Fighting the Jormongumo with a full party from the start was an interesting challenge. She was obviously still bound by overworld aggro rules, but she had the unique ability to make defensive choices. She kept skittering around, her snakelike coils moving like a sidewinder as she tried to keep away from specifically Myrin. Reno tried to position herself to limit the monster’s movement, but it practically ignored her.

It took Kaldalis a moment to figure it out.

The Jormongumo had no way to reasonably expect to evade Reno. Her rapid attack rate ability meant that trying to elude her wasn’t going to reduce her damage very much. Meanwhile, Myrin’s slow attack speed meant that if the monster could dodge an attack, it meant nearly a full second of Myrin’s DPS being reduced effectively to zero.

Just the same, though, the Jormongumo was a match for one player in an ambush situation. A full party was too much for her to handle by far.

To her credit - and her sapience - she didn’t try to run. She fought to the end.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Reno said after it was done. “I thought this was gonna be hard.”

Kaldalis took a few moments to catch his breath. He felt lightheaded, but with the fight over, he found himself regaining his composure. Just the sight of a monster resembling Ara was an experience. Fighting her was demoralizing in a way he didn’t expect.

“Yeah,” he said, not even trying to hide his discomfort. “So easy.”

He expected someone to respond to his obvious cry for help, but before he could even finish recovering from the fight, the next threat presented itself.

“Attack! Attack!” a voice called. “The camp is under attack!”

Kaldalis felt a surge of panic. For some reason, he thought that it meant Cotanaku was being invaded by the Infernal Horde.

When two eight-armed monstrosities slithered out of the ruins and charged at them, he realized that this time, he was the Infernal Horde.

The first appeared around the corner of a nearby building. The second emerged onto a wooden balcony right above them, and her snakelike coils overflowed the ledge. Her body coiled around the support beam with the speed of familiarity as she entered a controlled descent to the ground.

Two of them together complicated the fight.

Kaldalis’s mind was taxed enough keeping track of eight clawed hands, but sixteen of them was another matter. At the very least, both of them seemed too consumed with the fight to trash talk. He was struggling enough fighting two of his worst nightmare at once, he didn’t have the stomach for it if they were going to start taunting him in the middle of it.

Myrin had a much easier time dealing damage with two of them. They moved around each other fairly well, but overworld aggro rules were a bitch, and the pair of them couldn’t watch each other’s backs when they couldn’t bring their claws to bear against anyone but Kaldalis.

By the time the first one fell, he was starting to feel numb to the sight of their claws, fangs, and eyes. His focus was still wholly consumed by tagging them once, and then preventing them from getting a solid grip on him, even if their claws raked across him more than was necessary. Their damage output was surprisingly manageable, and Balrim had his back.

When the second of the pair was dealt with, the group of adventurers started to move into the ruins. With three monsters slain, a chunk of the progress bar had filled in - much more than when they’d taken out the equivalent number in Panbu.

“They don’t have numbers,” Balrim observed. “We might actually be able to handle this with just the four of us.”

The ruins were different from the others they’d seen. They were thematically similar to the ruins outside of Panbu, the one with the giant sand dinosaur. But they were obviously lived-in and maintained. Now that they were inside the ruins, they could see that the wood of the buildings wasn’t old. It had been replaced and repaired. There were signs of firepits outside of a few buildings, some were even still smoldering.

One had a pot of thick stew hanging over it.

Reno stepped out of line to sniff at the pot. “I wouldn’t,” Kaldalis said, his voice thick. “It’s… It might be people.”

She wrinkled her nose and rejoined the group.

As they advanced towards the middle of the ruins, four more Jormongumo attacked. Two at first, with two more joining in as the fight raged on. It was a bit more of a struggle, but Kaldalis made generous use of Kaia’s flicker now to keep out of their grip. Balrim was healing on cooldown for this fight, and even then, Kaldalis’s hit points still were ticking down faster than they were recovering. But the fight ended well before he was in the danger zone.

From where they were, they could see the center of town. There was a larger building there, and while it was mostly in the same curvy style as the rest of the ruins, it was two stories of stone, without wooden components building up off of them, even though it was covered in a thin layer of tangled vines.

“We work our way there,” Balrim said, once he finished topping Kaldalis’s hit points off. “That’s our goal.”

“Why?” Reno asked, flicking some blood off her daggers.

“That bar is going to stop moving,” Balrim said, gesturing at the progress bar with his clawed hand. “Once it does, it’ll be because we need to drive out some sort of boss monster.”

Kaldalis had a sinking feeling that he knew what that boss monster would be.

Or, rather, who it would be.

The large building had a cleared-out square before it, and once they entered the area, three armored women attacked. They wore heavy plate armor resembling that of the guards from Cotanaku, and wielded weapons. Two held swords and shields, while the third had a long pike.

“Stop,” one of them barked. “Surrender or die!”

“Seems kind of an aggressive stance to take,” Kaldalis observed, leveling his glaive at the trio. “What would you have said if you heard that on one of your attacks on Cotanaku?”

“Yeah,” Myrin chimed in, “we’re here for revenge!”

“You know what they say about revenge, right?” one of the women said, taking an aggressive combat stance, with her sword forward. “One who seeks revenge keeps his own wounds open.”

“That’d be a more compelling argument if your attacks weren’t coming every night,” Balrim shot back. “You can’t ask us to seek healing when you’re the ones who keep opening the wounds.”

“This is actually a pretty good dialogue,” Kaldalis cut in before one of the human form Jormongumo could speak again. “Compared to the others who were focused energetically on killing me to the exclusion of all else. I appreciate it.”

“I assume the others have all fallen, mercilessly slain at your hand,” the woman in the center of the group said. She waved a hand to get the other two to step up, and they readied their weapons as well. “Your attack on our people cannot go unanswered.”

“‘One who seeks revenge keeps her own wounds open’,” Myrin said cheerfully. “Just food for thought!”

“Maybe we can settle this peacefully,” Kaldalis said, shooting Myrin a glare, even as Balrim patted her on the back. “You’ve been looking for someone specific, right?” He took a moment to put his weapon away, taking the first step towards an actual conversation. “That’s me. I’m the guy.”

“Kaldalis?” the woman with the pike asked.

He realized that this was not going to lead to a peaceful resolution from her tone.

It wasn’t awe or disbelief. Her voice was filled with anger. Hatred, even.

She reacted to him identifying himself by lunging with her weapon. Despite the length of the weapon, her body exploded into her full monstrous form before the pointed head came in at him. The lower half of her armor became bits of shrapnel and broken rivets ringing off the stone of the courtyard.

The weapon lanced into his shoulder for two hundred and twenty-seven damage.

Kaldalis was wrong.

These weren’t more of the same. They were a more powerful foe than the others.

The other two transformed as well, though not doing it so quickly, he saw that they had to partially disrobe to do it. Their cuirasses had patches of loose chainmail that became sleeves for their extra arms, but they had to unfasten a mechanism that caused their greaves and cuisses to fall away before their legs fused and became their snake half.

“Then pay with your blood!” Reno barked, lunging forward into the fight.

Kaldalis didn’t get the chance to tag any of the trio before Reno stabbed one of them in the side.

By overworld aggro rules, the monster should have whirled and bitchslapped her.

But she ignored the Vathon damage dealer.

All three of them only had eyes for Kaldalis, even though he hadn’t dished out a single point of damage.

“Uh, that’s not supposed to happen,” he said, slapping aside the next stab of the pike with his armored forearm. “What’s going on here?”

“Kill him! Kill him!” the one Reno had stabbed hissed as she lunged, sword lashing out towards him. Her shield deflected one of Balrim’s arrows, but it seemed to be incidental rather than intentional.

“Revenge for our champion!” the next shrieked, her sibilant voice echoing off the buildings on the sides of the courtyard.

Kaldalis didn’t even draw his spear again, focused instead of staying ahead of the sudden ferocity of the three attackers. He wanted to stand his ground and try to hold the monsters in place for his allies to attack properly. But he was forced to dance away, nearly fleeing before their furious assaults.

They were fearsome foes by the numbers, and their obvious rage had rendered them terrifying.

That wasn’t even the worst part. While their voices and weapons conveyed hatred to him, their eyes told a different story.

Hunger.

Absolutely bestial bloodlust.

He’d gone from being only slightly uncomfortable to being in way over his head.

“Champion?” Balrim asked. But the monsters had no patience for discussion anymore.

Deep down, Kaldalis hoped that this was going to represent the remaining 50% of their progress here, because he was rapidly losing the stomach to continue.