The fall wasn’t terribly far. Kaldalis didn’t even have time to realize he was falling before he heard bricks hitting bricks.

His landing was a little rough, thanks to the pile of fallen bricks that preceded him. Because it was a short fall, however, it did little more than knock a breath out of him.

Kaldalis imagined that the opening they’d fallen through had allowed illumination into the darkened space, but as soon as he started looking around, he realized it was the globe of vision that he always had in pitch blackness.

They had fallen into a chamber that felt vaguely familiar. While the layered stone bricks that made up the ceiling had been small and uniformly-shaped, the walls were made of thick blocks of stone in various sizes and shapes, no less than two feet on a side. They fit together like puzzle pieces, and as Kaldalis examined them, the seams formed vague shapes. His mind turned the wall as a whole into a huge face, with the lines between blocks of stone outlining a short snout, triangular nose, and radiating whiskers.

A Lataxinan.

“Oh shit,” Kaldalis said into the darkness.

“I’m fine by the way,” Myrin grumbled, rolling over and tossing bricks off of herself. “Since you asked.”

“Sorry,” Kaldalis said, looking around at the room as a whole, “both for that, and for doubting you. I think this is exactly what we’ve been looking for.”

The room was relatively narrow, only ten or eleven feet wide, but it was over thirty feet long, darkness enveloping the ends of his vision. There was no sign of furniture or even remains of it. There was no indication of what the room had been, until he took a step away from where they landed. The globe of his vision uncovered the far wall quickly, showing him a column of inserts cut into the stone wall. It took a second to visually follow them up the wall to the ceiling, where they led to an offset square amidst the bricks still there, with roots poking in around three sides.

“It’s an entrance,” Kaldalis said. “We just found it in the wrong place.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Myrin said. She’d walked the opposite direction, and gestured for Kaldalis to join her.

Crossing the pile of rubble to see what she was seeing, he pulled up short right beside her. The globe of his darkvision uncovered a huge stone archway. The curve of it was stylized like a shark’s mouth, with rows and rows of triangular teeth poking down from the top. Smaller blocks set into the wall near the corners of the room looked like eyes.

“What’s on the other side?” Myrin asked, though neither of them took their eyes off the yawning entrance. “Another one of these?”

“No,” Kaldalis said, though he walked towards the archway as he gestured back towards the far end, “it’s our way out. A ladder with a hatch at the top.”

“Hey, let me know if you guys are dead,” Balrim yelled down from the hole in the ceiling.

“We’re alive,” Myrin yelled up at him. “Took you long enough to ask.”

“I wanted to make sure at least one of us could go for help!” Balrim called back. “I booked it when the cave-in started. I thought it was going to be a lot worse than this.” The Talsar’s snout poked down into the darkness, slit pupils widening as he focused on them in the pitch blackness.

“Did you go for help?” Myrin asked, stepping back to grin up at him. “Does everyone think we’re gone? How were our funerals? Was mine bigger than Kal’s?”

“No, I-”

“You didn’t even give us a funeral?” Myrin wailed, though she couldn’t hide her laughter. “You monster! I thought you loved us!”

Kaldalis tuned out their bickering, pressing onwards to the archway. He kept himself alert, with his awareness poised to smash down any or all of his cooldowns should something rush up the stairs at him.

The stairwell vanished into darkness below, but the stone stairs were clean and clear of debris and dirt. It looks very much like the hallways in the labyrinth of the previous dungeon.

Carefully, he set his foot just past the threshold of the archway. As he both feared and hoped, a pop-up filled his vision.

Leaden Halls of Ninurta

There is no previous clear time for this dungeon. World-first completion will set the record time for future runs.

“This is it,” Kaldalis said. He grimaced as he realized that Balrim and Myrin were still jabbing at each other about funerary arrangements, and raised his voice. “This is it! The dungeon!”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, the pair were silenced not by his confirmation, but by a roar that filled the air.

It seemed to come from the forest in all directions.

They knew that roar.

They’d heard it before.

It was a sourceless warning that meant only one thing.

Infernal Horde.

The thought crossed Kaldalis’s mind only seconds before the quest appeared on the right side of his vision.

Establish Dominance

Repel the first Infernal Horde raid!

“Fuck!” Kaldalis, Myrin, and Balrim all said at the same time.

“How do we get you out of there?” Balrim yelled down at them, panic clear in his eyes. “Do I need a rope? Should I jump down? Do we just wait this out?”

“No, no,” Kaldalis said loudly but calmly, forcing himself to keep his cool. “There’s a ladder and a hatch on the far side. We’ll get out and run back to the camp. Just stay calm, okay? This isn’t the first time an attack has happened with us outside the walls.”

“Do you think we caused it?” Myrin said, her voice wavering slightly with anxiety as she rushed towards the far wall. “Do you think forcing the dungeon made the attack proc?”

“I don’t-” Kaldalis said, and then stopped. With a grimace, he forced himself to keep walking, hurrying after Myrin. “Maybe. It’s possible that Monsoon planned for this. A trigger on the dungeon entrance to force this event if it hadn’t happened already, to slow down people trying to speedrun entire regions.”

“Balls,” Myrin cursed, scrambling up the stone ladder towards the hatch. “I wish we’d known.”

“We couldn’t have,” Kaldalis said, reaching the bottom of the ladder and letting her get a head start. “But now we do. We don’t make this mistake again, okay? It’s possible that we could have dug in farther down and gotten in beyond the trigger for this.”

“None of that,” Balrim interrupted, though he was now gone from the opening in the ceiling. “You’re asking for trouble there. Things happen in their own time!”

Myrin reached the hatch and struggled with it for a moment before some scraping sounds joined her grunts of effort. After a moment, dirt rained down on them as it flipped open at last, Balrim’s clawed hand reaching down to grab Myrin and help her up. Kaldalis was only a little behind her, and Balrim helped him up as well.

The hatch had been covered by an enormous tree root. Balrim had needed to get a sharp tool from his gathering skill menu to chop through the thick length of wood that had pinned the hatch down.

“We gotta move,” Kaldalis said as soon as he was back at ground level. “Right now.”

“Yeah,” Balrim said, turning to start away at a jog, “the camp is in danger, we know.”

“Not just that,” Kaldalis said, looking at the forest around them before breaking into a run, moving past his friends, causing them to pick up their pace to keep up. “This attack was going to uncover this dungeon, presumably by knocking over this tree to break the root. Infernal Horde aren’t just going to go to town. Some of them have to pass through this exact spot.”

“Faster,” Myrin grumbled, her short legs having to work twice as hard to keep up with her taller companions, “faster would be better.”

It was after sunset, and so they bolted through darkness impeded by the limits of the globes of vision they had come to rely on. White-blossomed trees loomed out of the darkness, and Kaldalis did his best to guide them around any treants before blundering into them, but he felt himself picking up the pace every second.

As they emerged from the forest into the gap between the woods and the camp’s walls, they were practically at a full sprint, which made Kaldalis immeasurably grateful that there was so little undergrowth here for them to trip over.

The camp was visibly in an uproar. There were people on the walls with torches and lanterns squinting out in the darkness at the forest. A dozen people were grouped up and ready to rumble outside the main gate, weapons ready. They were arranged in a wedge shape, tip towards the forest.

“The fuck did you do!?” barked the man at the head of the group there. He was obviously a tank, wielding a sword and shield, wearing stylized black platemail armor.

After a second’s thought, Kaldalis recognized him as the tank whose greed for glory had gotten Haldir killed.

Just like Kaldalis’s greed for glory was bringing the Infernal Horde down on the camp.

He had to make this right before lives were lost - especially those that would not come back.

“Move the fuck over,” Kaldalis snapped. “We hold here,” he raised his voice, addressing the group instead of just the tank. “We do not let them through!”

The tank in black armor snarled something at him, but Kaldalis was ignoring him. Instead, he looked to the town. The town’s defenses were far from solid, barely better than what Cotanaku had when the first attack had come there. He’d wanted to push for a focus on defense at the next council meeting, but fate (or Cerh) had conspired against him to make him miss it.

So much brainpower had been spent separating his different obligations, and only now did he see that it was all connected. Neglecting the town - intentionally or not - had caused them to be unprepared for the fruits of his hunt for the dungeon. But at the same time, his devotion to getting Reno and Ess ready for primetime meant that they had that much more muscle for this fight, even if they didn’t have an impenetrable fortress to fall back on.

Right now, though, he needed to take control of this situation.

He had to remember the names on the wall back at Cotanaku.

The right thing to do was to take responsibility right now, and refuse to add any more names to that memorial.

“Form up,” Kaldalis shouted, continuing to ignore the black-armored man. He gestured at Balrim, and one by one, more names appeared on the panel on the left side of his vision as Balrim invited them, forming a proper raid group. “If you’ve got a bow, I want you on the wall, not here. We keep the fight in range of the wall.

“I’ll pick up as many as I can,” he said, desperate to squeeze every second of strategizing he could out of the time they had. He looked up and picked out Courbois and Martok. They were both tanks, and so he pointed to them. “You two are my backup. Martok, do as I do and just mass them together. Courbois, use your staff mobility bullshit to pick up anything that tries to walk past us.” He finally turned his attention to the man in black armor, and tried not to see Haldir’s dead body when he looked at his face. Kaldalis wanted to punch the man based on that alone. “You peel one off at a time and then stand in fucking range of the wall where everyone can hit it. Do you think you can do that?”

The man glared at Kaldalis, but he could see the wheels turning in his head.

This assignment would put him at the center of the group’s attention, giving him the glory for doing the easiest job. It was just what the moron wanted.

But it also meant he had to stay in a safe position, tethered to the archers’ range. That was just what Kaldalis needed to avoid the same mistake as last time.

“There!” an archer from the wall shouted before the man could yield to Kaldalis’s authority.

As a group they whirled as one to face the forest as the first humanoid figure emerged from the trees.

The Infernal Horde was upon them.