The clock started ticking down, just ten minutes until the quest ended. They were aggressive in their tactics, with Valit firing off flashburn beams to attack targets from range and sticking close to Spiral to take over handling them. Kana roamed the streets, going from soldier to soldier and rescuing villagers. He directed each of them to seek shelter at the temple before moving on to the next group.

They quickly sent a dozen families to safety, but after the third street they liberated from attacking soldiers, they started running out of steam. Constant combat with no recovery time drained their stamina bars, or willpower bar in Valit’s case, and while they were in no immediate danger, they definitely couldn’t keep going for the full ten minutes if they didn’t pace themselves.

Kana kept pushing anyway. His HP bar went yellow around the same time his stamina gave out completely. He managed to finish off the soldier he was fighting, but only because Valit helped him. The game translated a draining stamina bar as something akin to having resistance bands strapped to him. Everything became harder to do, took longer, but since Istrius was VR, there was no struggling to push through it.

“There’s no rush,” Spiral said. “We’ve got four minutes left and we’ve already cleared the target number to succeed the quest. Anything we do now is just to grind out a bit of XP while we kill time.”

“Right. I know that.”

But that didn’t stop him from rescuing another villager as soon as he had enough stamina to fight again. Occasionally, he saw villagers successfully defend themselves, but it was almost always a case of numbers. The invaders had better weapons, were wearing armor, and were probably a higher level than the NPCs of Faldsteel.

Rather than risk their lives further, he directed them to the temple just like all the ones the party had saved. Before he could make his way to the next group though, the timer on the quest ran out. “What happens now?” Kana asked.

Before Spiral could answer him, a house went up in flames nearby. The background panic took on a decidedly sharper tone as more and more pillars of fire dotted the village. NPCs ran past Kana for the temple. Even the enemy soldiers seemed hesitant as fire spread to engulf the entire village.

The Temple of Vulk was made of stone, fitting as he was the God of Earth, of the harvest and woodlands and all things that grew from the ground. The important part was that it wouldn’t burn like the wooden houses with their thatched roofs. The group followed the villagers there, pausing only to fend off a few of the more tenacious invaders before they arrived. The temple had been built to hold the entire town’s population when they gathered, so while it was crowded, there was still some room.

They found Thulnar holding a side entry against a pair of assassins. They’d given up sneaking into the temple and were fighting for their lives against the old man. Despite that gulf in their ages and his obvious injuries, he held them off easily and killed both of them as the party approached.

“Looks like you got most everyone here,” he said. “Good work. Can’t believe how much you guys have stuck your necks out for his little pisshole of a town. You’re really stupid, you know that? You should have run when you could.”

But he smiled as he said it. The smile fell away when he looked at the burning village around him. “This… this is my fault. I thought I could just fade away and live out the last decade of my life in obscurity, maybe give a little back after taking so much from the world.”

He stopped and gestured to the scared villagers. “Look how much I’ve enriched their lives. Aren’t they so much better off than before I moved here?”

Thulnar straightened and slapped the head of his axe onto his open palm. “Enough is enough. I may not save the village, but maybe I can still save its people.”

He walked to the front of the temple and stopped. Kana followed behind him and watched, curious what the NPC was going to do. He had thought Thulnar would give them the next quest, and possibly one or two more after that until the quest line culminated in hunting down Alidrak and killing him. Apparently, he’d been mistaken.

Instead, Thulnar reached up into his hair and pulled loose something that Kana hadn’t even realized had been threaded in there. It was a stone, perhaps a pearl of some kind, though it had a crimson hue to it. He turned around to face the party. “I have a request. Keep them safe for the next few hours.”

“What are you going to do?” Valit asked.

“My desperate last resort. Something I swore I’d never use, that it wasn’t worth the cost. Perhaps it’s fitting though, my true atonement for the hundreds of thousands of lives I’ve taken and spent in pursuit of selfish ambitions. This is a summoning stone. It’s powered by souls.”

“What does that mean?” Kana asked.

“You’ll see. Just keep them safe. Don’t let this be a wasted sacrifice.”

Then Thulnar crushed the pearl in his palm and sparkling red dust spiraled out from between his fingers. He took a deep breath, inhaling most of it, and his whole body shuddered. He hunched over, one hand clutching at his stomach while the other struggled to keep a grip on his axe.

He shot up, and up, and up, growing exponentially until he was at least three times taller and probably ten times heavier than he had been. The transformation didn’t stop there. His eyes became burning pits and when he opened his mouth, nearby flames surged through the air to be inhaled. Thulnar repeated that action a few more times before he started down the street.

Each step shook the ground, and the villagers gathered at the front of the temple to watch in horror as the giant paced back and forth between the houses. He gathered up the fire by inhaling it into his body, which in turn caused him to swell even more until he was clearly visible over the still smoldering rooftops.

Then, apparently satisfied, he unleashed the fire on the assembled army just outside the west edge of the village. Searing flames washed over the men, and the air filled with their agonized screams. Thulnar breathed more fire out, and the men broke and scattered.

“Holy crap,” Valit whispered. “That was incredible.”

“Pretty good special effects,” Spiral agreed. “The game is going to start spawning attackers in a few seconds. This next step is just taking care of them before they overwhelm us with numbers, and I think there’s some sort of commander or something that shows up at some point.”

Almost as soon as he finished talking, three soldiers appeared at the end of the street. They rushed the temple and were only stopped when Spiral stepped up to intercept them. It was the work of seconds for Kana and Valit to pile onto one and kill him. They switched to the second, and then the third. The NPC’s HP bar flashed from green to yellow to red so fast that Kana almost missed the color in the middle.

He got 45 XP for the fight, which would have seemed like a lot a few levels back, but which didn’t put much of a dent in the amount he needed to reach the next level now. He also got a 3-star rarity sword, one that claimed it increased the chance of Riposte occurring by 15% in addition to granting +12 to strength and ignoring 10% of the enemy’s physical damage reduction.

“Hey Spiral,” he said. “Is this an upgrade for you?”

Spiral looked over the stats, then did a double-take. “Are you serious? How? There is no way you could possibly have gotten this lucky. Shit, yeah, it’s an upgrade, but are you sure you don’t want to sell it?”

“Take it,” Kana said. “We can always sell it later when you’re done with it.”

“Uh, guys, more enemies coming in,” Valit told them.

Kana traded it over and Spiral equipped it just before the next group ran them down. The new sword was significantly fancier-looking than the old one, with a wide cross-guard and a long, thin blade. It flashed through the air as the knight fended off the first of the enemy soldiers to reach him. Kana couldn’t see any noticeable difference in the speed the NPC’s HP bar was dropping, but Spiral seemed happy with it.

They dealt with that group of soldiers too, but the next wave spawned faster, and the one after that showed up before they could finish. That one also included a single assassin, who managed to sneak past Spiral and Kana and attack Valit. Kana broke free from fighting the soldier NPCs and helped her kill the assassin, but the damage had already been done.

“What kind of poison is this?” she demanded. “Chance to lose concentration and interrupt a spell? That’s crap!”

“Uh, guys,” Spiral said. He was fending off attacks from three different soldiers at once, and the only reason the other four behind them hadn’t gotten in on the action was that there wasn’t any room for them to attack him. Unfortunately, that meant they started working their way around the fight so that they could get into the temple.

Kana rushed to help him stem the assault before it got completely out of control. After a strong push from the enemy invaders, their numbers trickled with an occasional one or two joining it, but no more large groups. The party finished off the soldiers, those that didn’t flee when the battle started turning against them, and took a moment to breathe.

The fires around town had sprung back up again, spreading from the homes that hadn’t been extinguished by Thulnar’s strange attacks. They weren’t as bad as they’d been before, but unless the villagers somehow got it under control, every single house was going to burn to the ground. Considering that the entire village’s population was sheltering inside the temple, Kana thought it was unlikely that they’d have homes to return to.

The next wave of soldiers appeared from between two burning houses and rushed down the street at the temple. More and more of them poured out, more than the rest of the event combined. They gathered about a hundred feet away until they were in formation, which Kana guessed to be about fifty men.

“What are we supposed to do about that?” Valit asked. “That’s way too many!”

“Don’t worry, we can handle it,” Spiral said.

“That’s bullshit. You know something we don’t.”

He grinned. “You don’t want me to spoil it, do you?”

The leader of the assembled forces, a man labeled as Captain Gunnary, raised his voice to give the order to advance. Just as he said it, there was a horrendous creaking groan from the house next to them. It shuddered once, then toppled over, crushing the assembled troops. Only the very lucky few at the front or the back managed to escape death, and even then, all of their HP bars were either yellow or red.

“And there’s the signal to attack,” Spiral said. He ran forward, shield leading, and attacked the stunned Captain Gunnary. Kana followed, though he focused on finishing off the rest of the wounded soldiers before they could recover and start fighting back. The ones who’d been too far away to be hit by the house didn’t even stick around to fight, instead deserting en masse.

While they were fighting, a towering Thulnar stood up from the wreckage of where the house had stood just moments before. His armor was dented and scraped, and blood flowed down his face from a scalp wound. Scorch marks spotted his entire body, searing his armor clean at some points and black with soot at others.

The group finished off the last of the hostile NPCs about the same time Thulnar disappeared back down the street and out of sight. The quest objective updated from defending the temple to assisting Thulnar, but Kana wasn’t really sure how they were supposed to go about doing that. The giant NPC caused so much collateral damage that it seemed suicidal to voluntarily go after him.

“Seriously? They want us to go help him?” he asked.

“Come on, you’ll see.”

Spiral started chasing after the giant, and with a helpless shrug, Kana and Valit followed him. There were no enemies in their path, and when they reached the edge of town, they understood why. The remains of Alidrak’s forces had gathered in the fields outside of Faldsteel and were making a concentrated effort to bring Thulnar down.

The man-turned-titan lumbered forward through a cloud of arrows and crossbow bolts. He shielded his eyes with one hand and swung his axe with the other. The mammoth blade swept through the front ranks, killing a dozen men outright and sending more flying away with their HP bars in the yellow or lower.

“I don’t understand what the game wants us to do,” Valit said.

“Just wait. You’ll see. I thought you didn’t want spoilers,” Spiral replied.

It seemed like Thulnar had everything well in hand. The enemy soldiers couldn’t stop him. He had gained the same triple HP meter the elites the group had fought earlier had, and he wasn’t even into the yellow of his first bar yet. Everywhere he went, he caused massive destruction, and honestly, Kana wasn’t sure there was anything more to the current quest than just witnessing the destruction.

“Wait,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “What knocked Thulnar into the house?”

An enormous slab of stone appeared out of thin air and shot forward at high speed to strike Thulnar’s center mass. The giant let out a roar of pain and toppled backward, where the enemy soldiers wielding swords and axes could finally reach him. They swarmed him, and with another roar he swept them away and crawled back to his knees.

“Oh, I guess we should figure out what’s causing that and stop it then?”

“See that guy there?” Spiral pointed across the field. “He’s a sorcerer. He’s the one casting the spells. We stop him, and Thulnar can finish off the invaders.”