Disclaimer: I still don't own Golden Sun
Chapter 1
No sooner had the pair passed through the main gate of New Vale and each laid a hand on the welcoming psyenergy pillar in the main square of the town did they hear the loud beats of a galloping horse on the road. A crowd quickly gathered, wondering who would be in such a hurry to reach the small and relatively peaceful town. Isaac saw several of his closest friends among the crowd; the red haired Mars adept Garet and his Mercury adept wife Mia, the Jupiter adepts Ivan and Sheba, and Jenna's brother, the Venus adept Felix. Piers had returned to Lemuria after the Mars Lighthouse had been lit and had immediately joined the Lemurian Navy. In his own words, "They practically begged me to join."
"Hey Isaac," Garet said, "Looks like somebody wants to get here pretty badly. How far out is he?" Isaac knelt down and placed his hand on the ground, feeling the vibrations in the ground through his psyenergy. The Venus adept stood back up and remarked, "Duck."
Just as he spoke that word, a man on a horse leaped through the gate and landed mere feet from the assembled crowd. "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" the man shouted at the top of his lungs. The rider turned to face the crowd of Valeans, and then collapsed in exhaustion. Almost immediately the crowd flooded over to surround the man, summoning healers over to make sure the rider was still alive. However, nobody expected it when Ivan suddenly reached the man and recognized him. "Bunza?!"
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Bunza slowly woke up much later. Groaning from a dull but throbbing pain, Bunza gathered his bearings and noticed that the people of Vale had taken him from the plaza where he had fallen and placed on a cot in a small, warm wooden house. Bunza tried to pull himself out of the bed, but stopped as a wave of nauseating pain rolled through his body.
"You're going to hurt yourself if you don't just lie down and rest," a voice told him. Bunza saw a young man with blond hair cut in a bowl shape standing over him, holding forward an open vial filled with a blue liquid. "Drink," Ivan said gently, and Bunza gratefully ingested the healing liquid, some of his wounds visually knitting. "Are you okay?" Ivan continued. "Yeah," Bunza nodded, "I'll be all right". Now that the man was visually improving, Isaac stepped forward and asked, "You were in a hurry riding to Vale. Why? Who was chasing you?"
"Lord Hammet sent me," Bunza began with a cough, "a business partner of his was conducting a business deal with a client when their caravan was ambushed. When they found him, the caravan was completely destroyed, the client was missing, and Lord Hammet's friend was found with an arrow in his gut and barely hanging on to life. The poor man told his rescuers soldiers from the Guild of the Illuminated were responsible for the attack. The client was an adept. After that, every merchant caravan doing business with adepts has been attacked in some way."
Bunza paused for breath as his hosts absorbed the information. The Guild of the Illuminated had emerged only two months after the release of the Golden Sun as a small network of rich families which had gotten their wealth through less than respectable ways, and then had quickly an immense amount of power throughout Weyard. The Guild also hired so many mercenary companies that its military power rivaled the armies like Kalay and Tolbi. With nobody knowing the actual intents of the Guild, that power scared people.
"Lord Hammet feels that the Guild is targeting and kidnapping adepts for some reason. Two days after I set out from Kalay, I was nearly ambushed by a small group of men in Guild uniforms. Evading them, I nearly rode into the camp of a large group of soldiers. They were heading this way. I've been riding night and day to reach this town after I saw that force."
Bunza broke off coughing heavily, and Mia, who had been watching farther away with the rest of the adepts, rushed forward, hands emitting the blue glow of her healing psyenergy. Isaac and Ivan turned back to their friends, who all had heard the conversation and fully understood the meaning of the information Bunza had given them.
"Okay," Isaac addressed his friends, "we should probably set up a watch. Get your weapons and meet here as soon as possible. We'll work in three hour shifts through the night. Understood?" The rest nodded. "Good, let's hop to it."
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It was well past midnight when the alarm bells started signaling an attack. Isaac jolted awake, throwing on his cloak and his weapons belt, with several elongated daggers, throwing knives, and his long sword, the Excalibur. Running out of the house, Isaac took the chance to watch the combat taking place between the Valeans and soldiers in the black masks and robes of the Guild.
The adepts were in a well used formation, a larger group holding the center of the line while one or two ensured that the flanks held. Isaac saw that Mia and Garet were holding the left flank, and holding it well, Garet slicing through their attackers with his burning long sword and psyenergy, while Mia watched his back with her own deadly water-based powers and a powerful mace. There were three kinds of bodies that littered the ground around them; burned Guild corpses, frozen corpses, and some showing both types of wounds.
Further on fought Felix, cutting down Guild soldiers with his Sol Blade and hundreds of psyenergy generated stone flechettes he shot from his hands. Above and behind him, Ivan and Sheba floated above the battle, raining lighting and bolts of plasma upon those soldiers unfortunate to be caught in the open. It wasn't necessary to say that the center of their line was secure.
Knowing that Felix and the Jupiter adepts did not need him, Isaac moved on to the remaining position. Jenna was fighting on the right flank alone, yet she seemed to be secure. Jenna fought with the double long weapon style she discovered and quickly mastered in Lemuria, a style best suited for her mentality of speed and power over stationary defense, and had insisted on teaching it to several of her like-minded friends, including Isaac. Signaling his presence, Isaac slipped beside his friend and touched his arm to the Mars adept's, assuring her of his support. The two had practiced this particular technique numerous times in the past, but this was the first time they had actually used it in battle.
The pair of adepts dashed forward into the crowd of Guild soldiers. Jenna lead the attack, bringing her weapons to bear on the closest Guildsman and bashing the man's scimitar up high and numbing his sword arm. Caught at a great disadvantage, the Guildsman was confused when Jenna then pivoted on her right foot and turned left. So confused that when the man brought his weapon back to strike his curiously retreating opponent, he never noticed Isaac's Excalibur plunge into a lung and jerk back out.
The man dropped to the ground, blood frothing from his torn lung. As one, the remaining Guildsmen took a step back, and then charged. Isaac and Jenna took the charge head on, blades flashing and weaving as they continued spinning using each other as a pivot. The pair fought in such a way that no Guild blade got close to scoring a hit on either adept, both covering each other with their blades in an impenetrable defense. Here, a scimitar angled towards Jenna's back was expertly turned aside by Excalibur, which then reversed direction to tear that soldier's throat out. There, a Guildsman moving in to hamstring Isaac found Jenna's Tisiphone's Edge being driven through his lower back, severing the man's spine. It hurt, but only for a moment.
The pair quickly fell into the rhythm of the battle, blades flashing and cutting swaths through the enemy lines. Isaac and Jenna fought in perfect harmony, each supplementing the other's strengths and covering the other's weaknesses. Whereas any competent fighter could easily slip past the defenses of a stationary enemy, the constantly moving adepts exposed no weakness that could be exploited. Those Guild soldiers who tried to died quickly. Those who didn't lived just a little longer.
Before long, the majority of twenty odd Guild soldiers that had attacked them were either dead or dying quickly. "Good exercise, eh?" Jenna said breathlessly. Before Isaac could respond, he spotted a glint of light in the shadows. Isaac took two hundredths of a second to recognize the glint as a crossbow, and less than a second more to realize that the weapon was aimed at his friend. Isaac immediately opened his mouth to cry out a warning as he cocked back his hand and threw the knife in it. Time seemed to crawl to a standstill as Isaac watched his thrown knife carve through the air mere millimeters away from the inbound crossbow bolt.
The weapons struck their respective targets at almost the same time. The knife cleaved into the Guildsman's heart, blasting him backward into a tree, but Isaac did not look or care. The quarrel struck the Mars adept in the chest, knocking her back a foot before she uttered a quiet "Oh" and collapsed. Isaac immediately turned in rage towards the few remaining Guild soldiers, who turned around and ran, but not fast enough, for Isaac raised a hand and with a forceful thought, Briar! thorn-covered vines shot out of the ground and crushed each of the men, spilling their blood on the ground.
Isaac turned towards his fallen friend, cradling her head in his lap and pouring every ounce of strength he had left into the healing spells he cast on her. But it was no use, there was no response, and as Isaac blacked out the last thing he saw was the ground rushing up to meet him.
