Sakura's POV

"What is even happening?! And what do I do?!"

That was what I was asking myself as we were under the Monastery, fighting a bunch of soldiers led by… the Ashen Wolves? Me, Saki, & Ai along with the three House Leaders, Professor Byleth, AND Linhardt, Ashe, and Hilda, decided to check out this underground pathway after Claude said he saw an intruder. I didn't expect to be fighting so late at night, but we're lucky that the Professor had some weapons on hand, (where does he even put those?).

"A fourth house living underneath Garreg Mach? This was highly unexpected." Ai ponders as she dodges a sword slash.

"That big guy looks REAL tough, this might be a little fun, makes staying up worth it!" Saki knocks a guy out as she charges towards that shirtless guy, who's only wearing a jacket over his muscled chest for some reason.

I sighed as I continued fighting on, until I heard Dimitri, "Sakura! Out of the way!", I dodged to the side away from that red headed girl's magic and saw a lever. I pulled it, but nothing happened! That guy with the purple hair mocked us, saying that only they knew how it worked, what a jerk!

"HA!" Saki threw a few punches right into the gut of that big shirtless guy and he was taking them! Though he did stagger a bit.

"Urgh… You've got some guts, I'll give you that much." He said, trying to stand up to continue as Saki grinned, looks like she has another training partner.

We took out a few more guys, leaving those two to keep fighting and then we saw the red head again.

"Come to think of it, there's an easier way to handle this. (sigh)"

And A BIG WORM MONSTER came out of nowhere as she ran away!

"W-W-WHAAAAAAAT?!" I screamed as I tried to run from that thing as rocks flew towards me.

I'm so lucky Byleth was there with his cool whip sword.

"T-thanks, I'm still not used to fighting stuff like this after Miklan." I told him.

"Then stay behind us for now and help take out the other rogues." Edelgard said, running up to me.

Claude and Dimitri followed her and Byleth, surrounding the monster before attacking all at once! It was amazing seeing the four of them do their thing, but I had to keep going so I ran ahead of them and I saw the redhead behind a door.

"Is it too late for me to back out of this fight? I don't want to hurt anyone. But in this case, I guess there's no avoiding it." She doesn't look like she wants to be there, but her magic attacks look so strong! I'm having a bit too much trouble here.

"Allow us to provide some assistance!" I heard Ashe say before I saw him and Ai shooting arrows at the other girl.

"Thanks guys!" I smiled at them, which they returned before I knocked down that redhead a bit too easily.

"This is... boring. Count me out." She stated as she walked away, at least we beat her.

The house leaders and the professor caught up to us after taking down some armored guys as we finally saw Saki joining with us again. We continued on until I saw a blonde, noble-looking girl on top of a pegasus. Next to her, was the smug purple-haired guy we saw earlier.

"We've got this, right Ashe?" Ai asked our classmate who nodded back at her.

That blonde girl shot out a HUGE ice spell that they were barely able to dodge and they fired arrows in her direction, but she dodged too!

"Tremble in fear of my magical might! Ahaha!" Man she sounds a little annoying, but she can definitely back that up.

She shoots fireballs at us, and it's times like this that makes me happy to see Linhardt. He's usually asking us a lot of questions about us being zombies, sleeping in class sometimes, or just spending time with Tatsumi in the library for some reason. After being healed, Byleth just responds back with his whip sword knocking her out of the sky.

"Nice one, Prof.!" Saki yelled as I saw Byleth smile, aww, looks like he's finally opening up!

We finally see the purple guy, holding his silver sword as me and Claude's classmate Hilda went after him, but he's fast! We couldn't get a single hit in on him before he just trips us both!

"Well, what do we have here? Some lost kids stumbling around in the dark. Stay awhile, won't you? Shame indeed not to have a bit of fun with each other while we've got the chance, you know?" He says calmly as he clashes with Dimitri.

"All of them are so tough!" I picked myself off the ground as I talked to Edelgard.

"Indeed, how can we not have known of these four until now?" She responded as Byleth steps in.

The two of them had a sword fight, kinda like in an old action movie, but this was real! I cheered on Byleth until he finally took down that guy and the four of them are together again. The muscle guy says his name was Balthus and then Hilda starts arguing with him, it looks like they know each other!

"Best way to acquaint yourself with someone is to get into a tussle with 'em. That's common sense right there." Balthus says, as a few of us shake our heads.

Ai decides to speak up next, "No, that's really not.", she pinches the spot between her eyes.

"That's the correct response for a reasonable person. We're not all as far gone as Balthus here." The purple-haired guy says, who I learned his name was Yuri later on.

They told us that someone was targeting Abyss, which was where we were right now. It doesn't look like these Wolf-people are bad, but we'll probably run into bad people from what they said. We followed them until we saw this small underground town, with some scary looking people. There was a bar, a big statue, a classroom, a… fortune teller room? Then there was this big library, which I found Linhardt in.

"Oh, Sakura. This is quite the collection of books, I'm sure that a lot of these are ones the Monastery threw out."

"Really? Why do you think that?"

"There's a lot of banned books here, and I haven't found a single one that wasn't already in the monastery! It doesn't look like I'll get any sleep tonight in here."

"Ha ha, yeah seems like it…" Hopefully I won't have to wake him up, or worse, carry him into battle.

"Oh! I almost forgot, me and your… manager? I think is what he calls himself? Anyways, we've been digging around the monastery library for a while now with no luck. But there's plenty of material here where we could maybe find information on that staff you found."

I was about to leave until I heard him, "Wait, that's what you've been doing with Tatsumi?!".

"Keep it down, we're in a library you know."

"S-sorry. You think we can really find something here on that?"

"I said, maybe, which means there is a chance we won't find anything here. Yet since we'll be down here for quite some time, I might as well indulge myself in finding anything useful."

"Alright, then let me know if you find anything Linhardt! Oops, too loud. Thanks."

He just picked up a book when I went out the door and I decided to go back to the classroom to meet these Ashen Wolves, well, meeting them outside of our fight of course.

END OF CHAPTER 19

"I am Ferdinand von Aegir" count x3 (no change)

Constance von Nuvelle laugh count x1