When Kaldalis got back to Panbu, he put out the word for everyone to gather on the beach to discuss what was coming. Twenty minutes later, he had an assembly going of a few dozen people, with a handful more visible on their way aboard longboats from Cotanaku.

“Alright people,” Kaldalis said, raising his voice and clapping his hands to draw attention and quiet the chatter. “I’d love to wait for everyone to be here, but honestly we’ve been on the clock since last night, and every second counts here. I trust that when more people arrive from Cotanaku, or the late risers start clawing their way out of bed, you all can fill in your friends on what’s going on.”

The weight of the crowd’s attention was smothering to Kaldalis.

Logically, he knew these were mostly the same people who had been listening to him during the raid defense, and speaking before them was probably less important than speaking to the council, but the idea of so many eyes trained on him made his spine tingle.

“The Infernal Horde has come and gone once,” Kaldalis continued, struggling not to grit his teeth as he felt his anxiety climbing, “but we all know it won’t be the last time. We managed to repel them efficiently this time, but there’s no guarantee that our luck will hold. I’ve talked to the council, and they’ve agreed to let me push to get this place upgraded to a town to put an end to the attacks.”

He paused, watching the rapt interest of the crowd.

“We’re going to need a few things to that end.” Kaldalis looked out over the crowd and tried to find specific people. He eventually located Martok, and pointed him out. “First, we need to know the terrain. Martok, I want you to get whatever help you can to complete your map of the immediate area as fast as possible. If the lay of the land can give us an advantage, I want it.” He cast his gaze out over the rest of the crowd. “Anyone who has done random wandering around Nos Meles who hasn’t met Martok before, make friends now so we can get the information we have compiled in one place before we go on to gather more.”

Kaldalis pointed to Balrim and Myrin. “Our second objective is the same, but reframed. I want to know where they came from. We find their camp, and then we have the same edge we had on the syncoresi in the attack on Cotanaku. Anyone who had worked with Martok before, and those who want to keep exploring after talking to him, that’s your objective.”

The group was already starting to stratify. People were gravitating towards Martok, and other people were filtering aside. He focused his next words on the group separating away from Martok.

“But the biggest push is going to be right here,” Kaldalis continued, raising his hands to try and quiet the murmur of crosstalk that had begun. “The first step to triggering the final raid isn’t planning for that raid, it’s preparing to make it happen in the first place. I’ve asked the council to spam out the quests to build the town up. This is our shot to show them our stuff.”

He looked around the group, trying to make eye contact with as many people as he could without fainting from realizing just how many people were here.

Public speaking was not something he was comfortable with, and this context was making it all that much worse.

“After the fuck-up with Cotanaku’s founding,” he said, clearing his throat and trying to ignore the sweat he could feel beading on his brow, “we need to make a good impression. But to be honest, I think we’re making out like bandits on this deal. Quests mean experience points, and like all good gamers, we’re thirsty enough for those to commit mass murder unprompted. So for the next three days, find all the quests you can, and get those orders filled on cooldown!

“We all need to pull together here like we did yesterday in the fight, and in every fight we’ve had before,” Kaldalis said, trying to draw the speech to a close as fast as possible. “In three days, the council is going to make their final judgment on whether or not we’re a bunch of stone cold badasses. The starting line is right now.” He waved his hands, shooing the crowd away. “Let’s show them what we can do.”

About a third of the group dissipated. Martok led a small knot of folks into the beachside gate, presumably to work on his maps. A handful more followed Balrim and Myrin as they headed out towards the jungle, no doubt to undertake the search for the Infernal Horde hive. Nest. Whatever.

The rest of the group just milled around, though, not yet moving.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Reno said, pushing her way through the crowd to step up to Kaldalis’s side.

“What do you mean?” Kaldalis asked. He gestured towards town. “We go grab every quest we can and then get shit done as fast as we can so that we can get more. And then we do that over and over again for three days straight.”

“Well?” she said, patting him on the shoulder before gesturing towards the town. “Lead the way, then!”

Kaldalis realized then that the remaining adventurers were looking to follow his lead, and he was standing up here thinking he had delegated.

Ass.

At least this was an easy one.

He headed into town, and the crowd streamed in after him.

Gathering up the quests was the same as it ever was. He took the opportunity to get Reno and SeventyEight in a party with him and then started hunting for the rainbow shimmer on NPCs that would mark them as having a quest for him. As expected, there were a couple of extra quests available. In addition to the usual quests - two monster hunting and two gathering - there were only three others, one more for hunting down monsters for materials, and two more for gathering stone and ore from the surrounding area. It felt like the meager addition indicated the council’s low opinion of the adventurers as a group.

“Nice and easy start,” Kaldalis said, raising his voice for the group as a whole. “Time to show them we’ve been underestimated!”

He led the group to the grotto up the beach that had served as the camp’s quarry, and tried not to be nervous about them treating him like some kind of leader. Why weren’t they dispersing and making their own way? Why were they glued to his back like attention-starved cats?

When they reached the grotto, he realized that they had dispersed. It was just a minority of the group that had gone elsewhere. Of the massed group from town, he only had thirty left following his lead.

It was still an intimidating number, but nowhere near what had been following him before.

Regardless, all he could really do was get to work hitting rocks and watching the quests on the right side of his vision tick away as he acquired the corresponding bits of stone, ore, or whatever else.

That was when he noticed another quest with only one remaining material.

“Oh, hey, everyone!” Kaldalis said, raising his voice as the group started to fill the grotto, each person finding a rocky outcropping to grind off of. “I also need to get my hands on a sanguine diamond for something. If anyone gets lucky, I’ve got a pretty hefty pile of credits and I’m willing to pay for one.”

“The hunt is on!” someone yelled from across the grotto.

There was a bit of a laugh at that as everyone put their heads down and got to work.

Kaldalis thought that having all the different quests at once would make things go by faster. It seemed sensible to assume that it would put the three quest items into the drop table for the mining operation, increasing his odds of one of the quests ticking up.

Instead, whatever random number generator was determining what he got seemed intent on dumping the same amount of junk in his inventory. All it meant to have the three quests at once was that it was going to take three times as long before he moved on to the next assignment.

Fortunately - or unfortunately - he wasn’t the only one struggling. He’d sort of expected everyone else to have better luck than him and start moving on to other quests, but the opposite was true. As they went along, more people filtered in than filtered out, joining the mining operation as they finished the other quests.

Though some of them were coming here for another reason.

Word was going around about his big plan, being passed to those who were still filtering over from Cotanaku. Some of them had taken it upon themselves to seek Kaldalis out in order to receive a task assignment directly from him.

It was pretty easy to pick what people should be doing. Whenever he recognized them as an alpha player, he sent them to help Balrim and Myrin to search the surrounding area for the Xorn’s nest or help complete Martok’s map, since they would definitely be strong enough to survive out there without incident. If someone was obviously one of the last waves fresh off the boat from Zara, the best use of their efforts was on the quests he was working on with everyone else, since they would benefit most from the big exp boost the quests would provide. Everyone who was a contemporary of Kaldalis himself, he used his best judgment to assign them between one or the other groups.

What surprised him most, though, were the NPCs that came to him for assignment. He’d thought any of them Garyung sent across - or who came across on their own initiative - would report to the council, or whatever power structure that NPCs were supposed to adhere to. Instead, they came to him, even if all he was gonna do was send them back to the council to help whatever building effort was most matched to their skillset.

After about two and a half hours of mining (not that he was counting), someone approached that he’d sworn he’d seen already today. He was pretty sure they were someone from the last wave, like Reno and Ess, so he mentally prepared to send them back to town to pick up the quests.

“I’m sure you heard the whole spiel by now and know what you’re good at,” Kaldalis said, “so you didn’t need to-”

“Hah.” The Talsar man’s small laugh seemed very sarcastic. “No, sorry, you misunderstand.” He held out a clawed hand and in the middle of the ochre-scaled palm was a small red chip that glittered in the light. “You were looking for this, right?”

Kaldalis stared, slightly stunned. “I-is that a sanguine diamond? I didn’t actually expect anyone to get one.”

“Don’t know what to say.” The Talsar shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

The part of Kaldalis’s brain that still thought of himself as Dylan did some quick math.

A mining attempt took about six seconds between gathering an item and then gathering the next. Ten items per minute. Two and a half hours was therefore about fifteen hundred items, which was consistent with the amount of junk - or crafting materials - he had massed in his inventory now.

Getting one diamond in that span of time was only a 0.06% chance.

That wasn’t as bad of odds as he’d expected. It was actually slightly better than a lot of the mounts in Colossus that people considered super-rare.

Then again, he’d had more than thirty people working with him. More than that, one of them had actually been the one to find it for him. If there had only been thirty people with him the entire time - and not accounting for those who had filtered in during the time he was here - that brought the total number of attempts up to forty-five thousand.

That took his estimate of the drop rate down to 0.0002%, and that was assuming the Talsar had been neither lucky or unlucky.

“Jesus, man. You just saved me like four days of non-stop mining,” Kaldalis said, gingerly accepting the tiny gem. “What do I owe you?”

“A million billion dollars,” the man said, crossing his arms and giving Kaldalis the fakest scowl he’d ever seen in his life.

“No, really,” Kaldalis said, laughing and giving the man a playful sock to the arm. “I owe you big. What do you want? Crescents? Potions?”

The Talsar shot him a grin. “Just take it, man. What am I gonna do, buy my mount training?”

“At least give me your name,” Kaldalis said, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder, “I have some stream viewers who might want to show their appreciation.”

“Fine, then. I’m Teebu,” the Talsar said with a laugh.

“You heard the man,” Kaldalis said into the empty air. “Teebu is the guy who got us here, and is such a class act that he won’t let me pay him for it. So y’all do me a favor and pay him for me, alright? I don’t want anybody thinking I’m a cheapskate.”

Teebu laughed at that, and went back to his spot to resume mining.

Kaldalis hoped that his viewers wouldn’t let him down. He went back to work himself, but not before resolving to make another trip back to Cotanaku soon to see what Sivima could give him for these items.