Chapter 289: Full Moon

Still wedged in the broken earth, Noland keeps straining to free himself while Kalgara mocks his stubbornness and reminds him that the crew will burn at sundown. In the village, warriors blame the foreigners for both the plague and the quake and try to spear them through their cage, only for Seto to stop them, insisting that Shandia warriors must keep their word. Noland fights so hard he breaks his own bones, and his refusal to yield begins to impress his captor.

As the two argue, Noland condemns the villagers for gladly throwing away innocent lives. Kalgara snaps that he cannot defy a god whose will, voiced through the priest, is absolute, then reveals in fury that Mousse is his own daughter. Their clash is interrupted when a second giant serpent, Kashigami's offspring, emerges from the trees.

Noland presses his case, asking whether the village truly suffers a curse or simply a disease. He reveals that his own homeland of Lvneel was ravaged by the very same illness generations earlier, with a death rate near ninety percent, until herbalists synthesized a cure from the Kona Tree at the cost of many researchers' lives. He has that remedy now and can save everyone. When the offspring lunges to eat Noland, Kalgara intervenes and kills it, then asks what he has just slain. Told it is only a snake, the weeping warrior finally accepts that his god was a beast and the curse a treatable sickness. Under the rising full moon, Noland cures the Shandia, and the two peoples celebrate together.

The chapter marks Kalgara's change of heart, his killing of Kashigami's child to protect Noland, and the revelation of Lvneel's own past outbreak of Tree Fever. The cover continues Ace's Great Blackbeard Search, with Ace sitting in on a G-2 meeting whose first order of business is the base's terrible coffee.