physical damage from him, and suffered a stack of Gust. The Syncoresi he had struck only took fourteen physical damage and avoided the Gust stack. He wanted to be irritated that two levels and several gear upgrades later he was still doing so little damage, but compared to his last encounter, he had at least broken double-digits now.

His polearm gave him the advantage in reach, and using it let him get their attention without opening himself up to attack, even as a forest of claws and fists came in at him. He darted back quickly, and as he moved the throng ahead moved forward to match, opening a pocket behind the group.

Kaldalis backed away, stabbing at the group for sixteen here and fourteen there, building up the list of foes who would chase him to the ends of the earth. As he fought, his friends caught up and joined into the chaotic scramble, running up behind the pack of Infernal Horde.

Haldir and Myrin started laying in with their weapons, and Balrim stood at range and started adding his arrows to the melee. As they came in, a few more of the sieging forces broke away from the crowd to join their fight, and Kaldalis had to work to keep up, keeping the knot of monsters growing rather than risk them running wild against his friends.

Kaldalis focused on what needed to be done, keeping his aggro rolling and his hit points high, to let Haldir and Myrin do their work. It wasn’t long before the first syncoresi broke from the pack and fled back into the jungle. And then a malum after that. Then another syncoresi.

As they left, Kaldalis guided the pack of mobs closer to the walls. He picked up more, keeping the knot of monsters roughly the same size as Haldir and Myrin sent them running. Each one was another step closer to the wall. One step closer to his current goal.

In the thick of battle, it took Kaldalis way longer than he wanted to admit to realize that the malum here weren’t exploding. They didn’t have to Flicker, and while that was odd, he couldn’t focus on the thought for more than a few seconds.

It didn’t take too long before they’d cleared the edge of the mob of sieging monsters to the wall. They still had a knot of enemies to deal with, but they had access to their goal.

“Hey, Balrim!” Kaldalis yelled. “We’re at the wall! Whatever your plan is, here we are!”

Balrim ran around the group of enemies to the wall. The talsar looked uncertainly up at the smoldering structure before enacting his plan.

“Ho there!” Balrim yelled. “Hello the wall! Is anybody up there?”

“That’s your plan?” Kaldalis snapped, suddenly struggling to keep his concentration on his movement ahead of the pack of enemies still arrayed against him. “Just walk up and talk to whoever can hear us?”

“Listen, buddy,” Balrim yelled back, “this is the best I could come up with, and I didn’t hear any other suggestions.”

“Hello?” A voice came through the smoke up above. “Are there people out there?”

“Yeah!” Balrim yelled back quickly, turning his attention back away from Kaldalis and up to the stranger above. “We’re here to save the day! What’s going on? Where are we needed?” He paused briefly before adding: “and how do we get back inside?”