The first strike felt like a strong start.

After the previous battle, Kaldalis had leveled up and given his gear a significant upgrade. Plus the censer’s effect was tinting the monster a sickly orange. It was no surprise that his performance was improved, but it felt great to see by how much.

His first attack did one hundred and thirty-seven physical damage and twenty-two earth damage.

Nearly double damage compared their last meeting.

Enormous fists lashed out at him from a monster straddling the gap in the wall, and Kaldalis slipped to the left, focused on avoiding the incoming damage if he could. He couldn’t back away, though. If he let the monster step in through the breach, all the Xorn behind them would flood in shortly after.

Forcing the Xorn to hold its position was his first priority.

The party’s DPS leaped up to do their part. Reno stepped in shoulder-to-shoulder with Myrin, both of them slashing their weapons at the Xorn as hard as possible. Myrin was obviously pulling out the stops, using her greatsword with brutal efficiency, while Reno was flailing at high speeds with twin daggers. Behind them, SeventyEight was wielding a spear, using the extra reach offered to strike over the heads of the other DPS.

Martok was near at hand, but he didn’t join the fight yet. That was good. They’d need him on deck for emergencies. Sure, establishing aggro now would be smart if they feared Kaldalis falling, but if they needed him to cover another breach, or to tank subsequent Xorn who might force their way in. He would struggle with those duties if he was trading hate with Kaldalis on his current target.

The Xorn’s second punch was a high haymaker, and forced Kaldalis to duck to avoid it. But that just put him off-balanced. The third arm came down in a hammerblow, catching his shoulder and almost flattening him.

Despite the physical power behind the blow, Kaldalis’s much-improved armor stat and and debuff from the censer reduced the damage from the punch down to ninety-four physical and fifteen dark damage.

It was a fun change to be doing more damage to the Infernal Horde than he was taking, even if his actual damage output was likely very low compared to what even the lower-level DPS were doing.

The next blow came down at him before he could get his feet, but given the surprisingly manageable damage level, another one hundred and nine damage was far from the end of the world.

His larger concern was for the huge knockback that accompanied the punch. He wasn’t sent flying, but he was left scrambling to try and get his footing back.

The Xorn tried to use the opportunity to push into the camp, but Myrin let out an enraged shout, forcing her weight against it with her blade. Her greatsword flared with a pulse of blue energy when it struck its hip, marking it as a critical. The force of the burst pushed the Xorn off-balanced, stopping it from making ground.

“Nice save!” Kaldalis said as he stepped back up into position. “I owe you one!”

Myrin just yelled again, hammering her oversized weapon against the Xorn’s leg again.

“I’m not sure where to go with that,” Kaldalis said with a laugh.

“Can we concentrate?” Balrim barked from behind him. A potion crashed into Kaldalis’s back, topping him off. “We’re all still in mortal peril, you know!”

Ultimately, Balrim was right. Kaldalis had to focus. Myrin had saved all their bacon with that critical hit, but he couldn’t count on another. Overworld aggro rules meant that he just had to hold his ground, and this breach would be plugged indefinitely. All he had to do was keep the Xorn in place and Myrin, Reno, and Ess could whittle through the whole army.

It might take a few hours - or days - but it was the best they had right now for a plan, given the circumstances.

Just then, a wave of red energy floated through the breach.

It tingled slightly as it passed over Kaldalis’s skin, but had no noticeable effect on him. The Xorn, however, had its scrapes wiped away, and the smaller cuts and abrasions on its legs from Myrin’s attacks closed up and vanished.

“I don’t know that we’re going to be getting out of peril anytime soon,” Kaldalis said as he slipped to the right to avoid a giant metallic fist.

“Or ever,” Reno muttered as she stabbed at the Xorn’s calf. “I think we need a change of strategy.”

“Martok,” Kaldalis said, looking for the other Vathon. “I’m going to move this one into the camp. Catch the next Xorn and don’t let it in!”

“Luq!” Martok said. Kaldalis had no idea what that meant, but the man stepped up next to the breach, ready to leap in with his weapons ready. He assumed it was some sort of affirmative.

“DPS with me!” Kaldalis called as he backed off from the Xorn, letting it step into the camp. “Unattended DPS, to me as well!”

As the Xorn entered the camp, Martok leapt up behind it to block the next one from entering, lashing out with his daggers to establish aggro. Kaldalis couldn’t spare him that much more attention as he lured the Xorn into camp, where the rest of the arranged adventurers could gang up on it.

“Kill it!” Kaldalis yelled as he hurled himself back from another huge haymaker swing from the monster. “We kill it here where the heal won’t reach!”

The adventurers who had been hanging around in a holding pattern didn’t need any more prompting than that.

They descended on it like a house full of hungry cats on a half-opened can of tuna.

Weapons ripped at the xorn from all sides, and Kaldalis just kept running in small circles, using the open space of the courtyard to keep out of reach of the slow-moving Xorn. It stomping after him made it slightly more inconvenient for the damage dealers, but avoiding damage altogether meant that Balrim and Yosini could offer Martok their undivided attention.

After a minute, another pulse of red energy filled the battlefield, radiating out from the breaches in the walls, but the Xorn they were fighting was much too far away to be affected. A few short seconds after that, the sheer number of attackers chasing it around had it looking bloodied.

The Xorn tried to break and run, but it had nowhere to go, and it lacked the speed to outpace the ravenous horde of glory-starved adventurers that were running it down.

Kaldalis didn’t even have to chase it down for them.

“That’s one!” Myrin crowed triumphantly.

“Yeah, just two hundred more to go,” Kaldalis said, giving her a quick sock to the shoulder. “Easy everyone, we can’t get ahead of ourselves.” He broke into a jog back to the breach in the wall where Martok was holding the line. “Change places! Martok, bring one out for them, and I’ll be the cork now!”

“Wo batlhvad!” Martok barked as he backed away from the breach.

Again, Kaldalis didn’t know what that meant, but didn’t have time to ask. He had to step up and jab his glaive wildly at the next xorn trying to push through the gap.

Kaldalis had to slash his weapon through three different Xorn now. Since he’d left, the Xorn had widened the breach, and more than one were jockeying for position to push their way into the camp.

Luckily, between the censer and having two healers watching his back, the punishment was numerically manageable. It was just hurting like a-

A scream went up from somewhere behind him.

Kaldalis couldn’t look. Too many fists were coming at him. He was going to lose all that he’d worked for if he let his attention lapse at just the wrong time.

And then a second scream came. And a third.

He had to grit his teeth and push his terror aside. Was that SeventyEight? Reno? Myrin? Were his friends in trouble?

The next sound was the one that made him look away.

A loud and resounding crack.

It didn’t come from behind him, but from his left.

The enormous wooden beam that they’d set to block the inner gate of the killbox split in two. Shards of wood scattered into the courtyard where Martok was leading the kill target around in circles.

The gates flew open.

The first thought that crossed Kaldalis’s mind was that there was now an unblocked path for the Horde to steam into the camp.

The second thought was that there was no sign of the four groups that had been out there. None of them were leaping ahead of the tide of metallic monsters, or scrambling up atop the gate or walls from a spear-powered leap.

They’d been killed to the last man. Even Gabriel - who Kaldalis had believed was an unstoppable trump card - had fallen.

Kaldalis let one of the Xorn hit him, using the impact to hurl himself clear of the breach. It wasn’t going to end well if he tried to hold the window closed while the front door was wide open. As of this moment, he had other obligations.

“Fall back!” Kaldalis bellowed, projecting from his gut as he turned and ran. “Split them up and pick them apart!”

“The fuck are you going?” Balrim shouted after him, even as the talsar scrambled back from the Xorn pushing their way in through the opening in the wall.

“The council!” Kaldalis yelled back. “I need to get the council out of here before it’s too late!”

But it already might have been just that.