Walter talked animatedly to Reeve’s mother, Wanda. The squat, dark-haired, blue-leather-clad dwarf looked unperturbed as she stood listening, left-hand-on-hip in the stance Reeve had associated with her mother for as long as she could remember. Reeve examined her to the extent the distance would allow but found no signs of harm or injury. In fact, the dwarf looked relaxed, her body language one of a woman in charge of the situation. At some point, she’d twisted her bushy black hair back into a rough bun. Sticking from it was a white trillium flower. The only thing Reeve could see amiss was that the dwarf did not have the standard-issue double-bitted battle-ax with which she’d spawned into the game.

They were far enough away that Reeve could not make out anything Walter was saying, though she occasionally heard high-pitched halfling notes across the clearing. Reeve watched him point first to the sky, then to the ground, before pantomiming a dive to the side. Walter talked on and on, waving his tiny halfling hands around as he did. The whole time, the kobolds of the camp went about their business, paying no attention to the halfling and the dwarf in their midst.

Reeve sat back on her heels and put both hands on her waist. “What the actual—“ Her astonishment was interrupted as a particularly dramatic series of gestures culminated in Walter swinging one hand behind his back and then whipping it forward, his bee smoker appearing momentarily in his hand before being flung past his wife’s dwarven avatar directly into the side of the head of a passing kobold, one that was large for its race, being several inches taller than either the halfling or the dwarf. “Ohmagod.” Reeve’s eyes widened as activity across the entire camp stopped in an instant, and all of the kobolds focused on the diminutive pair by the campfire, the kobolds’ previous indifference replaced with intense aggression. “Time to go!” Reeve rose and leaped the bush in front of her, Nyx following a moment later. Reeve spared a quick look back to see the honey badger trundle straight through the wiry bush and begin barreling after.

Two groups of sentinels had joined the bee-smoker-smote kobold to encircle Walter and Wanda in a shrinking cordon. The kobolds’ already grotesque features were twisted even further with rage, and they crouched, long, clawed fingers raised as they approached their prey. Saliva dripped in viscous strings from several mouths, which may have contained teeth but appeared as gaping black holes set in skeletal faces beneath foreheads sprouting bony crests that reminded Reeve of some dinosaurs. Reaching the bee smoker where it lay on the ground, the kobold that had been the unintentional participant in Walter’s reenactment crouched lower and picked up the object, its claws clinking against the metal as it examined the unfamiliar device. The bee smoker emitted a wispy trail of smoke that twisted around the kobold’s face. It looked at Walter and narrowed its eyes to slits, a guttural hiss rising from its throat and seeming to jump like arcing electricity to its nearest brethren, continuing to spread until the ring of creatures were all hissing at Reeve’s parents’ wee avatars.

Walter watched the kobold raise the bee smoker accusingly. “Now, you see,” Walter said, gesturing toward his back and what he could now reliably remember as his hammerspace, “this is just a bit of a misunderst—” A roar from his right caused him to turn, panic rising, the fatal goblin encounter in the clearing briefly flashing across his mind, but what he found was Reeve charging toward the ring of cobble-things that had surrounded him and Wanda. Nick and the honey badger were not far behind her. Reeve’s roar had also caused the cobbles between them to spin, and a couple spread their wings and looked to take flight. Before any could move, let alone leave the ground, Walter watched Reeve swing her limb-trimmer weapon—Was it a nakey-nakey? He tried to remember. No, that didn’t seem right to him.—in a wide arc before her. From where Walter stood it looked like a curtain of innards unrolled from the other side of the creatures, spooling down their legs to pile on their feet, the rest of their bodies crumpling to the ground a moment later.

“Dad, look out!” Reeve’s warning cry caused Walter to turn back toward his wife and the cobble that still held the bee smoker. The thing had apparently also been watching its friends disemboweled by his daughter, and it turned its gaze back to Walter and hissed so violently that rank froth sprayed through the air and speckled Walter’s face. Walter tried to remember where he had put his knives, and for a moment his hands jerked back and forth around his waist, as though he was doing a frantic search for car keys, unsure whether to try his hammerspace or his waistband. The thing with the smoker deepened its crouch and launched itself at Walter, who decided on waist. He just managed to grasp the hilts of the knives and pull them free with an unfortunately familiar twang of severed suspenders, when the springing creature disappeared in a blur of fur and claws. Walter caught the suddenly free bee smoker between his blade-holding hands and felt his breeches come to rest around his ankles. He looked around, not entirely confident that he understood everything that was happening.

Reeve stepped over the downed kobolds and glanced at her Combat Log. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d faced kobolds and wanted to review the relative challenge she’d be facing.

You critically slash four Level 5 Kobold Sentinels with a naginata using Enraged Surprise Attack Amplifier for 27, 32, 24, and 30 points of damage.

You kill four Level 5 Kobold Sentinels.

Ugh, she thought. This was going to be a slog.

She was nearly knocked from her feet as the honey badger charged past. Her halfling father’s eyes widened, and he moved to place himself between the oncoming badger and Reeve’s dwarven mother, but his breeches bound his ankles and he toppled forward, faceplanting in front of the dwarf, who bent from the waist and patted the halfling’s bottom through his dust and sweat-stained underpants. The honey badger swerved around the well-intentioned but misguided halfling and tackled the kobold just beyond, which had raised into the air a pointed, watermelon-size rock in preparation for braining Reeve’s mother.

“This is different, Hon’,” the dwarf said to the halfling, giving him another appreciative pat on the rear.

“Mommmm! Eww!” Reeve spun her naginata through a full vertical three-sixty, ending its flight in the skull of a kobold coming at her from the left as Nyx reappeared, cheeks smeared with blood, and grasped the neck of another sentinel from behind, wrenching it ferociously, the two tumbling to the ground.

“Dad!” Reeve yelled, pushing forward to drive the disintegrating ring of kobolds back from her parents. “Pants! Now!” At the same time, she sent Nyx an image of the two of them advancing on the low ledge that marked the beginning of the precipitous, tiered path they needed to ascend to find the camp boss and free the NPCs.

“Spare a hand, half-orc?” The musical voice was unfamiliar to Reeve, and, after she plunged her blade straight into the chest of an advancing kobold, she paused to look up toward the suspended cage, where the dark-haired captive squatted and her flaxen-haired companion stood, both resting their forearms casually on cross-bars over a drop of at least fifty feet. The standing half-elf within gestured up the cliff, and Reeve raised her gaze, following the rope from which the cage hung until she saw a kobold hovering in space, wings beating rapid half-beats as it gnawed at the rope. One of the strands of the loosely braided rope gave, and the cage slowly twisted as the remaining strands strained under their increased load.

“Great,” Reeve said to herself, “this fight has a countdown timer.”