As soon as Kaldalis had caught his breath - and the healers finished gradually spreading their cooldowns around to top everyone up - he rushed out of the cavern. Out in the predawn light, he saw no sign of the syncoresi. What few signs remained that they had lived here had been squashed underfoot by the stampede leaving the tunnels.

“Let’s just hang out for a minute,” Kaldalis said, almost breathlessly. “They might come back to reclaim it. Or to get revenge.” He gestured vaguely up and to the right of his vision. “The fight for the town seems to still be going. We’re not done until that’s done, right?”

“If the fight’s still going, we should get back to them, right?” Deytembos asked. “What if they need us?”

“If they need us we’re still a while away from getting to them. I’d rather make sure we’re done here before starting that trip, since the bulk of our time will still be the walk back.”

Myrin groaned as she flopped down to the ground. “Yeah. I could also stand to get off my feet for a second. This has been… This has been an entire day.”

“It’s like four in the morning,” Balrim said.

Myrin shrugged. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

“That’s not-” Balrim put a hand to his scaled temple, rubbing at what Kaldalis imagined was a nascent headache. “That’s not what that-”

“Forget it, Balirm,” Courbois said, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s Chinatown.”

“That’s not what that means, either!” Balrim wailed.

Kaldalis chuckled low and returned his eyes to the jungle. It wasn’t easy, but he ignored the continuing comedy bit his friends were doing behind him. If the syncoresi returned, he’d need to be ready. A few seconds later, his Jump cooldown came back up, and he kept his attention fixated on it in case a threat appeared that demanded a swift response.

As the seconds turned to minutes, his vigilance proved unnecessary. Even after the syncoresi should have returned, there was no sign.

“All clear,” Kaldalis said at last. “This den is really done. They’re not coming back.”

“Let’s get moving, then,” Deytembos said, already taking a few big steps back towards the town, “if they need us-”

The text on the upper right of Kaldalis’s vision flashed, and from the way Deytembos stopped abruptly, he knew the blue-skinned vathon had the same happen to him.

The quest completed, rewarding him with two-hundred and fifty experience points.

“They did it,” Courbois said. “The absolute madmen.”

“I know a lot of the urgency just went out of this,” Kaldalis said, “but let’s get moving. I’ve been dying to see what this place looks like as a town.”

Despite knowing that victory had been achieved without them, the group set an unreasonably fast pace through the jungle. Instead of cutting back to the beach as they had before, they set a beeline straight for the camp.

Or, rather, for the town.

The edge appeared on their minimap before they broke through the trees, revealing that it had been named Cotanaku.

Kaldalis wasn’t sure what it meant. But he was just glad that it wasn’t Towny McTownface.

Breaking through the treeline revealed just how much had changed. Most notably, it had grown. The walls had somehow moved about twenty feet out, reducing the distance between the treeline and the walls. The walls themselves had gone from crude - nearly uncut - palisades to much more symmetrical and even walls, with visible crossbracing and reinforcements. There were a few multi-story stone buildings whose tops poked over the top of the walls, visible from the jungle.

The watchtowers built along the wall were now made of stone. Kaldalis wondered at how many resources had been in the town’s stockpiles to facilitate such a construction. At the front gate, the left tower - or the right one, from the inside perspective - was half again as tall, and the crude clock that had been built into the inner side was now much more serviceable, and replicated along the four faces of the tower.

Kaldalis wondered at just how much else had changed.

“I guess that answers our questions about if the bonus objectives are worth it,” he said under his breath.

“The what?” Balrim asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kaldalis said, brushing off the comment. Considering they’d all survived, he had to remember to keep Garyung’s executive dysfunction under his hat.

Speaking of which, Kaldalis could see a small group gathered at the gate. The most familiar figure was the one pacing back and forth. Garyung. As soon as he identified that figure, he realized that the others were the council gathered around behind him.

The whole scene was obviously trouble. The council must have had some business to deal with, and were waiting on Garyung. Kaldalis had to get him on track, or - as he had feared - the whole system was going to topple.

Garyung started to rush towards them as soon as the group emerged into the clearcut area between the walls and the trees. Kaldalis picked up his pace to try and meet him in the middle where they’d have a few seconds for him to give Garyung some reassurance before everyone else caught up.

“You did it,” Garyung said as soon as Kaldalis was in earshot. “Your plan worked. It was a little rocky, but it worked.”

“Is everyone alive?” Kaldalis asked quickly. “Did we lose anyone else?”

“A few people went down,” Garyung said, “but they were known PCs and they were being idiots about their Flicker cooldowns. No NPCs. No more lives lost. You saved the whole camp with your plan.”

Kaldalis reached up and grabbed the sides of Garyung’s face. “You dumbass. This is your win. Your plan. You saved the whole camp - the whole town. Not me. Remember that, okay? I helped, and I accept your gratitude for that, but you have to remember that this is your victory. Do you understand?”

Garyung started to protest, but looked over Kaldalis’s shoulder at the others approaching, and nodded. “I understand.”

Kaldalis let go of him and returned the nod. Garyung needed to be the leader. He didn’t have to look like a hero, but if it looked like Kaldalis was puppetmastering him, the whole camp’s faith in the election - and the governing process in general - would be shattered. Kaldalis wasn’t going to let that happen so soon after wrenching victory from the jaws of defeat.

“So what happened?” Kaldalis asked again, as Balrim and Deytembos caught up behind him. The rest of his group was shortly behind them.

“This might shock you,” Garyung said, “but we won.”

Myrin feigned shock. “What? How unexpected!”

“You gotta see the town,” Garyung continued. “There’s still some work to be done before I’m happy with the place, but I imagine that’s the point. We’ve got a real town hall now! And guard NPCs are spawning from the barracks we built, manning the towers and patrolling the town.”

“We’re here to stay, then,” Kaldalis said, looking up at the walls and picking out the archers manning the towers. He couldn’t make out details from here, but they were alert and at attention, scanning the treeline for threats. “The Infernal Horde won’t be pushing us out of here now.”

“And now that they’ve returned,” Ikzoz said, finally catching up to the group, “can we deal with the new emergency?”

“Emergency?” Kaldalis asked.

“Uh,” Garyung said, trying not to look at Kaldalis. “I may have fucked up.”

“A minor miscalculation,” Ikzoz said, “but an important one. We really should have discussed this issue last night. But the simple fact is that none of us thought we could be this close to it coming up.”

“What happened?” Kaldalis said, grabbing Garyung by the shoulder and turning him around.

“It’s complicated,” Garyung said.

Captain Filomena approached from behind him, cackling. “This crazy son of a bitch. A man after my own heart after all. He declared us sovereign territory! A new independent nation!”

“You did WHAT?” Kaldalis gasped.

He wasn’t the only one stunned by this.

Behind him there was a chorus of similar gasps and curses. Even behind Garyung, every member of the council winced at the reminder.

“Okay, so when founding the town, I had to do some random bullshit,” Garyung said quickly. “It was like filling out a form. I named the town, assigned the council members as appropriate department heads, all that.” Kaldalis could tell the man wanted to shrink down into his shoes rather than confess to this. “It also asked for allegiance.”

“What did you do?” Kaldalis asked.

“I wrote in the only thing that made sense,” Garyung said. “I wrote down Adventurers League.” He gave a sheepish look back at the council gathered behind him. “Apparently that wasn’t right.”

“We are-” Ikzoz began.

“Were,” Filomena corrected with another burst of laughter.

“We were,” Ikzoz said again, giving her a glare, “citizens of the Kingdom of Zara.”

“I know,” Garyung said, “but I didn’t know that counted as our allegiance.”

Kaldalis ran his hands through his hair, careful to avoid his horns. “Okay,” he said carefully. “So what does this all mean?”

“We are, technically,” Ikzoz said, “secessionists. And on top of that, our allegiance implies that the league as a whole wishes to be independent from the kingdom.”

“And we can’t explain it as my fault,” Garyung said, “because it’s the kingdom of Zara. They hate having ‘our types’ in charge. If we try and get in touch and apologize, they’re going to think it’s all a ploy.”

“We have to just deal with things as they come,” Ikzoz confirmed. “Our only real option is agreeing to be annexed, but that will cause untold headache, and likely cause you adventurers to be second-class citizens. After they send an army to occupy the city for the foreseeable future.”

“So our best option is just to chill,” Kaldalis said.

“Unfortunately,” Ikzoz grimaced. “Though I fear that might become an issue to be resolved sooner rather than later, now that we have a port town out here for ships to land. It could be a day, or it could be hours, but we will need to deal with an inquiry from Baimer about what we’ve done.”

“If they send any diplomats, we can just tell them our new national motto,” Myrin said.

“Motto?”

Myrin flashed a toothy grin. “It’s ‘Fuck Around and Find Out’.”

“You are a menace,” Balrim said with a snort. He turned to Garyung. “We shouldn’t let her talk to anyone. Ever.”

“Not wrong, buddy,” Garyung said with a sigh. “But we need to figure out what our plan is.”

“So then what are you all doing out here?” Deytembos asked. “Shouldn’t you be sequestered in the town hall formulating a plan?”

“I wasn’t sure if you folks were okay,” Garyung said defensively. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t send you all to your doom.”

“We’re all PCs,” Kaldalis said. “If we were doomed, we’d have been back here in thirty more minutes. We were all fine.”

“In thirty minutes you would have respawned in the middle of a nest of infernal horde. What would you have done if they spawn camped you?”

Kaldalis paused. “Huh. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Wait,” Courbois said, “did we not have a plan for that? Really?”

Before Kaldalis could get embroiled in the unexpected nearness of disaster, someone burst from the town gate and sprinted to the council.

“It’s time,” the man said, gasping for breath. It didn’t take Kaldalis long to recognize him as one of the sailors.

“Shit,” Garyung murmured. His sudden stress and tension was mirrored by the rest of the council.

“What time?” Kaldalis asked. “Time for what?”

“The boat,” the sailor said. “It’s setting down anchor by the pier now.”