Kaldalis tried not to be nervous as he approached the hastily-constructed wooden building that had become the encampment’s command center.

He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he shouldn’t be there.

But when he’d gotten back into town, people had been laughing about how Onirioago had grabbed the leader of the research team - a talsar named Ikzoz, if Kaldalis was remembering the name right - by the tail and dragged him away, stumbling backwards and squawking about the indignity of it. If she had gotten her inner circle together for that meeting, the last thing he wanted was to make her send someone to fetch him.

“I know I’ve said it like four times now,” Myrin said, “but I don’t want to be here.”

“Your objection has been noted,” Kaldalis said, “and I understand, I really do. If I could, I wouldn’t bring you at all. But I know she’s going to ask if anyone isn’t accounted for.”

“Then tell her I’m busy,” Myrin said.

“You popped the Flicker right in front of her in that first fight,” Kaldalis said, “just like I did. You have to be there. Just stay behind me. I’ll hold her attention off of you. As the tank, that’s my job, right?”

She grumbled, but crossed her arms and followed as he led the way into the building.

The hastily-constructed building had a single large room, and it immediately appeared to him like they had just lifted up everything in the command tent and moved it into the building without any changes. It made the room look cavernously large. The meeting table and chairs had dominated the tent, but now the arrangement seemed small. Kaldalis wondered if they were going to add some interior walls to the building to make it look a bit more imposing, or if they would eventually add other things to the room until it was filled out again.

Onirioago looked relatively small at the head of the table in the huge space. She cut a less intimidating figure there than she had in the tent, but only slightly. The vathon didn’t have a commanding presence to fill the space, but she was scary enough that her sudden gesture for him to take a seat at the far end of the table made him flinch.

“Finally,” she said, clearly aggravated. “I assume the encampment is safe from further attack?”

Kaldalis wanted to coyly arch an eyebrow and ask if that meant he was head of security if she was asking him, but his anxiety spiked under the attention of the assembled League officials. “We ran it off again, yes,” he gave an uncertain shrug. “But we didn’t get the chance to kill it.” He gestured vaguely to the right side of his vision, and then stopped when he realized he was hovering his hand near something no one else could see. “I have a quest to kill it that remains incomplete, so we will be seeing it again sooner rather than later.”

“A quest?” Onirioago asked, visibly perking up. “May I see it?”

“Um,” Kaldalis furrowed his brow, confused. “I don’t know, can you?”

“Adventurers.” The expedition leader sighed, rolling her eyes. “Any quest you have that was generated by the world you may share with a league official, who can then offer the quest to others.”

“Uh,” Kaldalis focused for a moment, trying to bring up a quest journal. All he had to do was think ‘journal’ and a window popped up with a listing of his quests. “Give me a moment.”

Kaldalis hadn’t been checking the quest journal very often. He had barely realized that the journal offered additional details for the quests.

Nemesis’s Pursuit

The Syncoresi Major has grown in power by amassing a following. The intermingling Infernal Energies have empowered it further, amplifying its strength and giving it additional power. It seeks to bring its might to bear to destroy the encampment. Defeat it before it gains too much power to be stopped!

Kill the Syncoresi Major 0/1

He wanted to look over the other few quests he had, but not while he was in front of a dozen important people, including the terrifying gaze of Onirioago herself. He saw at the bottom of the quest text window there was a command prompt to share the quest. He focused his attention first on that prompt, and then on the sky-blue vathon at the head of the table.

“Ah, thank you. I will oversee distributing this quest through the camp,” she said at last, and her eyes unfocused, presumably reading over the quest text much as he just had.

Kaldalis suddenly realized he’d just placed a tool in her hands. Being the source of the quest meant that she would no doubt lay claim to a lot of the credit when the monster was eventually felled.

Yet more of the political power she seemed so desperate to amass.

“This is indeed a serious threat to the mission,” she said at last, after reading over the quest. “It also tells us some valuable information about the Infernal Horde that we may want to investigate more.” She turned to address the research team leader, the talsar. “Ikzoz, do you know anything about Infernal Energies?”

“Not yet,” he said, scratching his scaly chin. “But I can use that to focus our search for further information once we start gathering intelligence on them.”

“Oh, we might have something for that,” Balrim said, interrupting. “We were going to drop these off with your team, but I’m sure we could hand them to you now, right?”

To Kaldalis’s surprise, Balrim produced from his inventory a pair of folders of notes. They looked just like the monster study notes he’d turned into the research team when he’d killed the Grizzled Dragon and the Irritator. Even more to his surprise, he checked and confirmed that he had two of them himself.

“Of course,” Ikzoz said quickly, failing to try and act casual as he half stood up to lean all the way across the table to grab the folder from Balrim. “I intend to personally oversee this particular investigation. Please, give me everything you have for them.”

Kaldalis was glad for Balrim’s prompting as he pulled out his own notes that he totally wrote down himself and were not generated automatically by the system. He added them to the building pile with the folders Haldir and Myrin produced. He stood up and slid them across the table to the research team leader so that he wouldn’t have to stretch for them again.

“Right, you killed one of them,” Onirioago said, “or two?” she tilted her head, quietly counting the folders.

“We came at the Infernal Horde from the flank,” Kaldalis said, drawing her attention back to himself before it could settle on one of the others. “It meant we handled a few of the small ones and sent them packing, and had a chance to fight one of the big ones. In the end, we chose to delay our arrival back in town by a few moments to chase it down and finish the job.”

“A bold move,” she said, giving an appreciative nod. She turned her attention to Haldir. “Can I assume that you recovered what we needed?”

Haldir placed one of the tennis-ball sized glassy orbs on the table, and then, shortly after, the second.

Now that they weren’t covered in the goopy remains of the malum captains they’d been pulled from, Kaldalis could see that they weren’t perfectly smooth. Their appearance was rough and slightly craggy, sort of like the Thing if Ben Grimm had turned into crystal instead of rock.

Despite their strange appearance, Onirioago looked at them with undisguised hunger. Around the table, every League official was looking at the pair of spheres like a man fresh out of the desert looking at a glass of water.

“You’ve delivered our salvation, then,” she said at last, breaking the silence.

“We’re adventurers,” Kaldalis said. “It’s what we do.”

“Of course,” Onirioago said. She took a moment to compose herself. She fell into the familiar tone of someone reciting a speech. “On behalf of the league, I commend you for your service. You four faced dire challenges far beyond what anyone expected so few to accomplish so quickly. All those saved by these censers will have you to thank for their lives.”

“As long as people are being helped, that’s all we wanted.”

“You know where to take those, then, Haldir?” one of the other League officials asked. They were a bespectacled human man.

“Don’t worry,” Haldir said, tucking the cores back into his inventory. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the Infernal Horde is weakened in their next attack. Even if what it takes is to just do my job.”

“Thank you, Haldir,” Onirioago said, drawing the conversation back to herself. Now that the cores were put away, she clearly wanted to reassert control over the conversation. She stood up, crossing her hands behind her back and puffing out her chest. “Now that that’s taken care of, we can move on to the true purpose of this meeting. As unbelievable as it may be, we have more dangerous things to discuss than the Infernal Horde.” She turned her gaze on Kaldalis, and he tried not to flinch away. “I’m afraid we’re here to discuss something that might be black magic, and how we intend to deal with it.”