This is not the chicken breast I wanted

by Zar'ral Helvimtor

We reach Padstow and turn in our Rice Breed heads for a tidy sum of gil and return our mountaineering equipment to get some money back.

We board an airship bound for Crysteria to see if we can find any books containing lore about the primal crystals, records of the primals they contain, or instances of crystals appearing on people. We part ways with Gilbert as he doesn’t want to fly.

Aboard the airship, we speak to an old man looking for a weapon called Fiendscythe, one of Arrex’s fellow Dark Knights who’s too busy being edgy to pay any attention to us, a bunch of adventurers heading to Crysteria to take part in the Holy Blood Bowl festival, and Cid Raines, the owner of the airship company we’re flying with. Cid very kindly gives us free passage for life for helping refuel his airship that one time, which is very lucky considering none of us purchased passage for this particular trip.

Vex decides to pay a visit to Cid’s private chambers so I very generously furnish him with a flask of olive oil for his health.

Checking out the White Mage guild, we find that they’re all out overseeing the festival. Since it’s due to start soon we decide to sign ourselves up and take part.

We learn that the ‘festival’ is sanctioned wholesale slaughter of the local fauna and flora, with cash prizes for all participants based on the scale of carnage they create, ranging from tier 1 (babby monsters) to tier 5 (big daddy OG monsters). The participants with the most impressive kill will receive a magic item.

We begin the festival on our chocobos with the goal of reaching some of the tougher monsters before our opposing adventurer groups. The first thing we encounter is a bunch of tier 1 imps, which we deem to be a waste of our time and resources and dash past them. Anyone that runs into trouble with these things shouldn’t have been signed up in the first place.

As we’re getting past the imps, we’re ambushed by harpies. They’re not a huge threat, being only tier 2, but Vex, Rex, and I still fall prey to their feminine bird wiles. We overcome them with some small amount of difficulty, but emerge mostly unscathed.

Pressing on, we see a great hideous purple giant thing ahead, while behind us we notice a full group of our fellow adventurers have been taken down by some displacer beasts. I immediately move back to protect the fallen group, as I have little to no interest in money when more important things are on the line. Vex is shocked by this, apparently having assumed that my general shadiness and morally unclear background meant that I was just some greedy vagabond in a nice coat.

The party splits between the displacer beasts and the giant. Vex, Rex, and I believe we can handle the displacers between us, while Zef goes to earn our group some credit on the tier 4 giant. Kupo remains between us to provide support.

The giant proves to be more formidable than we expected, even with another small group of adventurers battling it alongside us. Kupo is brought down by the giant with some kind of evil bullshit from its eye whilst Zef receives a near-fatal blow, only escaping through his honed jumpy-boi reflexes. He brings Kupo back up with a potion before dashing back into the giant’s range. Meanwhile, just as we’re about to bring down the last displacer beast, a crystal dragon lands right next to us and hits us with a blast of its crystal breath. We just about survive, and quickly finish off the displacer beast before turning out attention to the dragon.

Things are looking pretty dire, as the group we came to save from the displacer beasts now has a dragon looming over them instead, and the giant seems to be overwhelming Zef and the other adventurers. All of us have taken a beating and seem to be nearing our limits, and it seems that the best we can do is draw the dragon’s attention and hope another group will rescue the fallen party. In the background, we hear a horn sounding the retreat: apparently this dragon was not part of our scheduled activities. We see monsters and adventurers alike falling back from our location as we begin to put our last-ditch plan into effect.

Beset on both sides by massive, terrifying monsters, I notice that Kupo suddenly has an arrow made of what I can only assume to be the Sun nocked in his bow. He lets it loose and it sails right through me, Vex, Rex, Zef, the dragon, and the giant, flooding us with energy. Our wounds close and our energy returns while the dragon and giant reel in pain. With renewed vigor, Zef and the other adventurers bring down the giant. Zef then joins our fight with the dragon while we send the others away to safety. Bringing our full force to bear on it, we bring it close to death before it tries to fly away- a big mistake, as Zef leaps up to deal it a plunging death blow.