After the interaction with Heluna, Kaldalis had six separate moments of panic simultaneously. He hadn’t considered the possibility that she would get him a gift. Suddenly his purchase of the stuffed Soakanine toy was looking a lot more worth the ridiculous price tag. It might save his relationship.

Relationship.

What actually was he to Heluna? What was she to him? He liked the idea of a quiet friendly dinner with her, but unfortunately it seemed like he was going to have to interrupt it with a serious discussion defining what they had. He hated serious discussions centered around defining things. He’d had teenage relationships end because he was constantly squirming his way out of those conversations. Naturally, he was much older and more mature now, but…

Heluna was a person.

Potentially a real person.

This had gone from a dating sim minigame with no possible consequences to a very real relationship that he was feeling very real anxiety about. If she had been just ones and zeroes on the server, the worst that could have happened is embarrassing himself by becoming known as “the guy with the videogame waifu” on stream. But because she was - or because he had to consider the possibility that she was - real flesh and blood, he was capable of hurting her as well.

The idea that he might break her heart terrified him, and not just because of how muscular her arms looked.

Despite his better judgment, Kaldalis turned away from Cotanaku. It was still well before dawn, and he realized that nobody was going to be awake. The best he could hope for was dragging Garyung out of bed to figure out who the next person to drag out of bed could be. It was unlikely that they would be as helpful to him if their first meeting was him waking them up before the sun was all the way up.

He had more productive options now. For example, making sure the stuffed toy he’d purchased wasn’t entirely dwarfed by whatever Heluna got him.

The area immediately around Cotanaku, outside the wall, had been cleared of trees during the town’s construction - as well as the construction of their defenses against the Infernal Horde - leaving a bit of a clearing. The jungle was trying to reclaim it, but it was slow going for the trees. The undergrowth, though, was working hard on filling the space. Creeping vines already made spiderweb patterns across the ground, and smaller bushes and brambles were starting to spring up out of the stumps that had been left behind by the clearcutting. Kaldalis knew what he was looking for, though, and picked his way around all the taller plants.

One of the early quests he’d gotten in Cotanaku had been using the Harvesting skill to gather various materials. One of the frequent targets in this region was a sort of coarse grass called Hopeful Centaurea. Usually, the objective was to get longer, older strands of the grass, so that crafters could weave it into cloth, but the same plant, when younger, was a source of alchemical ingredients. The plant’s flowers were fluffy tufts of blue and purple, and when ground into a paste were a critical alchemical component, though Kaldalis didn’t know for what - his potions came from his stream rewards, not from alchemists.

What he did know was that they were very pretty flowers. The center was a deeper purple, with dozens upon dozens of multi-prong periwinkle blue petals, making each one look like a bright blue firework burst. They would look nice beside the blue stuffed dog he’d bought. Since the flowers grew on the younger plants, the clearing was the perfect place to seek them out. In just a few minutes he had a bright and bushy bouquet of two dozen of them.

He found himself surprised by how fast he’d accumulated them. He thought it was going to take until such time as he could reasonably head into town. But a clean ten minutes of harvesting didn’t put that much of a dent in the time between when he started and a reasonable hour to start asking questions.

Another hour of fishing couldn’t hurt. And not just because he needed to dig into his heart and see what was there. He just needed so many fucking fish.

With it being just light enough to see around him, and being on the beach instead of the pier, he took the opportunity to open his pet menu and summon Ein. The corgi pup was happy to see him, but was even happier to see the ocean, and set about busily chasing the waves in and out.

It was too early for the dog to have birds or other wildlife to chase, but the water at Arma Tide was more than enough of a plaything for the easily-amused puppy. Kaldalis was grateful for the distraction as he cast his line out. The dog’s ceaseless yapping and snapping at the waves was a nice lighthearted break from how heavy the whole world felt around him.

Between the reveal of Monsoon’s super-villainy, the Contender’s constant interference, the endless bombardment of threats against him from every angle, his friends’ struggles with their own challenges, and now wrestling with his own feelings, it was nice to just watch a silly little dog try to fight the ocean.

He owed Heluna this break from the headache. She had given him Ein in the first place. Without the dog, he didn’t know what sort of emotional state he’d be in. Even if the little diversion seemed small in comparison, there was no way to know how far gone he’d be without the dog.

Of course, when the dog stopped yapping and went stock-still, that was cause for alarm.

The dog raised one of his paws up to his chest, leaning forward in a remarkably well-trained pointing motion. He didn’t even react when the waves came in and washed over his paws.

Kaldalis whirled, terrified of what was going to be a big enough threat for the dog to react this way.

Was it a monster?

Another fisher?

A Jormongumo?

There was a small critter on the beach, crawling out of the water. It paused to shake itself, and in that moment, Kaldalis knew what it was and what it meant.

It was an Enhydra. The little fast-moving furry creature he’d seen only a few times before, with a dark-furred body and a light-furred face. Catching it would force it to drop rare and powerful treasure. The Enhydra caught sight of them and froze, the fur on its back slowly standing on end. Kaldalis and Ein stared back at the little critter for a long moment.

It turned and fled, sprinting for the jungle.

Ein gave a fearsome yap and gave chase.

Kaldalis popped his Jump cooldown and leaped after it as well. Jump didn’t give him great precision to land right on the monster, but what he needed was speed. If the little beast got too far away, he’d never see it again. Running it down was a challenge, but the rewards had been worth it thus far. He wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip through his fingers.

The Enhydra reached the jungle right ahead of Kaldalis, vanishing into the treeline. Using Jump to keep pace was twice as hard among the trees, but the creature was still trying to pour on speed rather than falling back to stealth. The shaking undergrowth and scrambling of its paws were easy to follow, made all that much easier once Ein got involved. The dog’s peculiar intelligence seemed to have been flipped on like a switch, and instead of just following the scent trail, the little corgi seemed to know exactly where the Enhydra was, and was moving around its path, trying to flank it and flush it towards the leaping Kaldalis.

It was almost a surprise when he caught it. Leaping ahead into a small clearing, Kaldalis was watching where he was landing for a moment when the Enhydra burst out of the brush nearby. Ein was right on its tail, and a furious yap and lunge sent the Enhydra into a spinning dodge to avoid the dog’s snapping jaws, putting it squarely into Kaldalis’s path. It was more instinct than anything else that put Kaldalis’s hands around the creature’s torso as he came down on top of it, turning his landing into a roll, ending with him pinning the beast to the ground.

“Holy shit,” Kaldalis said, stunned by the brevity of the chase, considering how easily these things had previously forced him to outfox them instead of running them down. “Good dog! Very good dog!”

Ein scrambled up beside him, yapping happily at the praise.

The Enhydra squirmed and squeaked at him, but Kaldalis held fast until the creature miraculously popped free and zipped away at physically improbable speeds, leaving behind its treasure. Ein immediately yapped and started to give chase.

“Easy, boy,” Kaldalis said quickly before the dog could get too far into the jungle. “We got what we wanted.”

The treasure wasn’t a charm, though.

It was actually shockingly large, considering he hadn’t seen the creature physically carrying it. He held a long hexagonal metal container, about three inches wide and just over a foot long. It was covered all over with little ceramic tiles on its surface, many of them chipped or damaged. Each one was scratched in the center with a little shape.

It took Kaldalis a moment to recognize them as Lataxinan symbols. As soon as he made that connection, there was a little chiming noise and he got a quest.

Lataxinigma

Solve the puzzle box.

The quest dropped off his list instantly, vanishing, but the same chiming noise came again, and it popped right back up again. Kaldalis frowned at the unexpected hiccup. That had to mean something. Was this quest too high level for him? Had he instinctively rejected it because he couldn’t read Lataxinan symbols to even begin to work on it?

Or had Monsoon tried to take it away from him, but his possession of the box had immediately given it to him again?

No possible explanation changed the fact that he didn’t know where to begin, and so as he pushed back up to his knees, he took up the box and popped it into his inventory. Another day, another new problem for him to solve. At least this one seemed like it was supposed to be fun instead of frustrating.

“Come on, Ein,” Kaldalis said, popping open his pet menu. “I don’t want you getting lost in the jungle once your hunting instinct wears off. I’m lost enough already without having to look for you, too.”

Ein gave a pleased yap as Kaldalis reached down and gave him a scratch behind his fuzzy little ears before dismissing him back to the menu. The dog had some great instinctive training as a hunting dog, which was unexpected for a corgi. He was pretty sure they were herding dogs, not hunters. He tried to examine the dog in the pet menu to see if he might get more information about their origins in this world, since they might be different to those on Earth.

Nothing came up, but that didn’t stop him from dreaming of the potential. If the dog could be trained to have a similar reaction to other threats as it did to the Enhydra, he might be the perfect companion for ventures into the deep jungle. Helping to track fleeing monsters they had weakened, identifying oncoming larger monsters worth avoiding, or even sniffing out ruins and treasure. As long as the pup could keep quiet between adventures instead of becoming a little fuzzy noisemaker alerting everything in the region to their position, he might-

Someone grabbed Kaldalis’s shoulders. He tried to jump to his feet, but two more hands grabbed his elbows. Two more grabbed his head, stopping him from turning to see his attacker.

Too many hands.

Kaldalis knew what this was.

Too many hands.

He tried to struggle, but the Jormongumo ambusher was too strong. Her grip tightened and he felt a hot, meat-smelling breath on the side of his face as she leaned down against his back. The force of his revulsion was almost strong enough to let him wrench out of her grip, but he couldn’t get any leverage while still kneeling.

“Your presence is requested,” a voice hissed in his ear. “Refusal is not an option.”

He was grateful that the voice wasn’t Ara, but he couldn’t react before sudden unwanted warmth and a sharp pain landed on the side of his neck. He told himself that the darkness closing in around him was because the paralytic poison was delivered so close to his spine, but deep down he knew.

Terror at what he was about to suffer made him faint.