Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders

The Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders (全界十三騎士団) are a group of knight orders comprised of powerful Ancients in Elder Tale. Each Order is tasked with guarding one of Elder Tale's servers and, during the game era, members of these Orders could be quest givers, temporary party members with Adventurers, or be in need of rescue. Sometimes, if the Adventurers failed to clear an event quest within a certain time limit, such as the Return of the Goblin King, their respective Order would step in and resolve the situation.

After the Catastrophe, all of the Orders disappeared, having been eradicated by the Geniuses. Including Elias Hackblade, less than one hundred Ancients remain in Theldesia. In the Eastal League of Free Cities, the nobles attempted to hide this fact until it was revealed to the Round Table Alliance representatives by Raynesia.

Chivalric Orders
There is a chivalric order for each of Theldesia's servers.

* Unconfirmed. Associated server is an estimated guess based on the Order's name.
 * The three remaining servers are the Africa, Middle East, and Oceania servers.

The Catastrophe
Before the Catastrophe occurred, Elias Hackblade and the other Knights of the Red Branch learned about an incoming threat to Theldesia in the form of the Geniuses, currently sealed away on the Great Stronghold of the End. (In terms of the game era, they were new monsters being added through the Homesteading the Noosphere expansion pack.)

Heeding the prophet Sumiltimahra's advice, the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders gathered together&mdash;even including the elusive Shapeless Knights&mdash;to combat this threat. The plan was to prematurely unseal the Great Stronghold and strike the Geniuses before they could get their bearings. However, the unimaginable happened: the Geniuses unsealed themselves first, and ambushed the vanguard, the Knights of the Red Branch. Worse yet, they wielded the Words of Death, which exposed the "reality" that the Ancients were nothing more than fabricated existences created by character software to give Adventurers purpose. By accepting the Words of Death as truth, those who heard them fell into stasis; they were not dead, but they neither breathed nor had heartbeats.

To protect his allies, Elias led a suicide party to stall the ambush while the remaining Orders prematurely activated the Spacial Teleport Devices to enter the Great Stronghold. Because of this forced activation, the land's mana was drained, rendering all Intercity Transport Gates on Theldesia inoperational when the Adventurers brought in by the Catastrophe awoke.

Etymology

 * The kanji name for the Knights of Shinha is 獅子吼, which is a transcription for the Sanskrit word Siṃhanāda, or "lion's roar." The Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra is an early Mahāyāna Buddhist text transcribed from the words of the Indian queen Śrīmālā, and Mahāyāna Buddhism is prevalent in certain parts of Southeast Asia.
 * The Zilant Knights take their name from the legendary creature mentioned in legends of the foundation of Kazan.