I ask around the different districts about the National Mobilization Law for Grace's sidequest. Multiple locals mention that Captain Kate has been acting strangely since the Imperial Defense Force showed up, which is interesting. I also run into Azel, who I'm pretty sure is a Testament in Zero, but now he's a regular working class dude, so that's cool for him. At Times, we walk in on Erebonian soldiers detaining a shop owner for being Calvardian. There are a couple of potential sidequests wandering around town, but it looks like I can't activate them yet, so we're off to the old field exercise camp and St. Ursula.
When we leave town, Jona messages us to inform us he's hacked our ARCUSes and installed some game onto them. For some reason, the main menu music sounds like the character select theme from Mario 2. It's basically just Puyo Puyo, but I'll take it over Vantage Masters, I guess. It takes me a few tries, but I eventually beat Jona. When we arrive at the old field exercise camp, we run into Freddy as expected. He shows us Musse's old Panzer Soldat, as I figured. Musse says she might be able to get us access to the others, too, and she gives Roselia a call to confirm some details. Now that she's learned a few tricks (literally) from Vita, she thinks she can summon them through the spirit path with Roselia's help. And it turns out she's right! Before she goes, Roselia says the anomaly in Crossbell is way more powerful than any of the others. It could be due to the Great Twilight, but there's another possibility (that she neglects to actually name, naturally). She adds that the Heimdallr group is having a hard time of it, too, so we shouldn't expect them to back us up.
Freddy has made a couple of more discoveries on top of this one, too. He found some ruins near where we fought the cryptid in CS3. Then he breaks the news that he spotted the Pleroma Grass while he was fishing earlier, but it was blue, not black. Well, Crossbell does operate by different rules than Erebonia proper, so it's still worth checking out. With that, we're back on the road to St. Ursula.
Eventually, we stumble upon the Stella Shrine, or to be more accurate, it simply materializes as soon as we get close. There's black Pleroma Grass around, too, but nobody mentions it for some reason. Like the first shrine, this is actually a dungeon instead of a long corridor that just leads to a boss. We fight a random enemy literally called MKE Maus, I mean seriously, on the nose enough? This shrine isn't too difficult to navigate, and we eventually reach the boss. I've noticed that CS4's dungeons tend to be simpler than previous iterations, perhaps just to leave room to focus on the story since they've got to cram a lot into this one. After the battle, we get another flashback, this time to Osborne begging someone Rean's life in that house fire. This is a rare humanizing moment for Osborne, so it's too bad it ended so quickly.
