With the corrupted king out of the way Fault can wander into a small underground cavern and learn the “Path of the Dragon” meditation gesture from an unusually zen corpse. There’s also an enemy or two and a fairly boring chest. Disappointing reward for beating an optional boss, right?
WRONG!
This little area actually has an entire secret zone hidden behind an illusionary wall.
The “untended graves” are a perfect copy of the tutorial area but filled with vicious undead. Also the sun appears to be missing. And the stars. In fact everything is deeply disturbingly dark.
While it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on here it seems this whole area is either an alternate reality where the First Fire died or perhaps an interactive vision of what a world without Fire would be like.
This is cool because while a lot of people both in and out of game have suggested we should just let the Fire die nobody really knows what that would accomplish. The status quo of the Age of Fire is pretty bad but that doesn’t’ necessarily mean that the Age of Dark would be any better.
Likelihood of stubbing your toe probably isn’t the best metric for solving ethical dilemmas, but it’s probably not the worst either.
Anyways, new optional area means a new optional boss. It’s actually the tutorial boss all over again, but stronger and faster than ever before. He’s one of those fighters who can just string together combo after combo, leaving only the tiniest of opportunities to actually fight back. Definitely a good place to burn an ember and summon a friendly phantom. If you killed the crazy katana wielding sword master back in the normal fire link area you can summon him here. Otherwise I guess you’ll need online help.
This is another boss that killed my non-gimmick character dozens of times in a row. In fact, it caused me to walk away from the game for several days (I got lost and assumed this was a required boss). But somehow Fault emerged victorious on her first try. Just like with the Sullivan fight I blame this on good muscle memory from my previous file along with the good luck of having the boss focus on the NPC phantom just long enough for me to pull off a brutal combo at the end of the fight.