Morning came and Kaldalis arrived at breakfast with a new spring in his step.

He knew why he was in such a good mood. Goals had suddenly manifested with perfect clarity before him, and he just had to find the path to them. He hadn’t felt a sense of purpose like this in a long time, and it gave him a sense of confidence that he was unused to.

There was maybe another reason, too. He’d already checked four times since getting out of bed to make sure his stream was turned back on.

Kaldalis squeezed Heluna’s hand, giving her a small, secret smile before he approached his friends.

“Good news, everyone,” he announced as they sat at the table, interrupting the ongoing conversation without hesitation. It hadn’t sounded important anyway. “Everything came together perfectly last night, and now I finally know where we’re going from here.”

“Great,” Balrim said around a mouthful of steak and eggs. “Where’s that?”

Myrin was about to say something, but stopped, looking back and forth between Heluna and Kaldalis. Instead of giving voice to whatever meme she was about to blurt out, the corner of her mouth turned up in a smirk.

Kaldalis blinked for a moment, suddenly realizing that what he’d just said had probably been misinterpreted.

He could already see Ess and Reno giving him moody side-eyed expressions. Ess looked confused and hurt. Reno just looked grumpy. On the other side, Courbois and Heluna appeared to be having an entire conversation with just their eyebrows.

He suppressed a tired sigh.

“It’s about the Lataxinans,” Kaldalis said, lowering his voice and leaning over the table. “I found them.”

“What?” Balrim sputtered, putting a clawed hand over his mouth to stop from spraying chewed-up eggs across the table.

“My plan all came together,” Kaldalis explained. “I had to use every trick I could think of, but it worked. I went to the Paths Between Paths and reached the Lataxinan’s vessel.”

Kaldalis was trying to keep this quiet, but the sudden stunned silence around the table was attracting the attention of others in Cotanaku’s makeshift food court. People weren’t crowding around trying to listen in, but there were more than a few curious looks being cast their way.

It suddenly became very important to choose his words carefully. Word getting out about the Lataxinans wasn’t bad. Especially since he was going to need all the help he could get to achieve his goals. But he was going to have to dance around the context of his discovery to keep Monsoon happy. Obviously, Kaldalis was all but openly acting against their interests now, but so long as he played ball in public, direct retaliation against him would be a complicated prospect.

So he just had to be smooth about this.

Easy, right?

“The Lataxinans are alive,” Kaldalis said, no longer whispering. As soon as he said it, the silence spread. The curious looks became extremely unsubtle eavesdropping. “They’re in the Paths Between Paths. It’s very difficult to reach them, but possible.”

“How?” Courbois asked immediately, leaning forward with obvious excitement.

“You need four things,” Kaldalis said, holding up a hand and counting on his fingers. “You need Kaia’s Flicker to reach the Paths, obviously. Second, momentum is conserved between the world and the Paths, and you need momentum to get from where we pop in all the way to the vessel.”

He paused for dramatic effect, allowing everyone to chew on his words instead of their breakfasts. “But, even at terminal velocity,” he continued, pushing down the third finger, “you need more time in the Paths to complete the journey. I used just shy of max stacks of Slow to do it, but Nyxlas’s Augment works to extend Kaia’s Flicker, too. But being in the Paths for that long requires you to hold your breath, so the final requirement is a solution for the breath bar if you want to survive.”

“That’s complicated,” Myrin said, tapping a finger to her chin. “Most of what Balrim and I have found for breath bar stuff is straight-up water breathing, not just holding breath.”

“Right,” Kaldalis confirmed. “That’s why we did that super fishing binge. My new fishing rod gives me something called Unending Breath. That gets around whatever the normal way to hold your breath for that long.”

“Normal way?” Reno scoffed. “You think there’s a normal way to do what you just did?”

“There has to be, right?” Kaldalis said, giving a pointed look at the people around who were now following the conversation. “This has got to be the next story event, right?”

Reno grimaced at that. Kaldalis regretted shooting down her perfectly logical reasoning - especially since things were strained between them already - but he needed to do whatever he could to obscure that he was definitely not supposed to have this information.

“But we figured it all out,” Kaldalis continued, reaching over and putting an arm around Heluna. “We all worked together to get the fishing rod done, I got the slow debuff, I got the velocity, and I reached the vessel.”

“What was it like?” Myrin asked. “And did you ask why it’s shaped like that?”

“What are they doing?” Ess cut in. “And how did they get there? Why have they stayed so long?”

“Yeah,” Balrim quickly agreed. “It’s been centuries by now, right? Why haven’t they just steered the ship right back home by now?”

“Why did they leave?” someone asked from the next table over. It was a green-scaled Talsar that it took Kaldalis a moment to recognize as Droto, the tank player best known for his blind worship of the bow. “And why aren’t there any of them left around here?”

“Let me just get through the important stuff,” Kaldalis said, waving the questions down before the whole cafeteria started to bombard him. Though he raised his voice to be heard by the whole group instead of just his table of friends. “They left ahead of the Calamity to escape the Infernal Horde, but they don’t have a way back. They need someone to learn a specific Lataxinan ability and bring it back to them. With that, they can bring their vessel home.”

“That’s good news,” someone said from over Reno’s shoulder. “They made the Lataxinan abilities, so they can talk to the Contender and tell him to fuck right off with his bullshit, right?”

“That’s the problem,” Kaldalis said quickly. He stood up, to better address the whole group. If everyone was going to listen in any way, he may as well turn this into a rallying cry. “With the Contender’s sanctions in place, we can’t learn the new Lataxinan ability. It’s at the end of the raid outside of Kayore. The one he has a war camp guarding.”

Murmurs of complaint seemed to radiate out from him at that announcement. Kaldalis’s first instinct was to quiet it, but this was his goal. If he was going to get the help of the community, he was going to need it united against the very thing they were grumbling about.

He waited for attention to return to him before he spoke again.

“Furthermore, we need to shore up our defenses,” Kaldalis continued. “More than anything, we need to come together. If me meeting the Lataxinans kicked off an event of some sort, you can bet there’s going to be trouble ahead of it.” He pointed vaguely in the direction he knew the jungle lay. “If past events have taught us anything, it’s that Infernal Horde raids knocking at our door is a threat to all our lives. We need to be ready to fight.”

The group before him nodded at that.

That was good.

It was also good that making this into a speech meant that his friends weren’t cutting in with questions now that he couldn’t answer.

After what the Lataxinans had told him, Kaldalis expected a resurgence of the Infernal Horde. Monsoon had stopped doing whatever they’d been doing to connect Earth to this world, but they were going to turn the “Great Shovel” back on now to get to the Lataxinans and silence them once and for all. There was a real risk that doing that would unleash a bunch more Infernal Horde onto the islands.

“I also need whatever help you all can offer against the Contender,” Kaldalis said, adjusting the cadence of his speech to indicate that he was wrapping up. “The only way to end this is to get into that raid. And the only thing stopping me is the Contender. We need to break his hold and get him to let us continue our work here. Whether by helping with his investigation or…”

He stopped and looked around before lowering his voice to stage whisper. “I’m not telling you guys to do anything unlawful, obviously, but I don’t need him happy. I just need him gone.”

There was a slight chuckle at that, and Kaldalis smiled at the gathered crowd. He needed to get a real plan on that front, but this wasn’t the place to make that plan.

“Our first priority, though, is holding on to what we have,” Kaldalis announced. “I’m going to go talk to the Cotanaku council, so that we can all work together to prepare for the danger to come. And while we need to be cautious, I don’t want to undercut the excitement of all this.” Kaldalis spread his arms, the gesture encompassing the island. “All the ruins we’ve seen were built by the people we’re going to bring back. The great underground cities. The spectacular powers. It’s all theirs. And if we can come together and make this event happen, we’ll have the greatest supply of knowledge we could dream off delivered right to our doorstep.”

A muted cheer went up at that. Kaldalis sat back down as the crowd started to disperse, a buzz of excitement going around the room.

“So when did you decide to bring the Cotanaku council into this?” Myrin asked, her sly grin saying she knew the answer already.

“Shortly before announcing it,” Kaldalis admitted with a smirk.

“This fuckin’ guy,” Heluna groaned, putting her arm around him, the gesture full of feigned reluctance. “Such a planner, isn’t he?”

Reno shot Kaldalis a glare.

“Listen, I’ve got a lot of concerns right now,” Kaldalis said. He didn’t, however, remove Heluna’s arm. “Like not turning this into a lynch mob to take down the Contender. Or a war band to attack the guards around the raid entrance directly.”

“Is that why you brought up the Infernal Horde?” Balrim asked. “Just to avoid a war crime?”

“We’ll see,” Kaldalis said with a grimace. “Things might get really complicated really fast. For now, we handle things one step at a time. And hope that we can get this done in six days.”

“Six days!” Ess exclaimed. She shot forward in her chair, both hands flat against the table. “You should have started with that! And you probably should have come to find us last night as soon as you learned.” The last part was added with a wounded pout.

“I won’t deny that the timeline is condensed,” Kaldalis said, trying to keep calm - and trying even harder to change the subject away from last night while he was talking to Ess. “But listen. I’ll fill you all in on every single little detail, from the Lataxinan’s timeline to the information about the Infernal Horde. Hell, I’ll even tell you what I learned about their agriculture and how much I missed a nice hot shower. But we can go over those details where we aren’t getting eavesdropped on by the entire goddamn camp.”

Ess didn’t look mollified by that response, but she did settle back in her chair.

“Let’s get walking and talking then,” Myrin said, picking up her empty breakfast plate. “We’ve got to get a meeting with our good buddy Garyung now, right?”

Kaldalis watched as most of his friends got up and followed Myrin, chatting about different topics in hushed voices. Everyone except Reno and Ess.

Reno touched Ess’s arm, just the smallest show of support, before both women turned to glare at him. They then gathered their plates and stormed off after the rest of their friends with a huff.

That was going to be a problem.

He could see it on the horizon, a dark shadow of clouds looming menacingly. Threatening to rain on his parade, ruin his picnic, and move his party indoors all with one fell swoop.

But he’d have to deal with interpersonal drama later.

Right now he had an entire race of people to save and wrongs to right.