He knew something was wrong when the pressure he was holding back from pushing into the room began to loosen. His sphere of darkvision didn’t reveal what was happening, but the syncoresi near the limits of his vision started to back off. Instead of pushing forward, they pushed to the sides, clearing a path down the middle.

It was too perfect. He guessed what it was for just before he saw it.

“Big trouble!” Kaldalis said, his voice slipping an octave higher than normal. “Big trouble incoming from the back!”

People reacted slow. But the thing pushing forward didn’t.

The huge creature pushed through the tunnel, pressing the other syncoresi roughly into the walls as it squeezed towards the room. Its broad muscular shoulders scraped against the stone on either side, and it was hunched over so low it was practically crawling. Both hands reached along the wall, grabbing the uneven, craggy surface to pull itself forward.

One of those hands had only four fingers.

“However big you think I just said, it’s bigger than that!”

The monster didn’t even bother trying to jockey for position. It just bowled over the handful of its companions that Kaldalis had tagged at the front of the group. Those enormous claws were brought straight down towards him. Kaldalis hurled himself to the left, barely dodging the strike, but the reckless maneuver left him open to one of the scrambling regular-sized syncoresi, and without the censer to mitigate the damage, it ripped across his shoulder for two-hundred and fifty-eight damage.

It was a lot of damage, but nothing compared to what was coming. The four-fingered syncoresi forced its way into the room, towering over Kaldalis and the arrayed adventurers. As soon as it was through the tunnel, the other syncoresi started to file in behind it, though they seemed reluctant to rush forward ahead of the boss monster.

“What the fuck do we do?” Deytambos shouted.

“This is just between us!” Kaldalis yelled at the four-fingered syncoresi. “Let's have a proper boss fight here!”

The syncoresi major gave a snarl, and pointed at Kaldalis with a single claw.

In response, the other syncoresi surged forward. Apparently the beasts were disinclined to acquiesce to his request.

They weren’t going to be handling this fight in the classical style.

“Many whelps!” Myrin yelled. “Handle it!”

Kaldalis popped his Sweeping Strikes cooldown and charged into the oncoming mob. Despite how hopeless it looked, he just reminded himself that this was the plan. They were here to go down swinging. If he - and all of the adventurers with him - hadn’t known this was the most likely outcome, now would be the time to come to terms with it. But since they’d started with that expectation, all that remained was the fight itself.

“This is it!” Kaldalis announced. “For a thousand years, they’ll look back on the stream of this day and say ‘This was their finest hour!’”

Kaldalis ripped his spear across the front of every enemy he could reach. With the censer down, even the Sweeping Strikes damage bonus only brought him to ninety physical damage and six wind damage to the regular syncoresi.

What was worse was striking the syncoresi major. The four-fingered bastard only took fourteen physical damage and one wind damage from Kaldalis’s attack.

As soon as he struck them, he secured his hold. Overworld aggro mechanics meant that the only person in the room who could take their attention from him was Courbois, and she was holding position at the door, keeping the captains out.

Claws whipped in at him by the dozen.

Kaldalis reversed direction and leaped backwards. The longer he stayed alive, the longer before everyone else was overwhelmed. He was resigned to die here, but he had to hold on as long as possible. The quest was still lit up on the right side of his vision.

Until the town was safe, he refused to die.

Or at least, as much a choice as he was going to be allowed.

He slashed his spear at the right side of the room. The syncoresi were surging past towards the other adventurers, and he grabbed a hold of as much as he could. But there were too many. The room was too big. He couldn’t cover the whole space.

“Protect Balrim!” Myrin yelled. “Protect the censer!”

Balrim was furiously pouring powdered incense from a sack into the censer, looking around in a panic at the wave of enemies diving in at him. Aurigeant and Myrin stepped up immediately beside him. While Myrin grabbed the first syncoresi that approached, Aurigeant’s Sweeping Strikes were ready again, and he pulled the rest before leaping away, causing them to follow him back across the room. His glaive swept through the other syncoresi as he went over their heads, kiting them around the room with his jump cooldown, just staying ahead of their attacks.

Kaldalis had bigger problems. At least twenty syncoresi only had eyes for him right now, and one of them was a behemoth that dwarfed the entire room. With everyone else dealing with the two dozen other syncoresi loose in the room, he had to hold them all himself.

A storm of claws slashed at him, and he had to leap back away from the whole crowd to avoid being cut to ribbons.

There were just so many.

Too many.

“Anyone who’s not kiting, focus the boss! If we can get him to run, we might be able to hold!”

He wasn’t sure if that was true. Kaldalis knew defeating it in the first raid had sent the whole attack fleeing, but there was no guarantee that it would work here.

Just the same, he was grateful when he saw a steady stream of arrows coming out of Droto and the human archer, pinging away at the four-fingered Syncoresi.

He saw Myrin as well, scuttling across the room, darting between the syncoresi chasing Aurigeant in circles around the room. She started hacking away at the monster’s calves and knees, still running circles with every swing as the monster she’d aggroed off of Balrim chased her.

Kaldalis had his Jump cooldown ready, and decided to follow Aurigeant’s example. The finnian had more mobs after him than even Kaldalis did. He didn’t know how much longer the man would have his Jump cooldown rolling, but it had proved functional in the short term.

Since their goal was survival only until the quest to save the town completed, the short term was all they had.

Kaldalis leaped over the heads of the smaller syncoresi, whipping another Sweeping Strikes attack beneath himself as he went. The spearhead slashed through upraised claws, arms, and shoulders, dealing out his paltry-seeming ninety-six damage to each foe he struck. The arc ended slashing across the chest of the sycoresi major for only fifteen damage.

It was working. But the problem with the Jump ability was that it didn’t give him much control over his movements in the air.

He wasn’t able to twist out of the way of the four-fingered hand that swatted him.

Without any mitigating factors - no censer and no Endure cooldown - it struck him for four hundred and eighty-nine damage. The damage felt like he’d been slammed bodily into a rock wall at terminal velocity.

Shortly after, he slammed bodily into a rock wall at terminal velocity.

He didn’t take damage from that impact - either because the system didn’t consider it an attack, or because of his Jump cooldown - but it still hurt like a bitch.

The pain wasn’t his biggest concern right now, though. He scrambled to his feet and kicked off the ground as soon as he could get his legs under him. Kaldalis launched himself back into the fray, carving another arc through the syncoresi that were trying to attack Courbois from the rear. He didn’t have time to stop and see if that helped.

When he landed at the feet of the syncoresi major and attacked again, his Sweeping Strike drew the attention of the few syncoresi in the immediate area that weren’t already looking to rip him apart.

It felt pointless to strike the boss for only fifteen damage, but this wasn’t about victory or defeat.

This was about sending a message.

As Kaldalis leaped clear of the next strike of the four-fingered syncoresi, three regular syncoresi got their claws on him, ripping at his ribs for two hundred and fifty-eight damage each, dealing more damage with two of those strikes than the boss would have, with another attack on top of that.

As it stood, he was nearly dead. He had barely more than two hundred hit points left.

Anything laying hands on him would be the end of him.

“Hello?” Myrin yelled over the roar of combat. “Team? We got a tank about to die over here!”

A potion hit the ground nearby, letting out a huge blast of blue-green fumes. Kaldalis regained another one hundred and seventy-eight hit points, and he saw on the left side of his vision, the other party hit point bars went up at that one as well. It put him at three hundred and ninety-eight total. Enough for another attack from a smaller syncoresi. He just had to keep ahead of the huge claws of the syncoresi major.

“Thank you!” Kaldalis said, leaping straight up over the next storm of claws lashing out at him. “I thought I was-”

The four-fingered syncoresi smacked him out of the air again.

For a brief horrifying moment, he knew he was dead.

But the claw that struck him was tinged with a sickly orange hue.

The attack only did three hundred and eighty-nine damage.

Kaldalis looked back and saw that Balrim was holding the censer aloft with one hand, and hucking a potion with the other. It landed on the stone wall right before Kaldalis’s momentum brought him there. Another two-hundred and seventy hit points from his friend’s healing brought him to the cusp of the danger zone.

The brief moment Balrim had bought him let him grab a potion from his inventory, healing him for three hundred and eighty-two hit points.

Being near thirty percent health wasn’t anywhere near safe.

But he could still fight.

And with the censer active, their last stand would last. It would take quite a bit longer for these monsters to put them down.