Kaldalis kited the Xorn Captain past the spot where he’d seen a group dealing with a handful of monsters only a few moments ago.

What he found there was beyond disheartening.

There was no sign of the Xorn.

All that remained were three corpses.

One was the man in black armor, and another was a woman in robes Kaldalis didn’t recognize, but must have been one of his healers. The third one was about a dozen feet away from the first two, and looked like a second healer.

That corpse was rendered unrecognizable by the Globin, who were all that was left of the fight. A pair of them were tossing the body back and forth between them for some unfathomable reason, their rough handling reducing the corpse to a bloody wad of torn robes. There was no sign of the DPS who had been a part of that group.

For a moment, Kaldalis actually felt bad for the man in black armor. Maybe he needed to do some serious work on getting better at the game, but he seemed to be wildly unlucky to have been the first to fall in so many fights.

He pushed the thought aside before he could linger long enough to remember Haldir.

If he circled back to give the corpse a swift kick, it was likely that the Xorn Captain might catch him with another hit that he couldn’t afford to take, or the Globin might have abandoned their game of catch to give chase to him. He had to keep moving.

The next group he saw was Gabriel’s party, and even the higher leveled healer was visibly struggling. They had a few more Xorn, presumably from the fallen group. Kaldalis couldn’t really offer any help. The Xorn Captain was too close behind.

He couldn’t even try and negotiate a change in strategy. Even as he considered, it got a little too close and a fist cocked back, threatening to chunk his health out again.

On the rest of this lap around the camp, he saw much of the same.

Most of the parties were still together, but merely struggling. Two more were missing, leaving small groups of Globins strangely playing catch with the remains of a randomly-selected adventurer.

Other parties seemed to have picked up more Xorn, and were nearing their limits. There was no end in sight.

A tipping point was coming.

For every party that fell, the Xorn were spreading through the camp, overloading parties that were struggling already.

Those parties would fall, adding their foes to the mess.

And all the while, Kaldalis couldn’t stop long enough to shout instructions. The best he could do would be to shout a warning, but all he could think to say was that parties were falling and more foes were coming. There was no way he could think to phrase it that wasn’t going to come across as doomsaying, and morale was already flagging.

The progress bar hadn’t taken a single tick the whole time they’d been here.

As he got back around to his own party, he saw that Martok was kiting around significantly more Xorn than before, and Courbois had two more Globins in her group.

That was going to make it even more unmanageable.

The healing on the group was increasing, but their damage wasn’t. He could see grimaces of inevitable defeat on every face.

Something had to change.

“Swap!” Kaldalis called. “Courbois, keep the Globin away from healing the Xorn while the DPS actually whittles them down! We need to actually kill things! We need progress, for the sake of-”

The pause to speak was enough for the Xorn Captain to catch up. But instead of cocking back its fist, the sand whirling around its vaselike head redoubled in speed, becoming a storm of silver granules.

Kaldalis didn’t have time to do anything but activate his Endure cooldown before the shockwave blast radiated from it.

The blast was gratefully a cone, so it caught only him rather than bludgeoning through his entire team. But it was a devastating hit. It dealt only one hundred and thirty-two damage, but the worst part wasn’t the damage. There was the debuff attached to it.

Kaldalis gained seven stacks of it instantly from the blow, but it quickly flickered. Five stacks vanished and a second debuff appeared.

As soon as the second debuff appeared, his whole body went limp, and he went from a full sprint to tumbling bonelessly across the dirt.

When Kaldalis came to rest, he felt panic rise as his limbs refused to obey.

Unbidden, he felt himself remembering being rendered helpless by Ara’s venom.

The feeling of her touch.

Being unable to turn away or avert his eyes or even defend himself.

But this was different. Ara’s venom had paralyzed him, stiffening his muscles and joints, robbing him of control. Whatever this was had made his body limp and unresponsive.

Mentally examining the debuffs revealed the truth of what had happened. They each had extremely long durations, relative to what he’d previously suffered.

They would affect him for a full minute.

Sleep [2]

Afflicted by a Sleep attack. Upon reaching five stacks, stacks are removed and replaced by Deep Sleep.

Deep Sleep

Succumbed to a Sleep attack. Unable to move or take actions. Effect ends upon taking damage.

Right. The Xorn Captain had unleashed a special attack on him, and it had applied a debuff. That debuff had applied some potent crowd control to him. And now he was forced to just lay here until it stomped up and started beating him into the dirt.

Sleep was such a misnomer. He was wide awake and full of adrenaline-fueled panic. He just couldn’t move.

The ground shook with its approach, but slowly, it’s pace a far cry from the sprint Kaldalis had just led it on. The enormous monster seemed to believe that the impending attack would be the end of the fight, and was savoring the coming assault.

Kaldalis still had over a thousand hit points remaining, so he was confident he would survive, but he found himself struggling with anxiety more than survival. Its lazy approach reminded him of the malicious confidence of Ara once she’d paralyzed him.

He was struggling more not to freak out at the memory than he was trying to force himself to move.

Instead of simply stomping him into the dirt, the Xorn Captain kicked Kaldalis over, flipping him onto his back. His expectation was for a cocked-back fist to drive into his chest, but instead, the malice radiating down on him intensified as it stared.

For a long moment, he wasn't sure what the towering monster was going to do. It just glared at him. Time seemed to stretch on indefinitely.

That was when he realized what was happening.

His eyes went to the debuff bar to watch the Deep Sleep timer tick away, and he saw the buff timer for his Endure cooldown ticking down at the same time. They had the same duration, but his Endure had been activated a second sooner. Somehow, the Xorn Captain knew this, and was waiting out his defenses to get its big punch in on him.

For his part, he was glad that he was the only person who had touched the Captain. It meant that for a full sixty seconds, the beast was content to just stand over him and glower.

As he lay there, he experienced a small victory. The little yellow progress bar for their raid ticked up a little bit. Someone, somewhere, had managed to kill some Infernal Horde.

It was likely too little too late. Too late by far.

Whoever had done it wasn’t alone. The bar ticked up again. And then once more. Kaldalis wished he could make his body respond so that he could look over and see if his team was the one doing it.

The bar continued to climb though. There was no cheer among his friends, or from anyone nearby. He started to suspect that something else was at work rather than the Horde actually getting picked away at. Was there a capture point somewhere that someone had started standing on? Was someone behind schedule somehow and delivering building materials to an unknown turn-in point?

He didn’t have time to think of any other possibilities. The duration of his Endure cooldown was ticking down into the last few seconds, and the Xorn Captain reached down with its lower arms.

They grabbed the sides of the chestplate of his armor.

Huge muscles the color of burnished steel rippled as the inhuman figure lifted him up off the ground. Kaldalis’s limbs refused to respond, and even his head hung slack, rolling back and forth over his shoulders. Despite the lack of control over himself, he still got a good look at what was going on around.

His party was struggling. The DPS had followed his instruction and moved to the Xorn, but Martok had gathered too many to stop moving, and so while he was kiting them, the DPS were being kited in turn. How then, was the quest progressing? What was happening?

“Don’t worry, Kal,” Balrim yelled from nearby, “as long as something doesn’t go wrong, my next heal has your name on it!”

Kaldalis was unable to contest the idea.

He was fine.

Probably.

The Xorn Captain wasn’t going to kill him. And once he started moving again, he wasn’t going to let himself get caught again.

His confidence did begin to wane slightly as the monster wound up. It didn’t just cock back a fist for a single strike. Both of its upper arms spread wide, ready to clap down on either side of his head.

He was about to get his ears boxed by a fifteen-foot tall faceless Machamp made of metal.

Regardless of how much damage it was going to do, this was going to suck. This was going to suck a lot. And that was just if it let go of him immediately. He didn’t see an obvious reason why it wouldn’t just slam him again.

He had to make a plan. He needed to react as soon as he was ‘awake’ in order to get loose, or else he was about to-

“What the fuck?” Balrim yelled from nearby. “Holy shit! Holy shit! What the fuck!”

An arrow landed in the Xorn Captain’s forearm a few feet away from Kaldalis. Incredibly, the monster turned, the malice of its attention pulling off of him slightly for a second.

Balrim’s voice called again at the same time as Kaldalis’s lolling head turned just right to show him what was happening.

“Garyung!”