The fairy tries to open the portal at Oblivisle...and fails!
On her second try she succeeds, and the party amusingly acts like they beat a boss, complete with the victory hops and fanfare! But no, the portal activated because of the power unleashed by the elemental stones, which means the villains are planning to enter the holy land!
Sure enough, they get blown up by an airship! Which is piloted by the red wizard of Altena, who sarcastically thanks them for helping them unleash the energy of the stones before bombing them again!
The beastmen take to the skies with a fleet of birds...
And the Nevarlan thieves follow suit, with this...curious contraption.
Amazingly, the party survived the bombings, and in pretty good condition even! They ponder how to get to the sky, until Riesz remembers of a winged protector in her homeland who could carry them on their back!
The party quickly hurries back to her castle, where they get the path to the protector unblocked. A few skirmishes with mountain fowl later, they climb to the very top of the mountain range, where a white dragon awaits!
After some comedy about misgendering it, Riesz gives it the same name as the dragon of the last game, and it flies them to the holy land in a very elaborate flight sequence.
The villains had already beat them to the holy land, and had fiercely battled with each other, leaving many charred corpses behind. The land itself was full of rabbits, including some royal rabbits that hit surprisingly hard! Thankfully, Hawkeye's form changing spell worked on them, and took out most of the danger. Now this did have the downside of zeroing out their XP, but tbh that wasn't really a concern of mine; winning fights was much more important than extracting any theoretical maximal value from them, and if I found myself in need of levels, I could always just grind them later.
I spent an embarrassingly long time circling around the land, until I caught sight of a lotus pad path I had missed.
This led to an elaborate dais, where the fairy explained that the goddess statue atop could be used to change classes, and that the second class change would require getting hands on some special rare items. That sounds really arduous to me, honestly I think I'll just be using action replay codes to get the classes I want when the time is right.
The path continues, and it turns out, I was right to be cheesing the royal rabbits, as they have a multitarget damage move atop their enhanced physical stats! Besides them, however, there was little danger, and the party amazingly got to the Mana tree and the sword before the villains did!
'
The fairy channeled the power of the stones, and the sword flew gracefully into Hawkeye's hand, entrusting it to him! Well, guess we won. That was a pretty good gam-
Oh, the fairy got kidnapped somehow, and we need to go rescue her now for reasons. Also, despite our heroics, the Mana tree is going to die soon anyway, so all the goddess can do is give us a drum to call upon the white dragon. Jeez, talk about a depressing conclusion.
On the way back, they run into the dark knight, who reveals that his master was defeated, and his forces scattered. Well, nice to have that problem sort itself out, heh.
The clown similarly tells of a powerful foe who felled his master and destroyed his seat of power, and warns them that their arch nemesis awaits them at the holy land's entrance, and has grown powerful beyond belief.
Horror of horrors, it's the very last set of villains, Isabella, her vampire, and whatever evil king they're working for. They coerce the party to bring the sword in exchange for the fairy's life, and the party can immediately tell this is a setup. Unfortunately, they don't have anything to counter the setup, and are forced to meekly deliver the sword to them.
But not before enjoying a ride on their flying steed, which controls a lot more smoothly than its Secret counterpart and has helpful navigational aids, besides. It's still a
little awkward, but I got used to it much faster.
The villains' reception is, as you can see, less than hospitable. It was kind of surreal to return to Hawkeye's castle after such a long time, and even more surreal to see it populated with high level foes. The evil ninjas were the most dangerous foe of the lot with their multitarget debuffing spells, and I made Hawkeye disable them to save me a good deal of grief.
Hawkeye delivers them the sword, but it rejects them, as they are very clearly evil. They then begin to corrupt the sword to make it accept them, tell the team they will release the ancient beasts to destroy the human world, and then revive their dark master, the ruler of Mavolia. They then vanish, leaving the team with a sickly fairy and a horrible aftertaste.
Welp. Nothing to do but try defeating the beasts.
I restock, and then elect to go for the beast of the fire dungeon, as it's the closest dungeon nearby. It was guarded by duckmen and evil ninjas, both of whom were quite vicious. The evil ninjas did their usual debuffs, and the duckmen threw weapons for high damage, and had powerful melee strikes besides. It didn't help that later, they were joined by fire lizards, who, with the presence of meatshields, proved to be an absolute threat with their fire breath!
Still, the team was resilient enough to power through the dungeon, where they reached their first ancient beast, a giant cloud of many flames! It changes into many forms, and, predictably, throws out powerful fire spells and moves with each form. It also has a furnace like structure in the middle, into which it sometimes retreats to heal itself. At about the halfway point, it borrows a nasty little trick from the elemental gigases(gigai?) in Secret of Mana, and enchants their weapons with fire, making their strikes heal it! It was definitely a fight worthy of its reputation; the party did win it, but only at the cost of most of their supplies and some careful application of revives.
The fairy plays spoilsport and informs them that, though they may have defeated an ancient beast, they can't rest on their laurels; there are still seven of them left, and they only grow stronger with time! Their quest to save the world from ancient evils shall continue...next time! For now, the session ends here.
