Garyung, Martok, and Gavinkim were on the stairs now. Kaldalis didn’t know how they’d been driven there, but they were truly cornered now. A few of the rooms behind them had windows, but escaping that way would be nearly impossible with Onirioago in tow.

Especially considering she was likely to make it difficult on the way out.

They weren’t cornered by Jormongumo.

It was people.

Some of them Kaldalis recognized from Cotanaku.

The group was comprised of a mix of races, but from their dress and behavior, Kaldalis was pretty sure they were mostly PCs. Even with Kaldalis’s group joining the others, the oncoming mob outnumbered them by a decent margin.

The only reason for them to be here, menacing them, was if these were Onirioago’s allies, here to aid in her escape.

An escape Kaldalis couldn’t let happen.

He immediately pushed past Gavinkim towards the front of the group, with his friends shortly behind him. Kaldalis wanted as many bodies between Gavinkim’s grip on Onirioago and the enemy.

“Get to the top of the stairs,” Kaldalis ordered, glancing over his shoulder at Gavinkim. “If this escalates, I want you to get her out of here and back to Cotanaku as fast as physically possible.”

“Great,” a voice from the attacking group said. They emerged from the crowd with a cocky smirk. “If Kaldalis is the one in charge on their side, everything is bound to go our way.”

Kaldalis was shocked - and a little hurt - to see Dalgaard taking the head of the group of attackers. They were the healer that had been with him when he’d first encountered Ara, and his inability to protect them from her attack still haunted him. He’d tried to talk to them since, but they avoided him at every turn.

They made a wordless gesture to the group behind them, and a handful of people from the back of the group broke off and moved back down the stairs. Presumably to set up a perimeter to try and pick up Gavinkim if he actually made good on Kaldalis’s order of escape.

That told Kaldalis that they meant for this to escalate.

They weren’t here to compromise.

Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from trying.

“This doesn’t have to end this way,” Kaldalis said. “I’m sure we can figure out a nonviolent solution here.”

“We have one already,” Dalgaard said, making a show of slowly cracking their knuckles. “You hand over our friend, and we all go home happy.” They sneered up at him. “Of course, we all know you’re going to choose to do this the hard way. And we all know how that is going to go.”

A sinister chuckle went around the group at that.

“What’s she offering you?” Kaldalis asked. “We’ll beat her price.” He looked at Garyung, who seemed visibly pale by the claim. Despite his apparent uncertainty, however, he offered Kaldalis a nod. “She can’t possibly have the resources we do. We can all go home happy here.”

Behind him, Onirioago laughed at that.

Kaldalis tried to ignore her.

“You’ve already made clear that you can’t offer me what she can,” Dalgaard spat. Their hand reached for their stomach, pressed to the place Kaldalis had seen Ara rip open. “Security. Safety. A return to the way things are supposed to be, with the actual expedition leader at the head of the group. Not some... Pretender.”

Kaldalis flinched. This wasn’t going to develop into a reasonable discussion. Dalgaard had already decided that this was going to end in their favor, or come to blows.

“I hope you know this doesn’t have to end this way,” Kaldalis said, drawing his glaive. “You’re the one choosing to go this route.”

“With pride,” Dalgaard said with a little flourish.

The flourish was some sort of signal. Their companions behind them visibly tensed, ready to charge.

“Don’t try it,” Kaldalis said quickly, trying not to lose his nerve in the face of so many foes staring him down at once.

“You underestimate our power,” Dalgaard said with a smirk.

They - and the group behind them - charged up the stairs at him.

What happened next was unexpected.

Dalgaard charged with fists alone, and Kaldalis interposed his polearm in front of their charge. The weapon was lined up with Dalgaard’s center of mass as they ran up the stairs, but at the last second, before the moment of impact, the weapon itself wavered. His hands faltered, as if of their own accord.

The glaive moved aside and Kaldalis was forced to swing it at Dalgaard to try and take advantage of the weapons’ reach before they got to him, aiming to slash across the top of their face, hoping to send a curtain of blood into their eyes.

Again, the weapon failed him.

The blade of the glaive turned aside, and he physically could not strike them.

Dalgaard closed in, and instead of drawing steel, they drove their fist into Kaldalis’s gut. It didn’t do damage, but it drove the wind out of him, making him back up a step.

There was pain as well.

Just because there weren’t numbers attached to it didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt him.

Another fist came in at his face, and he managed to react fast enough to slip aside from it.

Kaldalis choked up on the haft of his glaive, and tried to sweep its blade in at Dalgaard’s arm. For the third time, the weapon twisted in his grip, refusing to connect.

It was like the weapon had a mind of its own and was adamantly refusing to be used in combat like this.

As the group accompanying Dalgaard closed in, he saw that none of them held weapons either.

And all the little things started to make sense.

On the night they arrested Onirioago, she had held her sword to his throat - and, later in that same night, Bangen’s throat - but never raised it in open combat. The only time actual combat between players had happened with damage numbers and everything, it had been obviously consensual, when Kaldalis had sparred with his new friends aboard the ship.

This game had restricted opt-in PVP. But in order to facilitate roleplay in some description with physical consequence, they could engage in unarmed combat, and while they didn’t do damage numbers - it couldn’t kill anyone - just like a real-world fight, eventually the bruising and battering would take its toll.

He knew that because when he’d punched Haldir, he’d drawn blood.

“Weapons away!” Kaldalis barked. “We have to fight hand-to-hand for this!”

From behind him, he heard his friends cursing.

He also heard Onirioago letting out a cackle, which he chose to ignore.

Putting his weapon away, Kaldalis lashed out with fists of his own. Deep down, he felt a sense of guilt and disgust at himself for physically striking Dalgaard, someone he’d sworn to protect. But on the surface, it was never difficult to punch someone who just punched you first. Dalgaard seemed ready for the hit, and blocked it with their arm, but the force behind Kaldalis’s strike sent them staggering back anyway.

Despite Kaldalis having taken an unguarded punch to the gut, his attack in return seemed to have much more of an effect.

As two more of Dalgaard’s friends stepped up to try and attack Kaldalis in turn, he had a guess as to why. Despite his stats all being numbers that got turned into other numbers though weapons, he had long since noticed that they did seem to matter. As a tank, his high defensive stats meant that he outpaced his friends in terms of physical stamina. Meanwhile, Myrin was significantly more physically powerful than he was. It hadn’t been too long ago that she had Balrim dragging behind her and still easily had the power to push Kaldalis ahead of her, too.

So when the two Talsar men with fists raised approached him, he wasn’t that worried to face them both at once. Their strikes were firmer and obviously more powerful than what Dalgaard had hit him with, but he found that he rolled with the punches easily, even if he knew being right about it meant that his own attacks would be relatively ineffective.

As he faced down his foes, the rest of Dalgaard’s - or, more accurately, Onirioago’s - forces rushed around the sides of him, crashing against his friends.

Within seconds, the stairwell became the site of a vicious brawl.

Kaldalis made ample use of his position two steps up from his foes - on top of his physical height - to add gravity to his hits down at whoever stepped up towards him. The two Talsar backed off after trading blows with him and obviously not making progress. A Vathon and a Human took their places, and Kaldalis focused on sponging up their damage.

If he was going to come out ahead in this brawl, it was going to be by being the last man standing by virtue of his high Vigor stat.

Near at hand, there was a yelp, and a Bhogad woman went hurtling past him, crashing down the stairs head over heels. Behind him he heard Myrin cackle, confirming that she liked engaging in PVP just as much as she enjoyed fighting just about anything else.

Shortly after that, he heard the sound of breaking glass, and Balrim cursing. “Shit! Potions do nothing!”

That was a sobering discovery. Someone from Kaldalis’s left caught him off-guard with a punch to his jaw, and while he was able to take that punch, it meant that the bruise it was going to leave across his cheek wasn’t going to get washed away as easily as having his back ripped apart by a monster’s claws.

He was just going to have to absorb everything, then, and keep coming.

Stamina alone wasn’t going to be enough.

His stubbornness had to combine with it.

Someone tried to kick him, but it was clumsy to come from a lower step on the stairwell. He caught the foot and twisted it hard, sending whoever it was to tumble, unbalanced, down the stairs. Kaldalis then took another hit on the chin, but his determination to be the rock at the center of this fight meant that even with stars flashing in his eyes and blood on his tongue, he kept his feet on the ground and his back straight.

“Come on then!” he barked into the blurry faces of the foes before him. He spat blood into someone’s eyes. “I didn’t hear no bell!”

He sensed a large physical presence stepping up beside him, and from the chuckle, he recognized Garyung. On the other side, someone else went tumbling down the stairs, and Myrin stepped up on that side. Between Kaldalis’s determination, Garyung’s size, and Myrin’s apparent gift for physically chucking people down the stairs, the three of them formed a wall, physically blocking the oncoming enemy. And the superior position at the head of the stairs gave them an advantage they wouldn’t squander.

This seemingly indomitable situation made Onirioago’s sultry laugh - as full of confidence as ever - all the more unsettling.