The Contender’s forces made a terrifying racket crashing through the jungle behind Martok. It gave the team only a few seconds to prepare before the fight was joined.

“War Weapons away,” Kaldalis instructed with a calm tone. “If they have weapons, they’ll approach without them, and only draw them when they think they’re losing. We can still have some element of surprise when we have the tools to match them.”

Reno and Balrim quickly followed the direction, their sinister weapons vanishing into their inventories. It wasn’t much of an advantage to scramble for, but he had to do something or else this was going to escalate faster than he wanted.

It was a surprisingly long time before the Contender’s forward guard broke through the treeline. A testament to how terrible they were at moving through the wilderness that they were heard coming from so far away. Kaldalis was going to ask Martok if they could try to hide and elude them right before they first crashed into the clearing.

From the sounds in the jungle, it was obvious that they didn’t have an exact position on Martok. Five men in green-and-gold armor burst into the clearing at first, and there was still noise in the jungle to the left and right, indicating that they’d spread out.

Before there was time for them to react to suddenly stumbling on a dozen adventurers, Myrin and Reno lunged.

The two of them were the first to react, and while Myrin’s short stature meant she was a little slower to the fight - and with less range from her tiny arms - she was no less fierce.

Reno clobbered one of the guards across the face when he opened his mouth to shout something, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes, clutching his jaw.

Shortly after, Myrin barrelled into the legs of the second guard, bowling him over. She used her disproportionate DPS strength to grab him by the leg and use him to bludgeon the next guard to the ground as well.

“Alarm! Alarm!” one of the two men still standing shrieked. “To me! This way! It’s them!”

Courbois and Ess reached the group before Reno and Myrin could demolish the whole squad by themselves, but even as they were battered to the ground, the damage had been done. These five had been outnumbered, but one of them had managed to call for help, and on all sides the fanned-out scouts were coordinating and converging. When they came next, it would be in much higher numbers, and unlike this group, they’d know there was a fight to be had before it was over.

“Get ready,” Kaldalis warned, “this is where the fun begins.”

Kaldalis was determined to position himself where he could cover Balrim and Dalgaard. As a tank, his high Vigor stat would let him stand up to a lot of punishment, where the DPS players’ lower Vigor but higher Clout made them glass cannons. He didn’t know what advantages Acumen offered, but having low Vigor and Clout together put healers in a sticky situation when the fists started flying. They needed some nearby muscle to keep them safe until it was time for Balrim to pull out the bow Kaldalis had given him.

The next attackers came from the east and south side of the clearing. Kaldalis was impressed that they’d encircled the area so completely that they were approaching from behind, but it meant that Martok had escaped their pursuit so well that they’d had to comb the whole jungle for him.

Dalgaard’s friends moved to support Ess and Martok as the enemies rushed the east side. Reno insisted on staying to cover the north for the next wave, which meant that those who approached from the south were left to Myrin, Courbois, and the others.

The fight turned brutal very quickly. Myrin’s usual cackle rang out as she battered foes twice her size to the ground. Her size became an asset in this fight quickly, as foes either underestimated her, or simply didn’t see her coming until she struck. On the east side, Ess was much less joyful, but no less successful. She had a wide stance that looked like something she may have learned in a self-defense class, and while her movements were panicked and jerky, they were undeniably efficient at dishing out harm while keeping her relatively protected from counterattacks.

Despite fighting bare-handed instead of with her staff, Courbois had the same fluid motions she’d used with the weapon, weaving through combat and evading blows as much as she could absorb them with her tank stats.

On the other side, Martok clearly had some combat training in the real world, and despite his low strength stat, he was almost as destructive as the DPS players with merciless strikes and brutal throws.

The enemy coordination wasn’t there. These were city guards used to doing battle in the streets, where reinforcements could move about unhindered. In the jungle, they were trickling in from random directions in ones and twos, and they were being put down far faster than their allies could arrive to help. They knew they were in for a fight, but they weren’t prepared to fight under these conditions.

The battle was solidly in the hands of the PCs here.

Kaldalis’s ability to oversee the battle didn’t last long, though. When guards burst through the treeline from the north, Reno was there to batter them into submission. When they emerged from the west, however, there was no one on that side to stop them. Kaldalis had to leap into action to cover the open flank.

While Kaldalis couldn’t use his normal weapons to strike his foes, he could still use the abilities they granted. He activated Jump and launched himself across the clearing. With the momentum of the jump he collided with the first guard at high speed, leading with his knee. He felt the guard’s breastplate bend under the weight of the impact. The man clawed at Kaldalis as they crashed to the ground, but with Jump still active, he kicked off, sending the guard into the ground as they separated, gasping for breath in his warped armor.

Three guards came through the undergrowth next, and for a moment Kaldalis feared that they would split up, with one or two of them keeping him busy while the others rushed the unprotected Dalgaard and Balrim. But one of them pointed at him and said a single word that made the other two turn as they all converged on him.

“Kaldalis!” the guard barked in mingled recognition and anger.

Apparently being the Contender’s number one enemy was an effective way to hold aggro even in PvP combat where that concept didn’t mean anything.

The first one barreled toward Kaldalis, stepping over the first downed foe before leaning down into a bull-rush to try and grapple him. With Jump still active, Kaldalis deftly leaped over the clumsy tackle and came down with both feet, stomping on the man’s shoulders to drive him to the ground. He wanted to try and land a solid kick to his head to stun or disorient the would-be grappler, but the next foe was on top of him too fast.

A flurry of gauntleted fists came in at Kaldalis, and he had to raise his hands to guard his face. He felt himself leaning on the fighting style he’d learned from the assassin in Baimer. His shoulders and hips went into a bobbing and weaving motion to turn the attacks into glancing blows whenever they managed to connect. When the second foe joined the melee against him, his footwork became more evasive, dancing in tight circles to keep the pair of them from cornering him between them.

Another guard burst from the undergrowth, sweeping a meaty fist down on Kaldalis’s shoulder. The impact was sudden and unexpected, but his evasive stance and footwork meant that it only set him off-balance instead of doing real damage. Another fist landed on his ribs, but he saw the blow winding up and was able to roll away from it to keep it from being more then bruising.

As he spun, he lashed out with one hand, landing a back knuckle blow on one of the guards. After being defensive for so long, the sudden attack was unexpected, and he caught his target right in the temple so hard that the man spun in a full circle before dropping to the ground in a heap.

Kaldalis was outlasting them. These guards didn’t have tank stats like he did. He could endure their strikes, but they had glass jaws. He just had to weather their attacks and lash out when he had the chance. He could overcome them.

“Kal!” Reno warned. “Incoming!”

He barely had time to spare a glance towards Reno. She had about six downed guards scattered around her, but a large heavily-armored Bhogad was engaged with her while the other two that had emerged from the north side were rushing at him. She had held her own on that end of the clearing with raw damage output, but she didn’t have enough hands to contain the additional attackers.

And now that they knew where Kaldalis was, all the guards who weren’t busy were converging on Public Enemy Number One.

His bob-and-weave style kept him from getting hit too hard when the third guard joined the two on him. The fourth started to overwhelm his defenses. When one of the others he’d struck but not downed rejoined the fight, he couldn’t keep track of that many fists at once. Someone hit his ribs and when he went to roll with the punch he caught a kick right to the kidney. The lashing of his tail kept his feet under him, but the shot of pain up his back was too big of a distraction to ignore.

Kaldalis’s guard fractured.

Someone grabbed his forearm, and when he tried to twist away he caught a fist to the eye. His endurance let him power through it to rip his arm free anyway, but another fist caught him in the gut hard enough to send him doubling over. A Suyon guard grabbed his knee and Kaldalis was abruptly introduced to the feeling Myrin had inflicted on her foes as he was flung to the ground like a sack of rice.

They were all over him. At least five sets of hands were grappling him, holding him down.

“Orders are orders,” a guard said. He was one of the ones still standing over Kaldalis as he was pinned to the ground. “Now this ends.”

To Kaldalis’s horror, while all his friends were busy dealing with the foes arrayed against them, the guard standing over him produced a greatsword. The blade was impractically thick and broad, made of crystal that shimmered like river water in the light, but instead of a pleasant blue, it was a deep brownish-red, like a fresh scab.

The sinister aura of the weapon made it very clear.

This was a War Weapon.

The order in question that these guards were enacting was for nothing less than Kaldalis’s violent death.

Kaldalis was about to be executed.