With three enraged snake monsters fixated on him, Kaldalis didn’t have time to consider any other options. He thought about using his Jump ability to hop up onto somewhere unreachable. But he knew real-world snakes could climb walls - to say nothing of spiders - which meant taking the high ground might only isolate him from his friends. While his foes could rush right up at him anyway.

It also meant he didn’t notice when reinforcements arrived.

In a rare stroke of unusual luck, they were his, and not theirs.

The Jormongumo with the pike shifted to the left, trying to harry Kaldalis’s flank and drive him towards the nearest wall of the courtyard.

For a moment, he thought he might actually be in trouble.

But that was when Ess dropped out of the sky.

She landed on the left side of the pike-wielding monster, and jabbed her own spear into her side, physically blocking her from continuing to move towards Kaldalis’s flank.

Garyung and Martok appeared a moment later, at the entrance to the courtyard before charging to Kaldalis’s aid.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Kaldalis demanded - or, at least, as much as he could while avoiding getting skewered. “Where is she?”

“We saw your hit points flailing around and figured you might need some help!” Garyung said. His sword slashed repeatedly into the nearest Jormongumo.

“Gavinkim still has Onirioago,” Ess said quickly. The reassurance would have calmed his heart rate, if he wasn’t still the sole focus of three murderous monsters. “His entire focus is keeping her in line!”

True to her words, Gavinkim was the last one into the courtyard, dragging the tightly-bound Onirioago behind him. He didn’t move to join the fight, instead electing to stay near to where Balrim stood. As soon as he came to a halt, he pulled Onirioago in close next to him to maintain control of her as much as possible. One hand was firmly gripping the lead trailing off of her bindings, and the other was planted on the back of her neck. It seemed a little draconian, but considering he was the only one wholly focused on her, while a fight went on only a few feet away, Kaldalis thought it wasn’t out of line.

“What did you do?” Garyung asked, still flailing his sword at the same Jormongumo. “Why can’t I peel them off of you?”

“Our anger will only be sated by your blood!” one of them hissed, sword catching Kaldalis’s forearm.

“Turns out Onirioago was right,” Kaldalis said, spinning away from the next attack and trying to get some distance before he could be overwhelmed. “They were after me for some reason.”

“Stand still and face your punishment,” the Jormongumo hissed again. “We will make your end faster than hers was!”

“I don’t know what’s going on!” Kaldalis yelped. A thrust of the pike went right past his nose, only two inches off of striking him squarely in the cheek. “And I swear, I really want to know! Can we just talk about this?”

One of them shrieked wordlessly, a shield flashing out to try and knock him off-balance.

“Guess not,” Ess observed, her spear jabbing at the pike-wielding Jormongumo.

With their combined numbers - and with Garyung directing and consolidating their damage - the pike-wielding monster fell after a few more moments.

Her death sparked a change in the other two. Their ferocity went from angry to desperate. When the second of the trio fell, desperation became honest fear. Kaldalis expected her to break and run to complete the quest to dispel the settlement, but she fought to the last breath, dying to Martok’s blades after several minutes of heated combat.

And the quest remained incomplete. The little bar under the quest was at 80% and holding firm. Despite that indicator that a boss foe still waited for them in the big building ahead, Kaldalis turned his attention on Onirioago.

“What do you know?” he demanded.

He expected her to try and avoid his eyes or turn away at the sudden confrontation, but he’d clearly forgotten who he was dealing with. Her eyes danced with undisguised glee.

“How would I know anything?” she asked, the sweet and innocent tone of her voice undercut by the muffling of her mask.

“You knew they were after me,” Kaldalis said. “Why? They mentioned wanting revenge for their champion. What did I do?”

“If anybody knows what you did, it would be you,” Onirioago said. She was visibly enjoying this so much that he almost believed that she actually didn’t know anything.

“Hope that helps!” she added, unhelpfully.

The only thing he could think of was if Ara had been a person of importance before he had killed her. It seemed odd, then, that Balrim and Myrin had been excluded from this revenge, since they had come to his rescue and done a lot of the legwork to actually end the fight in his favor.

There had to be more to this, then.

If Onirioago was unable or unwilling to clarify, he might never learn the truth.

“So we didn’t just kill some random monster,” Myrin asked, “but the bitch queen of the snake-spiders?” She looked over at Garyung. “Does this qualify as an international incident?”

“I don’t think they’re really a nation,” Garyung said, raising his hands as if to declare innocence. “Or else you could bet that the Svjetlans would have an ambassador here.”

Garyung grinned like that was supposed to be a joke, but nobody else seemed to be in on it.

“Anyway,” Kaldalis said, returning his attention to Onirioago, “you don’t actually know anything, do you? If you did, you’d be trying to leverage it now.”

“Are you positive about that?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him coyly. “I might be waiting until you understand how valuable and important the information actually is before giving it to you.”

“Let me clarify,” Kaldalis said, fixing her with a glare. “You either don’t know anything, or what you know isn’t important. You’re not afraid of what’s coming, so I’m not afraid of not knowing what it is.”

Onirioago offered a shrug, but didn’t say anything. She still kept the coy arch in her eyebrow, but dealing with her was starting to show him her tells.

He’d successfully guessed at her move, and it aggravated her.

“We’re moving on,” Kaldalis said, addressing the rest of the group, making a show of turning his back on Onirioago. “We’re going to wrap this all up and move on with all our lives, and I’m going out of my way to never see another woman with eight eyes ever again for the rest of my life.”

“Good luck with that,” Onirioago said, her taunting tone daring him to respond.

He ignored her. Whatever boss fight was to come needed his full attention. He hoped he was wrong, but if he wasn’t, he would need all his mental faculties to cope.

The large stone building at the far side of the courtyard was not as imposing as he expected from a distance. From across the ruins, it looked like a dark fortress, covered in jungle detritus. From up close it looked like an overly fancy hotel, intentionally covered in greenery for decoration.

Its entrance was empty, showing signs that there had been wooden doors that were gone and had not been replaced. Kaldalis had his spear ready as he carefully poked his head inside.

The interior of the building revealed that it didn’t have three floors. He suspected there was a second floor up above somewhere, but the first floor ceilings were extraordinarily tall. At first glance, it looked like the vaulted ceilings that the lataxinans favored, but it was still very much the curved lines of the rest of these ruins rather than the geometric design he’d associated with the smaller otterfolk.

This entry hall was made of stone and nearly featureless. There were a few segments of chest high walls arranged in a loose circle that made him anxious that he was about to be attacked by gun-toting locusts, but the room was empty otherwise. Tentatively, he moved forward. The room’s curved design guided him forward, into a strangely-shaped hallway.

A hallway here ballooned outwards three times, but after a dozen feet each time, it narrowed back down. The curved walls were painted in murals, and again, running contrary to the curvy architecture, the murals were angular masses of shapes, in a very Lataxinan style.

“What is this place?” Balrim whispered. The acoustics of the curved walls made even the whisper feel like it was being carried through the whole building.

“Lataxinans were here,” Kaldalis said. He pointed at the painted walls. “Welcome or not, they left their mark.”

“Do you think,” Myrin started and then stopped, wincing as her voice also seemed to carry unnaturally loud. She tried again, whispering. “Do you think there’s a tablet here?”

“It’s possible,” Kaldalis agreed, sharing in her wince as now his voice rebounded back at him. “But since this is overworld and not the dungeon, it’s more likely a room somewhere in here with the tablet itself missing.”

“Bijatlh ‘e’ ylmev,” Martok cut in, the consonant-filled syllables doubly harsh as the walls sent the strange vocalization around them all.

The man pointed ahead in the darkness.

Ahead, the hallway came to an end the third time it narrowed, opening into a huge room. Kaldalis suspected that this might have actually been a hotel of some sort, to act as lodgings for visiting Lataxinans.

If so, this was the Jormongumo’s answer to the Ritz. The room was obviously a ballroom. Its back wall was fully open to the wilderness in what had once been twenty foot tall windows, now with their glass replaced by tangled vines. In the middle of the room a huge metal chandelier - nearly a match for the one he’d seen in the dungeon boss chamber with the Nautilobster Queen - had crashed to the ground, shattering the thick stone tiles there. The tiles themselves were interlocking geometric shapes, but cut through artfully with a continuous pattern of curving tiles that wound through the angular mosaic like a python laid atop an overly complex stained glass window.

There was a woman in the middle of the room, standing alone and dressed like she was there for a ball. A low-cut pitch-black dress ran down to the floor, clinging to her curves in a way that drew the eye down to her hips and then back up to her face, with a brief stop along the way for a thick choker of pearls and glittering black stones.

Her features weren’t just familiar.

They were etched with perfect clarity upon the darkest part of Kaldalis’s memory.

“Kaldalis,” Ara purred, the acoustics of the room making the sound into a literal wave of nausea that washed over him. She leaned forward, the front of her low-cut dress dipping down an inch, baring far too much cleavage for her to maintain the illusion of royal bearing. “My eyes are up here, lover.”

Six extra eyes split open across her face just before her body became the stuff of Kaldalis’s nightmares.