Kaldalis tried to push the impending failure out of his mind. At his core, he knew that he’d done the best he could.

His plan of isolating a Xorn and overwhelming it out of reach of the glowing red healers was good, and working with Martok had gone surprisingly well for something he slapped together in just a few seconds.

But it had been far too little far too late.

And of course it had been. He could never have expected the otherwise mindlessly destructive Infernal Horde to bring healing with them.

The most horrifying part was when he saw the health bars on the left side of his vision being chunked away. Martok’s bar jumped back up quickly, but when someone else was hit, they lost almost more than half their hit points in one strike, and the healing they received was received in smaller chunks.

But he had to ignore it.

If he didn’t reach the diplomats and get them off the island, his failure wasn’t just going to be the fall of Panbu.

The diplomats’ deaths would bring the wrath of Zara down on Cotanaku.

“Get out!” Kaldalis yelled as soon as the council was within view. “Get on the fucking boat!”

“What the fuck is happening?” Courbois shouted back. She was in party with him, so she could obviously see the health bars, but without the additional context that Kaldalis had of the breached gate.

“I’ll explain everything,” Kaldalis said as he skidded to a halt in front of her. “But right now we need to get them on the fucking boat!”

A warning appeared in the right side of his vision, right underneath the quest for the final raid.

Bad Medicine: Final Raid

Save the town from the third Infernal Horde attack.

!!Crafting center critically damaged!!

“Shit shit shit,” Courbois cursed, obviously seeing exactly what he was.

“Get that gate unblocked,” Kaldalis said to the council’s guards. “Get them out of here!”

“What have you done?” Cerh demanded, clearly upset by having been spoken over. He raised a hand in a commanding gesture that stopped the guards even as they were moving to obey Kaldalis. “What’s happened?”

“The gates have been breached,” Kaldalis said, waving his hands at the guards. “The Infernal Horde is flooding in here by the dozens. The battle isn’t decided yet, but I can’t guarantee your safety if you stay here.”

“Of course you can’t,” Jetmorpan spat, stepping past Cerh and getting in Kaldalis’s face. “You never planned to. This confirms your betrayal!”

It took everything he had not to sock the Vathon across the face. “This has gone so far off the rails,” Kaldalis said, “that I am willing to accept whatever crazy conspiracy theory you want to throw at me if it gets you off of this fucking island before you die. The moon landing was faked, the Earth is flat, and I’m the zodiac killer. Whatever.” He grabbed Jetmorpan by the shoulders and physically pushed him towards the gate. “Get the fuck on the fucking boat before a four-armed vase-headed monster comes around the corner and flattens you!”

“Envoy Kaldalis,” Cerh interrupted, puffing out his chest and narrowing his slit-pupiled eyes, “you do not give the orders here-”

At that moment, a Xorn smashed down a nearby tent, charging towards Kaldalis.

Two more emerged from the camp behind it.

All three were making a plodding charge at Kaldalis.

He realized that it meant that the situation at the gate was so dire that nobody had been able to pick up the trio of Xorn he’d been holding at the breach in the wall.

“I’m not giving orders!” Kaldalis snapped, grabbing his spear and stepping away from the council to lead the Xorn away. “I’m trying to save your lives!”

Despite her earlier passivity in the face of Cerh’s authority, Captain Kensah barked a wordless signal, and the guard leaped to pull the bar off the gate. Proximity to real danger seemed to trump the normal pecking order. Jetmorpan tried to start yelling at Kaldalis again, but one of the guards grabbed him and bodily pulled him away.

The remaining diplomats seemed more willing to go along with them as the beachside gate was opened.

For a terrifying moment, Kaldalis feared that the Xorn might have circled all the way around, but the beach was empty. He supposed it was the benefit to their defenses crumbling under the Infernal Horde’s assault after the first few minutes. They were streaming into the camp instead of encircling it.

The council ran for the dock, where a single unmanned longboat waited.

As much as Kaldalis wanted to see that they made it safely off the island, there wasn’t time. The Xorn were upon him again.

He stepped up. The first one took one giant step towards him and threw the momentum of its charge into a huge straight punch at him. He quickly sidestepped it before stabbing his spear into its arm. The menace radiating out of the creature’s featureless face redoubled at his strike. A massive fist came across in a right hook that forced him to dance back away from the monster.

At the same time, another Xorn closed in on his left, its giant fist crashing down at him. Kaldalis kept backing up, letting the swing pass in front of him. He went to lunge back in at the monster with his glaive, but the other monster came at him with a haymaker punch.

Kaldalis had to activate a charge of his Jump cooldown to leap clear of the pair of attackers.

“This is bad,” Kaldalis said as he landed, with the two Xorn still coming after him. “We’re fucked.”

“You’re telling me,” Courbois muttered. She had grabbed the attention of the third Xorn to spare him that much more attention, but that only meant that neither of them could effectively help the other. “What do we do?”

Kaldalis didn’t have an answer. Without healers, the pair of them had to avoid taking damage, but without damage dealers, they couldn’t just dance around defensively forever. And even as they struggled to figure out an answer for three Xorn, he knew that there were dozens more on the other side of town.

It wasn’t just he and Courbois who were in trouble.

It was everyone he’d dragged into this mess.

As if to underline that realization, an HP bar on the left side of his vision emptied.

Somehow, Martok had fallen.

Within a second after that, Balrim’s bar emptied.

Yosini’s hit points began to flail wildly up and down for a few moments, and then emptied as well.

There was a slim ray of hope. As Kaldalis kept leaping ahead of the pair of Xorn following him, a message told him that his party had slain something called a Globin, and that it was worth ninety-eight experience points. That must have been one of the red monsters - the healers.

Myrin, Reno, and SeventyEight must have gotten one of them isolated to batter it down.

The victory was short-lived though. They fell within seconds of the experience point message.

“Kaldalis?” Courbois called, drawing his attention away from the knowledge that the pair of them were all that was left of the party. “This is all part of the plan, right?”

“No,” he yelled back. The distraction let one of the Xorn land a blow against him, though he was fast enough with his Endure cooldown to reduce the damage to only eighty-seven total. “This wasn’t at all part of the plan! Why would you think that part of the plan would involve all my friends dying?”

“I guess I was just looking for some false hope,” Courbois muttered, just barely loud enough for him to hear.

“Then yes, it’s all going according to plan!” Kaldalis yelled. He used the last second of his Jump cooldown to hop up onto the camp’s defensive wall to give himself a moment to breathe. “It was always my intention to trail at the half, thus deepening the Horde’s eventual humiliation!”

Even as he tried to humor her, from his new perch atop the wall, he could see how dire the situation was. Most of the Xorn were chasing small remaining groups of adventurers around the camp. It was possible that those parties were whittling their foes down, thinning their numbers, but every few moments there was a huge pulse of red rings that spread across the entire battlefield.

When Kaldalis saw that the red energy engulfed nearly the entire north side of the camp, he knew they weren’t going to be making much progress.

As he watched, a huge quartet of fists rose above the buildings, higher than any of the other monsters. A Xorn Captain had advanced into the camp.

The four fists came down fast, and a new message was added to the quest on the right side of his vision.

Bad Medicine: Final Raid

Save the town from the third Infernal Horde attack.

!!Crafting center critically damaged!!

!!Archery towers critically damaged!!

“Any second now,” Kaldalis muttered as he looked over the doomed situation. “Any second now, this will all turn around. Somehow. Even if I can’t think my way out of it, I’ll catch a lucky break. I always do, right?”

The wall he was standing on started to shake as the Xorn beneath him started hammering against it.

A part of him wanted to just hang on and sit up here until they brought the whole wall down. The fight was over already, wasn’t it?

All that remained was his brutal murder at the hands of vase-headed monstrosities.

He cast a glance over his shoulder, seeing a longboat paddling towards Cotanaku.

Despite their anger and distrust, they’d gotten on the boat. He’d gotten the council out.

“I guess there’s my lucky break,” Kaldalis said to himself. He even allowed himself to smile. “No permanent deaths. No new names on shitty memorial walls.”

As if in defiance of his one small victory, Courbois’s health bar took a huge hit.

Kaldalis’s eyes snapped back down to see five more Xorn beneath him. Three of them had joined the one Courbois was fighting, surrounding her so that she physically couldn’t keep running. The other two were at the wall beneath him, furiously hammering at the structure. In addition to them, there was one of the red monsters - the Globin - accompanying this group.

With that, there was no chance they could kill any of the infernal horde present, even if one of them had been a DPS instead of two tanks.

“Let’s hope the old sayings are right,” Kaldalis said, raising his spear to leap down into the fray. “Time to find out if it is, in fact, a good day to die.