I am pretty nearby the Eldin SkyView Tower, so I might as well run out to it and see if I can activate it to unlock the map here before I head West to visit Rito Village.
It turns out not to be very difficult at all. The tower is out of commission. An Aerocuda has flown off with the control terminal, and is flying around in lazy circles with it in its claws. The repairman, Sawson, is there to tell me about it. It’s a simple matter of shooting the Aerocuda out of the sky. I climb up the tower to the limit of my endurance meter, and then jump off, glide, use bullet time, and it’s like the easiest shot in the world. Aerocudas are one-shot enemies, and the stolen terminal drops to the ground. I pick it up and take it over to Sawson, who asks me to put it near to where it installs, and he hooks it back up again. The tower is operational once more.
I shoot up into the sky to scan in the map data, and as I’m coming down I spot a sky island very nearby, and glide over to it to check it out. As I get closer, I discover a Flux Construct II walking about on a sandy arena-like field strewn with Zonai objects.
I engage it in battle, using Ultrahand to rip it apart, and drop the blocks. Eventually the whole thing is disrupted enough to fall apart, and I am able to hit the one vulnerable block with a bomb arrow. A few hits, and it drops a treasure chest it was carrying on its back. I run to the chest and open it, and find another Old Map with an X marked on a spot nearby to the northeast, right where there’s a great chasm to the underworld. I’m curious as to what the Map mark means, but I’m prioritizing my visit to Rito Village, so it will have to wait.
After it drops the chest, the Flux Construct II changes up its attack modes. It turns into a giant Rubik’s Cube of Death, which rolls at me. This form I can deal with, again by ripping out blocks and letting it fall apart and hitting the vulnerable part again. But the next mode is something I don’t feel equipped for: a carpet bombing checkerboard of death. It goes into the sky high above me, laying itself out in a big grid, and sending row after row of blocks at me, which hover above my head before tumbling down to the ground to do huge damage if they touch me. And I can’t see the vulnerable block among them, so I’m like what the hell. I bet maybe the thing to do is use Recall on a block and ride it up to the sky and hit the leader block from up there, but I have no idea if that’s really the solution or not. I don’t want to figure it out, I’m on a quest to unlock fairy flowers and upgrade my damn armor so I can last more than a hit in a real fight.
I run off the edge of the sky island and plummet earthward. Below me I see a shrine, so I glide to it and enter. The test is a sneak strike trainer. There’s a zonai construct in the middle of a small, semi-enclosed area. I need to sneak up behind it and get close, and then deliver a sneakstrike. This is not actually too difficult, but I do have to re-learn that in order to sneakstrike, you need to be close enough for the on-screen tip to tell you that you’re in range to do a sneakstrike. So this actually takes a bunch of tries, but eventually I figure it out.
After I leave the shrine, I run across a field, where I see on the far end, and off into the shallow waters of the eastern Eldin shore’s spiral jetty, there is another shrine. Between my location and this new shrine, there’s the chasm to the underworld that is right by where the X on the Old Map is.
I don’t dive down to check it out, but since I’ve unlocked this shrine right here, I can fast travel back any time I want to. A bokoblin skeleton comes out of the night to shoot arrows at me, and I harvest a few before running down to the spiral jetty area.
I don’t want to mess around walking the long way along the entire spiral. I have a lot of stamina, and this enables me to plow straight through, swimming the gaps and make a beeline straight to the shrine.
This shrine is called Turbo-something. There’s an electrical motor in the center of the room, disconnected from a power supply. There’s a metal plate that I can use to connect the circuit to power the motor, and a fan blade that I can attach to the motor hub using Ultrahand. This creates a massive updraft, which I can use with my glider to get into the air, where I see two corners of the room have platforms high above that I can now glide to. One has a treasure chest with a really buff Zonai Shield with a 50 rating, the other platform has 3 Zonai flame projectors. I can mount the flame projectors to the fan blades, and when the fan spins them around, they ignite these torches that are mounted on pillars surrounding the motor mount. If I just manually light each torch, they get extinguished by a water sprinkler system that activates, but if attached to the fan blade, they spin quickly enough to ignite all the torches, six in total, which is the trigger to unlock the door to the inner shrine.
So I’ve cleared two more shrines. Now it’s time to transport as far west as I can and see if I can find the way to Rito Village.