An entire siege worth of Infernal Horde were hot on Kaldalis’s heels. Some literally, since mixed into the alien and monstrous creatures were foes of raw elemental power.

Kaldalis could feel the heat of the flames of the fire elementals as they flung softball-sized orbs of fire at him. Chunks of sand and bolts of light rained down around him as well, but luckily the monsters’ aim was poor enough that he could keep ahead of them.

At least, for a while.

An orb of purplish water flew right by the side of his head and landed right in front of his feet with a splash. He didn’t have time to stop or change directions, and ran face-first into the plume of bursting liquid.

Fortunately, the fraction of a second was enough to activate Ignore Pain, which let him absorb the eighty-five damage without flinching or stumbling, but the shield kept getting whittled down by the poison debuff that accompanied it.

A giant monster made of shifting plates of multicolored metal lunged at Kaldalis from the left, trying to cut him off. With his Jump ability on cooldown now, he could only dive to the right and keep running. The clawed hands of a Syncoresi narrowly missed grabbing him by the arm.

The thundering of however many monsters were behind him made it very clear what even just a stumble might get him.

A torrent of flames hit him for seventy-six damage. Kaldalis’s Ignore Pain shield let him absorb the hit without going down. There was an explosive blast right behind him that he recognized as the dark burst attack of a Malum. He wasn’t sure if someone else had come down, or if he’d been just ahead of it.

He was afraid to look back to find out.

All it would take was one wrong move. If he got caught at the wrong moment or-

A sudden notification surfaced to him. He almost jumped out of his skin.

Party invite. Nothing more.

When he accepted it, he saw his friends’ names all pop up on the side of his vision.

“I hope that’s a sign that we’re all in position,” Kaldalis grumbled. With no other way to communicate, he had to assume that they wouldn’t have thrown him the invite if the adventurers on and behind the walls were still organizing.

Something grabbed his leg.

It felt like a grip of red-hot stone, and he felt it smash over three hundred and fifty damage away from his Ignore Pain shield, with an additional eighty-five fire damage on top of that. He still had some of the temporary health points left, and he was grateful for it. The knockback and flinch immunity it gave him meant that he could use the grip to turn sharply to the right, back towards Cotanaku, and slip out of the grip before it could clench tight enough to bring him down.

As soon as he faced the town, he felt a lot better about the battle to come.

The walls were lined with archers, and the hail of arrows they pelted the oncoming horde with were doing actual work. Here and there, the lesser elementals were either breaking and running, or else were being totally overwhelmed, bursting into small blasts of their respective element and quickly dissipating. It seemed like after the previous sieges, a lot of people had leveled their bow skill for just such an eventuality.

Kaldalis activated his Jump ability again, hurtling himself back up at Cotanaku’s wall. The horde behind him still had ground to cover before they crashed against the walls, but he couldn’t consider himself safe atop the wall. Elemental projectiles were still hurtling at him, and so he had to take cover behind a stone crenellation as fast as possible to avoid eating shit right in front of everyone.

And everyone was here.

The walls were covered in archers now, peppering the oncoming mob with arrows. In the area around the gate there was a full army of adventurers ready and waiting. They were already forming parties for the killbox - the airlock-like two-gate system that would let them fight the Infernal Horde face-to-face in a curated chokepoint.

“You lunatic,” Balrim snapped, rushing along the wall to Kaldalis’s side. “I thought you were going to do something stupid and get yourself killed.”

“I almost had them, I swear,” Kaldalis said with a smirk. “But I was just buying time. Trust me, I know I can’t help anyone if I’m a ghost for the next hour, so I’m in no hurry to die in a blaze of glory.”

“So what’s the battle plan?” Balrim asked.

Kaldalis was a little surprised at the question, but not so surprised at how many of the nearby archers on the wall stopped shooting and looked to him for direction. Everyone seemed to have figured out their job properly while he was out desperately buying time for the adventurers to arrive.

Why were they looking at him now? Wasn’t someone else supposed to be in charge while he was being a heroic idiot? Where was Garyung? Where was a captain of the guard? A general? A commander?

The slam of Infernal Horde bodies against the wall shook him out of his moment of fear. It didn’t matter now. If people were looking to take direction from him, he was going to do his damndest to make sure they all came out of this alive.

He didn’t have time to shrink back from authority.

“Archers keep firing,” Kaldalis barked, he looked back and forth down the stone wall and raised his voice, pointing to the first familiar face he saw on the wall - aside from Balrim. “Follow Droto’s lead! Whatever he’s shooting at, I want focused fire to take it all the way down! Don’t let the globins undo all your hard work. I want tanks on the wall, too, every thirty feet. No, twenty.” He pointed down at the group gathered around the inner gate. “Some of these monsters are going to try and scale the walls, and I don’t want them running wild inside!”

Even though Kaldalis didn’t really feel qualified for leadership, he saw people leaping to obey - sometimes literally.

Near at hand, Courbois scaled the wall with a deft vaulting maneuver using her staff. A spear-wielding Bhogad launched himself from where he stood nearly in the middle of the crowd to the far end of the wall on the west side. Slightly closer than that, a handful of recognizable faces rushed to the ladder on the other side of the gate, including Martok, the cartographer.

“I want the town guards off the walls and away from the gate,” Kaldalis continued, gesturing south towards the town center. “Patrols through the town to catch anything that slips by. Some of those Elementals look like they should be able to fly, and I don’t want something going over our defenses and running around unchecked!”

Despite his lack of legal authority over them, the guards rushed to obey. Kaldalis was glad for that. He had come up with a pretty reasonable excuse on short notice, but he actually wanted them totally sidelined. They were NPCs, and their deaths would be permanent. They could also be useful as a reserve force if shit really hit the fan, and if things got that desperate, he’d much rather they be fresh and ready for the fight.

Town guards could be pretty badass, after all.

“Big guns into the killbox,” Kaldalis barked. The autonomous organization of that operation had stopped entirely once he started giving orders, and he needed them working. The longer the outer gate remained closed, the more Infernal Horde would be chunking away at the walls. Once there was a fighting force in the killbox, the monsters would mindlessly rush to attack the adventurers instead of damaging infrastructure.

He looked around the courtyard to try and call out the names of the higher-level Alpha players he recognized. “Gabriel, Aurigeant, Deytambos, get in there! I want three parties in, and three more parties ready to relieve them if things go too long. Go! Go!”

His directed orders seemed to shock them all into realizing that they’d stopped. The three parties were already nearly built, and in just a few moments they were in the killbox and opening the outer gate.

At that point, the fight was properly joined. The Infernal Horde hammering the wall right beneath where Kaldalis had leaped broke away, trying to use the new path to get in at him. Nearby, a Syncoresi scaled the wall to swing at him, but innumerable arrows hammered against the beast, driving it back with the tremendous burst of damage. Freed of that, Kaldalis ran towards the gate, finding a position where he could oversee the battle in the killbox.

The variety of sizes and shapes of their foes led to them fitting together like puzzle pieces, cramming far more through the gates than previous sieges Kaldalis had seen.

But their numbers were more of a detriment than anything else.

When they reached the gathered adventurers and actually had to fight, the monsters were literally tripping over each other.

A Malum couldn’t rear back to strike with its tremendous strength without stumbling over the rolling wad of elemental gravel under its feet. A giant Xorn reached out to try and grapple the tank of the far right group, but shrank back at the last second as the sentient bonfire right in front of it roared up to launch its own attack, nearly burning its own ally. A metallic monstrosity tried to perform a sweep of its shifting arm, the moving metal plates of its body becoming sharp, but the motion caused it to bowl over a half-dozen other Infernal Horde around it, fouling the attack well before it could cleave through the adventurers there.

And all the while, the parties they’d sent in suffered no such problem. They worked like a well-oiled machine. The left and right tanks had swords and shields, and leaned hard on overworld aggro rules to keep the attention of the surrounding horde. Their shields were almost constantly raised against attack. The tank in the middle wielded twin daggers, and used the weapons’ speed to become a whirling dervish, moving to avoid attacks far faster than even the sentient whirlwinds could lash out.

Around the killbox were a handful of archers pelting arrows into the group, softening them up. As Kaldalis watched, Balrim rushed up and joined them, adding his arrows to the fray - and flinging healing potions down to the adventurers to help ease the burden on their own respective healers.

It was all coming together.

The battle plan was working.

It was a relief to see that the killbox was doing its job and the forces there were holding. Along the walls, what few Infernal Horde monsters were scaling them were being picked up by tanks. Instead of holding them on the narrow parapets to distract the archers, the tanks were pulling them down off the walls and into the courtyard below, where the other assembled adventurers were eagerly zerging them down, overwhelming them with superior numbers and an utter disregard for danger.

Even from atop the wall and a hundred yards away, Kaldalis could hear Myrin’s boisterous laughter from the midst of the melee as she led the charge on every enemy that was brought into greatsword distance, with Reno and Ess close at hand.

Kaldalis finally let himself catch his breath.

From the moment he’d hurled himself off the wall and into danger, his mind had been running through the worst case scenario. And now the battle was in full swing and all his worst fears had been kept at bay.

People had listened to his orders.

He was keeping the NPCs safe.

The walls were holding.

Everything was holding. And with every passing moment, more Infernal Horde were passing the HP threshold to break and run, fleeing back into the jungle.

It was the first time he noticed the quest that had been quietly added on the side of his UI.

Unscheduled Arrivals

Repel the siege! 0/3

“Well, that’s ominous,” Kaldalis muttered to himself.

It wasn’t unusual for there to be multiple phases to an Infernal Horde siege. But the name… Kaldalis didn’t know enough about the system to know what that meant. Were quests automatically generated by the system? Or was it Monsoon? Was the Infernal Horde the unscheduled arrivals, or was it in reference to the Lataxinans?

“What’s that?” Balrim asked.

“This is a proper siege,” Kaldalis said, pivoting his thoughts away from the darker implications and towards the more immediate concern. “There’s a ton of crap here that we’ve never seen. What are their captain-level monsters going to be like?”

Balrim gritted his serrated teeth in a grimace at that thought. But before they could discuss the matter further, the enemies before them started to break ranks in bulk. At first it was a trickle of the Conceptuals breaking away from the rear and fleeing back into the jungle. But then the whole group turned and ran. The quest ticked up to 1/3 progress.

“Hold!” Kaldalis barked. The group in the killbox was already moving to chase, with more than a few of the archers firing in higher and higher arcs to try to reach the enemies as they grew farther and farther away. “Let them go! There’s more coming, and we need to be ready here, not caught with our pants down out there!”

As the last of the monsters fled into the treeline, the group let out a collective sigh of relief. They knew this wasn’t over. But they’d weathered the first wave admirably, and for the first time, they were going to be at full strength when the next wave arrived.

Kaldalis, for a brief moment, allowed himself to be a little optimistic. As a treat.