As expected, the beach side of the area outside Cotanaku wasn’t as busy as the jungle side. There was a flurry of activity around the walls as workers labored to repair the damage, and replace the torn-up wooden gate with something sturdier. But once Kaldalis got past the workers on the walls, the beach was vacant. The materials on the beach and in the ocean beyond - including fishing - were used for things like potions and other crafting, not for town building.

It meant that Kaldalis could head out into the water to fight the higher-level monsters in the ocean. His much-inflated defenses and underwater mobility would let him survive solo just fine - and escape back to shore if he needed - while their high level would mean they would have powerful defenses and high health pools as well. He needed to fight stuff that was unlikely to kill him, while he was unlikely to rip through the mob too fast for him to get his weapon skill increases.

Kaldalis tried to focus on picking fights with nautilobsters. They were of minimal threat to him, as long as h e could keep ahead of their grasping tentacles. He remembered when he had fought them with his friends, they had done about a hundred and fifty total damage to him when their blows connected. With Kaldalis’s inflated defense, they did thirty-seven physical and nine water damage. Meanwhile, his attacks in return went from about four hundred damage to a whopping eight-hundred and seventy. His amplified Slow Affinity also meant that he was dishing out stacks of the Slow debuff with every single strike.

He tried to calm himself by warning that these were against simple nautilobsters - some of the lower level monsters in the region - but he couldn’t help but get excited about the next time he found himself facing the Infernal Horde.

Honestly, Myrin’s behavior of gleeful damage output started to make sense to him, which was a little scary.

Being that his level was two levels beyond his skill rating, Kaldalis saw the skillups coming fast as he went. He focused on using his spear first, since that had always been his favored weapon. After about twenty minutes of work, he got his skill rating to 100, unlocking his next weapon ability.

Jump Attack

Attacks with a Spear deal 20% bonus damage when you have been airborne for at least 1.5 seconds before striking.

Kaldalis was a bit shocked at the potent multiplier. The only real drawback was that it would encourage him to turn his mobility cooldowns into offensive cooldowns. That could be very dangerous. However, there were some powerful options. He could already imagine burning Nyxlas’s Augment on a Slowfall and hovering in the air next to an enemy stabbing away for tremendous damage.

With that done, he switched to his sword and shield, and started working on them. The increased attack speed felt phenomenal with the lighter weapon. His attacks only did just under eight hundred damage against these foes, but the weapon flew back and forth in his hand, striking again and again, racking up his Combo stacks rapidly. The multiplier of the Combo ability meant that the weapon did more damage than his spear after only a few strikes. And when his Gust stacks activated, the tremendous burst of damage sent the enemies flailing through the water before him in a comical fashion, as the debuff proc blasted them for progressively more and more damage.

It took almost thirty minutes to finish getting his sword and shield skill to 100. The extra time came from killing the nautilobsters too fast and wasting time swimming around looking for more. Eventually he went for a sygnaceous crab instead, focusing on fighting much more defensively to account for the increased offensive potential of the monsters’ heavy claw attacks. It took some time, and felt much more dangerous, but the crabs took much longer to kill, and so he spent much less time searching the ocean floor and more time fighting to get his new ability unlocked.

Multi-Strikes

When activated, each attack applies a second strike doing 30% damage. This second hit activates Combo and applies Weapon Affinity damage or debuffs. 15 second duration, 180 second cooldown.

Kaldalis was impressed. It was making more and more sense that many of the NPCs in this world used sword and shield as an offensive tool. This weapon could be a serious powerhouse. The cooldown was really long, but for an offensive ability, the duration and multiplier were tremendous, and the synergy it would offer with Combo was absurd. And the ability to stack Gust twice as fast would give him absolutely ridiculous offensive power. He could either obliterate a weak foe before a fight could fully begin while solo, or he could use it to output significant damage during a burst phase or a DPS race in a dungeon or raid.

The remaining skills for Kaldalis to catch back up on were his gathering skills. He wasn’t terribly worried about them. Mining and Harvesting would happen when quests called for them, and if there was one thing he could be confident about happening in its own time, it was his Fishing skill.

Kaldalis was surprised at how late in the afternoon it had become when he emerged from the waves back onto the beach. He had planned on trying to make himself more presentable ahead of the meeting, but now he was feeling like he didn’t have time. Not to mention that after everything that had happened in the past few days, there was a very real danger that if he returned to his quarters and shucked out of his armor for a shower, he wasn’t going to be inclined to get redressed.

Between the late nights and the constant fighting, questing, social awkwardness, and political struggles, he was feeling progressively more and more worn-down. He might just crawl into bed and go right to sleep instead of getting anything else done.

Though he didn’t have grounds to complain about the late nights. Those had been his own choice, and he wasn’t about to regret it.

It also seemed like it was going to be much more in-character for him to just show up smelling like sweat and sea water. Considering the low opinion Cerh and Jetmorpan had of him already, and how unmovable that opinion had proven to be, Kaldalis was sure that any effort to make himself more presentable was going to be wasted. He could show up in a full suit and tie smelling like a rose garden and they’d treat him the same as if he’d arrived coated in reeking monster guts and nothing else.

Instead of wasting the time cleaning up, Kaldalis went straight back to the town hall to meet up with Garyung. The place was a hectic mess of preparations, even though it seemed like the meeting wasn’t happening here. Kaldalis tracked down Garyung quickly to try and figure out what was going on.

“Don’t worry,” Garyung said immediately when he saw Kaldalis in the doorway of his office. “Everything is going to be okay. I’ve got it all under control.”

“Do you know how it sounds when you start with that?” Kaldalis asked with an arched eyebrow. “I didn’t even say anything and you tell me not to worry? That worries me.”

“I warned you,” Garyung said, returning his attention to a messy stack of papers on his desk. “If I leave the town for too long, things will start breaking around here. We’re all making sure that the place will hold long enough for the meeting.”

“That seems like reason enough to have the meeting here,” Kaldalis observed.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Garyung said in a bitter tone.

Kaldalis could fill in the blanks. It had been a fight to get the meeting in the first place. Garyung likely couldn’t even bring up the option of Cotanaku as the site of the meeting without starting the fight anew. Jetmorpan had gone so far as to endanger his citizens out of an unfounded assumption that Kaldalis had been somehow behind the attack. If Garyung pressed to bring them to Cotanaku, they would probably declare the whole meeting an elaborate assassination attempt and go to war.

“Anyway, it’s fine,” Garyung grumbled, applying his signature to the bottom of a page. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just go over to Panbu, do the thing, and get back here as fast as we can.”

“Soon, right?” Kaldalis asked. “I don’t have time to catch a nap, do I?”

“Oh, I had something for this,” Garyung paused, producing a potion bottle from his inventory and tossing it to Kalalis. “Give that a try.”

Kaldalis took a moment to examine the potion. The liquid was a muddy orange color, with a viscous consistency that made it seem more solid than liquid as it jiggled in response to his light shaking of the bottle.

“What is it?” Kaldalis asked. No pop-up appeared in response to his examination.

“Trust me,” Garyung said.

In the absence of anything else to do, Kaldalis popped the stopper. The citrus smell of the potion hit him so hard he almost gagged, but he did as he was bid, choking down the thick gooey potion.

Despite the strong citrus smell, it tasted like an unseasoned hard boiled egg. But the moment it was gone, Kaldalis’s whole body lit up with energy. His fatigue washed away instantly, and he found himself aware and alert. It wasn’t even like he had just woken up from a restful night’s sleep. It was like his brain and body had been rewound back to before the siege, restoring all the energy he’d spent and eliminating all the fatigue that had built up.

“Holy shit,” Kaldalis said. “What the fuck was that?”

“Have you met Limbailey?” Garyung asked with a smirk as he shuffled through his papers. “She’s one of our research chemists from the original expedition. Apparently Infernal Horde Cores can be used to do all kinds of weird crap, and she discovered this one. It won’t stop the fatigue debuff if you stay up two nights in a row, but it’ll keep you running for sure. I swear, the first time I had one I wanted to marry that woman. It’s literally magic.”

Kaldalis couldn’t blame him. The sudden energy would let him handle whatever Cerh and Jetmorpan wanted to throw at him. All the energy would let him be patient and calm no matter how much they tried to bait him into making a fool of himself. It was a little ominous to think that he may have just drank a piece of one of those monsters, but he put the concern aside. He was going to need his wits about him to deal with the meeting.

“So where is the meeting, anyway?” Kaldalis asked.

“They’re hosting us in Panbu,” Garyung said, scooping up his papers and straightening the stack before standing up. “Let’s get moving. I’m assuming if we’re even one second late, they’ll use that to hose us as hard as they can.”

“Tell me about it,” Kaldalis grumbled, remembering the last time he missed a meeting in Panbu.