After affixing the rope around the tree trunk above the door, the others started to climb up towards the building. There were a few well-placed branches for them to gather along so that they could all charge in together, even if a couple would have to be halfway into the obscuring foliage around them.

As Kaldalis waited for people to get as in position as they were going to be, he got a good look at the structure itself.

Or, as good a look as he could from here.

It was obviously glitched somehow to have been built up here in the forest canopy. The bottom of the building wasn’t attached to anything. It touched a branch in one spot, but the branch wasn’t bowed by the building’s weight. It made him wonder about the mechanics of building in this world. Only a player would glitch a game’s system to float a building up into the treetops, and the only way he’d seen for a player to access the game’s building menus was when he had updated his quarters after Cotnanaku had become a town. Was this building technically part of Cotanaku?

Kaldlais wasn’t sure how to use this information. He wasn’t even sure how they’d done it in the first place. Could he theoretically displace the position of his own quarters to the middle of the jungle somehow? It seemed appealing to him to make his little shack into a watchpost near the Deacon Tetra lake, so that he could make sure to keep an eye on the fishing there.

But more importantly, did Garyung have some amount of authority here? Could he spawn guards here?

There wasn’t time to evaluate that now. Gavinkim was clinging to the tree trunk near at hand, and looked eager to charge in the front door and lay waste to whatever he found inside.

Kaldalis shared in his impatience.

He suspected Gavinkim’s urgency was born of bloodlust, but Kaldalis was just flat-out terrified.

Until he set eyes on Onirioago again, she could be anywhere. It was like seeing a giant spider in your room, looking away to grab a shoe, and then looking back to find it gone. It was scary enough to see something unwanted in your vicinity. But it was amplified tenfold when you knew it was nearby but not where.

Onirioago could be in there right now, planning her next moves around a table, stabbing a knife into a map of Cotanaku. But she might be perfecting the first batch of Geas Venom, having held back some secret final part of the recipe from even her trusted minions.

Or maybe she wasn’t here at all. What if she had used the weird glitch house to teleport into Cotanaku, already dropping poison into all the wells in town.

The last one up, Balrim, got up the rope and took a spot in the branches next to everyone else. A murmur passed between them as they were all now ready to strike.

Kaldalis leaned forward slowly, gripping a branch with one hand, with his feet set against the tree trunk. His other hand reached slowly - carefully - for the handle of the door.

There was a rustle of leaves, and Kaldalis looked back towards it. The sound was clearly from the left, but he didn’t see anything there. Just dense foliage next to Gavinkim at the far edge of the group. He worried about what that noise might have been, so he looked to make eye contact with Martok, trusting the man to have the skills to investigate quickly.

Except Martok was missing.

It only took a fraction of a second for his brain to summarize possible reasons why.

“Clever girl,” he blurted out loudly, making a curse of it.

“What?” Gavinkim asked.

That was when they attacked.

A Talsar man jumped down at Kaldalis from the trees, kicking his legs off of where they were planted against the tree. Suddenly he only had one point of contact - the branch he was holding. His whole weight slammed against the door face-first, and he swatted at the handle, trying to find any grip to not tumble all the way to the ground.

But he wasn’t the only one. Suddenly Onirioago’s group was everywhere.

Dalgaard dropped from the foliage and kicked Balrim in the face.

A Vathon woman grabbed Reno from behind and was trying to drag her back into the dense leaves, but Reno was strong enough to grab the branch she was on and keep her place.

Myrin was suddenly missing, and there was the sound of a scuffle in the foliage accompanied by her trademark cackle. Kaldalis tried to tell himself that it meant something was going their way.

The Talsar attacking Kaldalis lashed out at him, and the man’s clawed fingertips drew three lines of fire across his cheek. Kaldalis kicked the floating house’s door open behind him just to use the first foot of the floor to give himself the footing to avoid being a hanging punching bag.

But with his bearings, he found himself face-to-face with true fear.

The Talsar man was attacking him again, but not with an open hand. He was holding a bottle of shimmering purple fluid. Panic guided Kaldalis’s hand as he caught the Talsar’s wrist, stopping him from shattering the bottle across his face. His opponent bared his serrated teeth in a snarl, trying to force the bottle closer to Kaldalis’s face. Without the velocity, the bottle wasn’t going to break, but Kaldalis’s fear of what it might be drove him to put his all into holding it back. If it was Geas Venom, a whole bottle of it might be enough to render him fucked even without the slow increase in dosage that Bangen had warned of.

Kaldalis’s attacker was solely focused on trying to deliver the poison in his hand - his clawed thumb was inching towards the top of the bottle to pop the cork - which gave Kaldalis an opening.

Or, rather, a closing.

Kaldalis let go of the branch he was holding.

The weight of the attacking Talsar forced Kaldalis into the floating house, which unbalanced his foe. He started to move towards Kaldalis - both looking to press the attack and to catch himself from falling after Kaldalis suddenly stopped physically pushing back against him. Instead of allowing the man to get his footing on the threshold of the glitched building, Kaldalis grabbed the door and slammed it closed. It smashed into the Talsar’s face, and with a shattering sound, the man tumbled from the forest canopy, alongside a shower of broken glass and purple liquid.

“Look out,” Kaldalis barked in warning to his friends as he opened the door again, looking to rejoin the fight. “They’ve got poison!”

Just as he finished the warning, he heard the sound of a breaking bottle.

Dalgaard stood triumphant over Balrim. The healer didn’t have any pre-existing cuts on his face, but the shards of glass bottle had done that work already. Shimmering poison was splashed all over the side of his face, and Kaldalis’s look of horror was mirrored on Balrim’s face.

“Oh fuck,” Balrim cursed. He shoved Dalgaard away, but the Human was already moving away, leaping like a monkey back into the forest canopy. Apparently with the poison delivered, their work was done. “What was thaaaaargnhkkk-”

Kaldalis had worried at first that the poison would put Balrim at Onirioago’s command. Not immediately like a mind control, but with the threat of the Geas Venom’s fatal withdrawal symptoms.

What was happening instead was, in some ways, much scarier.

Balrim’s body seized up. His panicked movements were suddenly locked in place in a way that Kaldalis, unfortunately, recognized.

This wasn’t Geas Venom.

It was venom from the Jormongumo.

Before Kaldalis could think through what he was doing, he launched himself across the space between the building’s door and the branch Balrim was slowly falling off of. He managed to get a hold of the branch and Balrim, sparing him the long fall that would put him out of reach of help.

“Can someone-” Kaldalis started to say, looking for help securing Balrim before he could get to the fight proper. But he realized that he had been tunnel-visioned on his immediate surroundings.

No one could help him. They were all busy. All he could really do was lay Balrim across the branch so that he wouldn’t fall.

He’d thought for some reason that his DPS friends would be available to help, but this was PVP. There were no aggro rules here. Garyung, Martok, and Gavinkim were in the thick of the fight, but their enemies had no obligation to give them any attention when they didn’t physically block them. The damage dealers were being overrun, and because they were outnumbered and out in the open, they were at an unwinnable disadvantage. It was perhaps possible that the endurance of four tanks - Kaldalis included - might let them outlast and exhaust the mob arrayed against them, but Kaldalis had to acknowledge that they were woefully unprepared for this.

Kaldalis could avoid damage - he’d gotten quite good at it - but without the aggro mechanics, he had very little ability to generate any threat against thinking opponents. Especially since he’d adjusted his gear entirely towards his defensive stats. The only way he could make himself a priority is if he was a big enough dick to get their attention. Considering the fight seemed to all be Onirioago’s minions, and she wasn’t commanding the fight from the front lines, he didn’t have any idea how he was going to convince them to give him any attention.

As he saw Dalgaard pop out of the foliage and cock their arm back to hurl a bottle at Ess, Kaldalis realized one more way he could protect his friends.

He launched himself across the melee, physically putting himself between Ess and the vial of poison.

The bottle shattered against Kaldalis’s collarbone. Shimmering purple fluid covered his face, and the scent and flavor of sunflower seeds and olive oil overwhelmed his mouth and nose. He only dissociated for a second at the memory of that flavor accompanied by Ara’s fangs. But that meant that he didn’t try to catch himself before his body locked up in the familiar paralysis, including the breath bar at the top of his vision, since he’d lost control of his lungs as well.

The leap he’d made to save Ess from paralysis was going to end with him landing on his head on the forest floor, but one of Garyung’s large hands reached out and caught him by the leg, stopping him from falling.

“I’ve got you,” Garyung grunted, just before someone socked him in the nose, nearly knocking the both of them out of the trees and to the ground. Garyung caught himself, but not before two other people jumped on him, fists flailing at him over and over. Kaldalis tried to comfort himself with the thought that Garyung had a good grip on the branches around him when he heard the shattering glass.

With Kaldalis, Garyung, and Balrim out of the fight, the numbers advantage for Onirioago’s goons redoubled.

And with Dalgaard lurking on the edges of the fight with more poison, this fight was already over.