The fateful day was finally here, the sun began to peak it’s head over the horizon, leaving the sky a soft blue-ish grey, Yumi could feel the crisp of the cold, fresh morning air, as she sat on the bow of the boat, which she had acquired,

“ You know you still didn’t tell us where you got this boat from”, Polaris said, looking up at her,

“I know I left and, probably missed a bunch of stuff she said about herself, but this is a pretty big boat”, Barak said, walking along side the boat, on the shoreline,

“yup, I definitely thought that the oat would’ve been”, Aster paused,

“more unnoticeable”, Aster finished, dropping the ropes he had strung over his shoulders, these were connected to a rather large crate,

Aster left the crate next to the boat, he took a step back, and stomped his foot once, the earth underneath the soft sand began to slightly rumble, after a few seconds a square rock pillar began to raise the crate in to the air , with it coming to a halt at the same level as the deck of the boat,

Aster walked over to the pillar, placing his hand onto it, the sand that was under crate began to move lifting the crate into the air, gently placing it on to the boat’s deck,

“ Well my work here is done”, aster said, jumping on to the boat, he immediately went below the deck, Levant went straight to the front standing up and looking out at the sea, standing next to where yumi was sitting, Barak and Polaris just found random places to sit, yumi started the engine and they were off to the shadow continent,

A couple hours later

Polaris was fast asleep on the deck, luckily that part of the ship was covered, so he wasn’t being directly hit by the sun, Aster and Levant were below deck for a while now, and Yumi was on the upper deck steering the ship,

“ I heard everything from Pol”, barak said, walking up the stairs to the upper deck,

“well I figured that one of them would tell you sooner or later”, Yumi replied, her back turned to Barak, as she was focusing on guiding the ship,

Barak walked up next to her, taking a seat in the chair next where she was standing, his eyes focusing on her,

“well it doesn’t matter now, you held up your end of the deal, I can sense that those three are much stronger now, now we just have to hold up our end”, Barak said,

“ Ohh you can sense that, I take it your master taught you about divine energy then”,Yumi replied,

“you say that as if you know exactly where I went and who my master is, in any case, yes he did teach me about divine energy, though knowing him I doubt he taught me everything he knows about it”, Barak, answered, his interest now piqued,

“well to satisfy your curiousity, yes, I do know who your master is”, yumi explained,

“ I doubt he would remember me, I met him about ten years ago, I was eighteen at the time”, yumi continued,

“oh you had my interest but now you have my attention”, barak stated,

“ Elphante Macabee, he was the vice captain of an elite dungeon diving squad, we met in a dungeon, though at that time, it was me, Aluric, and five others, we had been sent on mission by the king and our former guild master, a rare dungeon had appeared in another country, luckily news traveled to us quickly”, yumi continued her story,

“ what country was it ?”, barak asked,

“it was the Elven kingdom, Flanesa, anyways, because it the news was so wide spread at the time, many countries sent their own exploratory forces to see what the dungeon had to offer, Dracht was no different, the problem lied in the fact that we were all competing, so whenever groups ran into one another it often ended in violence, it wasn’t uncommon to find whole parties massacred, even we, the squad I was with, was responsible for wiping out a few dozen of them, but when we ran up on your masters squad at the time we were completely out matched,” yumi continued,

“sounds about right, I was told often that in his younger years, he was quite the force to be reckoned with”, barak exclaimed, a smile breaking across his face,

“our fighting had spilled out into the forest that surrounded the dungeon, needless to say that really pissed the elves off, but at that point we had been at it for hours before in the dungeon, what we realized in our fight was that, we were outmatched because his group, wasn’t from any one kingdom, they were from all over the world so they had much more of a variety when it came to attacking us, we got lucky because our group leader at the time, managed to injure your master, though the monster that he is nearly wiped out half of us by himself, while they were retreating no less”, yumi said,

“however I heard a couple months after that they got disbanded because their captain got killed,by a group from the church of Exxion, Aluric also told me that one of them had become a leader of an entire country, and that she single handedly wiped out the group that killed her captain, Aluric speculated that she was probably stronger than your master, so he told all of us to be wary of her”, she finished,

“dam I always wondered where he got that scar, but when I asked he never talked about it”, Barak revealed,

“what was the name of his old squad anyways ?”, Barak asked,

“they were called Bahamut’s Hand”, Yumi answered,

“ wow that is a very ominous name”, Barak stated,

“yup, and they all lived up to that name”, yumi said,

Barak gavde pause for a minute, he remembered what happened in the basement of his master’s dojo, and how he introduced the leader of Arteva as an old adventuring buddy, his eeyes widened with curiousity,

“by chance this powerful leader, wouldn’t happened to be named Maria ?” barak asked,

“yeah, did your master tell you about her”, yumi said, glancing quickly across at barak,

“no, not exactly, I met her yesterday, she is one scary person”, barak said,

“coming from a fight junkie like you, she must’ve gotten insanely powerful”, yumi said,

“if she is that powerful, she could’ve done something to reprimand those skovol dogs that she has under her command”, barak said,

“what is a skovol ?”, yumi asked,

“ the skovol clan is the only other clan in arteva with the strength and number to match ours, but they have a fucking attitude problem, and love provoking fights, since that’s all they are good at, so good that on average they are better fighters than us”, barak explained,

“okay, but why would she have to reprimand them, well unlike our clan who use us and the elders to determine who the next clan leader would be after two candidates are nominated by the people, their next leader is hereditary, so marriage and children are quite precious to them, my father got the chief of the skovol’s wife pregnant, this all happened when I was quite young, and they invaded our clan in search of him, the elders quickly found him and brought him forth to the skovol’s in order to stop and all out war, but the chief of the skovol’s at that time saw an opportunity to deal a devastating blow to their only rival clan and they took it, and as the clan war ensued, the skovol chief found my mother, and he killed her as an act of revenge” barak explained,

“sounds like your dad is a prick, so what happened”, yumi said,

“well, my father and the skovol chief’s wife got banned from both of their clans and effectively the country, we pleaded with the leaders of arteva to take action against the skovols but they said they had all rights to retaliate how they saw fit, and gave us the fault in the matter”, Barak said,

“ohh, I could see why the bad blood would intensify over the years, what happened to your dad though”, yumi asked,

“don’t know and don’t care, whatever little hole he decided to go off and die in is up to him”, barak said,

Two days later

As they drew in closer to where they were suppose to dock, mist started to slowly appear, by the time they were ready to get off of the boat, the mist had become rather thick, with each passing minute yumi grew to worry a bit more,

“okay boys grab your weapons and take the cloaks, out of the crate, let’s get a move on”, Yumi said, you could he a slight break in her voice,

“you okay ?, you sound worried”, Aster asked,

“yeah I’m fine”, she said throwing on her cloak and jumping off of the boat,

“ what’s got her so freaked out ?”, Levant asked, appearing seemingly out of nowhere,

“AHH, dude stop that”, Aster jumped,

“you two done playing around, Pol and yumi are already off the boat”, barak stated,

“yeah yeah, were coming”, Levant replied, he followed by aster jumped off the boat,

it was odd, though it was a small village the people here were usually friendly and many of them knew her, yumi thought, so why is it that no one has come to greet them yet,

“this is starting to bother me, this place feels like a ghost town”, barak said,

“everyone stop and don’t move”, barak continued, causing everyone to stop dead in their tracks,

Barak placed one of his hands on the ground, sending small currents of electricity in multiple directions,

“Rak what is it”, Polaris asked,

“there’s a big pile of something over there”, barak pointed, in a eastward direction, but nothing ahead could be seen properly due to the thick cloud of mist,

“they followed him as he walked in that direction, after a few moments he came to a stop,

“what is that smell”, Bark, whispered to himself, covering his nose with his hand

“dude whats the hold up now”, Levant commented, he continued past Barak,

“look nothings he-……...”, he stopped short, he was falling, the ground beneath him had began to crumble,

“Oh come on Lev”, Aster grumbled, placing his hands on the ground, Earth shot forward below where levant was going to fall,

“you need to be patient, if you were, you wouldn’t find yourself in these situations”, Aster complained,

the resulting actions had dispersed the mist surrounding them, Aster took his hands off of the ground, however they felt odd,

he looked down, his hands were smeared in blood, though it felt very sticky, some of it had a blackish colour to it,

“guys, I think we’re standing in blood”, Aster said, but, no one responded to him,

“guys”, he said again, still nothing, he looked up to see everyones eyes glued onto something in front of them,

“ I really don’t want to come across the people who did this”, Polaris uttered,

“ I’m betting we already did” yumi said,

what stood before them was a pile of rotting corpses, eyes falling out of sockets, hair filled with dirt mud and blood, even the small corpses of children could be seen, with all manner of bugs and rodents, running and crawling in and around the bodies,

After staying silent for a while, Levant decided to speak up

“oh well, lets go and get some supplies and start to head to the main army”, Levant said,

yumi stood there still in silence, tears falling from her eyes, that familiar feeling of her throat running dry came back, she knew in her head that she had seen only two people capable of this kind of massacre, especially if they were together,

she dried her eyes wiping her tears away, steeling her emotions,

yumi sighed,”i guess you’re right, i can’t do anything about the situation here right now anyways”, yumi said, though the look on her face was quite pained,

They gathered some supplies and found some horses and an empty wagon, they threw their things in the wagon and jumped in the back with barak and polaris at the front steering the wagon,

The next three days went by slowly, with them stopping and resting every once in a while, with barak and levant complaining about how uneventful the journey on the shadow continent was so far, they came to a large open field with a chasm running along side of it, and from out of the chasm flew these multicolored large insects, with four sets of large transparent wings, that changed color as they flew through the air with the sun shining through them as they zipped around,

Asters eyes filled with excitement,” what the hell are those things ?”, aster asked,

“Giant Vorgas dragon flies”, yumi said,

“beautiful aren’t they”, yumi asked,

“yup, they are amazing”, aster said,

as they continued they eventually came to a mountain path, and as they followed it they came to a gaurd post, after a brief talk with the guards they let yumi through, as they continued up the path they came to a dead end,

“oi get up we’re here”, yumi shouted as she was in the drivers seat and the boys were in the back of the wagon sleeping,

“what its just a dead end, you sure you didn’t take a wrong turn”, levant asked,

“well i guess I’m up”, Aster said getting down from the wagon and doing some stretches, as he approached the wall it began to rumble and then it started to lower

“`what the hell did you do aster”, levant shouted,

“me, i didn’t do anything”, aster shouted back,

“boys stop bickering”,yumi shouted,

“look its the entrance to the headquarters of the rebel army”, she continued,

as both boys stopped shouting at each other to turn and see a large tunnel with workers on the inside