The Xorn den was a significant distance from the camp. The congregation of adventurers and NPCs moved in relative silence. It was almost eerie. There were small pockets of conversation, but it was almost as if anyone was afraid to speak up louder. Like the Infernal Horde would manifest and send them running back to Panbu.

After a while, they passed the unknown ruins Kaldalis and his friends had been at, and kept going into the jungle beyond it. This area of the jungle had some unique vegetation in comparison to the rest. The trees were slightly more spindly than where they’d been before, and their thinner branches made a more porous canopy above, letting more light down to the forest floor. Smaller brush and other vegetation thrived in the dappled sunlight.

The vegetation slowed their progress, but it couldn’t stop them. Myrin, Kaldalis, and SeventyEight were at the head of the group, and used their weapons to batter a path through the undergrowth.

Trees thinned further as they went, and eventually they parted into a small clearing, dense with much thicker vegetation growing out of and wrapped around thick boulders and dense spires of stone. At the far end of the clearing, an enormous crag emerged from the ground, covered with jagged stone edges and bright orange lichen.

Up the middle of the crag, there was a clear path where the orange lichen had been scraped clear of the stone. At the top of the path was a fissure in the stone. From down here, it could have just been a jutting bit of rock casting a shadow, but knowing the den was here killed any possibility of the entrance being hidden.

An anticipatory quiet had fallen over the group as they entered the clearing.

Kaldalis had thought they were silent through the jungle, but now that they were out in the open in the shadow of their goal, even the hushed whispers fell silent. Only the rustle of the vegetation being crushed underfoot was heard as the group collectively held their breath, as if anticipating an oncoming attack.

“We’ve got this under control,” Kaldalis said, as much to himself as to his friends around him. It felt like his voice was booming in the unnerving silence. “We did this with a single raid group of eight, right? We have an army this time. We’ve got this, easy.”

Despite his feigned confidence, the ominous silence that had fallen over the group unnerved him.

“Courage will be your best defense against the storm that is at hand,” Myrin offered. She patted him on the elbow and hefted her greatsword to her shoulder with a cocky grin. “That and such hope as I bring.”

“Are you okay?” SeventyEight asked, peering at Myrin with obvious concern. “That didn’t sound at all like you.”

“Don’t engage with it,” Balrim said with a sigh. “She’ll be back to normal in a second.”

“Philistines,” Myrin scoffed, turning up her nose.

Kaldalis raised a hand to interrupt this discussion before it could continue. He didn’t need Myrin going off on a Tolkien tangent. “Anyway. We have a job to do.” He turned to address the larger group gathered behind him. “We have two jobs here: take out the Xorn Major and finish this once and for all, and watch each others’ backs while we’re in there. I won’t tell you to hold the daring heroics, but no going it alone. We’re on their turf now, and failure is not an option.”

There was no cheer - the tension was too thick for celebratory bravado - but a solemn nod went around the group. Kaldalis took that as a direction to proceed.

The path up the crag wasn’t as impossible as he’d believed. It wasn’t a sheer cliff face, and the jagged rocks offered handholds, but the stone was visibly cracked and brittle.

Balrim and Myrin had said that the Xorn accessed the entrance by punching their hands into the stone and making their own handholds, and he could see signs of that. Trying to climb up the visible path using those handholds would be possible, but he couldn’t imagine it as anything but dangerous. One broken rock and he could lose his grip and fall. In that event, a sheer face would have been preferable. His Jump cooldown could mitigate the fall damage, but would do nothing if he was sent rolling down a steep surface littered with jagged rocks.

That same Jump ability made the concern a moot point, though.

Kaldalis activated the first charge of it and launched himself up.

He couldn’t make it all the way up in one jump. He landed roughly on the surface of the crag, and focused on keeping his feet beneath him as even the brief touchdown on the rocks caused the surface to crack and crumble. The second Jump landed him on the lip of the hidden fissure. He took a moment to appraise the situation before setting up to help those who would have to follow.

The mouth of the cave was surrounded by that orange lichen, but the cave itself was barren of it. Kaldalis could see the rough outlines of fingers along the edge of the lichen. The Xorn, for whatever reason, scraped the lichen from the stone regularly. He wondered if that meant anything. Was the lichen food to them? Was it like mowing the lawn? Or maybe it was poisonous to them, and they wanted to keep it out of their lair.

And from up-close, there was no mistaking this as anything but a lair. The opening in the stone was narrow, but there was a palpable warmth emanating from it like a breeze. It was like the crag was breathing, and he was now crouched in front of a nostril.

The borrowed rope someone had brought him was more than long enough to tie around a nearby spire of stone, and still reach all the way to the bottom of the crag, where everyone else waited. Kaldalis knew some number of the people below could jump up here, too, but the bulk of the forces behind him were going to need the assist, since not every weapon offered vertical mobility.

His friends were the first group up, and with the small size of the landing before the opening, they decided to get started on the work to come rather than waiting for the rest to catch up. Kaldalis led the way while his friends - and the handful of others Balrim had invited to the party when the group had been moving through the jungle - arranged themselves behind him as they ventured into the dark fissure.

The cavern opened up immediately, the floor of the opening leading down and fanning out. It didn’t open up into a room so much as it split into several smaller pathways. Kaldalis closed his eyes for a moment, and sensed where the warm breeze leaving the cavern was strongest, heading down the tunnel the farthest to the left.

The passage was empty at first, which Kaldalis hadn’t expected. At the Syncoresi den, the monsters had met them outside, and they had to fight their way in. Here, though, they were moving through a natural shaft towards the heart of the den completely unimpeded.

He feared what that meant.

Was this the wrong tunnel? Was this not even the den?

Were they in the wrong place entirely?

His narrow globe of vision in the pitch-black passages meant that whenever the tunnel stretched for thirty feet in one direction, he feared something lunging out of the dark at him.

Kaldalis’s fears were put to rest when the passaged finally opened up. The globe of darkvision around him widened as well to fill the space, giving the biggest, most dramatic reveal possible, just like it had when the situation obviously called for it. Kaldalis remembered this happening when they first arrived on these islands, when he fought the giant nautilobster, and again during boss fights in the dungeon, not to mention when they reached the underground city.

Judging from his minimap and sense of spatial awareness, the crag they’d seen from the outside was about half hollow. The chamber was purely natural, with no signs of hewn rock or dug-out sections indicating that the Xorn had any part in its creation, save for the wear of their passage flattening and smoothing the floor. A jagged ceiling was decorated with squared-off stalactites, some of their edges looking sharp as a blade.

The cavern itself was at least one hundred and twenty feet wide and twenty-five feet tall. Their passage opened up halfway up the wall, and the uneven natural wall here sloped down to the floor.

Xorn filled the chamber.

Dozens of them at least.

Most were sitting or kneeling, and many were bristling with familiar arrows.

That was why they weren’t filling the tunnels. This was supposed to be them facing the wounded. An effective method for punishing the very cheese they employed. Having prioritized the Globin over the Xorn was going to bite them now, and doubly from their focus on sending their foes running instead of truly grinding down and killing them.

The foes here were weakened, yes, but they were numerous.

Among the wounded, he saw many Xorn who looked to be entirely fresh. Those were the forces they were likely supposed to be fighting here, supplemented by the raid’s Xorn survivors.

Only the Xorn had mostly survived.

This force was twice the size of what they were likely supposed to fight in this space.

Around the chamber, Kaldalis saw more of the rough openings in the walls. As he looked around, he saw the other party leaders he’d brought here emerging from those openings.

This was a blessing and a curse.

Everyone splitting up meant that they were blocking the exits; no Xorn would be able to exit through the tunnels and flank the adventurers from behind. But it also meant their forces were split. Kaldalis couldn’t expect further reinforcements from the tunnel behind him, because everyone was going to have their own fight to deal with.

In the middle of the room, a group of Xorn stood up, and Kaldalis immediately knew that they were the primary challenge here. Each of them towered over their fellows. They were the Xorn Captains who had been at the attack and fled here after being repelled.

Two of them had been badly wounded in the fight, but the other six were almost entirely fresh.

That was the true difficulty spike, and a mistake they would have to remember the next time they built up a settlement. They hadn’t killed any of the Captains, and now here they all were, ready to wear them out before the Xorn Major even showed itself.

“Damn,” Kaldalis said with a sigh. “This is what we get for not doing the Divine Beasts first…”