Kaldalis had thought he’d had an army going into this fight. Scores of adventurers arrayed around the front gate had seemed a huge group to have at his command.

But that had been nothing.

The group at Garyung’s back dwarfed Kaldalis’s forces by threefold at least. There was a small group at his side that he recognized as one of the parties from Kaldalis’s own group, but they were the minority amid the huge column accompanying the elected expedition leader.

Most prominently, the group contained a lot of the alpha players who had remained in Cotanaku, as well as the third-wave newbies who hadn’t been brave enough to face the challenges in Panbu.

That was where the progress was coming from.

Garyung had gathered literally everyone with a weapon and was brute forcing his way through the scattered enemies.

While he felt a surge of sudden confidence at the sight of them, it didn’t last very long. As the group jumped to help Courbois defeat the mob of globins she’d assembled, he started to pick familiar faces out of the crowd.

As soon as he started to put names to the faces, his blood ran cold.

He recognized the healer who helped patch Courbois up as Sardol. The tank who peeled a few of the foes off of her was Gavinkim. The damage dealers that swept in to beat the Infernal Horde down included Bangen on the front lines.

They were NPCs.

Garyung had brought so many by bringing the NPCs into the fight.

Suddenly the stakes of the fight were so much higher. If the battle turned for the worse, these people weren’t coming back.

As if to underline that point, a blue streak of curses streamed through the air from near at hand.

Heluna charged at the legs of the Xorn Captain, her twin daggers becoming a blur as she hacked away at the metallic flesh.

Kaldalis wished he could say that the sudden exposure to danger snapped him out of the sleep debuff, but his mental state was apparently insufficiently extreme to be able to break game mechanics. Even if he was screaming endlessly in his head.

Instead, he lay limply in the Xorn Captain’s grasp until its hands came in and smashed him.

The upper hands clapping down on him counted as two attacks, adding up to nearly five hundred damage bashed out of his health bar. It snapped him out of the deep sleep debuff, and he went to work immediately getting control of the situation.

“The absolute fuck are you doing here?” he yelled down to Heluna.

“Fuckin’ saving your stupid ass,” she yelled back, still chipping away at the monster. “What’s it fuckin’ look like?”

The Captain cocked back a fist to strike Kaldalis again, and he realized that he was actually in mortal peril. The combined damage he’d taken had left him in striking range of his death.

He scrambled to stab his glaive into the monster’s wrist, driving the curved head of the weapon as deep as he could before grasping the haft and wrenching it to the side. It only dealt his eighty-four total damage, but the deep reach of the blade and the cruel twisting motion made the Xorn Captain fling Kaldalis away rather than sock him again.

Kaldalis hit the ground hard, sliding on his back through rubble. He tried to scramble to his feet before the Xorn Captain could close with him again.

A big hand clapped over his upper arm and hefted him out of the dirt, helping him to his feet.

“You alright?” Garyung asked with a big, stupid grin as he helped Kaldalis to his feet.

“Reply hazy, ask again later,” Kaldalis snapped, fixing the tall Bhogad with a glare. “Specifically, when we find out whether or not anybody fucking dies because you brought them here!”

“I had to,” Garyung said, suddenly defensive. “We were about to get completely hosed with Zara! If I didn’t come here, they might have-”

“We will discuss this later,” Kaldalis said, cutting Garyung off. “Don’t think this is over. If there’s another batch of names getting carved into the memorial, it won’t be because I let myself get distracted with an argument.”

Garyung grimaced and backed off, returning to his tanking duties gathering up the smaller Xorn. Meanwhile, the Xorn Captain was lunging across the battlefield at Kaldalis. He carefully timed his dodge, ducking to the left right as its fist crashed down at him.

Heluna was screaming angrily and chasing the Captain, stabbing away at it with gusto. A dozen more took up positions beside and around her, thrashing the monster. Arrows began to hail against its head and shoulders as well.

With all the damage hammering into it, Kaldalis suddenly had to stand and fight. Four huge grey fists swept in at him over and over in a constant stream of attacks, and he put all his effort into staying ahead. For a brief second it was frantic and terrifying, but then potions from the mob of healers started to crash into and around him.

They had all the resources necessary.

All that remained was to generate the elbow grease.

The Xorn Captain’s fists made for a quartet of terrifying pistons, the next lashing out at him before the first was even fully withdrawn. Kaldalis had to keep moving constantly, struggling to keep ahead of the Captain. He wished he could get back to kiting, but a huge group had clustered around it, and seemed very intent on attacking the big monster, sticking him with the duty of holding it still for them.

Despite how much help he had, the fight was far from easy. The monster’s damage potential was immense, and if he let his guard down his hit points would be gone in seconds. If the healers weren’t on top of him - which was a believable course of events given how much was going on around him - he was literally a breath away from death.

Alongside that, it apparently had a mountain of hit points. Even in the absence of Globin healing, the mob was smashing it for an extremely long time with no visible change.

Further complication arose when Kaldalis noticed the sand whirling around its head. It was readying for its sleep attack again. Despite it being a special attack, the Xorn Captain’s fists didn’t pause. The whirling sand was the only tell, and if Kaldalis hadn’t seen it before, he would be in huge trouble.

Armed with knowledge, Kaldalis hurled himself forward, underneath the monster’s feet at the moment it lurched forward towards him. The shockwave cone of its sleep attack passed right over his head.

There was trouble anyway. He’d accurately assessed the move and avoided it, but the narrow window meant nobody else had the opportunity to see it coming. The shockwave cone blasted across everyone behind Kaldalis. The shockwave scattered people left and right, and many of them flopped to the ground limply.

A concerned cry went up, and Kaldalis raised his voice, yelling back at them: “it’s a sleep debuff! Get them healed up and they’ll be fine in a minute!”

He didn’t have time to see what the outcome of that was. The Xorn Captain’s attacks redoubled upon him now that the special attack was out. Big silver fists thundered against the ground around him as he danced back and forth. He didn’t have the proper time to even attempt to strike the creature.

In the midst of the careful dance, he found himself picking Heluna out of the crowd of DPS. She was still energetically lashing out at the monster’s metallic thigh, but despite her fervent offense, she still met his eyes across the battlefield.

Despite the dire situation, her cheeks turned the purplish hue of a blush.

With that look, and that blush, he felt like she knew something she couldn’t tell him now, in the midst of combat.

Was it related to Garyung’s arrival?

As soon as he started thinking about it, though, he knew something wasn’t adding up. It was true that he’d sent the Zaran diplomats back to Cotanaku, but that hadn’t been much more than thirty minutes ago. It was a seventy minute boat ride to Cotanaku, and then seventy minutes more coming back.

Garyung had been on the way here before the town had even fallen. He had to have left Cotanaku at about the same time as the Infernal Horde raid had even begun in order to be arriving now.

Why?

Kaldalis was going to have to figure that out later. For now, the fight was still well underway, and his failure represented permanent death to the people around him.

Instead of thinking about Garyung, he focused on Heluna.

He focused on not letting her become a name carved into a memorial.

Kaldalis fought for her life. And the lives of the others around him. Having not kept good track of who was and wasn’t an NPC, any one of those around him could be left permanently dead by a single poorly-timed misstep on his part.

Considering how cavalierly he’d allowed the other groups of adventurers to be overwhelmed, the pressure was sudden and indescribable.

But he couldn’t let the metaphorical pressure get to him, or else the physical pressure of a quartet of metallic fists were going to make his worst fears come true.

Kaldalis glared up at the Xorn Captain.