It didn’t take much longer to finish the final mining quest. Whether it was renewed vigor after Teebu found the sanguine diamond for him, or if someone in charge of RNG finally felt pity for him, it only took another half an hour or so. With that done, Kaldalis headed out of the grotto to work on the other townbuilding quests.

He wasn’t the only one, though.

While he’d thought everyone had been experiencing poor luck on the quest item drop rates, as soon as he moved to leave, more than half of the other adventurers put their own pickaxes and quarrying hammers away as well, following him out.

“How long have you been waiting for me to be done?” Kaldalis asked Reno and SeventyEight as he led the group into the jungle for the next part of the quests.

“Only about forty minutes,” Reno said, though she gestured to SeventyEight. “Ess was done before the second hour was up.”

Kaldalis groaned at his poor luck. But considering that some people stayed behind in the grotto to keep working on mining, he hadn’t been the most unlucky person there. It wasn’t quite enough to completely calm his aggravation, but he couldn’t let himself slow down to vent his frustrations.

He wanted to get this pass of the quests completed fast to show the council that the adventurers here could rise to the occasion and outperform their expectations. RNG would have to adjust.

The next quest he took on was the harvesting quest. Naturally, the demand for building materials was high, so he wasn’t surprised that they were gathering more wood, but what surprised him was that the location of the quest was on the edge of the jungle near town. Chopping away the trees there was ideal, as it would open up more area for defenses and give the town more time to respond when the attack came.

As such, he led his group there and went right to work.

Kaldalis could see a few figures positioned on the walls to watch for danger. He imagined that one of them might be Captain Kensah, and that she was being treated to quite a spectacle. All of the adventurers she had disparaged were swarming the treeline like ants, furiously attacking the trees in service of her own goals.

It was important to Kaldalis that he work to reverse the Zaran diplomats’ opinions of him and the other PCs. Even if things didn’t work out exactly as planned, he couldn’t bear the idea of them using any failure on his part against the dozens - maybe hundreds, now - of people just trying to play the videogame.

Despite the change of venue, the stream of people freshly-arrived to Panbu seeking him out for assignment didn’t abate. If anything, being closer to town seemed to increase their number. It was pushing towards mid-morning, and it seemed likely that folks in Cotanaku were just now starting to get through their daily bullshit on that side of the island, only now feeling free to come over here.

Regardless of the reason, he was starting to see some more familiar faces now.

He sent Banuk - the newbie healer he’d run through the dungeon with Reno and Ess - back into town to pick up the quests and join the train there. Gabriel - the terse Finnian who had a reputation as the best healer among alpha players - was an easy pick to head deeper into the jungle to seek out the Infernal Horde nest.

Even a few NPCs he recognized showed up, including the brown-scaled Talsar woman who had finished making the censer for Cotanaku. He sent her to work on making their new crop of Infernal Horde cores from the Xorn into a censer for their next fight.

He’d hoped to see Sivima - it would save him a trip back to Cotanaku to turn in his quest for the weapon mods - but he had no such luck. Apparently she was still needed there.

However, he did get to see one more familiar NPC whose appearance put a smile on his face.

“How the fuck is it going?” Heluna said, punching Kaldalis in the arm.

She’d carefully timed it so that it was when his harvesting axe was at rest, so he didn’t put anyone in danger, but he still jumped almost out of his skin at the unexpected impact. Despite the moment of fear, confusion, and anger, as soon as he saw her smiling face, it was all forgotten.

Before he knew what he was doing, he had an arm around her shoulder pulling her in for a hug.

“Hey! What are you doing out here?” he asked, thumping her on the back. “Shouldn’t Filomena have you working on the ship?”

“Probably.” Heluna tentatively put an arm around him to return the hug. “But I fuckin’ squirreled out of it to see if I could help here. I gotta get my ass back there for the afternoon, when we’re back on shitty board-bending duty, but you got me for a couple hours.”

When they parted, Kaldalis felt a little guilty for the impetuous hug. Her gunmetal-gray cheeks had taken a slightly purplish hue, which he’d come to recognize as blushing.

It was easy to forget that no matter how much she acted unlike other Finnians, she was an NPC, not a real person in disguise. While she wasn’t terse and standoffish, it was bold of him to assume that she was comfortable with casual physical affection between friends.

He just didn’t know enough about Finnian culture to make that guess.

Rather than apologize and embarrass her further, he changed the subject.

“Normally, I’d send you back to the camp to try and offer your help with whatever construction they might need an extra hand for,” Kaldalis said. “But if you’re going to be out of here after lunch, it seems unfair to have you just get into the groove and then skedaddle.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Heluna said with a shrug, shaking her head. “What else am I gonna fuckin’ do? Run around out here pretending to be an adventurer with you assholes? No thanks.”

Kaldalis flashed her a genuine smile. “I wouldn’t mind having a chat with you later, though.” After thinking about it earlier, he wanted to jump at the chance to talk to her while he was riding high on his work here. She deserved one conversation with him where he didn’t need her to be his therapist. “What are you doing for lunch?”

“Probably grabbing some fucking thing jammed into a cut roll and eating on the boat back to Cotanaku,” Heluna said with sudden bitterness. The turn in her mood caught him off-guard, and he found himself wanting to correct it.

“Sounds good,” he said immediately with a smile. “I’ll join you for that.”

“W-what?” Heluna sputtered for a moment, the purple hue coming back to her cheeks.

“I’ve gotta make a stop in Cotanaku anyway,” he said, absentmindedly gesturing towards the quest he still held for Sivima. “If that’s going to be the best time to talk, I’d be happy to ride back with you.”

Heluna grinned wide before giving him a playful punch in the shoulder again. “Okay. I’m fuckin’ looking forward to it, then!”

She had a genuine smile as she turned and headed back to town to help with the efforts there.

Kaldalis was glad he’d improved her mood, and worried about what had her so suddenly bitter. Was something going on in Cotanaku now that he was gone? Perhaps it was only at the idea of wasting so much time in transit, but he suspected something more sinister. He’d have to ask her about it when they spoke later.

After gathering the wood for the next quest, he - and about twenty more of the adventurers with him - went deeper into the jungle for the next task, hunting wallves for their hides. Wallves were a pack hunting quadruped with brownish fur and a vaguely canine appearance. Their snouts were wider than a normal dog’s, giving them a surreal nightmare look, and their disproportionately large paws gave them the extraordinary ability to cling to the trees, easily climbing and leaping from trunk to trunk.

There were a handful of people already hunting them, but facing challenges due to the pack mentality of the wallves. The scattered adventurers had to work together to watch each other’s backs out here, or else they would all be overwhelmed one by one if the beasts were allowed to coordinate their efforts.

Then everything changed when the Kaldalis nation attacked.

The number of adventurers in the area suddenly quintupled. Now the pack hunters were the pack hunted. Within minutes, everyone was caught up in a mad scramble to find, claim, and beat down any wallf they saw.

It was actually somewhat stressful trying to compete.

But the spawn rate seemed to be fast enough to keep up with the demand. There were always more of them lurking among the trees.

Kaldalis finished his quest objective relatively fast, but stuck around until Reno and SeventyEight were done as well.

After that, they moved on to hunting daemonraptors for tendons, and while it had been amusing to flip the script on the tree-climbing pack hunters, there was an additional vindictive thrill doing the same here.

Daemonraptors were classically designed to be a scary movie monster. They lurked in only the darkest part of the jungle, and were pitch-black themselves, blending in even despite the globe of vision the adventurers enjoyed. They were also ambush predators, lunging without warning at anyone who blundered blindly into reach of their claws and teeth.

Despite all that, they just weren’t scary anymore when there were two dozen assholes with weapons combing the dense forest, looking for them on purpose. It didn’t help that someone would periodically yell “Zoinks!” and do a bad stoner voice when one actually startled them, cutting the mood even farther away from the obvious intent.

Once they had the daemonraptor tendons, the final quest was to clear out some white-blossom treants before they became too much of a menace to the expanding camp. That went by quickly for the group, as it only depended upon killing them, not farming them for specific items.

The only challenge was finding one and being the first to claim it without feeling like an asshole whenever someone else ran up hoping to catch it. Or being robbed when someone else ran through the forest and helped finish it off, having been the initial claimant and being slow to catch it when low health forced it to run away.

All said and done, he returned to town with all his spoils gathered and quests completed with about fifteen people in tow right behind him, with a scattering trailing just to the treeline. As he headed back to deliver his results to the quest givers, he saw a dozen others who had beat him here.

The quest experience almost got him to level twelve, and he figured the next run would get him there.

Of course, the next run wasn’t coming yet.

“What’s the hold up?” Kaldalis asked the final quest giver; a Talsar stonemason who was using the mountain of stone being delivered to build the barracks. “I told the council we were here to push! Why don’t you have another quest?”

“Take it up with them,” the mason grumbled as he accepted the next bundle of stone from Reno, and then SeventyEight in turn. “I don’t have any more say in this than you do.”

“Apparently,” Kaldalis grumbled, trying to consider his next course.

“So what do we do?” Reno asked, gently putting a hand to Kaldalis’s elbow to guide him out of the way of the people trying to get to the quest NPC. “Just chill?”

“The council said they’d be pushing this faster,” Kaldalis said, looking around at all the workers in the area. Many of them were reinforcing the walls, and the skeleton of another watchtower was going up already. “But I think they didn’t anticipate our speed on this. I’d expect at least one more pass of quests today, maybe once more people have turned in this round. If the pace isn’t picked up by tomorrow, though, I’m going to have a chat with them about setting expectations.”

“I guess we could use all these new mats to do some crafting,” SeventyEight suggested, gesturing towards the crafting area. “If we hurry, we can claim some workstations before the rush hits.”

“You two go ahead,” Kaldalis said. One of the people working on assembling the new watchtower caught his eye as the familiar figure of Heluna. “I’ve got some errands to run.”