By the time they got off the boat in Cotanaku, Balrim and Myrin had moved on. Despite how much being banned from the new region was likely bothering them, they decided to treat this as an opportunity.

“We can actually venture outside of town here, at least,” Myrin continued. “I bet there are more ruins nobody has found yet. Or, at least, ones that haven’t been deeply explored.”

Balrim agreed. “We could ask around. Remember how the ruins near Panbu got uncovered by that rainstorm? Maybe there was a similar weather event while we were gone that nobody has thought to investigate.”

“There might even just be ruins everyone’s steered clear of,” Myrin said as they reached the end of the dock and set foot on the sandy beach outside Cotanaku. “Like how the Jormongumo laid claim to that one ruined town. Maybe there’s another one with a proper big boss fight inside that’s got people scared to approach?”

“Can we make our plans in the morning?” Kaldalis cut in before they could get too much deeper in the weeds on the discussion. “I need to get some time to think about what just happened before we start trundling back and forth through the same jungle for the eighth time.”

He also needed time to think of a way they could reliably avoid encountering the Jormongumo again, but he wasn’t going to say that.

“Of course,” Balrim said, giving Kaldalis a pat on the back. “You gonna do your fishing thing?”

“I do my best thinking that way,” Kaldalis said, looking out at the ocean. “I also need about eight thousand more fish for this quest.”

“Fun,” Myrin said with a laugh. “Don’t stay out too late, though. You don’t want to get hit with the Fatigue debuff if you can avoid it.”

He’d gotten a full night’s sleep the previous night - even if it had suffered a fitful start - so he didn’t have to be worried about that. But even so, he thanked them for their help with their misadventure and wished them both goodnight before they headed back into town.

Heading back to the end of the dock, Kaldalis threw his line into the water and tried to think of what the actual fuck he was going to do next.

Obviously, being blocked out of Kayore wasn’t a huge detriment to his plans. Yet. He suspected that the raid might become important later, but it couldn’t until the Contender was displaced. After all, even if he weren’t barred from Kayore and the surrounding region, no one was allowed in the raid yet.

The big problem was that he didn’t know where to go. He didn’t know what to do. And the only meaningful connection he’d been handed - the Lataxinans - had been forcibly pried from his hands. As much as he wanted to believe that the above-ground ruins might hold some information, it seemed more and more unlikely the more he thought about it.

Whatever Monsoon were doing to puppet the Contender around, it was only concerned with the dungeons. That must have been for a reason.

Onirioago had said she’d learned the truth from the information they had pulled out of the dungeons. If Kaldalis wanted to match her understanding, he’d need that same information. And it felt like a safe bet that if he wanted to exceed her understanding, he’d need to draw deeper from the same well. Or to draw more of the same water from a different well.

But The Contender had plugged all the wells. There was no way to get more information.

It seemed like he was going to be stuck playing Monsoon’s game. He had to dislodge the Contender. There just wasn’t another way. It wasn’t like the mysteries of the multiverse were going to be delivered to his brain in a flash of sudden and otherwise-inexplicable insight at a narratively convenient point, coinciding with the emotional climax of his personal story.

Monsoon’s storytelling could be hacky, but it wasn’t that hacky.

It was a struggle to keep from dipping into total despair. The more he thought about the problem, the more the Contender was the only obstacle he could focus on.

What if he could learn more information from the other ruins? It didn’t matter.

If he wanted to explore any ruins besides those around Cotanaku, he needed to break through the Contender’s blockades again. While he would need to talk to Bangen or Ikzoz to confirm, he suspected that trying to dig into the research they already had would be impossible. The Contender’s investigation was centered on the Lataxinan abilities. He probably had all of the records they’d accumulated in a big giant pile for him to sleep on like a scroll-obsessed dragon.

All he could do was depend on his friends. Balrim and Myrin knew more about the surrounding areas than he did. Maybe they could find something.

Kaldalis could easily tell himself that he was dropping into a depression spiral, looking for failure at every turn. He needed help getting out of it, or else he was just going to plop down on the dock and fish until he physically could not anymore.

By the time he’d realized that, he had been fishing for an unhealthy amount of time. Night fishing was calming in all the worst ways. Being limited to a globe of vision that didn’t even reach the end of the pier meant that he had no frame of reference for anything. Cloud cover was blocking out the two moons right now, leaving him in complete darkness.

The best gauge he had for how long he’d been out was how many fish he’d caught. When he first started he could catch about two dozen Pale Perch per hour. His increased fishing skill meant that reeling the fish in was much faster, but he wasn’t sure how much faster. He’d caught a hundred more, bringing him to two thousand three hundred and seventeen, but he didn’t feel like it had been four hours. Or even three.

Instead of examining that, he focused on what they would need for their plans in the morning. How could he keep the Jormongumo away? Giving them a wide berth would only get them so far. If Ara was still in charge of them, she might still have it out for him. Moving through the jungle could be very dangerous if they even left a trail that the monsters could follow. The variety in the Jormongumos’ appearances was another pitfall. Anyone they met in the jungle could be one of them. Kaldalis couldn’t very well demand that every woman they might happen upon take off their pants to show that they don’t have scales.

Maybe there was someone who knew something. Just as they had Martok to provide maps, someone had to be digging deep into whatever information could be acquired about the Jormongumo. They were too big of a threat for everyone to just ignore them again.

The only person Kaldalis could think of was their ‘fearless’ leader. Garyung had been dealing with the Jormongumo attacks the whole time Kaldalis had been getting Panbu set up, and he had laid out all the information they’d gathered from the victims. Who had gathered that information? Had they continued working after the attacks stopped?

Kaldalis ignored the light appearing on the horizon as he pulled in another Pale Perch. He also ignored that the last fish got him to two thousand four hundred even. But the thought lingered. He’d spent all night in a kind of fishing trance. It was nice to have made such incredible progress on his quest, but he also could have gotten literally any sleep instead. Still, he’d found something to ask about, so he didn’t want to say it was a wasted night.

After standing still fishing for somewhere between six and eight hours, his legs were wobbly as he made his way down the pier.

Even now, at the break of dawn with no one around to see him, he didn’t want to fall on his face right in front of town. The skeletal hulk of the Persimmon II on the beach would be the only witness, but he had a feeling that as soon as he did something to make a fool of himself, a handful of sailors would poke their heads out to issue some heckling commentary on his unstable gait.

His legs started to obey him a bit better as he reached the beachside gate into Cotanaku.

Just in time for someone barreling out of the gate to slam bodily into him, sending him staggering.

The thrashing of his tail wasn’t providing enough counterweight to keep him upright, and he entered that slow flailing fall of someone who knew they were going down, but whose reflexes still insisted on fighting it the whole way.

“Gotcha!” A firm hand grabbed his forearm. The offered support rescued him from landing face-first on the ground. Kaldalis’s eyes followed that firm grip up to its owner, and found his knees feeling a little weak for another reason.

Heluna looked stunning in the predawn light.

At some point since he’d been in Baimer, she’d changed her outfit, changing from the billowing loose shirt of a sailor to a more form-fitting sleeveless shirt that was more suited to the manual labor of assembling a ship. It showed off the muscles on her arms and shoulders in a way that Kaldalis found enticing. She was carrying a huge coil of heavy rope diagonally across her chest, and her other arm gripping it was tensed, the muscles standing out. Her ivory-white hair was starting to grow back in as well, though it had a long way to recover from how close-cropped she’d had it when they first met. The dawn’s light diffused by the cloud cover complimented her silvery skin.

If Kaldalis hadn’t already admitted to himself that he was really attracted to her, the way her smile lit up when she recognized him would have bashed him in the face with it hard enough to knock him clean out.

“Oh, shit! Kal!” she said suddenly. Before he could fully recover, she had swept him into a tight embrace. The firmness of her embrace had him glad he was wearing armor, or he suspected he would have the imprint of that coil of rope embedded in his chest.

He couldn’t help himself, and hugged her back. As much as he had been avoiding her, he realized now that he had missed her. It was the implications that followed that he had been afraid of, not the woman herself.

“How the hell are you?” she asked when she finally let him go. She still beamed at him, as if entirely oblivious to the fact that he’d been back for two days.

“Busy,” Kaldalis said. He could clearly hear the smile in his own voice. “There’s just so much to do, you know?”

“You don’t have to fuckin’ tell me,” she laughed. She rapped her knuckles against the coil of rope she held. “I’d love to chat, but I’m covering someone’s ass this morning. Fucker got drunk an hour too early, said he’d take care of this shit in the morning, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s hungover so fuckin’ hard he can’t even see straight.”

Kaldalis was about to snap out some defensive excuse for why he hadn’t sought her out earlier. Or even now, since this meeting was purely by chance. But she was entirely unfazed. She was just so trusting and cool-headed… He felt like an even worse heel for avoiding her thus far.

“It’s great to see you,” Kaldalis said at last. “We should catch up sometime.”

“I’d like that.” Heluna’s hand found his own, and she gave it a gentle squeeze. “How about tonight?”

Confused panic and uncertainty welled up within him. He opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. Instead he just kind of made a mumbling “uh” sound.

“Shit. Sorry,” Heluna said quickly, her cheeks flushing purple. “I didn’t fuckin’ mean- I just-” she stammered for a moment before forcing herself to a stop. “I just meant for dinner. You know? I spent a shitload of time while you were gone getting you a present, and I’d like to… Well…”

“It’s a date,” Kaldalis heard himself say, even if he didn’t remember explicitly sending the instruction to his mouth.

“Fuckin’ great!” Heluna’s face lit up with a smile again. “At the usual place, alright? I’ll make sure our table is open.” Before he could respond, she leaned in close to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “We’ll catch up then. But I really gotta get this done before the morning crew starts, alright?”

“Yeah,” Kaldalis said, reaching up to touch the spot on his cheek where she’d kissed him. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature made his head feel wobbly like a balloon.

Heluna was off and away, running to the skeletal beginnings of the ship with her length of rope.

Kaldalis found himself sad to see her leave.

But he didn’t mind watching her go.