空の軌跡SC // Trails in the Sky SC ⚔ Story Club・Week 36

Week 36 11th May 2026
Last Week Week 35
Next Week Week 37
Home Threads 空の軌跡 // SC

Content Warning: (moderate?) child abuse, death, rape, pedophilia, (moderate) airship crash

Details of Content Warning

Nothing happens on screen, and some of it is more implied.

An airship is shown falling from a great height. The condition of those onboard is not confirmed.

Finish the chapter, and view the opening scenes for the next.

Side Quests and Missable Content

Talk to Russell to give him your data crystals.

Data crystals: There are four in the tower.

Screenshot

Image upload not working. Imagine Estelle stood out front of the Bose branch.

Vocabulary

Vocab Sheet, thank you to everyone who helps with this.

Please read the guidelines on the first page before adding any words.

Discussion Guidelines

Everybody should feel free to post and ask questions–it’s what makes book clubs fun! But please do not post until you are familiar with Spoiler Courtesy!

Spoiler Courtesy

Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.

  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.
Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Click the cog above the text box and use either the “Hide Details” or “Blur Spoiler” options. The text which says “This text will be hidden” should be replaced with what you are wishing to write. In the case of “Hide Details”, the section in the brackets that is labelled “Summary” can be replaced with whatever you like also (i.e, [details=”Chapter 1, Pg. 1”]).

Hide Details results in the dropdown box like below:

Example

This is an example of the “Hide Details” option.

The “Blur Spoiler” option will simply blur the text it surrounds.

This is an example of the “Blur Spoiler” option.

Posting Advice
  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.

  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

If necessary, include an explanation of any discrepancies in the Ebook page numbers from physical page numbers. If there is an easy shortcut for some ebook versions to relate back to physical page numbers, it would be worth it to include it as a third bullet here, or if you want to use chapter page numbers instead of volume page numbers, as is the case with some manga. For example:
Example

For the Kindle version of this manga, the page numbers and the location number are always 3 apart. If you subtract 3 from the location, this will give you the accurate page number!

OR

Please use the chapter page numbers, instead of the volume page numbers. These are located in between the panels!

Discussion Questions

  1. What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!

  2. What was your favorite new vocab word from this week’s reading?

  3. Was there any passage that you found particularly intriguing? Did it resonate with you (either positively or negatively)? Was it surprising? Offer any insight or new perspective? Was it just beautifully written?

  4. Boss fight?

  5. What are your thoughts on the end of this chapter?

  6. What are your expections for the next one?

Participation

Will you be playing along with us this week?

  • I’m playing along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still playing the game but I haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m playing this game after the club has finished
  • I’m no longer playing the game
0 voters

If you’ve already played this game but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this part.”

Party Members Poll
  • アガット
  • アネラス
  • エステル
  • オリビエ
  • クローゼ
  • ケビン
  • シェラザード
  • ジン
  • ティータ
  • ユリア
  • ヨシュア
0 voters

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to stay abreast of discussion!

Which way for next week?

  • Clockwise
  • Anticlockwise
  • Big Thread
0 voters
Context

The map’s opened up and you can go to any of the five regions in any order you wish. We can either agree on a direction as I dictate every step of the way, or I can make one big thread for this chapter so people can run around wherever you want.

Au revoir les enfants (1987)

Actually had a pretty chill time fighting this boss. Definitely needed SOMETHING to be AoE but Joshua’s S-break plus a big spell did the trick so the rest was all beating up on Ren. I did also go out and specifically build orbments to get earth wall; it was mentioned last week and I know I’ve seen it come up online as well as being super helpful. And yeah, I can see why.

Good music at the end of this chapter. I like that the pirates (well one of them) wants to just dive straight into the other dimensional floating island… thing. Lots of confidence compared to their actual strength lol. The presentation of that stuff was pretty good (I know evo adds some things but I assume you all also get a proper cutscene showing its arrival?) and I’m fine with the actual events unfolding with their evil plan.

But… do these devs know what momentum is? The ominous floating continent has literally shifted dimensions and so we will spend the next hours being traveling telephone repairpeople. And we have to walk around the entire world now. The latter sounds annoying to me no matter what. But otherwise, I dunno, there’s an element of fastidiousness these devs have about the bracers at times that I respect. We need to coordinate and plan and it’s a fatal blow if the bracers are isolated; that’s kinda cool. I can’t help thinking it’d all work better if this game was more lowkey though.

FC indulged a little in magic technology but I think that level of it being a coup plot was about the right type of stakes for this. Restoring communication after, I dunno, some coordinated but ultimately human attack on it would likely be ok. Feels to me like they’re trying to have it both ways and it’s clashing hard. Once you are indulging in full JRPG hype and aura you have to keep your foot on the gas pedal. We gotta storm in and fight god in the next couple hours. You can’t tell us Sephiroth has placed cats in trees across the world and we need to save them before we fight him.

And just to be clear despite this mostly being critique I bother with it because I do mean it about liking aspects of how this game wants to focus on details no other series would. Losing communication and electricity in any other series would be like “damn that sucks we better punch god as fast as we can.” But for me, it’s weaker than it should be by trying to balance two tones.

I voted clockwise because the hometown just feels kinda pleasant to me and we’d go there first, but I don’t feel that strongly if we go the other way. In my experience it feels like keeping people together weekly always seems to turn out a bit nicer for conversation, but if a big thread ends up easier on you or something, anything is fine for me.

パテル=マテル

Somehow this tower felt long. The two from last week were long too.

I picked Tita and Kevin, thinking that they might be able to generate interesting conversation with Ren.

殲滅の天使 greeted my party with ほぼ殲滅… 1-hit KO randomly kill 3/4 of the party before I can make the first move (not even S-craft). Restarted from healing point before final gate and equipped with anti-KO now.

Minions walked away and fired beams with fossilize and poison :skull_and_crossbones: and I have to heal frequently. Nonetheless, hit-everyone arts dealt with all scattered Ren-Minions quickly (and also extra long MP bars from slots’ upgrade).

Luckily, Ren was the first to be defeated (exceptionally low HP boss?), and I revived and healed everyone to destroy the remaining bots with arts, and everyone get exp.

Then, the 2nd battle was nothing much. Not even hit hard enough to one-hit Tita (even lowest HP).

Afterwards, hijacked live greetings like a great villain.

And now, city in the sky.

Looking forward to travelling around the world :globe_showing_americas: :globe_showing_europe_africa: :globe_showing_asia_australia: :globe_showing_americas: next. I generally prefer paced, but I don’t mind clockwise or counterclockwise (haven’t checked the map yet). Big Thread could be OK too, if not many threads to be separated anyway. (How many cities per week?)

Wouldn’t getting bracers a speedy boat-car or a ship be a better idea?

Week 36

All but 1!? I got lucky then, I had 2 people survive :sweat_smile:

Wow Ren’s backstory is way more grim than I would have expected. It struck me as unnecessary for Joshua to jump in to say Ouroboros didn’t free her for its own sake but as a means to an evil end, but then it also struck me that we don’t actually see Ouroboros do a lot that’s objectively evil, so maybe the writers thought it was necessary. They’ve mostly caused public disorder and property damage, I think? Daisoujou or Simias (I’m sorry I can’t remember :sob:) has spoken about this before, but there’s a strange divide where extremely terrible things happen in the past, but nothing truly bad is allowed to happen in the present. The thought hit me again when the gang is speaking at the Bose guild and Jin says “まあ、リベールは治安がいいから暴動の心配は無さそうだが……”

ANYWAY. We got a cutscene! That thing is going to be an absolutely huge dungeon, isn’t it? I was laughing a bit at the bad guys congratulating themselves on the arc, because the light was so bright I could barely see anything.

And the pirates, they didn’t leave the game for good like I’d feared! Yay. I enjoyed their sequence, with the brother giving that “pray to the goddess” bit and then the whole map capsizing to mimic the falling ship. What can I say, I love these scrappy underdogs.

Earth wall has saved my butt more times than I can count. I love you, earth wall <3

w36

Lots of good loot in the tower. I managed to set up Croze with a ton of OP magic.

I enjoyed the discussion between Ren and Estelle on top of the tower. I enjoy mature, poised, self-confident Estelle. Ren being a literal child makes for a nice contrast.

Oh, well.

Indeed.

Ok so I don’t get my mecha boss fight, instead I get a mass aggro boss with status ailments.

Once I managed to dispatch all the minions with my 全体 spells, it got pretty easy.

I’m again amazed by the tone difference between the characters’ backstories and the actual game we’re playing. If you’re willing to go that hard on background lore, why have the game be Care Bear Land?

HELL YEAH

… oh it was a lame fight actually. Damn.

Very Star Trek.

This is clearly Eden from FF8:

That’s pretty epic. I’m a sucker for flying continents. The music is great too. I still wish we had any idea of the purpose of all of this stuff (and the hand-waiving of the “testing” by the Ouroboros is extremely unconvincing IMO, what the hell did putting random people to sleep in Rolent or triggering earthquakes in Zeiss have to do with anything?). But hey, if I get to explore a flying city, I’ll be content.

That’s the spirit.

How did the Aruseyu manage do land without orbal power? Can these glorified bricks even glide without engine?

So I lose Olivier, and now Croze?

Completely unacceptable. I guess I’ll have to rearrange my orbments to make Estelle the healer.

I guess we’re good for another pilgrimage around Liberl. I don’t mind too much, but I want to see the floating city :pensive_face:

reply

Yeah we got the cutscene with the island popping up and the power shutting down. Really cool-looking.

Yeah that’s a bit underwhelming, but it’s also very Trails I guess. Remember when an ANCIENT DRAGON attacked the city like 3 days ago?

That’s also how I feel about it. It is a bit weird that they wouldn’t dispatch a bunch of soldiers to do that at once though, instead of letting a bunch of kids go around, but at some point you have to accept the RPG logic I suppose.

Yeah I’m happy that I caught up last week and didn’t do the 4 towers back-to-back. I was fresh and rested for this one.

That’s a good point, assuming that they have non-orbal ships left. Also you’d need to sail below that giant city…

I hope we’ll get some vistas of the floating island from the various locations around the lake, it must be quite a sight!

I pre-charged Croze’s full revive S-craft and fired it immediately after the attack to bring everybody back online. Annoying but it did the job.

Week is up