SS Chapter 6: Spider Sense

Next stop, another "into the wilderness" sort of place.

Going back into Serafew reveals that the Shop has expanded its stock- now selling Torch and Restore staves. Torch staves give you vision in Fog of War, and strictly speaking, are the most cost-efficient way of getting EXP onto staff users. They only work in Fog of War, though, so I tend to prefer Barrier. Restore cures status conditions, and if you're going Ephraim route, it might be worth buying one.

I did not buy one.

At any rate, since we're back with the army with girls, we'll be sticking to the girls' run.

We are now In Enemy Territory. There are political reasons this is a bad idea, but I think we're long past worrying about those now. Now we're purely scared of the martial ones.

Eirika at least took a good route. Someone in the team is a good tactician, and considering what some of these people get up to, it's probably Eirika herself.

I know I'm just as bad about spoilers, game, but there's no need for you to do it.

A relatively interesting note about this chapter is that there was a change to the story between the prototype and the final version. That change makes this chapter title more appropriate to the prototype than the final, but I'm sure one can come up with reasons the final version sees fit to use this title.

Cameo appearance by Riev. He's ordering around some dark cultist- sorry, Shaman- and it's clear as day to people familiar with the Fire Emblem tropes that Riev is some mastermind behind the scenes.

He isn't. As far as I can recall, this is the only cultist other than himself we see. We don't get much details on what Riev's deal is- we know his backstory, but we don't know what he does when he's not in the background of the plot cutscenes going "heh heh heh".

This cult certainly has an uncomfortably high power level, if they can pull this off.

I have no idea what the expression "like rats in a sack" is referencing. I guess it's something similar to "like a moth to a flame"? Maybe not quite, but close...

Riev is not supposed to be doing this, but if he succeeds, well, that would embarass... well, some members of the Imperial Six. I wouldn't say Riev himself deserting his post would go unnoticed.

...Not from Valter, right? Because his definition of "handful" isn't the same as, say, anyone else's.

It knocked several of his stats loose, and most paladins don't get oneshot by wyvern knights. They get two shot.

Riev is aware that sending some unpromoted cannon fodder is likely to end with his side losing.

Novala knows what he's doing.

Or at least claims to.

Riev acknowledges that Novala has a lot of boasting to meet, and goes back to his job... Defending the Empire.

All of a sudden, I think stopping Eirika might actually be in his job description anyway.

Practically everyone in Magvel has a crush on Eirika. The villains, of course, express it in very unfriendly ways. The heroes are only slightly less creepy about it.

I think he's talking about Caellach as well as Valter. Valter's the obvious target of this snide remark, but Caellach doesn't actually express any interest in using Eirika for creepy reasons- he makes a few comments about women in general, which is why I suspect he's talking about him, but never specifically Eirika.

"Our master" for Riev's commander. Pretty good odds he's not talking about Vigarde here. He might've used "His Majesty" instead if he were.

Well, until we kill all your servants and you have to try personally.

Novala, now that Riev has teleported away, decides to declare that he's not as loyal as he appears.

You better hope he's gone, at least.

Eirika and Seth enter a foggy field- looks like it's time for us to meet Fog of War.

And now we've bumped into the ambush.

Surprise!

Eirika is less impressed than perhaps she ought to be. I don't think Novala is wearing anything that marks him as a Grado soldier, so aside from the teleporting, I think this might actually be a reasonable response.

Of course we take the time to admire Eirika's beauty. Perhaps Riev was insulting this guy to his face.

And, more importantly, he is asking Eirika to turn over her bracelet. Her perfectly innocuous keepsake trinket she got from her father that Seth had us spend a chapter to go retrieve when it got stolen by a random nobody thief.

And Eirika has no idea why.

Look... it's a bracelet. You can probably get five a bag of gold at the Emperor Store for "gifts to give your wife when you accidentally invaded another country".

Probably not. Why do the villains always say they'll leave you alive?

Seth, perhaps not quite realising his mistake yet, tells Eirika that bracelet is the most important thing she possesses.

Eirika's happy not to comply with her enemy's requests.

Novala breaks out further "convincing".

The player might actually believe this, but I don't think the game actually expects us to. Ephraim losing to Valter, of course, is such an obvious outcome that of course Novala is telling the truth here, except he isn't.

I think the main thing leaning towards "lie" is that they didn't just kill him on the spot. How do you capture Ephraim? I don't think that man knows the meaning of the phrase "come quietly".

Novala definitely couldn't take Ephraim. But Grado has plenty of other candidates for the job.

I'm sure he is.

Eirika is considering whether to believe him on that one. Both outcomes are reasonable assertions.

So then, it's time we saw what Novala's real plan is.

Hostage situation.

I don't think Eirika needed to know this was a Renais kid to be cowed by this strategy. Her heart's too big, a kid from anywhere would've worked just as fine.

And Eirika gives up the bracelet.

This is probably the point Seth realises his mistake. Had he told Eirika what that bracelet really was, Eirika would have an accurate understanding of the stakes of this scene. But instead, he decided it was a good idea to keep a lid on the situation until it got really desperate.

Hoarding is bad, kids.

Novala clearly recognises what the bracelet is on sight. This is some kind of magical thing, I'm not sure what he's noticing other than perhaps its design.

...

"Take off" our weapons? Perhaps he means the scabbards and such.

Yeah, I'm with Seth on this one.

The bracelet that she does or does not understand the capabilities of is one thing. For all Eirika knows, that thing is replacable. Now we're in serious demand territory.

Novala realises he's got no more leverage.

At this point in the prototype, Novala does kill the girl. This is probably where the "Victims of War" title comes from.

In the final version, however, Novala decides to stop playing the villain and start playing the supervillain.

And puts the girl in a slow-moving deathtrap the player has ample time to save her from.

Of course, Eirika doesn't know about the "slow moving" thing, so this sounds like a cruel and unusual way of just doing the killing.

Again, I don't think their country of origin mattered, or indeed, still matters.

...Valter aside, is this the first time Eirika's really facing someone evil? Sure, there's been bandits, but this is the next level up.

I'd say there are rules of war, but... Magvel might never have codified them, and such. Besides, "rules" of war never meant that the enemy was under any obligation to follow them. What's the enforcement going to do?

Eirika has had just about enough of this guy.

Grado is the clear bad guy in this exchange. That was never in doubt. All we had to figure out was how bad.

However, Eirika has not taken that as her cue to turn on the people of Grado.

Seth: Don't remember the time I tried to turn Natasha away for being Grado, don't remember the time I tried to turn Natasha away-

She, and her predecessors before her, worked hard to get to the point they've got to, and she believes strongly in the value of that that she won't see it go to waste.

Eirika is holding out for the idea that she can put a stop to what's going on in Grado and find the people are perfectly happy to resume prior relations- in essence, the idea that Vigarde isn't in his normal state and there is a way to reverse that.

With that said, however...

There are some people who just have to be dealt with before that peace can be claimed.

And Eirika is more than willing to deal with them.

Her words, no.

Her Rapier, though?

Heard it all before.

Novala teleports the hostage over here, to where the deathtrap is.

And has a nice healthy evil laugh about it.

I mean, you could've killed them as soon as we broke the hostage situation, like a normal person.

I don't think it's healthy to be that evil.

And the family is all trapped by mountains over here. Not that they'll actively choose to move- and there's a bunch of red units making that not a tempting prospect.

Don't worry. Vanessa can fly.

So here's the party setup- we've got Neimi, Lute, and Eirika up against...

Well, we can't see, but there's a lot of enemies in the Fog. The one advantage we have is that, when one enemy is left still alive, the music changes to a triumphant song, and that still works even in Fog of War.

There's a village down here, and Vanessa's going to pick up the prize for the sake of doing so. If you're wondering about the range of Fog of War, every blue and green unit can see X squares away from them- three for most classes, and five for Thieves. Colm isn't here, so just say three.

Yes, that means the family over on the right is giving us vision.

If we want more of it, though, it's time to break out the Torch staff. Torch lights up a selected square that can be [Mag/2] tiles away, and what I believe is a four tile radius around it also gets illuminated- although it wears off at one tile per turn.

Yes, this is getting us staff EXP, too.

...

I need to recheck my sources, that is not a four tile radius. The "you lose one tile of vision per turn" thing is definitely true, though.

Lute takes point as the main offensive presence, sitting in a forest for extra evade.

Also Vanessa found a mercenary to play with.

All right, here's how things look like in turn 2. We need to set up an offensive front.

Vanessa starts with the obvious move- she's going to do this regardless of my plans.

These things are actual monsters, and will be a recurring monster class. I'd've put up an arachnophobia warning sooner, but it might be relevant to more than just this chapter.

I don't think RPG designers really understand how awesome "a pouch of antitoxin" really is. Real life antidotes must be matched to the poison they're curing, for relatively simple chemical reasons, but in an RPG, anything you get poisoned by will get cured by any kind of anti-poison.

He gives us the antitoxin.

...Ha ha.

At any rate, poison is such a horrible status effect in FE that using an item slot for curing it is just a bad idea all around. If you have "the spare time", you want to be affected by poison, since that gives your healer more stuff to do. I have been worried about dying to poison from time to time, but not that often.

Oh great, Vanessa's in range of a Fighter. Nothing to do about it, though.

Neimi pulls the "hit the archer please!" card.

And Lute does quite possibly the weirdest move you can imagine from the map- why am I standing here and not on the fortress, where I get extra Avoid and passive healing and also not worry about this counterattack? Trust me when I say the reason is dumb.

Lute did get hit by the lance, so Natasha gets the EXP from healing her.

Even on plains, Lute's fine with the dodges.

And the crits, for some reason. Mage crits involve extra runic hand movements before the actual slinging of the spell, which is unchanged.

More Speed is important right now, but so is not dying.

There are an alarming number of ways to worry about dying right now.

There's the magic...

Ooh, Iron Blade. Much heavier than an Iron Sword, but much stronger, too. You can't mitigate weight at all through levelling up, so that means much more in this game, but we'll also be doubling just fine with this thanks to high Speed scores.

Cavaliers coming in from the north.

And normal shamans running around too.

Yes, these guys get their own turn. They don't do anything.

Natasha takes point on the fortress and heals Lute up. No, that's not why I left the space free.

This is why. I wanted to player phase kill this guy.

He has a Halberd, and if he gets to launch his attack first, his droppable weapon switches and you get an Iron Axe. If you stand on the fortress to take point, he can reach you.

Was it worth the effort? Probably not. But I did it.

Hm... this is a tricky one. I think Natasha can take a few rounds, though.

Eirika, annoyingly, did not dodge the hit, which makes her a little less likely to keep up.

Neimi takes out the Fighter. She'll be able to help Natasha next turn. Ish.

Vanessa keeps heading to the family. There's still some red units in there she can attract too.

Yay for misses!

Vanessa is doing just fine, but I'd really rather she didn't take damage.

Even Lute's managing dodges.

This was more likely, though.

And there's enough Javelins going around that lots of people are challenging them.

This shaman, nice and conveniently, could only reach Neimi to attack at 2 range. Putting an archer at the very tip of a mage's range allows the archer to do enemy phase- signficantly more effort than most units, but still possible.

And more Strength for the bargain.

And there's an archer up here. Thankfully, Vanessa is not dealing with him.

Oh, hello, enemy troubadour!

This one has a droppable Elixir. Killing her to stop potential uses of the Mend staff is more important.

...I had hoped I could do much more than that.

Best to heal and focus on saving the family. Although "attracting that knight closer" might not necessarily count...

Neimi, as promised, takes one of the attackers.

And Eirika does for the other.

She's doing perfectly well for herself.

Lute realises she's just fine from all perspectives to take this guy.

...If that isn't a still frame to catch.

Lute always knows her priorities. Although I notice her Skill is far lower than her other stats.

Natasha heals Eirika, mostly because she can.

Don't worry about this guy attacking the family- he can't cross mountains and the Javelin doesn't reach far enough.

Oh right, you had a Javelin. Ah well, Natasha can survive on her own.

So much for the bolt of lightning.

Neimi stands here. I believe this is the correct position to attract the attention of the Knight.

Had I moved someone else first, I might also have shot at the Priest, but meh.

Lute takes this guy, incidentally.

Natasha moves and uses the Torch staff again, this time to see what's going on with the boss.

Just one flunky? Those forests will give ample ways to deal with Novala himself.

So, Claude?

Novala isn't actually that shoddy a caster. He will melt at the sight of two physical weapons, but he can take one and sting you on the rebound. That 99 Hit, on the other hand...

At any rate, Eirika can't reach him, so here she is dealing with the troubadour.

I'm not going to lie, I felt dirty having Eirika kill a Troubadour. Even though she hasn't started talking to L'Arachel yet.

At least I got this.

All right, so somewhere around here...

AHA! There you are. The Bael Novala wanted to feed the family to has indeed been scritching closer every turn since the battle started. If the spider gets close enough to get into green unit vision, the family will cry out, but the peaks have slowed it down enough that we stopped it before it even became that much of an issue.

It can't really hit Vanessa, but because of the high Avoid bonus of peaks, Vanessa's having problems hitting too.

Neimi's not doing much better against the knight, but she's not got better things to do.

...OK, dealing with this guy is a good call. Although, if possible, perhaps I should've attacked from the south and let the Knight hit back?

Natasha Torches Novala. This doesn't do damage (although technically speaking, an enemy standing on top of a Torch tile is a really good outcome for long, complicated reasons that I'm not going to be exploiting at all), but it does give Natasha vital EXP.

And Lute comes down to deal with the Knight anyway. And also this guy. Might as well, I guess.

Well, let's keep going with this matchup, then.

That's annoying. But only annoying.

Oh, come on.

Hitting Lute hard, but sticking to her main four stats. She's picked and chosen.

Why weren't you? Why do villains love delegating all their work so much?

...Right, power hunger.

The least you could've done is manage a 73% hit.

(...It's kinda impressive that 63% turns almost exactly into 73% with True Hit- precisely, it's 72.99%, but close enough.)

Neimi shoots back.

But fortunately, we have one turn to go to do a bunch of stuff.

Like getting more Magic on Natasha.

And killing this spider. Not actually necessary- all you need to do to save the family is not let them die. But still, now there is one less bael in the world.

There's the triumphant refrain kicking in! Nothing else left but to take Novala down.

You call yourself a master magician?

Because you didn't do anything.

Oh hey, there's some Skill. Funny.

We got the hostages out, thankfully.

I would be surprised if you weren't.

Saving the family gets you a reward. Perhaps this event was only added for the reward, but it's more than worthwhile. Although it bothers me somewhat that this is the second time a prototype has revealed it was impossible to save people it was possible to save in the final release (the first instance being over in Chrono Trigger). I mean... at least the devs are improving over the course of the game's development?

The Orion's Bolt is a promotion item for checks notes... Archers. Yes, just Archers. You see, in FEs 6 and 7, there was a class called "Nomad" that was based on the mounted archers of the Mongol Plains. The devs apparently either didn't have room for them in terms of "how many party members they wanted to include" or "finding the country to justify such a heavily culture-inspired design" (all Nomads come from the Mongol-inspired Sacae and have a strong identity of such), so there are no Nomads in FE8- although their promotion, Nomad Trooper, did get de-Mongol-fied and repurposed.

Oh, and by the way, Neimi's also the only Archer we get. FEs 6 and 7 included more than one Archer, but FE8's smaller cast also means less representatives in each class. Both of these facts combined to give us... a promotion item that only works on Neimi. If you're not using Neimi long term (which is... most people), you can just sell this freely. We'll be using it, though.

Sure, Seth. Blame Eirika's dad. Whatever lets you sleep at night.

This is the point where I wish I caught Eirika in a blink frame, because that's about how I'm feeling.

"And have been for the past four chapters."

Basic principles we're starting at here, aren't we?

There's a niggling idea of mine that Seth held off on the exposition so Eirika would still believe it's in the temple when Natasha asked about it last chapter. I'm going to hope there's a better reason than that, but this leg of the plot is a little hastily rewritten around the corners...

Renais decided to use trickery to hide the Sacred Stone. Jehanna does, too. Grado, Frelia and Rausten keep the Stones where they say they do- at least in Grado's case, this might be by design, because they actually use the Stone for things other than "ancient artefact to be kept sealed at all costs."

Seth says "infinitely complex lock", but how it was forged is left unquestioned. At the very least, it is assumed by all involved, including the villains, that breaking this lock is out of the question.

Fado told Seth and a few other higher-ups.

Definitely the right call on that one.

...A bit of a weird assumption, but definitely a phrase to write down. This belief is founded in later plot developments.

So, to recap, the only things between Grado and the Sacred Stone of Renais are the bracelets. One of which belongs to a man out in the wilderness trying to attack Grado directly and succeeding entirely due to player character power, the other belonging to a woman who is unaware of just how precariously some very severe consequences are perched on her head.

And Seth did not think the first time they lost it was a good time to enlighten her.

In peacetime, admittedly, it's probably a very good idea this is on a need-to-know basis. On the other hand, I don't exactly think I'd trust the people wearing the bracelets to be left out of the loop, because of exactly the reasons Eirika demonstrated in the story- if Eirika doesn't think the bracelet is irreplacable, she's liable to discard it if something "higher priority" comes up.

In wartime, of course, there are a lot more of those kinds of "higher priority" issues that a token keepsake is easily discardable for.

OK, I'm not going to leave Fado blameless here, but Seth, it didn't occur to you that we were in great peril anytime sooner than this? Ignore the Prologue, where Renais was destroyed. Ignore the bandit attacks. What about, you know, the sudden reappearance of monsters in Chapter 4? Or when Natasha exposited that Vigarde's goal was exactly this?

I thought you were the smart one.

Oh yeah, by the way, let's not ignore that. That bracelet is doomed as hell. Or at least should be.

...What kind of secret keeping practices are those? Perhaps Fado deserves a little more of the blame...

Seth. I want to bring up something relevant.

Why do you think you're the only one who knows about the bracelets? I, and I think most players, assumed that the reason Grado figured this out is because Orson was also one of the secret-keepers and he blabbed when he turned traitor, but I don't think this is actually an explicit connection the game draws. Which, naturally, leaves the open question of how Grado figured it out. In the end, if it's not that, either the information got tortured out of Fado before they killed him, or Lyon figured it out through the similarities of the magic between the bracelets and the lock- a lock there's no guarantee he found without knowing it's there, and he hasn't seen the bracelets in over a year.

So yeah... Seth, now might be a good time to remember if anyone else knows about the bracelets.

True statement: We don't know why he's destroying the Sacred Stones. We know he is, and we would really like to stop him, but the why sounds like it's important to figure out.

"Or he could do it in public, is there any real reason not to?"

So what's this about not trusting information Grado people tell you?

At any rate, hurrying to Prince Ephraim and ascertaining the safety of his bracelet is paramount. Sure, they can't get in with half the lock, but it's better they have less parts of the key rather than more. After all, if they seize control of Ephraim's bracelet, there's only one point of failure on our side.

...I did kill everyone. Feel slightly better about killing the two healers, too.

On the other hand, if they have the power to do that, we've already lost. They have control over the bracelet. That's that. We know, thanks to Colm, that there's no "only the owner can remove it" enchantment. If Ephraim is a prisoner, we've lost the bracelet. Simple as that.

Which means that thing we've been doing is exactly the right call all along.

Next time: Eirika gets to Renvall.