The only thing that retired police officer and former mercenary Nobuo Okada knows is that he must find - and then guide - ten cynical and troubled people toward a vague and uncertain destiny that appears, at face value, to be a heroic adventure. In his profession as a counsellor, he begins his self-appointed task, aware that the fates intend to throw everything they can at him - defiant and disbelieving recruits, gang warfare, a tired police force on the verge of collapse, a sport-betting conspiracy, cultist murder sprees, an overzealous cold-case enthusiast, foreign assassins and, somewhere...

Deep within the hidden core of the "World Temple," an ancient prophecy is chiselled in stone - it predicts the beginning of a journey to do... something. Quite what is unclear, but it certainly relates to a group of young inhabitants of the survivors' village of Ghirina, which stands as a small defiant remnant of a kingdom that was obliterated in the so-called "Final War" 60 years earlier. None of them are aware of the prophecy, their relevance to it, or even to the existence of the temple: their only concern is the removal of a vicious, demented old man that has ruled their village for the...