Part 9: The Escape

A bishop shows up from the right side of the map.



I was making plans to rescue you, but apparently there is no need for that now. ...You look upset, but I am glad to see you are safe.
August... I've never hated the Empire as much as I do now. They killed my parents, and they even took away the one person who I could call my mother. I hate the Empire...and I hate that Reidric, who follows its commands to do evil. Tell me, August. How can I fight against them? I would do anything to get her back. Please tell me, August!
Eyvel has been turned to stone? If that is the case, I am afraid there is nothing we can do.
! ...What do you mean? Is there no way to bring her back!?
A certain staff called the Kia can revive petrification.



I have heard rumors of a secret Lopto temple in the underground of the Yied desert. They say that the statues of various warriors are kept there. I have even heard that the statues include the captives of the war in Barhara from a decade ago. I am sure that Eyvel's statue will be taken there as well.

That... That's impossible!
I understand your anger, but those 'impossible' things that you speak of are currently happening, Lord Leaf. Already, thousands...no, tens of thousands of children have been kidnapped from this land of Thracia and taken to the Imperial Capitol of Barhara. Areas like Manster and Lenster have been hit particularly hard because of the strong Lopto influence on them... Children are seldom seen there any more.
Are the parents just sitting there watching? Why won't they stand up and fight!?
Of course they are putting up some resistance, but they are still ordinary citizens. They are no match for the Imperial Army or the Lopto Church. If they are not killed on the spot, they are taken away to concentration areas where they are mass-executed. Lopto's mage army, the Schwarze Rosen, is especially cruel. If one villager tries to oppose them, the entire population is burned alive. It is almost a reiteration of the Dark Ages... People have lost their will to resist and have become slaves for those in power.
How...cruel.
Yes. Northern Thracia used to be a land of blue skies and rich greenery, but now it is covered in an endless cloud of darkness. Lord Leaf, I understand your concern for Eyvel, but you have more important deeds to attend do.



And you are the perfect example, Lord Leaf. Being the son of the tragic heroes Cuan and Ethlin, you automatically have the right to unite the people. Do you understand? If you stand up, the rebel forces of Northern Thracia will come together to form a single force that will have the power and ability to drive out the Empire and the Lopto Church.
...I haven't given up saving Eyvel, but I understand what you're saying. If you want me to lead the liberation of Northern Thracia, then I'll do it. Rebuilding Lenster and leading its army to defeat the Empire... That was a dream Finn and I have been talking about for years!



Yes... I wanted to hear that resolve from you. For now, we must escape.
There are soldiers everywhere coming after us. Is there a safe way out?
I suggest using the side gate in the east. The problem will be getting through the castle undertown. If a guard sees us, he will call for reinforcements, making our escape that much more difficult.

More like that much more awesome

So we have to go unnoticed by the guards... That will be tough.



We can fly over the castle walls, so no one will notice us.

All right, then we won't have to fight. But will you be all right?
Hermes is saying he'll do his best. Pegasi usually only allow women to ride them, but he says he'll bear with us for now. Good boy.
...I suppose we can rely on her for our escape. Now, the question is getting through the castle town...

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Our goal here is to escape from either of the two black arrows I've so elegantly added with Microsoft Paint. There's also a scattering of villages we need to visit, marked with the blue arrows.



Here's the main group of enemies, located directly to the west of our main force. We don't want to take them on here, the terrain isn't suited to fighting off large numbers of enemies (no chokepoints), and the two bishops at the back of their forces have Meteor.

You can also see Redric and a staff user in the upper left, an area which is inaccessible to us.



Truman's the map's boss, and is embedded somewhere in the center of the main force.



Down the center corridor we've got a scattering of armors and soldiers.



Our forces heads toward the side door. We'll be heading through the two doors here, into the center area, so as to get around the large enemy group.



We keep on moving. The structure shown here is our supply, the supply holds our excess items.



Eyvel's inventory's been sent to the supply, the fire sword in particular will be helpful. The fire sword is a sword with a long-ranged magic attack, similar to the light sword.



Nanna takes the rest.



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Three units show up to the north-east in an inaccessible part of the castle.

Sorry, Bishop, I'm afraid I gave you an extra burden.
Galzus, was it? Were you not hired by Lord Redric? Why did you save this girl? Do you know her?
No... That's not the case.
...I see. It is a rather large burden for one traveling alone, but I shall take care of her nonetheless. Farewell, Galzus!



Cyas and Marita warp away now.



Okay, seriously, what's his deal?

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It's our turn, and an enemy soldier is in range of Fergus and his now ridiculous 9 move.



Fergus successfully captures the soldier.



Bryton takes the soldier from Fergus, takes his items, drops the soldier, and moves into the bottleneck. Meanwhile, Lifis visits the village.

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We get a Rapier from this, a light and accurate but very weak sword. The rapier is also effective against mounted units and armors, and has a 10% crit chance. Fergus is going to make good use of this, a 10% critical chance becomes 100% with his PCC.

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Now that we've attacked a guard, the jig is up and the main force is heading our way. However, Truman and the bishops are left behind, which will make things easier on us. As well, the rows of houses provide plenty of bottlenecks to wring the enemies through.



While the main force moves, a brave soldier from the south decides to pick a fight with Karin.



It ends poorly for him.



Doesn't go so great for this armor either.



Now it's our turn, Bryton heads to the nearby house.

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Thanks to you, I was able to hide him in safe place, along with the other children. I'm Hicks, an Axe Knight of Manster. I was thinking it was about time to teach that Redric a lesson. I'll fight alongside you.

Alternatively, if we'd been stupid and hadn't saved the children back in 4x, we'd get this instead.

Get out of my house! You call yourself the Liberation Army, when you can't even save one kid? You people sicken me!

Not quite as friendly. Every house here's reward is conditional on having saved the children back in 4x, and so you better hope you didn't abandon the children, because some of these villagers have some really useful items.

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Our turn ends like this, with Fergus in range to bait out an enemy armor, and the rest of the gang waiting for the main enemy thrust to reach us. Not shown in Nanna healing Bryton back to full health.



No surprises here. The Rapier's coming in handy already.



They're coming.



Karin flies to a village, her role in the map is to use her flying horsie to visit all the hard to reach villages. As a flier, Karin is completely uninhibited by terrain of any sort. This goes two ways though, she also doesn't get stat bonuses from advantageous terrain.

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A spooky disembodied voice thanks us.



We proceed to get a Knight's proof. Knight's Proofs promote first tier units above level 10. There's a limited amount of these throughout the game, so they're quite valuable.

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Fergus moves down to hang out with Karin, while Makua moves into the bottleneck for the upcoming enemy assault. Asvel moves into the upper bottleneck.









I meant for this mage to attack Asvel, but I accidentally left Leaf in his range.







Karin dives bombs a mage and then continues on her quest. I'm putting a small amount of faith in her here, she's going to be attacked by 4 enemies.



Asvel attacks the armor who's armor Makua slightly dinged earlier. He's left with 16hp.



Makua's gunning for the mage.



[Hp: 27, Str: 5, Mgc: 2, Skl: 15, Spd: 15 Luk: 10, Def: 5, Bld: 7]

(I'm trying out a new format for showing level ups, bold means a stat increased. Also this is a bad level, bad Makua.)



Brtyon takes Makua's place and exchanges blows with the weakened armor. He too is unsuccessful.



And so he retreats to the back lines, for his own protection and for healing.



Hicks takes a swing at the incredibly tenacious enemy armor. Yet again, a miss. Hicks falls back to give someone else a turn.



Oh for fuck's sake.



Leaf of all people finally manages to put the armor to rest. [Hp: 34, Str: 8, Mgc: 0, Skl: 4, Spd: 12, Luk: 11, Def: 7, Bld: 6.] Not bad, Leaf's got decent speed and defense, so he has some durability.



It's Dashin's turn to play tank. I decide against attacking here, no sense risking some damage for a not even guaranteed 11 damage.



On the enemy phase though, Dashin and the armor duke it out. Dashin wins.



Karin's about to be swarmed.



This may not have been the best plan.



A second armor takes his turn, thankfully missing.



Yeah this isn't good. Not good at all





And we live to fight another day! I think dodging an inaccurate, potentially fatal blow makes for a good segue into true hit. True hit is kind of hard to explain, because when it comes to Thracia 776, there's nothing to explain. A 26% hit chance means a 26% of hitting. (Later games in the series have a hidden true hit system, where two random numbers are averaged to determine if an attack connects. This makes hit chances lower than 50 less accurate than they appear, and hit chances greater than 50 more accurate than they appear. This generally favors you, which is why there's no chance it would show up in Thracia 776.)



The enemies keep forcing their way into the bottleneck. I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder if they were smart enough to go around. I mean, they could surround us, but at the same time they'd just be making three fairly weak fronts for us to cut through. Anyways, doing so occurred to one bright mage, who's heading around south towards Asvel.





Karin breaks through the enemies surrounding her and moves to the other side of the wall.



Leaf attacks the armor directly across from him with his Light Sword.



Makua takes down the mage.



She's in range of another mage, so I have Dashin rescue her. (He's not in range.)



Fergus successfully captures the armor leading the charge.



Bryton takes Makua. Up north, Hicks takes the captured armor from Fergus, and takes away his armorslayer. We don't want Fergus to have the armorslayer equipped while acting as our tank. He can kill anyone who attacks him, which isn't good when they can all do some fairly hefty damage to him.



Oh god damn it. I thought I had taken away his armorslayer, but guess not





Well there's one attack that would have killed me. Instead, I get a level! [HP: 30, Str: 13, Mgc: 2, Skl: 11, Spd: 10, Luk: 11, Def: 6, Bld: 10]. Strength is nice, otherwise meh.



And a second.



Well, let's see how long you can dodge for Fergus.



I really shouldn't be alive. That makes three that should have killed me.



Thank god.





Well, that's one way to take care of things.



On our turn, Karin moves into range of one armor and heals up with a vulnerary.



Bryton and Makua are going to take care of the three enemies Karin left weakened.





Meanwhile, Hicks attacks one of the two remaining bow armors and a healed Fergus attempts to capture it. For his efforts, he gets [Hp: 31, Str: 14, Mgc: 2, Skl: 11, Spd: 11, Luk: 11, Def: 7, Bld: 10]. Fergus's strength is fantastic, and the rest ain't so shabby either.



Asvel finishes the job Fergus failed.



Dashin attacks the last bow armor but misses.



With the majority of the enemies taken care of, our forces start heading south to escape. We're going to go out the eastern door and out the small south-eastern exit.







[Hp: 27, Str: 10, Mgc: 7, Skl: 9, Spd: 20, Luk: 18, Def: 5, Bld: 4]. Kind of disappointing, although in her defense she doesn't actually have the Hezul scroll I said she would. I gave it to Makua because she was 12exp from a level to start with, but it took her long enough to level that it was too late to give it to Karin afterwards.



She moves out of the range of any enemies.



With Hicks' help, Fergus captures the bow armor.



Makua's going to bait out the soldier. Meanwhile, Lifis picks the eastern door's lock.



Makua does what I had planned, nothing else happens on the enemy phase. On the player phase, Karin heads for another village.

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Someone named a kid boy?

Thank you so much. Please take this magical book as a sign of my gratitude. I hear it has special powers, so I hope it will be of some use to you...

We get the Elite book, a consumable that teaches the elite skill to a character of your choice. Some of you may know Elite by its modern name, Paragon. Elite doubles all experience gained. So yeah, this is an incredibly useful item, and borderline impossible to bring yourself to use.

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We keep on heading towards the eastern gate.





[Hp: 28, Str: 5, Mgc: 2, Skl: 15, Spd: 15, Luk: 10, Def: 5, Bld: 7]. Well that's just terrible. You even have the Hezul scroll Makua.



Bryton's going to take out the last armor, but before that Karin's going to visit another village.

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Here, I'll give you this. I found it in my backyard the other day. It looks like a page torn out of a book or something. I hope it'll be of some use to you!

We get the Odo scroll, which boosts skill growth by 30%. On the other side of the map, Hicks visits another village.




We're poor, so we can't give you anything much, but please take this Holy Water as a symbol of my gratitude.

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We keep heading towards the exit.



Bryton does his thing, killing the armor. [Hp: 30, Str: 8, Mgc: 0, Skl: 7, Spd: 9, Luk: 2, Def: 7, Bld: 14]. Meh, not bad, but not great either.



Karin bums a vulnerary from Byrton and moves into range of the last armor.



[Hp: 20, Str: 4, Mgc: 6, Skl: 9, Spd: 9, Luk: 12, Def: 4, Bld: 5]



We keep marching towards freedom.





That's not good.



Each cavalier is equipped with a Long lance, which are quite powerful.



Karin makes short work of the lance armor.





Retreat!







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There's no way this is going to end well for us, is there?





Galzus is warped into the main part of the map. He's pretty much a time limit on the map; we need to get out fairly soon.

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Bryton fights one of the cavaliers, the rest just swarm the area. Unfortunately, Bryton seems to have gotten boxed in.





He dismounts, and Karin rescues him, letting Hicks safely deposit him in our back lines.



Beyond that, Dashin moves the bottleneck back slightly, and any non-essential personnel make for the exit.













None of them prove much of a threat.



[Hp: 26, Str: 0, Mgc: 8, Skl: 7, Spd: 15, Luk: 8, Def: 3, Bld: 4]. Not bad, but far overshadowed by +1 Mov!.

Anyways, three cavaliers left, here's how it goes.











And we're done.



Galzus hasn't been moving every turn, which is why he's still fairly far away. Anyways, let's take care of any last business. First, there's an armory.



As you can see, axes are half the cost of anything else, which is pretty useful. I have some chump change from hocking some broken weapons and a slim sword, but I don't buy anything yet. With that out of the way, let's escape.





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W-We're sorry, sir!
Command General Eisenhow to lead his troops and pursue him immediately! It will be a pain if Leaf escapes into Thracian land.
Yes, sir.
By the way, what happened to that Mareeta girl? I haven't seen her...
Well, I was going to tell you, but... The guards were ambushed, and she was taken...
You are all so useless! Do you not have any idea at all who did it!?
Whoever did was clearly a very skilled individual. Some people say that they saw that mercenary, Galzus, near the scene... Are you sure he can be trusted, my lord?
Hm... Galzus...
Some claim that they saw the markings of Ordo on his back. If that's true, it means he is of the royal family of Isaac...
Hmph, I am not so foolish as to hire a mercenary of unknown origins. Yes, he is part of the Isaac family. He is the prince of the now demolished Kingdom of Libo. He is in fact the cousin of Prince Shanan of Isaac.
Isn't Prince Shanan one of the leaders of the rebel forces against the Empire? Is it safe to hire one of his relatives into our service?
Do you not know anything? The Kingdom of Libo, Galzus' country, was invaded and destroyed by Isaac's forces, led by Shanan's grandfather. Galzus was put through many hardships since he was a youth because of that. Do you really think he would help Shanan?



So Galzus and Marita obviously have some kind of hidden connection. Oh well, I doubt it'll ever be relevant.

What?
No, it is nothing. Anyway, don't worry about Galzus. That girl is of no use to us any more. However, we can't afford to lose Galzus, so don't do anything to him.

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New Recruits



Hp: 80% Spd: 30%
Str: 35% Lck: 55%
Mag: 5% Def: 30%
Skl: 40% Bld: 30%
Mov: 1%

Weapon Ranks: C (Axes), E (Swords) Movement stars: 0 Skills: None PCC:2

Another Axe Knight, Hicks is a painfully boring unit. There's nothing that bad about him, his growths are serviceable, although his bases are kind of low, but there's not much interesting going on with him. He's got no skills, no movement stars, and a poor PCC. He's just there.

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Viewer Participation Time:

We've got ourselves a far bigger issue on our hands than we've ever had before. This chapter, two interesting things happened. First of all, Asvel hit level 10, and secondly, we got our first Knight's proof. The thing is, Asvel happens to be a fanastic character to promote early. He promotes into a sage, who have absolutely insane promotion bonuses. They are as follows: +0str, +5mag, +5skl, +6spd, +4def, +1 bld, and +1 mov, which are high enough that it may not even be worth leveling him any more in his first tier. After all, stats only cap at 20. Here's a comparison between what Asvel would look like if we promoted him now, versus at level 20.

Asvel, 10/20: Hp: 36.45, Str: 1.9, Mag: 19.45, Spd: 20*, Luk: 14.65, Def: 8.9, Bld: 6.9
Asvel, 20/20: Hp: 41.95, Str: 2.9, Mag: 20, Spd: 20*, Luk: 18.15, Def: 9.9, Bld: 7.9

So, the early promoted Asvel would have -5.5hp, -1Str, -0.55Mag, -3.5Luk, -1 Def, -1 Bld, compared to 20/20 Asvel. Now, strength and build are unimportant for a mage, and the magic gap is barely noticeable. He'll cap magic either way due to scrolls. So it's really just -5.5hp, -3.5Luk, and -1Def. *(Speed can't not cap, he'll cap it automatically on promotion due to how high it is now.)

In exchange, we'll gain a very powerful character to lean on very early. As well, Asvel will gain a weapon rank in fire and thunder, letting him use better tomes early. As well, he'll gain a D rank in staffs, giving us a healer who can easily be put in the frontlines, and he'll get a C rank in light magic (not really relevant as we haven't seen any yet.)

So the question is, do we promote him? (I`ll top him off to lvl 11 if yes wins.)

Yes
No

If you vote No, specify if you think he should wait a couple of levels, or if you think we should wait until twenty. I'm not going to split the no vote, but I want to know how to proceed if no wins.



Hypothetical representation of Asvel as a sage _{credit goes to TurnipFritter for the photoshop earlier in the thread.}

(Oh hey, vote on the Odo scroll too. +30 to skl, in case you forgot.)

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Current Resets: 0

Next time on Thracia 776: Going gambling with some old friends.