The Hinterlands – Five days out from the western coast of the continent

"Suppressive fire, Az!" Sylvie shouted as she hid behind a dented boulder. She breathed heavily, feeling the rough, rocky ground beneath her and the dry, almost burning air sucking into her lungs and cracking her lips.

A dozen meters to her side, beneath another boulder, Azhar took out his skeletal bow and slipped out of his cover. His quiver was empty, having long since been drained in this hours long battle. But his bow could manifest arrows of bone, and he did so now. Three long, sharpened femurs materialized between his fingers.

He nocked the arrows, wreathing them in a film of black magical energy, and fired. The arrows split into a total of twelve identical copies – the effects of the [Split-Shot] skill – and sailed in beautiful, neat arcs before boring into the stony skulls of kobolds.

The kobolds were thin, misshapen creatures with humanoid bodies and draconic heads dotted with beady yellow eyes. They were made out of grey rock, looking entirely like artificial constructs, and indeed they were, created as familiars by the real threat up ahead.

Sylvie bit her lip as she pressed her back against the boulder and began to think, assessing the situation. She had always prided herself in her perception, her eyes capable of perceiving so much at once, and she prided herself even more in her ability to process what she saw so efficiently.

To the point where when she explained to Jeanne how she kept her mind apace in even the most tense and deadly of battle situations, Jeanne had teased her by saying that maybe her hair had gone silver from overthinking stress.

In a way, Sylvie wished she could be like Jeanne. Just shoving and smashing her way through life with enough strength that she did not need to think much about what she did.

The half hero stood ahead out in the open, wielding her priest's staff as a bludgeoning weapon, shattering the bodies of kobolds that escaped Az's keen eye and showers of arrows.

The earth rumbled, and Sylvie peeked out from her cover to watch Jeanne dash to the side, narrowly escaping a stomp from an enormous, grey scaled dragon foot. In retaliation, Jeanne roared as she swung her staff straight into the foot in a brutish show of force that hardly any other priest would ever be able to replicate.

But this was Jeanne, blessed with heroic blood, and her staff exploded into the scaled foot in cracking impact as metal crashed against rocky, scaled skin. Her hit blew back the foot just a little, lining a scale with cracks, but that was about it as far as damage went. Spurts of lava poured out from the cracks, but when they spattered on Jeanne, they did not burn her skin, only warping the metal of her armor.

"Jeanne, do not waste energy trading blows!" shouted Sylvie. "The rock hydra's scales are aurichalcum-infused! You will only strengthen it!"

"I know!" growled Jeanne in frustration at the fact that she could not beat the towering hydra to death. Sylvie could understand, for after all, for if the rock hydra's scales were infused with any other metal aside from perhaps adamant, Jeanne could smash through it easily with her prodigious power.

But aurichalcum was special, capable of converting half of all physical damage into mana. And rock hydras were already among the most durable of dragonkin.

"Then focus on evading!" shouted Sylvie. "You'll burn us all alive at this rate!"

Sylvie squinted her eyes and parted some sweat matted hair from her forehead, looking up. It was night, but there was so much light that it might as well have been day, and the source of that lay floating in the sky, right above the huge bulk of the fully grown rock hydra.

A sphere of molten rock gleaming with heat and light rotated above like a miniature sun, and arcs of orange energy linked it to the rock hydra who fueled it with its mana.

The heat from that orb was so intense that Sylvie and Azhar could only huddle behind the rocks to prevent their skin from burning up. Jeanne could resist it with her heroic durability that also seemed to make her nigh immune to damage from heat, which was even more useful considering the rock hydra seemed to have bathed in a fault in the earth, infusing itself not only with aurichalcum, but with lava that coursed through its scales and skin like veins.

But ultimately, if she could not harm the hydra, then all she could do was stall it. Which was the whole point, actually, but Sylvie sighed as she found her plan thwarted not by herself, but by the incompetency of others.

"Will your blade work soon?" said Sylvie as she looked ahead with her back against the boulder. A little ways from her, shaded under the boulder's shadow, there knelt a young man with bronzed skin staring down at a silver-green longsword.

Sylvie could tell at first glance that it was a weapon nearly incomparable to anything she had ever seen before. The length of its white blade shone in a shimmering haze like moonlight on the water's surface, and lining its edge was an iridescent, teal green glow radiating with heat and power.

The intricacy of the ivory white patterns of flowers and rays of light decorating its pommel and the night-black, star speckled color of the handle indicated materials unavailable to man and skill beyond the finest any blacksmith she knew could produce.

For this was the Moon Reaver, a Divine class item – one of the few of its kind to exist or have ever existed in this world – and the greatest treasure of the southern city state of Enna.

"By the moon, this damned thing is failing me," said the man as he rapped the gleaming white blade with a frustrated rap of his knuckles.

And this was the divine weapon's wielder. Zal – the crown prince of Enna.

"My love, you know better than to insult our most divine of treasures," spoke a woman about the same age as the man. She was wrapped up in flowing, silvery white robes that seemed like moonlight forged solid, and strikingly green eyes shone through a thin veil of white.

"You are right, my darling Rudaba," said the man as he flourished a dashing smile and leaned forwards, giving the woman a kiss on her cheek.

The woman bashfully turned her head to the side. "Oh, to show me such love even on the battlefield."

"When my heart races in the fight, it reminds me only of you," said Zal.

"Can you two please stop twittering like love birds and focus on the task at hand?" said Sylvie, her voice bleeding with more of an edge than she would have liked it to. She was happy about seeing the two being so loving with each other, but the topic of love was not something she particularly liked to dwell on.

She ignored a sudden urge to think of Li before she cleared her mind with one quick breath. "Jeanne is out there risking her life, awaiting the Moon Reaver's activation. Tell me, is it ready? I understand it may be a secret of your state, but our lives and the march of the five armies depend upon it."

"Oh, believe me, I would not hide anything from a fellow adventurer," said Zal. He looked down at the Moon Reaver in confusion. "But the blade should be responding to me. It is nightfall, the moon is visible, and I believe I am fighting for good. All the conditions are met."