Almost a century has passed since the end of the Energi War, and the prolonged peace has made complacency easy. It takes the Schwarzschild Empire's renewed campaign of conquest — swallowing neighboring nations one by one — to remind the world how fragile peace really is. In the frontier town of Heiland, two residents named Ash and Karim rescue a young woman being chased through the woods by foreign soldiers. Her identity is a mystery, but the role she has to play — and the fate now entangled with theirs — will pull them far from home.