Kaldalis was caught between the opposing desires to keep moving to avoid taking another hit, and to stand still and let his friends attack the monster. In the last few seconds of his Jump cooldown, he tried to split the difference. Instead of dodging backwards, he focused on leaping forward or to the left, circling around the monster. It had only attacked him with a sandstorm ability and its giant head. Forcing it to turn in place could give him the time to let the Slow debuff fall off while keeping the giant sand dinosaur from charging around, eluding the damage dealers.

The monster had other plans, though.

A sharp cracking sound reached Kaldalis’s ears before his body reported the pain. From his new angle alongside the beast, it’s long tail had lashed out at him. The enormous strength of the beast combining with its prodigious length turned it into a whip, lashing him for one hundred and sixty-one damage.

Only the mindless correction of his own tail kept the force of the blow from flinging him to the ground.

Kaldalis counted himself lucky that the Slow debuff didn’t gain another stack, but he then remembered he had a Slow affinity charm, which gave him incrementally more resistance to it. He hadn’t picked it on purpose, but he still wanted to take credit for the unintentional foresight.

“Jesus,” Balrim yelled from across the battlefield. “That looked like it hurt!”

“No shit!” Kaldalis yelled back. He altered his course and charged right towards the monster, hoping he could get inside of its effective range of its longer attack angles. “Healers, adjust!”

Balrim grunted as he hucked a potion with an overhand throw. The ability-generated glass bottle covered an impressive distance to crash against Kaldalis’s shoulder, giving his HP bar a welcome refill.

“Thank you!”

Balrim grumbled something Kaldalis couldn’t hear from where he was across the battlefield, but Reno let out one of her characteristic cackles in response. It meant that Kaldalis probably had it coming, whatever it had been.

Now wasn’t the time to sit around getting roasted. There would be plenty of time for that when he wasn’t being smacked by a sand dinosaur.

Kaldalis closed in on the monster’s side and smashed his spear into it. Bits of sand scattered in the air as he carved another fifty-seven total damage into the shifting surface.

About fifteen feet away, Myrin, Reno, and Ess were hacking away at the beast’s hindquarters, sending a spray of sand that dwarfed what Kaldalis did. Despite the huge disparity in both physical damage and numerical damage, when the monster started to turn to attack again, it only had eyes for Kaldalis. Instead of adjusting to attack him with teeth or tail, it lunged forward, trying to trample him with its enormous tree-trunk legs.

The attack suited Kaldalis just fine. The legs kicking and stomping around him were terrifying, and it was likely if he was pinned underfoot by one attack, the rest would pummel him to death in seconds, but their size and limited range of motion of the thick limbs made them predictable. He was able to dance around in the storm of feet with ease, and was even able to lash out with a few attacks of his own against the monster’s shins, thighs, and underbelly.

The creature let out a trumpeting noise, and Kaldalis knew it meant the sandstorm attack was coming again. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the shape or direction of the attack last time, so all he could really think to do was activate his Endure cooldown and eat the damage.

The blast of sand buffeted Kaldalis from all sides, blinding him, even though it only did one hundred and twenty-nine damage. Unfortunately, it added another stack of Slow to him, refreshing the debuff’s duration back to the full ten seconds.

Kaldalis knew he had to get the debuff off of him soon, or else he was going to be in trouble.

He picked a direction away from the rampaging bulk of the monster before him and scrambled that way. If he couldn’t see its kicking legs, it was more likely to be able to catch him with one of them and then trample him under. He had to put all his effort into getting up to a full sprint, since twenty percent of his movement speed was eaten by the debuff, reducing his full sprint’s speed into something just barely above a hard jog.

All the warning he got was a thundering stomping sound coming from the sand around him before its charge crashed into Kaldalis. A knee thicker than even his barrel chest smashed into his back for another one hundred and twenty-nine damage. He didn’t suffer another stack of Slow, though it seemed irrelevant as the physical impact threw him to the ground. Sand still blocked his vision, but even amidst the storm he could still sense the big dark shape looming over him. It was about to crash down on him with thunderous fury. Just a couple of hits would be fine - he had over two thousand hit points - but if he was trapped beneath it indefinitely, he was betting his life on his friends killing it before it killed him. He had to get out of this situation.

All he could think to do was activate Kaia’s Flicker and see what happened.

With a moment of mental effort, the world vanished. Kaldalis had retreated to what the Lataxinan’s called the Paths Between Paths.

He had been prone in the real world, but in this space, directions didn’t mean anything. He was floating alone in the same featureless void as ever. Off in the distance he could see two huge looming shapes that were nothing but pale ovals. He still didn’t know what they were supposed to be. But there wasn’t a way to really check.

All he could really do was hang out and watch his breath bar tick down - since there wasn’t air in the void. His only other option was to flail around, but he still didn’t totally understand how momentum and position was carried over between the void and the real world. He’d learned previously that momentum was preserved, so in theory he could set himself up to stand up when he got back, but without anything to push off of, there was no way to generate that momentum.

Instead, he just had to wait. It was difficult to relax, knowing that he was going to suddenly be thrust back into the chaos of battle, but there wasn’t anything he could actually do to prepare.

He just watched the little blue breath bar slowly drain.

Kaldalis blinked a few times, trying to remember how much of the breath bar would drain normally during the Flicker. Was it more than a quarter? He knew that in the real world only one or two seconds passed during Kaia’s Flicker, despite it feeling like five to ten, but it did strangely feel like he was in here for an unusual amount of-

No sooner had the thought formed before Kaldalis snapped back into the physical world, laying on his back in the mud with a huge monster looming over him. The sandstorm was gone now, which gave him a perfect view of a tree trunk sized foot coming down on him like a hydraulic press coming down on a clay figure.

As soon as he had the muddy ground beneath him, Kaldalis flung himself to the left, going into a roll. There was an earth-shaking thump in the space he had just gotten out of. He counted himself lucky for dodging it, since the Slow debuff still hadn’t fallen off.

Scrambling to his feet, Kaldalis didn’t stay still for longer than absolutely necessary. He felt the wind of a strike pass just behind him as he continued to run, the cracking sound revealing it as the whip of its tail.

“What the fuck did you just do?” Balrim yelled. Kaldalis looked and saw a potion already in the air as the Talsar shouted to him.

Kaldalis dodged into the potion so that it broke across his body and guaranteed the cure. The potion topped him off again. “What do you mean?”

The creature let out a weak rumbling sound that was a far cry from its earlier trumpeting. When Kaldalis spared a moment to look at it, he was surprised by what he saw. The monster’s body was much thinner now, much more of its back was those thorny stone protrusions instead of shifting sand. There were now pointed stones sticking out of its neck and tail, and the ground around him was littered with sand.

“Uh… I didn’t do it.”

Myrin let out a vicious cackle, hacking away at the monster’s legs with her greatsword. The weapon sent buckets of sand flying with every strike, and Kaldalis noticed that the ground was covered in it. Reno and SeventyEight must have been doing the same thing on the far side of the monster.

The huge creature turned to try and chase Kaldalis - overland aggro rules forcing it to be single-minded - but its eight legs staggered and bowed under its weight. It listed to one side. Kaldalis saw Reno and Ess ducking out from the other side of the monster, getting out of its way as it toppled over.

It landed on the mud with a crash, and the shifting sand that made up its flesh all went loose, no longer clinging to its form. Beneath the sand was a skeleton of thorny vines made of stone, but when it hit the ground it came entirely to rest. The beast was dead.

Kaldalis was informed that it was called a Brontorpid, and was worth ninety-eight experience points.

“Whoo,” Kaldalis said without gusto, letting himself relax for a moment. He was still watching the last few seconds of the Slow debuff winding down, but no longer being threatened with imminent violence took the pressure off.

“What did you do?” Balrim asked again, at a more reasonable volume as he jogged to Kaldalis’s side.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kaldalis said. His voice sounded unnaturally deep and slow, and he grimaced at the debuff still dragging him down.

“What is this?” Balrim asked, arching a scaled brow. “What are we doing? Is this a bit?”

“Slow debuff,” Kaldalis said, trying to get across the information in as few words as possible.

“Ah,” Balrim said, a scaled hand coming up to scratch at his chin. “That might be it. Nevermind, then.”

“Good thing we aren’t in a rush, then,” SeventyEight said, having circled around the downed monster to join Kaldalis and Balrim on the far side. “How long are you stuck for?”

“Just a few more seconds,” Kaldalis said. He looked over at the monster to see Myrin hacking away at the stony skeleton it had left behind. She apparently felt like beating it to death was insufficient revenge for the trouble it had given her and Balrim before. “And yeah, I guess we’re not in any hurry, huh?”

“So, back to exploring the ruins?” Balrim asked, patting some of the sand and mud off of Kaldalis’s back.

Kaldalis nodded, but even that motion was slower than he wanted. “There was a building in there. Looked like it might-”

LocalAlert: Nabu’s Infested Halls has been cleared for the first time by a group including Voker and 3 other adventurers!

As soon as Kaldalis had the time to process what that alert meant, there was a monstrous roar that filled the air.

Shaken Up

Defend the camp from the second Infernal Horde Raid!

“Oh, what the fuck!” Myrin shouted, her anger directed at the nothingness of the quest alert.

“So much for not being in a rush,” Balrim snapped.

Reno and SeventyEight shared a look. “Wait, does that mean someone ran the dungeon?”

Kaldalis wanted to observe that this was the second time he’d been in these ruins, and both times he’d had to hurry back to Panbu at top speed. But the last three seconds of the Slow debuff meant it would take longer to say than they had before Panbu came under attack.