As they left the beachside gate, Kaldalis was met with a scene he hadn’t seen since the first day here. Because of the nature of the quests, and the various jobs people had to complete during the day, gatherings were rare. In fact, Kaldalis hadn’t seen all the PCs gathered in one place without there being a fight.

Garyung had started a bonfire, and a thin column of wispy smoke trailed up into the sky. However, the fire itself was barely visible, since it was surrounded by almost every person in camp.

Everyone had divided into their little cliques on the boat. And while everyone was friendly around town, they still had their usual groups they socialized with.

But now everyone was gathered together, chatting as one giant mass.

He realized immediately what was bridging the gap.

The dungeon runs.

Having had to arrange people into small teams - especially with classes taken under consideration - meant that a lot of the players were divided out and forced to socialize outside their normal circle. Even if the only outside person was Kaldalis or one of his original party, it still opened up conversation, and seemed to remind a lot of people that the other adventurers outside of their group were people too.

Garyung was standing next to the fire chatting with the veritable army he’d gathered as Kaldalis and his friends approached. As soon as he spotted them, though, he cut his conversation short and raised his voice to get everyone’s attention.

“The Infernal Horde is a threat to us all,” he said in a booming voice. All at once, people turned to listen. “And what we need more than anything else is methods of dealing with them. We need weapons. And what’s the best weapon?”

“The bow!” someone from the back of the group shouted.

“Yes, we know,” Garyung said with a chuckle, “you like bows, Droto. We all know that.”

“I’m just saying!” the green-scaled talsar from the back of the group yelled again, over the laugh of the gathered adventurers.

“Okay, glad that’s settled,” Garyung said loudly, quieting the laughter. “So the bow is the best weapon. But what’s the second best weapon? Knowledge. I don’t need to tell you that knowledge is the most useful tool we can have. There’s a reason that all of us have a wiki or two in our bookmarks bar, am I right?” A knowing chuckle went around the group. “And the most popular MMO mods in the world are all about giving us more information. Damage meters, improved minimaps, encounter alerts - all of this is information. And without the ability to either build those wikis or program those mods for Project Rundan, we have to do things the old-fashioned way.” He gestured to Kaldalis’s group and beckoned them forward. “We have to share knowledge with our word-holes and store it in our thinky-parts. Here with information for our thinky-parts, I bring you the word-hole of my friend Kaldalis.”

Kaldalis had never been introduced as a speaker before.

It was kind of weird.

There was a little bit of polite applause, even.

“I, uh, didn’t anticipate this being a lecture,” Kaldalis said as he stepped up into the space Garyung vacated next to the bonfire. “They say you should start every speech with a joke, so I’m going to start by saying that you should start every speech with a joke. It’s such an overused trope that I think that should be enough to count.” A polite chuckle rippled around the group, and Kaldalis tried to force down his anxiety at public speaking.

“Garyung covered the basics here. The Infernal Horde is a threat. Even the weakest of them are boss-level monsters, and because of their tactics - attacking in force and fleeing when near-death - it’s very difficult to kill them. For whatever reason, the only way to learn anything in this world is to kill shit, so information packets have been few and far between. But my friends and I managed to secure a few kills in this last attack. The kills yielded some notes, and in the hands of our very capable research team, we have the results of those notes.”

He held up the red folder Bangen had handed him. People’s eyes immediately followed the red folder, like they were all raging bulls, except that bulls-liking-red thing was bullshit.

“This doesn’t tell us everything,” he warned, “but it’s knowledge we didn’t have yesterday. And knowing is half the battle.”

“So what can you tell us?” Garyung asked, then paused. “Let’s start at the beginning. I’m sure we’d all like to know the weak point we should be attacking for massive damage, but we need to deal with the whole Infernal Horde, not just specifically the red jelly guys.”

“Alright, well...” Kaldalis trailed off as he tried to put his thoughts in order. Everyone waited patiently, which was pretty nice. “The Infernal Horde are elementals of a kind.” Kaldalis flipped through the middle portions of the report, where all the stuff that looked like story information was gathered. “And not just for the classical elements. Weird shit. The malum are anger elementals, for example. The syncoresi are likely elementals of a different emotion or concept or whatever. Not having research on them means I can’t say for certain.”

“Are they people, though?” someone asked from the crowd. Kaldalis oriented on the voice and saw that it was a suyon in the second row on his right. He recognized them from one of his dungeon runs. They were a healer named Yosini. “Can we talk to them? Maybe make peace?”

A chatter went around the group at that, a few people objecting to the idea, while others defended the concept. Kaldalis flipped through Bangen’s report quickly to find an answer.

“They aren’t really conscious,” Kaldalis said when he found the relevant information. Everyone quieted back down to let him speak. “They’re not even animals, either. They’re natural disasters.” He frowned out at the group. “You couldn’t reason with a lightning bolt or… or a tornado. The Infernal Horde’s only objective is to seek out combat and leverage their stat advantage on everything else in the world to be as terrifying as possible. Any display of intelligence or even instinct is only in service to that goal.”

There were a few upturned faces that didn’t seem all that convinced. He could hear the grumbling starting, mostly in the back. Kaldalis blew out a steadying breath.

“I don’t know how to even say it. It’s all right here.” He shook his folder at the crowd. “They’re basically not even part of the ecosystem here. They spawned only to push us back off the beach. It’s… they aren’t born, they just spring up in established dens. They don’t age. Like, they don’t die naturally. They don’t contribute to the ecosystem in any way. Instead they just kind of rampage around and kill anything that crosses their path.” He pointed out into the jungle. “The first one I saw killed an irritator with brutal efficiency, and then walked away, leaving the whole corpse to just rot out there.”

“The only reason they exist,” Myrin said, cutting in, “is to challenge us. Monsoon put them here to build tension and create challenges. We either fight them and keep our foothold, or they push through our defenses and kill us over and over until our only choice is to respawn back in Baimer.”

“Or not at all,” Kaldalis said, trying not to look at Haldir when he said it.

There was a moment of somber silence at that.

As much as it made him a dick to point it out, Kaldalis was glad that it hit as hard as it did. Some gamers could be a bit sociopathic when it came to NPCs. In other games, people delighted in tormenting them, harassing them, and even murdering them. Even in RP-heavy MMOs, NPCs often earned insulting nicknames and inspiring fanfics writing them out of the lore.

It was good that the group of adventurers assembled here had at least enough empathy to find the NPCs here worth protecting.

At first he had thought the permadeath aspect of the NPCs was kinda bullshit. A stupid design decision from Monsoon. But they could always create more NPCs, and would likely have a whole shit ton of them ready to join as soon as the town was established.

But Kaldalis didn’t want new NPCs. He liked the ones he had.

Kaldalis snapped to attention when he realized Garyung was talking. “The only option is to show them the same mercy they’ve shown us. Which is none at all.”

“To that end,” Kaldalis said, flipping to the back of the folder, “they do have weaknesses. Not many, and not necessarily easy ones to guess, but they’re there. The malum are weak to water. Or, rather, they’re less resistant to it. Not necessarily the biggest weakness, but an exploitable one. Their fire affinity is high, as you all no doubt guessed from the fire damage on their attacks, but their dark affinity is low. I believe that means that the dark blast attack has a high damage multiplier to make it as scary as it is. That means that having more dark affinity will offer disproportionate protection.”

“Not that that matters,” another adventurer said, “since we can all avoid it now with the flicker.”

“Maybe,” Kaldalis said, hesitantly. “But when you’re in a fight with several of them, they might blast on different timings.” He referred back to the notes. “And the attack is apparently called Tenebris Shock? I don’t know, do we want to start calling it that, or do we just want to all agree to call it something that rolls off the tongue a bit better? We’ve all just been saying dark blast for the last couple of days, after all.”

“Tenebris Shock sounds better to me,” Balrim said.

“Blasty McBlastface!” Myrin suddenly blurted.

For a brief moment, Kaldalis was in the middle of a nascent riot. A nontrivial cheer went up at Myrin’s suggestion, but a much louder group of voices shouted them down.

People started yelling about taking things seriously, while others chided them for not having fun.

He was pretty sure there was about to be a brawl, and Kaldalis realized he didn’t know if unarmed attacks could actually do damage.

“Hold it! Hold it!” Garyung bellowed. He stood up and raised both his arms, and his booming voice quieted everyone before things could escalate farther. “That’s not what this discussion is for! Calm the fuck down!”

“Sorry!” Myrin yelled as if to capture everyone’s attention, and then lowered her voice. “Sorry, sorry. My bad. I think I have a crack in the filter between my brain and my mouth. Completely my fault.”

Kaldalis waited until people had gotten themselves under control. “Alright. So. I don’t think I have many other details to share. There’s a lot of information in here, but I don’t know if any of it is immediately useful. The big details that needed to get out have been said, but the most important thing is knowing that this information is here to be had.” He held up the folder. “I’m pretty sure you can get a copy of this packet from Bangen in the research headquarters, and I’ll be happy to loan this one out if anyone wants to read over it.”

“I hope everyone takes the time to learn whatever they can from these new resources,” Garyung said, “I particularly need you all to get what you can from this before the next time they attack. Which, I might remind you, we don’t have a timetable on. Could be next week. But also maybe tomorrow.”

“I’m sure we all have other stuff to be doing with our time,” Kaldalis said. He gestured over to Balrim and Myrin. “My friends have work to do on leveling some crafting skills, and I’m sure a lot of the rest of you do, too. But I’ll stick around for a little bit with my folder to field any burning questions you might have.”

“Thanks,” Balrim said quietly as the group began to separate and disperse. “I was hoping this wouldn’t keep me busy all day.”

“I didn’t say that for you,” Kaldalis whispered back. “Get Myrin out of here before she starts another fucking riot!”

The talsar grinned wide. “Ten-four, good buddy.”