Revier's entourage headed for his former family castle, Igros. Meanwhile, Olan tried breaking into Ovelia's chambers to convey her the truth about his father-in-law, Orlandu, but he was injured by the castle's security, and by the time he got to her, Delita got wind of his antics and stormed in! He outright boasted about how he'd done a "good thing" by framing Orlandu as Goltana's killer, and how killing Goltana was completely justified.
Ovelia and Olan are aghast to hear of such blatant skullduggery, but Delita, running high on arrogance, goes a step further, and tries to persuade Olan to work for him while outright stating he wants the Church's High Priest dead! This goes too far for the church's agent, who prepares to stab him, but Delita catches her in the act and stabs her!
Cutting away from all of that, we see Zalbag pay a visit to their father Barbaneth's grave, with a chemist in tow. The chemist confirms that he had indeed been poisoned, and further mutters that the poison mushrooms sprouting from his grave are a terrible omen, foretelling the fall of his family. Zalbag pays him and gives his thanks, before heading back to settle some affairs...
Sure enough, by the time Revier reaches Igros, he finds Zalbag already at Dycedarg's throat! This leads to a quick and rather anticlimactic showdown where Dycedarg calls upon his personal forces to fend off his brothers, only to be blasted to pieces!
Of course, he, having obtained one of the stones, also had a demon transform. This demon tried to intimidate Revier's squad by instantly dismissing all of his guards and obliterating Zalbag. Unfortunately, he wasn't good enough to face them by himself, relying too often on slow, albeit powerful summons that were easily dodged. He was killed with little fanfare, effectively marking the end of the family. I felt a little sad about this, honestly; despite Dycedarg being an evil schemer, it did seem like the rest of the family had good intentions, and tried to be nice to Revier, their workers and their subjects.
The story wastes little time mourning the moment however, as Revier makes his way to the grand monastery of Murond, capital of the church. It turns out the cabal had already turned on the High Priest and stabbed him after killing his guards. They forced him to reveal the way to the dead city - it was underneath the monastery of Orbonne, sealed by some ancient magic! The means of unsealing it was within the forbidden book Revier had acquired from Orbonne's head priest! The cabal cursed this turn of events and took their anger out on the priest, brutalizing him! Ouch!
Outside, Revier runs into the monastery's guards, oblivious to the betrayals happening within. They tried to stop him as he was a heretic, but they were poorly prepared for battle, and probably couldn't have prepared for the mighty combination of Flare, Holy, a Lancer jump, a Samurai's katana, and a gun! The only real concern was the geomancers getting lucky with the status effects on their geomancy, while they had very low odds, they were still very capable of debilitating or even outright "killing" their targets! Thankfully, that didn't happen, and the monastery's forces were cleared out before they got to do much of anything.
Inside, the remaining survivors of the cabal confronted Revier and cajoled him into an obvious trap...err, I mean a deal. They wanted the forbidden book and his stones in exchange for returning Alma to him. Revier gave the book, and of course, the moment they figured out the unsealing method, they turned on Revier, swearing to kill him to avenge their fallen! This was yet another quick affair, because all the party had to do to make them back off was kill their most prominent affair, though they did get to take out Revier on his first turn.
To be fair, he was also wearing outdated equipment for a damage and healing boost, having learnt everything he wanted from Dragoon. Switching over to Geomancer allowed him to combine its naturally high movement and some damage boosting light gear with a spear via equip spear, and infinite vertical clearance with ignore height. The extra power also made his Chakra considerably stronger, letting him theoretically fend for himself, despite his bad armor.
In other gameplay related news, I had also unlocked Teleportation on the time mage. This was a potentially very powerful skill, allowing its user to travel to any tile within the map! The catch was that it had a chance to fail, and the chance got considerably higher the farther they tried travelling. This, combined with the largely small maps, did a good job of reining it in, but it was still quite the impressive movement skill!
The last map of the Murond monastery had the cabal resurrect Zalbag as a vampire to spite Revier, before fleeing. Once again it went pretty quickly, though Zalbag, to his credit, did manage to evade dying to the chemist's gun by outpacing it with his movement fueled regen. Of course, that didn't do him much good evading holys and flares, to say nothing of the mighty samurai's strikes itself! Heh!
That left everything except the final dungeon cleared. I shall, however, first showcase the rest of the sidequests before diving in and finishing this off. See you all later!
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