As soon as they were out of the town and heading into the forest, Kaldalis took the lead on instinct. As the tank, it was just the most sensible for him to be in front, even if he only had a vague idea of where he was going.

It did, however, let him give the nearby questing areas a wide berth.

“Why are we taking the roundabout?” Myrin asked, pointing to a more direct route. “It’d be faster to cut right through the white-blossom forest.”

“It’s where all the questers are right now,” Kaldalis said, continuing to circle around the indicated area. “I’d rather not have to cut through a crowded area and answer a lot of questions.”

“Why not?” Myrin asked, pressing him. “We might find Reno and SeventyEight, and we could bring them along.”

Kaldalis grimaced, turning back towards Myrin. “Not to be a dick about it, but I kind of don’t want them along.”

“What, is the honeymoon over?” Balrim asked, even as Myrin elbowed him in the hip.

“Nothing like that,” Kaldalis said quickly. “I can’t promise that us being out exploring will net them as much exp as the daily quests they’d miss out on. They already got a slow start”

“Nice save.” Balrim snickered.

“It’s not a save,” Kaldalis said, pulling up short and turning to face Balrim down. “I can’t be doing all this to prioritize getting them caught up and then pull them away from getting caught up. Use your head, man.”

“Alright, alright,” Balrim said, raising a hand defensively. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything about it. I just thought you were going to say they’d slow us down.”

“They wouldn’t,” Kaldalis said with a firm tone. “They’re smart players, more than capable of keeping up with us. Someday soon, they’ll be a great backup to have along. But I don’t want them stuck six levels behind us forever.”

Balrim seemed happy to leave the conversation at that, and Kaldalis felt the same.

In all reality, Kaldalis actually did fear that Reno and SeventyEight might slow them down if he brought them along, and he felt like a heel for thinking it. It was serendipitous that he had another excuse ready to go to. And it was the truth. He knew Reno was smart from raiding with her in Colossus, and SeventyEight was literally a pro. Ex-pro.

Once the pair of them caught up numerically, the five of them together would be an unstoppable team.

They just had to get there.

In the meantime, the trio circled around the white-blossom forest and headed deeper into the island, carefully picking their way through the dimly-lit jungle. The ground was still soft and muddy from the rain, but the storm had passed long enough ago that they weren’t sinking in sludge.

“Don’t forget,” Kaldalis said, taking a lower-set stance as they began to approach the farthest reaches of the map they’d uncovered previously, “the Infernal Horde is still at large out here. If there’s a chance this landslide uncovered the dungeon, then there’s an equal chance that we might catch our first look at one of them.”

“Shit,” Balrim cursed, following Kaldalis’s lead and taking the crouching posture that was universal videogame language for stealth. “What do we do if we see one?”

“I told you what happened when I saw the first syncoresi, right?” Kaldalis asked as he slowed his pace, trying to quiet the squelching sounds the forest mud made under his boots. “It chased me for literal miles.”

“In this world,” Myrin said somberly, not bothering to crouch as she was still shorter than Kaldalis and Balrim could ever hunch, “it’s kill or be killed.”

“Anything that attacks us, we have to fight it,” Kaldalis agreed, glancing around carefully as he went, looking for any shape even vaguely humanoid in the first around them. “The best we could hope for by running would be to lead it farther away from the camp. Either we have to all die at the same time so that we respawn together to run back to town, or we have to kill it.”

Balrim shuddered. “I’d prefer not to die.”

“Then if we see something, we fight,” Kaldalis said with a nod. “I don’t know if it will stop the raid if we drop the scout, but it’ll stop them from having a thirty minute head-start from our respawn timers.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “If we rush home fast enough, we can warn them what’s coming. Or, at least, warn them about what to look out for while they’re out here.”

“I’ve got some ire potions ready,” Myrin said, gesturing at the empty air in front of her, presumably with her inventory open. “I’m not sure if it’ll be enough, but it’s the best shot we’ll have with just the three of us.”

They continued on cautiously, picking their way farther and farther away from town.

The trees began to thin, and Kaldalis immediately started to see signs of the landslide. There were huge mounds of mud and dirt pushed up against the trees like snowdrifts, and the ground beneath their feet became a much thicker layer of rain-softened muck.

Myrin was light enough to walk along the top of it, and Kaldalis was able to slow his pace enough to avoid sinking into it more than a few inches - partially in thanks to the augmented balance offered by his tail. But Balrim’s digitigrade Talsar legs put too much of his body weight on too small of an area, and their pace slowed to a crawl to let him keep up as every step plunged into more than a foot of mud.

As soon as they were out of the trees, the mud began to clear. It made sense; without any root structure to keep it in place, this was where it all would have slid down from. As expected, the ground here was rough and rocky from where the loose soil had been stripped away.

“Where are the ruins from here?” Kaldalis asked, keeping his voice low. He didn’t know why he bothered to try and remain stealthy. Without the cover of trees, they would be plainly visible even if they weren’t overheard.

Myrin gestured to the west. “They should be farther that way. According to the account we heard, at least. It was straight south of a lake we discovered two days ago without you. So it lines up on our map with somewhere off in that direction.”

With a nod, Kaldalis led the way along the uneven terrain to the west.

It didn’t take long for them to crest the top of a rise and see their objective before them.

Kaldalis had to admit, it was hard to pick out the details that would have separated it from random rocks scattered around, and the ruins of an actual town. It reminded him of the ruins he’d found with Dalgaard, if that place had been hit with a tidal wave of mud. All the wooden parts of the structures weren’t just decayed, they were entirely gone. He imagined that if he was down among the stones, it would have looked like nothing more than piles of cut stone blocks. From up here, though, the piles were visibly structures, carefully spaced and lined up to indicate the road that had once passed through the middle of this town.

At the far end was a taller structure, made mostly of stone. Kaldalis couldn’t tell from here, but it looked like it might have been made of one single continuous piece, like the libraries they’d seen elsewhere.

“That’s our goal,” Kaldalis said, pointing towards the large building. “If there’s anything of value to be found, that’s where we’ll find it.”

“So what’s our approach?” Balrim asked, crouching down next to Kaldalis. He pointed to the center of the ruins, where he could see movement. The clawed finger moved around the town, and Kaldalis saw that there were at least a dozen quadrupedal figures among the buildings. “If we circle around the long way, we may be able to avoid a fight.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” Kaldalis said, starting forward. “If we fumble and get spotted, I’d rather deal with these things intentionally, on our own terms, rather than get surrounded, with enemies on all sides.”

“Smart thinking,” Myrin said, pulling out her greatsword, even though they were still a few hundred yards away from the nearest enemy.

“Be careful, though,” Kaldalis warned as he started to pick his way down towards the ruins. “The last ruins like this I saw, there was a boss monster that got the jump on me. We need to be keeping an eye on our way back out, to make sure we don’t get boxed in and trapped.”

They approached the ruins with what Kaldalis believed was an appropriate level of caution, even as it was obviously making Myrin progressively more and more antsy. As they reached the bottom of the hill, they could no longer see where the enemies were, and Kaldalis started to pick his way forward even more carefully, examining the ruins as they approached.

The buildings had fared very poorly under the thick layers of dirt, every building reduced to its stone skeleton. It was a challenge to tell what they’d been back when the area had been occupied. Given the size of the ruins, he imagined it was another small town, like the one he’d encountered near Cotanaku.

When they got closer, he started to see some telltale similarities. There was a building with a big rusted lump outside that may have once been a forge. He could picture a few of the other buildings as homes or other businesses, but few of them had any visible remnants that he could identify.

On the edge of town that they approached, there was one familiar-looking structure. It was a larger stone building, filled with rusted metal vats that were still partially intact. Kaldalis suspected they were full of mud right now, but he wondered what they were. Why did the lataxinans require a dedicated building to store huge metal vats? Was it for the mass-production of potions? Liquor? Or, perhaps, something more sinister?

“Maybe we should investigate-” he began to say to Balrim and Myrin as they crept closer to the building.

He was interrupted by the first of the monsters as it appeared around the corner. Despite their attempts at stealth, its beady eyes oriented on them immediately.

It was a quadruped, as they’d seen from above. Most of its pebbled hide was a mottled gray, though it was heavily spattered with brown mud and muck, as though the landslide had unearthed it. Its face was its most striking feature, though. It had a huge frill, like that of a ceratopsian dinosaur, composed of spiked purple crystals, glittering in the sunlight. Two black eyes were set into the middle of the jagged structure, and at the very bottom of it, a birdlike beak capped the tip of its snout. At its rear was a stiff stubby tail, looking for all the world like a ridged stalactite.

Kaldalis could only assume this was the Jeotops he sought for Sivima’s quest. While that meant he likely wanted to fight it, at this moment, it appeared his opinion on the matter was irrelevant.

It lowered its spiky frill and charged right at him.