Retracing Our Steps Story Summary - Arknights

Kjerag is a nation that hasn't seen a Catastrophe in a thousand years. Legend says the god Kjeragand left one last precept on the mountain peak: "If you keep this precept, no Catastrophe shall come to this land."

But one winter, the dying Grand Elder makes an unexpected confession to the Saintess Enya: "For a long time now, I haven't heard Kjeragand's voice." That very night, something falls from the sky, the mountain collapses, and the first Catastrophe in a thousand years begins.

The Saintess sets out on a pilgrimage to answer the god's silence, while her brother Ensiodes, president of the trading company, sees this chaos as the opportunity he's waited twenty years for. Two utterly different people begin walking toward the exact same question — what makes Kjerag, Kjerag?

1. Catastrophe strikes the snow mountain, of all possible times

The avalanche swallowed the train station in an instant. As the SilverAsh family rushed in to dig out survivors, the terrified villagers cried out as one: "Kjeragand, save us."

The first Catastrophe to strike a nation that had gone a thousand years without one. The station lay buried whole under the snow.

Aktoz, head of the Paleosh family, personally leads his men in digging through the snow. But when Browntail's head, Latatos, is nowhere to be seen, whispers start behind her back.

At a mine near Mount Karlan, an unidentified black crystal is found — evidence that something fell from the sky the night before the avalanche. Neighboring nations, sensing the scent of Originium, begin to gather.

Ensiodes seals off the site and locks down information first. He knows full well that the moment the word "Catastrophe" leaks out, neither the Three Clans nor Manjuwon will be able to hold.

2. The friendly neighbors' oddly-timed offensive of kindness

As news of the Catastrophe spreads, Victoria is the first to send a convoy of trucks. The Victorian noble Harold arrives with a mountain of relief supplies and grins shamelessly. "We're a good deal warmer than those aggressive types, wouldn't you say?"

The Victorian journalist Alberta takes the chance to cover every corner of Kjerag. Meanwhile, a newlywed couple empties their entire storehouse for the disaster victims, saying, "Kjeragand is watching, so we ought to help each other now."

Columbia threatens to send troops under the pretext of protecting its observatory researchers, while the Victorian ambassador presents an aid package with 40% of the mining development rights tacked on. Behind them, Duke Caster secretly plants spies to dig up the secrets of Kjerag's mines. Everyone knew all too well that a Catastrophe is also an "opportunity."

Meanwhile, faith begins to waver inside Manjuwon. A young monk cries out, "Kjeragand grew angry and sent the Catastrophe upon us," and Enya calmly counters, "Surely you're not claiming to make promises to the people in Kjeragand's stead?"

Before a blazing hearth, the Saintess and Grand Elder **Adso** sit facing each other for a long while. Every time, their questions miss each other.

3. The Saintess sets off on pilgrimage, her brother starts scheming

Enya makes up her mind. The "pilgrimage" — normally held only in spring and autumn, in which the Saintess walks the whole of Kjerag on foot in atonement — she'll undertake it in the dead of winter. Her brother's objections mean nothing.

The night before she departs, Enya's head handmaiden Kiyar vanishes without a trace. In the empty room lit only by the hearth's fire, Enya calls out the name, out of old habit.

All that Kiyar left behind: a hand mirror, a comb, and one unfinished letter.

Her grace has always rested beneath a traveler's feet.
— Enya

The one who saved Enya after an unknown attacker's arrow found her on the snow mountain was the young hunter Joanna — a girl who resented SilverAsh for the home she lost when the railway was built, but not someone who could stand by and watch an injured person suffer.

As it happens, Joanna's father was also at that train station when the Catastrophe struck — he'd gone down the mountain to find medicine for his daughter's illness and never came back. Not knowing this, Joanna's first thought had simply been to report the Saintess's party.

4. How a fake corpse catches a spy

The Saintess wasn't the only target. Aktoz and SilverAsh's youngest are attacked one after another, and a mysterious figure secretly reaches out to Latatos. The three families start suspecting each other.

The attackers wore Paleosh armor, but Joanna caught it at a glance from the arrow fletching. Paleosh combat arrows use three feathers; these all had two. In the end, it was the work of Victorian spies imitating Ursus's traditional craft.

Behind it all was Caroline, a Victorian spy posing as a Rhine Lab researcher. She was simply the colleague who used to pull all-nighters at the observatory — no one had ever suspected her.

Latatos goes so far as to fake her own death in an explosion — a plan to use her own death as bait to lure out the Victorian spies. It works, but she hides even this from her own sister, earning nothing but resentment.

At the sham funeral, her sister Siurus, long overshadowed by her, steps up as head of Browntail for the first time. "Only today have I come to understand all of my sister's anguish — and now there's no way left for me to tell her so." Ironically, it's this very funeral that finally prepares Siurus to stand on her own.

Meanwhile Ensiodes leads his troops to surround Manjuwon entirely, brandishing "evidence" that Manjuwon has colluded with Victorian spies. It turns out to be true — a few young monks really had been in contact with Victoria.

When attackers storm even the front courtyard of Manjuwon, Ensiodes's dark knight Degenbrecher stands alone against them.

In Manjuwon's front courtyard, the dark knight Degenbrecher single-handedly faces seventeen attackers. Drenched in blood, he never once steps back.

5. "Kjeragand does not exist" — the Grand Elder's confession

Rhine Lab researcher Elena, tracking the "celestial matter" that fell on Mount Karlan the night before the Catastrophe, runs into Enya and Joanna. The three end up an unlikely team — people chasing the same answer through science and faith, by wholly different paths.

Camping on the mountain trail, the two talk long into the night. A scientist who admits that a custom of divining by snowflakes is "a placebo that still works," and a Saintess who answers, "Even if fate exists, this snow still fell on my cloak all the same." Different words, saying the same thing.

A Victorian journalist comes to Manjuwon to interview Adso. When asked what use faith is if it can't even protect a miracle, Adso fires back: "Your camera always seems to frame only the chaotic and the pitiable — is that the truth, or a picture book?"

But when Enya meets Adso again on the road, he makes an unexpected confession of his own: "Kjeragand does not exist." In his youth, he'd seen the original scripture with his own eyes, and had learned it was nothing more than a patchwork of stories stitched together by countless people over a long span of time.

Worse, Adso reveals something even more horrifying to Ensiodes. The train that killed his parents twenty years ago, in what was called an "accident" — the man behind it was Adso himself.

The man who killed your parents stands before you.
— Adso

Faith in Kjeragand, order within Manjuwon — all of it, Adso admits, was a lie he built up to preserve. He sets a condition for Enya: he'll show her, inside the cave, that there is no god — but in exchange, she must banish Ensiodes from Kjerag.

6. What the frozen Saintesses point toward

In a vision, Enya sees Kjerag's origin. Long ago, three tribes that drifted into these mountains fought over a lake called the "Heart of Karlan," until a nameless being appeared, stopped the conflict, and was given the name "Kjeragand."

And deep within the mountain, in a cave blown open by explosives, frozen girls stand in a row. All of them past Saintesses — women who died of hypothermia while seeking an answer from a god who never replied. Alongside them, a voice pleads: "Stop. That's enough now. Go any further and you'll die."

At the cave's end, a colossal figure of ice appears — the very form of the god that people saw a thousand years ago.

The moment Enya touches the figure, a vision floods in. Inside it, she meets the missing handmaiden Kiyar — who quietly reveals that she herself is Kjeragand.

Kjeragand was never an all-knowing, all-powerful god. Just one of the nameless "life forms" that fell to this land — one who had never once handed down anything resembling a precept.

What your kind has always had is the strength to help one another. You call that virtue.
— Kjeragand

And then Kiyar says her goodbye. "My time is up."

Go, and clear away the last dark cloud, and open a new tomorrow.
— Kjeragand

7. One warship turns back a Grand Duke

The Catastrophe alarm sounds again. A 72% chance of a second Catastrophe within three hours. As Enya rushes down the mountain, Victoria's Duke Caster leads a fleet to personally surround Manjuwon.

Aktoz stands alone in the fleet's path. "If you mean to set foot on Kjerag soil, you'll have to walk over my corpse first!" Before Manjuwon, Alberta — until now cornered as a hostage — steps forward herself and exposes Victoria's false pretext.

Ensiodes takes out a single high-speed warship, alone. In truth, that ship carries a card he's kept hidden for twenty years — a massive cannon concealed within the mountain.

On the deck of the *Gloriana*, one modest-looking warship comes to a halt before the great fleet.

At the negotiation, he fires a single warning shot at the Duke's very feet. At the controls is none other than the new head of Browntail, Siurus.

"To think Ensiodes had a toy this good hidden away — it's been a while since I got to have real fun!" Siurus shouts, delighted.

I will make sure Kjerag gets to have its 'tomorrow.' Whether I live to see that tomorrow or not makes no difference to me.
— Ensiodes

At the same moment, atop the mountain, Enya offers one last prayer. Not a plea to a god — a farewell to the time they'd walked together.

The Saintess of Kjerag stands alone atop the mountain, the silver bell in her hands.

The dark clouds part and light pours down. Duke Caster, his soldiers, even the hands gripping their weapons — all of them stop without meaning to. Before that light, no one could act recklessly.

Light splitting the clouds. Whether it was wrath or blessing, even those who don't believe could tell.

The Duke finally orders a retreat, saying, "The scales of victory have tipped the other way." What became of the spy Caroline, and the evidence Alberta had gathered — all of it gets settled within that single day.

Kjerag, afterward

Enya punishes the young monks who took part in the betrayal not with excommunication but with a winter of farm labor, "because they were brave in the face of an invader." Adso, after his penance, tries to throw himself off a cliff — until a single word from a passing girl stops him.

The Saintess's fingertips brush the old traitor's brow. "You never denied what he meant."

Gnosis becomes the new head of Karlan Trade Co., while Degenbrecher, to the very end, refuses to attend the promotion ceremony. Ensiodes steps down from his post as president — but as a meeting with Columbia's vice president makes clear, the wheel of Kjerag's fate still rests firmly in his hands.

Before the hearth at Karlan Trade Co., Ensiodes welcomes a new guest. He stepped down from his seat as president — nothing else.

A young monk at Manjuwon named Matthew tentatively asks whether the light that drove off the Victorian fleet looked less like a miracle and more like a farewell. The youngest of five brothers, he'd been sent to the temple just to lighten the family's burden.

Instead of answering, Enya recites the old precept once more. But this time the final line is subtly changed. Not "No Catastrophe shall come to this land," but "No Catastrophe shall defeat you in this land."

The god may no longer hold Catastrophes at bay — but the people, she was saying, will not be beaten by them either.

Months later, Elena dons a new-model powered exosuit and reaches out to touch the object herself. Her superior Muelsyse cheerfully encourages her over the radio: "It's the most brilliant moment of everything you've ever studied — you should enjoy it."

No explosion, no flash of light — just a quiet contact, like a handshake.

Analysis shows 70% of the object is an unidentified substance; the remaining 30%, astonishingly, shares the same cellular structure as elves. The signal the object keeps repeating, Enya translates from the old Kjerag script. The translated sentence is a single line: "Ruin... has come."

The dying Grand Elder had once asked Enya whether she could still hear Kjeragand's voice.

Now Enya can answer. The voice is gone — but something else has taken its place.