An Excerpt – The Bartender Skirmish

<The following is an excerpt from the final chapter of ‘And so, the Chair Shattered the Moon: Tales of the Second Era, Volume 1’ by Ernest Boyle.>

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The final tale we will take a closer look at comes from the former town of Vazio. Vazio was, for lack of a better term, a mistake. During the First Era, beasts were unnaturally common within forests, not to mention excellent places for ambushes, making them near impossible to settle in the war-torn past. With the rise of kingdoms in the Second Era, many tried to establish what they called ‘fortress towns’: independent governing bodies with garrisons in potential hotspots to warn of any incoming dangers. While there were many successes, some of which turned the country of Tengah into the superpower it is today, Vazio was one of the few where there ended up being zero activity. In the end, the town was abandoned due to the forceful reorganization following the Godless Massacre.

According to leaked internal reports, Vazio was supposed to be relocated sometime after the moon’s destruction. A few documents indicated a five year plan to move resident’s to a much more connected area, increasing its potential growth. However, these plans were later scrapped after a coordinated push towards using the place as a staging ground to train dungeon suppression personnel, or adventurers in layman's terms. As reported, this tale was supposedly the cause of that effort.

About fifteen years after the moon was shattered, a small skirmish had broken out just outside the town of Vazio. It was an act of war perpetrated by the Adventurer God, whose name remains unknown. They led a group of a hundred people from Mutan and launched a one-sided assault early in the morning on one Autumn day. As we talked about before, this was a complete surprise given the strong phobia against people with mutations at the time. The Adventurer God back then was known to have an extreme dislike of them, enough to kill any on sight, so it was strange that they would recruit anyone from Mutan. The reason behind their alliance was lost to the sands of time, but some speculate the Adventurer God threatened the people to comply or die, given their actions. The battle that took place became known as the Bartender Skirmish.

Why was it called the Bartender Skirmish? Well, according to reports made by Vazio’s Dungeon Suppression Administration, the Adventurer God started the assault all to kill one bartender hired by the branch: Melora Remuno. The reason was never expounded upon, nor were historians able to agree on a likely motive – she had no known mutations. It was simply written off as a whim given the Adventurer God’s temperament. The battle itself only lasted a few hours, ending when…