What Is A Guardian?
One thing I did notice, was while I can see the optional boss Lord Ochu in the center of the forest. The actual forest itself was basically double in size than in the game. I planned to use this time to grind for a little while, gain some levels, and get out of the ice section of my sphere grid. One thing I will say is that it seems like I have an easier time leveling since I have such a giant sphere grid to get through, I get three moves per level, rather than one.
I did want to delve into the other summons that I will have access to asap. So, another session of grinding ensued to gain levels, spheres, drops, new abilities, and the like. What ended up being about half a day of grinding, finally got me a complete snowflake on the sphere grid. I now have access to an ability called [Summon Frost Being] and [Ice Manipulation].
This ability allows me to summon most creatures I could think of that aligned with the ice element. For example, I could summon ice fairies, or a frost wyvern. I could even summon an Ice dragon, but the limits are on the amount I can summon. Granted, I'm sure that I could summon more than that once I get stronger, but for now, there are hard limits depending on the strength of the summon.
Like the ice dragon, I can only summon one since it had strength on par with an Aeon. A much weaker Aeon for sure, but an Aeon nonetheless. And I can still make my summons stronger as long as I add more mana into the spell. Ice manipulation just allowed me to shape and utilize ice in many forms, and in many ways. It heavily relied on my imagination.
The next few sections of the sphere grid, since mine wasn't all over the place with a bunch of branching paths, but rather, had several shapes that were separated by a straight line. They contained the same spells, but different elements, like fire, water, lightning, earth, lava. Etc. Then further down, are more unique summons when I get to elements that are like dark, light, life, death, etc.
I couldn't wait to get to that point, and while I could grind for a long period of time until I was extremely over leveled, I kept it in moderation and just completed the fire part of the sphere grid in the shape of a flame. The next was water, and after that was lightning. It took less time than I would have thought, but it's all the more reason for this grind.
This helped out my party a bunch as well, but they controlled their own sphere grids, I had no say in it. The next step was to take on Lord Ochu, in the center of the forest. I didn't feel like taking too long on the fight, so my party, and some crusaders just watched in awe, as I summoned a bunch of flame swordsmen and archers to attack Lord Ochu at once.
It didn't even last a minute. I did get lucky on the drops and got a map, some dark matter, and surprisingly, a winning formula. (This threw me for a loop when I used the random number generator for drops.) I was honestly stunned when I saw it, it came in a box that had a vial with golden liquid in it. I know this is a material to customize weapons with triple overdrive, I wonder what else I could do with it. The map as well, it detailed some of the other locations in the forest, including some other optional bosses, and some treasure chest. When we come back here, I'll check them out.
I stored everything away and continued on our journey, grabbing Lulu's hand, and casually walking the straight path towards the exit of the forest. One thing I decided to do was give Yuna two ice fairies that would follow her around.
It was a gift to her, and for her own protection. Kimahri and Lulu understood the underlying meaning. Once we got to the stairs of the temple, Wakka, the Aurochs, Tidus, and even Yuna wanted to race up the stairs. Since I knew there would be a sinspawn, I got ready to summon, but decided to let everyone else fight this one.
While the world is game like, that doesn't mean this won't help mature Tidus faster if he actively helps in fighting this thing. I'll just make sure nobody is in serious danger, and just use a few summons to help out. This boss might be stronger than in the game for all I knew.
When I saw every one of them run up except Tidus who was catching up, I started walking up the stairs, not giving away that I knew what was going to happen. Then Wakka yelled at us, saying there was a sinspawn, and the rest of us rushed up the stairs. I noticed that Yuna had two frost shields around her, the fairies already doing their job. I heard that iconic screen crack, and the fight began.
One of the biggest differences in this fight was that there wasn't just one of the tentacles sinspawn, no, there were two. So, it was decided that I would take one on myself, with Lulu supporting me, and everyone else would take on the other one. I wasted no time and decided to summon an ice wyvern, I would save summoning the dragon for a later time.
A large snowflake spell circle shown below me and Lulu since she was right next to me. It started to disperse into blue light and coalesce into the air, before the ice wyvern was summoned, and flew in to attack its target. The Wyvern looked like a smaller version of Valefor, but with more draconic features, and claws connected to its wings in place of hands.
It was royal blue in color, roared to the sky when it was summoned. I could summon one more wyvern, but I think the current one has enough impact. Yuna followed up by summoning Valefor to help out with their sinspawn fight. Lulu wasn't sitting idle either, she was casting blizzara, thundara, and other elemental spells while the sinspawn's focus was elsewhere.
My wyvern shot several ice beams at the sinspawn to keep it frozen in place. It honestly shouldn't come as a surprise when I saw that they were actually frozen, but I didn't expect it to work. I welcomed it with open arms though when I saw it.
Once Yuna summoned Valefor, she had its overdrive ready, and decided to utilize it here. My wyvern, apparently not wanting to be outdone, did one of its own. It took a deep breath as icy wind started to gather around its body, and it spit out an ice variant of the energy ray that Valefor uses. Instead of the earth exploding underneath the sinspawn though, it just freezes it in place, then cracks it into pieces. Once Lulu and I's target was taken out, I turned around to see Tidus finishing off their target with a spiral cut.
"I told ya he has potential. The kid managed to fend for himself pretty well." Everyone agreed with my point this time, and Wakka even commended him for it. Sadly, neither of these damn bosses dropped anything, curse my luck, must have used it all up last time. (Sucks to suck mate, can't help ya there. For reference, the number 1 means no drops, I had set both of the sinspawn to drop three things out of six randomly chosen drops that would make sense for them to drop. I got 1 six times. So I can't tell if the luck is down bad, or down horrendous.)
"So, what are sinspawn anyway?" Our resident blonde chocobo warrior askes the age-old question.
"Fiends. They fall from Sin's body and are left behind in its wake." Our resident gothic well of knowledge graces us with this information.
"Leave 'em alone, and SIn comes back for 'em. You gotta be quick!" The red chocobo blitzballer actually said something pretty useful. 'Hey!' I think I may have said that one out loud because I could see everyone laughing at Wakka, and him giving me an angry, but not really angry, look. I just chuckled and started heading up the stairs.
I conjured up some constructs to help fix the destruction we left in wake to make things easier on the managers of the temple. Once we were on the final set of stairs, Wakka started asking Tidus about Zanarkand. This was where he would lead himself into the delusion of Chappu possibly still being alive.
I just sighed, and Lulu voiced out all the facts, and really hit him hard, verbally speaking. It wasn't as bad as the original, where she went on and on about his hope that Chappu was still alive, she just told him that he's dead, end of story, Sin didn't keep him somewhere and drag him through time.
Of course this is the situation where just Wakka and Yuna believe that Tidus actually came from Zanarkand, of course I believe it too, but I didn't voice that. I would just let Lulu, and Kimahri see for themselves the truth later on. Speaking of which, I wonder how Auron will react when he finds out that Tidus is already a guardian. That's something I gotta see.