They headed out of the camp to the north, as a group. At Kaldalis’ insistence, they stayed partied together as they went, and Kaldalis was amused to see the long list of health bars on the left side of his vision finally start to clear out as the people Balrim spam-invited to fight the Four-Fingered Syncoresi started to leave the group.

It wasn’t until they were halfway to the treeline to the north before the first person left, but after that first guy, everyone else seemed to realize it was okay. The group went from over thirty people down to a dozen before they found Haldir.

It was only a few breaths after that before the total was down to just the three of them again.

A person that Kaldalis could only assume was Haldir stood alone. He was a vathon who was blue almost to the point of green, with a ponytail off the back of his head and a well-trimmed goatee. It struck Kaldalis as an unusual coloration, as all the others he’d seen had been in the range of blue to red. The stranger was also dressed in charcoal-hued studded leather, which told Kaldalis that he was probably a damage dealer, but the sword on his hip and the shield across his back messed with his perceptions.

He remembered Garyung saying on that first day that a sword and shield was perfectly viable for damage dealing, but it seemed a bit silly to him.

Against the grain, just like his choice of tanking with a spear was.

Maybe he didn’t have any room to judge.

“Ho there,” Balrim said as they approached. “The expedition leader sent us.”

The greenish vathon looked up from what he was doing, finally noticing them. He was standing near a tree with a particularly prominent root system lifting it off of the ground. Kaldalis could see that there was a damp area around the roots, though no sign of water. Haldir had a harvesting hatchet in one hand and was hacking away at an area in the roots.

“Finally,” he said, his voice just slightly more nasal than Kaldalis expected from him. “I’ve almost gotten this done by myself in the time it took her to send help.”

“Well, she didn’t send us for this,” Myrin said, a bit haughtily. “She sent us because you’re the guy who knows how to replace the incense in the warbanner.”

Balrim produced a hatchet - presumably from his harvesting menu - and stepped up to assist. “She did say to help with what you were working on, too. But the incense was a priority.”

“Right.” Haldir grimaced. He stepped back from the roots and wiped some sweat off his brow. “We had to burn that already. Well,” he said, gesturing at the roots before him, “we’re not going to get the warbanner replaced today. It’s too late already to really start. So we can take a bit to investigate this anomaly.”

“What is it?” Myrin asked, stepping up beside Balrim and crouching down, looking at the cracked parts of the roots.

Haldir said nothing.

“Maybe it was an opening of some sort?” Kaldalis guessed. He crouched down as well and ran his hand along the ground. His fingers came up damp. “There was a pool of water here.”

“Good eye,” Haldir said with a slight nod. “During the fight, our tank, er, bodyguard got picked up and bodily hurled into the water here. When the fight was done, we noticed that the pool had drained. That water had to go somewhere, right?”

“Do you have any theories?” Balrim asked, looking uncertainly at the root system.

The roots were thick, but a gap about six inches wide and a foot long had been opened already. Inside was pitch black at the moment, but there was definitely a space behind there.

“Go ahead and start cutting,” Haldir said to the talsar, as if that answered his question. “Once we have it open, we’ll know for sure. But I have my suspicions.”

“Care to share with the rest of us?” Balrim asked, grunting as he hacked into the roots. The thick wood barely parted under his first strike, but every little bit was progress.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Haldir said, looking around and obviously sizing the three of them up. “I know how you types can be about this sort of thing. But…” He sighed. “It might be a dungeon.”

“A dungeon?” Myrin asked, eyes lighting up. Within an instant, she got her own hatchet out to help Balrim open it up.

“Our types?” Kaldalis asked, giving Halrid an uncertain look.

Haldir gave him a look back that almost made Kaldalis - or rather, the Dylan within - flinch. It was the same look Dylan’s father had given him or his sister when he either knew something and didn’t want to have to say it, or didn’t know something for sure but didn’t want to say it aloud and be wrong.

Did Haldir know they were PCs? Was there a way he could tell? Had one of them - or all three of them - slipped up somehow?

Kaldalis decided not to press, and Haldir returned his attention to the work of clearing the roots, adding his hatchet to the duo already opening the gap.

“We probably shouldn’t venture in today,” Haldir said at last. “If we don’t get the easy parts for the warbanner done before we go in, the expedition leader will have our heads atop the warbanner instead.”

“So what do we need for that?” Kaldalis asked. He thought about his harvesting menu and it opened, providing him with access to a set of tools, including his own hatchet.

Haldir grunted as he hacked at the top of the gap, trying to open it up taller and Balrim and Myrin widened it. “It’s mostly just herbs and powdered minerals. Stuff you can only get out here on the Islands of Ulun, or else we’d have a stockpile from the mainland. The key ingredient is the hardest to get, though.”

“Why’s that?” Without waiting for an answer, Kaldalis tapped Balrim on the shoulder and let the talsar step back and catch his breath. If they rotated in and out, maybe they wouldn't be as exhausted as if all three of them worked simultaneously. Kaldalis took over his spot of hacking away at the roots.

“It’s called a core,” Haldir said, stopping a moment to wipe his brow again. “The only source we know of is from killing the Infernal Horde. Stronger specimens drop them on death.”

Kaldalis winced at that. Their primary tool against the horde required killing them in the first place. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Well, shit. How did we get the first one, then?” Myrin asked, taking a brief pause in the work as well, rolling her now-sore shoulder. “We couldn’t kill this one even with the incense working.”

“One of the sailors from the expedition that discovered the Islands of Ulun had one in a cage on their ship. Their description is the most reliable information we have on them. It died on the boat ride back - they didn’t know what to feed it, of course.” Haldir shook his head. “A waste. But most reputable research we have comes from those sailors’ accounts.”

“So what do we know about them?” Kaldalis asked. He scooted over to switch places with Myrin, letting her get on the other side to use her other arm.

“We know, most of all, that we know nothing,” Haldir said with a laugh. It didn’t sound bitter, so maybe the vathon thought he was funny. “They come in many forms, and certain ones seem to only appear under specific circumstances. Sailors report living masses of water during heavy rain. Being attacked by the air itself during windstorms. One of the islands - it should be two or three hours east of here by longboat - is an active volcano. Smugglers used it for drug running, until the volcano started to erupt. The eruption wasn’t bad, but when their badly damaged ship was intercepted and rescued by the Zara navy, the smugglers reported having been assaulted by living bodies made of sourceless flame.”

“Elementals?” Balrim said, scratching his chin. “That’s nothing like what we just faced.”

“I heard a lot of conflicting stories,” Kaldalis said, “asking around about it on the boat. Some people said they were like angry ghosts. Some people said they were plant monsters.”

“There’s intel in our legends,” Haldir said, adding his own hatchet back into the attack on the gap in the roots. “If the accounts are to be believed, the infernal horde can take on many forms. Some of them sound deceptively similar to other existing legends. Some of them appear as feyline beings, naked and supernaturally beautiful, luring people away from their fellows devour them, like the sirens of the western seas. Only while there have been no reports of sirens in the west since the dawn of modern documentation techniques, the rumors of such creatures here in the Islands of Ulun have remained.”

“It’s a shame we got these greasy gorilla monsters instead,” Balrim grumbled. “I’m sure we would have all preferred naked siren monsters instead.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Myrin said, straightening up and glaring at him.

“For, uh,” Balrim flinched from the harsh look, slit-pupiled eyes wide. “For the stream! The audience. Um.”

“Yeah,” Myrin crossed her arms as she stared him down, “because I’m sure that’s the marketing Monsoon wants. The premier source of murderous nudes in gaming.”

“Come on, you two,” Kaldalis cut in, interrupting the argument before Balrim could get his foot any farther into his mouth. Myrin didn’t take her eyes off Balrim, but she grabbed her hatchet and got back to work instead of pressing the issue. Kaldalis turned his attention back to Haldir. “I didn’t know they were humanoid,” he said, “or else I wouldn’t have suspected the Irritator I encountered to be one. Why are they only identified as bipedal?”

“What is a humanoid if not a biped?” Haldir shrugged, “I mean, some of them - the elemental forms in particular - don’t have any consistent shape. According to reports, some have tails, some have four arms. Some have no arms. Some have no head. Bipedal is the only consistent way to identify them.”

“So what do we do from here?” Balrim asked, crouching down and squinting into the widening opening. “Obviously, we have to deal with them somehow. What’s the plan?”

“You folks are the plan. Find them, study them, and report back to the research team. That’s the whole point of this expedition: establish a foothold strong enough to learn how to fight the Infernal Horde.”

Haldir held up a hand, halting Myrin and Kaldalis from continuing to hack before he peered into the hole. It was about wide enough for him to slip through. Kaldalis might struggle with his broad shoulders - and a bhogad would be entirely unable to fit - so there was still some work to do yet. “Yeah, this does look like a dungeon entrance.”

“Why do you say that?” Balrim asked.

In response, Haldir reached behind his back and produced a torch, flint, and steel. With the flint and steel artfully held in one hand, he scraped them together and lit the torch. Just before the torch fully lit up, he tossed it into the hole.

The torch fell maybe ten or twelve feet. It landed on damp ground, but not in a pool of water, as Kaldalis feared. The ground there was uneven and green, and almost immediately the torch started to tumble down, farther into the dark.

It took a moment for Kaldalis to realize it was on a moss-covered stone staircase, not natural terrain. The flame guttered a bit as it fell until it came to rest on a flat area. Once it stopped moving, the flame finally flared, burning bright and even.

The brighter light illuminated a ruined stone archway. Kaldalis couldn’t see much farther beyond it, but it was obviously constructed, and not natural.

“What is it?” Kaldalis asked. “Or, rather, what was it before it was ruins?”

“I don’t know,” Myrin said, leaning in close to try and squint into the darkness, “but it might further the plot.”

As if in response to that, a quest appeared on the right side of Kaldalis’s vision, right beneath the one to replace the censer.

The First Hunt

Explore the dungeon

Helpfully, this put a little marker on his map for the dungeon’s location.

“We shouldn’t head down there now, though,” Kaldalis said, though it was almost a question.

“Oh, no,” Haldir said, shaking his head. “Not right now. Maybe not for a day or two. We have to get what we can for the censer to save my hide from the expedition leader’s wrath.”

“Yeah.” Kaldalis suppressed a shudder. “Onirioago does not seem the sort to be kept waiting.”

“Oh,” Haldir said with a playful grimace. “She’s Onirioago now? So familiar.”

Flipping the talsar the bird, Kaldalis sighed. “Oh, come on. I’m not wrong am I?”

“Not in the slightest,” Haldir said with a sigh. He turned and started to head back towards town. “We learned what we’re going to here for the day. I’ll get names of herbs and minerals for the incense together tonight, and whatever information we need to find them. First thing tomorrow we’ll spearhead that hunt. Once we have it all, we’ll circle back to this and give a proper investigation.”

Spearhead.

With a quest to save the town, and one to explore a dungeon, it seemed like the next few days were going to be full of adventure. Maybe even some loot. And levels.

Kaldalis could barely contain himself. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”