Two months earlier, at night, on a hillside outside Oak Town in southwestern Brown Kingdom.
An Speyer—or rather, Samantha Ann Speyer—had been standing on that hillside for twenty minutes.
She had not gone straight into her hometown.
Part of it was the habit of observation she had developed over nineteen years in the military. More than that, the closer she came to home, the more nervous she felt.
She had kept in touch with her family by letter all these years, but words could not replace seeing them with her own eyes.
How much had her father, mother, and younger brother changed in those nineteen years?
Would they even recognize her when they met again? Would they resent her for taking so long to come home because of the war?
So many emotions weighed on her that the lieutenant general, known throughout the army for her courage and decisiveness, felt strangely vulnerable.
In the end, she pushed those feelings down, took a deep breath, and looked carefully over Oak Town below.
The town was much larger than she remembered.
Five rows of new buildings stood to the west, and the shopping center to the east had been renovated.
What puzzled her was that the money she had sent home should have been enough to build far more.
So why was the town square still in ruins? Why were only a few of the lighting crystals along the roads lit?
And after deducting the funds she had provided for the town's construction, had Baron Fermont of Oak Town truly passed on the rest of the money she had sent—the Allied Forces rewards she had fought for with her life—to her parents?
She took another deep breath, slowly suppressed the faint unease in her heart, and headed down the hill toward town.