Kaldalis was anxious about splitting the party, but he didn’t have a lot of other options. He thought he’d been calling Onirioago’s bluff, but she’d been calling his at the same time.

The only thing he could do was play out his hand and see who won.

If she was lying, then she was leading them right into the trap she wanted them to walk into. And if she was telling the truth, she might use the chaos of whatever fight happened against the Jormongumo to improvise an escape. The only intelligent way to call her bluff was to take a small group and scout ahead, denying her the opportunity to seize control of the situation in a moment of crisis.

Gavinkim, Garyung, Ess, and Martok stayed in the clearing with Onirioago. Gavinkim wouldn’t leave her side, and Kaldalis wanted to make sure to leave him with enough people to be able to hold their ground if something happened. Garyung and Martok were tanks, and would serve as big piles of hit points that attackers would struggle to get through, while Ess was the perfect support for them. She could put out damage they needed against a wandering monster, and her Jump ability, combined with Nyxlas’s Augment, would let her escape at high speed to get help against any larger threat.

Meanwhile, Kaldalis would lead the others forward, in the direction Onirioago had indicated. They would either find the ruins - and the Jormongumo within - or they would find nothing and call for the return to Cotanaku.

The jungle was denser this deep into the wilderness. They had to physically push into the undergrowth to get out of the clearing, and it didn’t improve much after that. Despite the dense canopy blocking out the sun, there were clusters of knee-high brush between the trees, slowing their advance considerably.

“Keep it down,” Kaldalis hissed when Myrin started to grumble. What was knee-high to him was waist-high to her. “If they’re out here, they’ll be waiting for us.”

“Who’s ‘they’ in this context?” Reno whispered as she used her daggers to cut a path ahead of herself.

“Whoever’s out here,” Balrim said, waving a clawed hand at the jungle ahead of them. “Either spider-snake lady monsters, or Onirioago’s lunatic drug cult.”

Kaldalis wanted to point out that Onirioago’s followers wouldn’t have the drug, but he had to take every possible precaution. If her followers were monitoring them now, the last thing he wanted was to announce himself as the only person who knew how to catch the Deacon Tetra that she was desperate to get.

The jungle thinned just as suddenly as it had around the lake. Kaldalis almost stumbled into the empty area, and was able to wave his hands to get everyone’s attention before they ran into his back - or blunder into the open.

Ahead of them were the ruins. They looked different from what they’d seen on this island elsewhere - they were a match, though, for the ruins outside of Panbu. They displayed curving patterns, with smaller doors and ramps, in contrast to the Lataxinans’ oversized structures with stairs and straight lines displaying their geometric obsession. Unlike the ruins in Panbu, though, some of the organic materials persisted - or had been replaced. Much of these buildings featured wooden awnings and balconies jutting off the sides, angled towards the sun. The buildings were also taller than he would have thought from the stone ruins outside Panbu, with the wooden parts of the buildings stretching farther upwards.

What demanded Kaldalis’s more immediate attention was what was in the space between the treeline and the ruins. The ground was torn up, with damper soil and broken roots exposed to the air. It had been turned in rows of furrows. The air was full of a quiet grinding sound of the metal blade of a plow biting through the next row.

A Jormongumo was pushing the plow.

She was in a halfway form between human and monster, which was a surprise to Kaldalis. He hadn’t known they could actively choose to stay in the halfway form that Ara had used to terrify him. This one had eight eyes and eight arms, but still had legs dotted with dark brown scales. This was optimal for operating the plow, as the snakelike lower body would likely ruin the work behind her, but having multiple muscular arms let the tool break through the root filled ground without an animal to pull it.

Even in this half-monster form, he could tell she wasn’t Ara. She was wearing just a sweat-drenched loincloth and a thick strip of cloth over her breasts, and her hair was only shoulder length and lighter brown rather than the long raven-black cascade Ara had. It was difficult to compare their appearances in any other way while she was in this monster form. The extra eyes made it difficult to judge her facial features, and her extra arms disguised her body shape and musculature.

As Kaldalis ducked down, trying to obscure himself as much as possible in the jungle undergrowth, a little flash popped up on the side of his vision, giving him a new quest.

Living Well

Clear out the enemy stronghold.

The quest was accompanied by a bar, much like the one that had appeared when they had needed to clear out the Xorn who had invaded Panbu.

“Go time?” Myrin whispered, edging up next to him.

Kaldalis’s head was spinning at this turn of events. First and foremost, this meant that Onirioago had actually been honest with them. She’d been telling the truth. This might not have been a scam at all. She might actually just be trying to prove herself trustworthy.

Second - and probably most pressing - they could actually put an end to the attacks without going all the way back to town and brainstorming a new plan. Or giving himself up to whatever monstrous bullshit Ara wanted him for.

In the pit of his stomach, he still expected the worst. But Garyung had been right all along. They couldn’t let this opportunity slip through their fingers. They had to drive the Jormongumo out of the region before more people were brutalized.

“Go time,” he confirmed, before breaking from the treeline and charging.

He almost guessed what the farmer’s reaction would be to him bursting out of the jungle and charging her. Her body snapped into her monster form, with her legs fusing together in a flash and expanding into her snakelike tail as her upper body became thicker and more muscular. In this form her shorter hair stood up slightly as it became visibly coarser and more bristly, but lacked the weight of Ara’s longer hair to hold it down.

Her reaction after transforming, though, surprised him. He expected her to run for help or raise an alarm, but instead she raised her claws and rushed towards him. Her bared fangs and beady black eyes gave him a flash of upsetting memory that almost made him turn tail and run, but he stood his ground. This wasn’t Ara, and even if it was, he was here to avenge what had been done to him, Dalgaard, and the half-dozen others who had been victimized.

To that end, he smashed the head of his glaive into the side of the charging monster, hitting her for one hundred and twenty-five physical damage, and twenty-one earth damage.

The Jormongumo reared back with a hiss, one hand pressed to the bleeding wound. Three clawed hands lashed out at him, their movements reaching to grasp at him, and the sudden horrifying memory of Ara smashing her face against his made him yelp with genuine fear as he spun away from the attacks. The movement kept her from getting a hold of his shoulder, but her claws still raked across his armor, inflicting one hundred and ninety-one physical damage to him.

Kaldalis kept moving away from the monster, hoping to turn it around as his friends came up behind it. But the monster surprised him again, backing off in turn to try and keep the whole group in her field of view.

“What the fuck,” Myrin cursed, “this is a new one.”

The Jormongumo oriented on her, claws raised to lunge at her. Myrin darted back, visibly uncomfortable by the monster’s attention.

“Shoulda brought more healers,” Kaldalis muttered. “This is going to get messy.”

“You have no idea,” the Jormongumo hissed at him.

Kaldalis forced down the discomfort her voice awakened in his gut. Hissing through her fangs made her threats sound just like Ara’s.

Considering there were likely a dozen more of these monsters waiting around the corner meant he was going to have to get used to these reminders.

“Then let’s take some chances,” Kaldalis said, raising his glaive and approaching the monster. “Make some mistakes, and get fucking messy.”