Kaldalis turned his attention to the creatures in front of him. “Potions!” he yelled as he cast aside the empty glass vial from the healing potion. “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”

He didn’t wait to see if anyone was following his direction. Instead, he lunged back across the room at the four-fingered syncoresi.

The monster couldn’t be allowed to blunder through the room for risk of it trampling his friends. And so that Myrin, who was still running around its feet, could keep hitting it. She’d been joined by the greatsword-wielding Human now, and he wondered what kind of damage output they had together.

He didn’t have time to worry about that, though.

Kaldalis landed at the giant syncoresi’s feet and stabbed it. With the censer running, the stab did significantly more damage than expected. His previous attacks had only hit for fifteen damage, but this time it struck for forty-seven physical damage and two wind damage.

It was kind of frustrating that he didn’t know how damage calculations worked, but his damage tripling was a good sign for the output of the DPS hammering on the monster.

As if on cue, Myrin started to cackle with mad joy. It was her stock reaction any time numbers got bigger.

Claws raked in at him, and Kaldalis danced around in a brief circle. The reach of his spear let him poke the boss again at the farthest extent of his reach, getting another forty-nine damage. He told himself it still wasn’t much - he wasn’t going to carry the day with that - but it still felt intensely gratifying.

A healing potion crashed into his back, restoring another two hundred and seventy hit points. From the number, he guessed it was from Balrim.

His health bar climbing back up was a bigger boost to his morale than the damage increase. He was starting to learn the attack patterns.

Instincts were coming online.

It was almost as if he was just plain getting better. The absurd damage output of his foes made all the more sense: he was being pushed to improve. Forced to, in fact.

He wondered if this would carry over to the real world. Not that he planned on getting in spearfights with armies of clawed monstrosities. But it might be nice to make it a little easier to navigate crowded convention floors.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flurry of movement. He turned his head to catch a glimpse of Courbois. She was a dervish of motion, her staff flailing around in almost poetic tandem with her acrobatic leaping movements that carried her through the crowd of syncoresi filling the room.

“Courbois?” Kaldalis called. “What are you doing? What about the door?”

“Room’s full!” she called back. “It filled from the back. They can’t get in anyway, so I’m just trying to free up the DPS in here!”

As she spoke, she whirled past Aurigeant, her staff a storm of rapping blows against the dozens of monsters the Finnian had been kiting around the room. Every one turned away from him. They were each forced by overworld aggro rules to exclusively target Courbois now.

As she circled the room, moving through the mobs as easily as water through a sieve, the other DPS had their attention freed up.

They all oriented on the boss.

“Not often I get told to ignore the adds,” Deytambos said as they squeezed through the crowd towards the boss. “But you never have to tell me that twice!”

Kaldalis focused his energy on avoiding the attacks that came in. All he had to do was stay alive. The longer the DPS were able to attack with impunity, the better. It would just take a bit of concentration.

The syncoresi major paused a moment before its next attack. Kaldalis didn’t know for certain, but he had a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The last time they’d fought the major, it had a new special attack over what the captains had. It had been an extremely potent burn debuff, like that inflicted by kismeleons in the jungle. The worst part was that the syncoresi hadn’t had a tell. It just paused for a moment, and then let out a huffing noise to blast them with searing-hot air.

This was that pause. There was no time for hesitation.

“Flicker!” he barked. “Now! Everyone!”

He didn’t like hitting Kai’s Flicker before confirming that everyone else had done so as well, but in a window barely long enough to get out his warning, he’d wasted most of his wiggle room shouting it. He saw that a few followed his advice instantly - Balrim and Myrin were gone before he could even turn his attention to the ability.

Even as he activated it, he saw Courbois and Aurigeant vanish into thin air before him.

The Paths Between Paths was surprisingly crowded. As he appeared, not only had Balrim, Myrin, and the two Finnians from his party arrived ahead of him, but the area was filled ahead of him. There were a dozen random people floating in the empty space.

As soon as he recognized Bangen among the others, he realized the cause. These were the people fighting back at the camp. They’d Flickered as well - likely dodging the dark blast attack of the malum there.

Kaldalis’s core reaction was to wish they could communicate. He wished he could urge the people at camp to pick up the pace. Or try and hash out a quick exit strategy with his party members. Maybe even just to reassure Courbois - as she flailed through the void, carried by the momentum of the sprinting pace she’d Flickered at - that she would be fine when she got back to the real world.

His second reaction was to wonder at the potential here. If everyone Flickering wound up in roughly the same region of the endless void, could they pass messages like this? Could he carry a corkboard with notes on it and show them to someone Flickering from the other side of the planet? Could he hand it off?

The idea of reinventing the telegraph and combining it with teleportation to destroy the shipping industry was going to have to wait. He only had a few seconds floating here before he would be back in the thick of combat.

Most of the people who were in the Paths Between Paths before he arrived winked out in small groups. Shortly after, others winked their way in, dodging their own dark blast attacks. Kaldalis caught sight of a familiar Bhogad among this group.

He and Garyung shared a look. Kaldalis gave his most convincing thumbs up. The indecisive leader probably needed the reassurance. He had to be confident that the choice he’d made - even if Kaldalis had been the man actually behind it - was the right one.

He didn’t have time for much more than that. Reality reasserted itself, snapping him back into the cave full of syncoresi.

“Sound off!” He called. “Did everyone make it?”

“Droto is burning!” Balrim announced. “I’m on him, but someone else has to pick the slack on getting Kaldalis topped up!”

“I got him!” Deytembos said. “Just keep the health bars up! The more hit points we have across the group, the more time we buy the others once this whole shebang goes sideways!”

Kaldalis could see Droto’s health bar steadily ticking down, but shortly after there was a jump from Balrim’s heal. A second later, a potion crashed into his shoulder, healing him for three hundred and twenty-one hit points. Deytembos’ healing was a welcome addition to his health bar, bringing him up to about the halfway point.

“Jesus,” the Vathon healer cursed. “I thought Balrim was just a lowbie, but you’re a beefy boy, huh?”

“Tank health pools,” Kaldalis said and he slipped to the right of a wild roundhouse swing of a four-fingered fist. “Gotta love ‘em.”

Another potion came down, flooding the area with green fumes again. Kaldalis saw all the hit point bars tick up together - he regained another one hundred and seventy-eight - putting him a nudge above fifty percent.

The four-fingered syncoresi attacked again, and Kaldalis threw himself to the ground to let the swiping roundhouse fly over him. That was when he realised he didn’t have a storm of attacks to dodge anymore. Courbois had picked up all the regular syncoresi now. He knew they could elect to attack him instead - they were both tanks - but she had stopped kiting and was standing near at hand, her careful dance around the attacks aimed at her slowly leading the group away from Kaldalis.

The four-fingered Syncoresi still had eyes only for Kaldalis, though, and he had to take it seriously as a threat. One strike wouldn’t kill him now, but it wouldn’t take many to do the job, and the healers were taking a long time to undo the damage he’d taken already. Like Deytembos said, the more time they could stall for, the better chance they were giving the rest of the adventurers to finish the quest and make the camp grow up into a real boy. Every conserved hit point was one more strike the syncoresi were going to need to rip through when the plan broke down.

When.

That was an interesting way of thinking about it. Kaldalis was glad his typical optimism hadn’t taken hold of his senses.

They were going to die here.

That was the entire plan.

It was just a matter of how long they could hold.

Just then, the four-fingered syncoresi changed. Its body suddenly became bloodied. Battle-damaged. Had they done it? Had they actually driven it to retreat?

The beast let out a howling snarl, laying about itself with both hands. Kaldalis had to leap back to avoid the wild attack, and so did the damage dealers - though a few were clipped for immense chunks of their hit points. More telling was the strikes that landed on the other syncoresi filling the room. They were slashed and scattered like misplaced toy soldiers before a toddler’s tantrum.

They’d breached the syncoresi major’s damage threshold, and instead of fleeing, it had only become enraged.

“We’re in the endgame now,” Kaldalis yelled. “We-”

“Don’t tell us not to hold anything back,” Myrin interrupted. “We’re already not! We haven’t been for a long time, now!”

“Fine then!” Kaldalis yelled, “then just… Keep going!”

“We weren’t stopping,” the greatsword-wielding human beside Myrin called back in a huffing tone, “but okay! You all heard the man, let’s get that status quo’ed!”

“Why do I fucking bother,” Kaldalis muttered, readying his spear as the four-fingered syncoresi lunged for him again.