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So uh, before we get into the meat of this update, we're actually going to revisit the treasure room right away, because I discovered two things while going back to reopen all the chests that didn't kill us. First is that the ogre nix is not a guaranteed drop from this encounter.
Second is that we actually just got incredibly unlucky with the other encounter the first time. The enemies all happened to go for their most dangerous attack at the same time, and if we'd survived long enough to get just one more spell off we probably would've been in the clear.
Oddly enough, it almost wipes us again on the next run where the ogre nix actually drops. But the only HP that matters is the last one, and now we can walk away without any unfinished business. 
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled boat ride.
...After some shopping, that is. We're rich as fuck right now, and I blow not quite half of it on a bunch of tinctures and restocking the rest of our consumables. I even buy a flash, just to say we have one! Which reminds me of a slightly silly side effect of the randomizer. See, normally there's no reason to have multiple copies of the same tool, and the game is nice enough to not let you waste your money trying to buy extras. This is, of course, still true even now that they're functionally just weird consumables. A bit annoying I guess, but tbh keeping track of what spells all the items cast is far too much work for me to make them a regular part of my strategy in the first place, so whatever.
(It would not surprise me if the current version of Beyond Chaos has done something about this.)
While we're on a spending spree, I also pick up enough wall rings to outfit a full party if necessary, as well as some beads just to see what they do. They're... disappointingly vanilla.
Okay, now we can get on the boat.
And then get off it again.
This time, I mean it!
(Anybody want a peanut?)
I'm actually gonna talk about the plot here for a second? I know, weird, but just pretend that this is actually Terra and Shadow in the scene. See, this whole subplot has always felt a little clunky, at least to me. The game never adequately sells the idea that Terra's parentage is this huge obstacle to her feeling love, and her worries seem unfounded and arbitrary as a result. But then one day it hit me. I'm sure this wasn't the writers' intent, but everything suddenly slides into place much more smoothly if you simply read Terra as aro/ace. She just doesn't have the language to properly express it, and so she falls back on the esper stuff as an attempt to make sense of how she feels. It even adds some extra poignancy to the end of her arc demonstrating that there are other forms of love just as meaningful as romantic love. I dunno, maybe I'm reaching, but this has been my Terra headcanon for a while now.
Nobody cares Goten, get off the stage! 
Iria's back! 
Not for very long, but it's enough time to check on our lore collection.
Looks like we're only missing four spells, and I can't recall what any of them might be offhand.
Iria's also got another one of those weird 28% spells, which I believe is our first confirmation that they're a natural mage. Good to know!
These are the only enemies we run into on the overworld, and we've seen them before.
So, Thamasa! Our final set of shops before the WoR. Technically we could've visited earlier on the airship, but I thought I remembered that they won't actually serve us until after we beat flame eater. Apparently that's not the case, though? Anyway.
Weapons and armor both have a lot of stuff for sale, some of it new, but there's only two things I really care about: dice, since they're a weapon that doesn't care about Aoi's awful strength stat, and buyable tiger masks. They're super affordable too, so I spring for a whole party's worth.
I also grab a light robe, just in case the arrows don't tell the full story. It does have by far the highest magic defense we've seen yet on buyable armor, but yeah, between red jackets and the snow muffler we don't have much reason to equip it right now.
We're still fine on consumables, but sure, why not, I'll buy a chainsaw.
Relics are... expensive. Especially the cursed ring, holy shit. Most of this is stuff we already have anyway, and some of them we can even get for cheaper elsewhere. Pass.
As for hidden treasures, Thamasa has four of them, a full half of which are green cherries.
Alright, time to see which sprite Strago is using now-
-Oh. Well, with fourteen characters I guess the odds are pretty decent that this'll happen at least once.
Relm and Mog's sprites, on the other hand, have done a one for one swap.
It's funny, up till now there's been at least one thing I remembered about every character, if not necessarily which character it goes with. For instance, while I didn't remember that Kars specifically has jump, I knew someone had it. These two, though? Complete blank.
I can refresh my memory pretty quick re: Archer at least.
...I'm starting to realize why you didn't make an impression. Archer is kinda bad, and not in an interesting way. Their commands are fine, if unremarkable, but those stats are obnoxiously low outside of magic.
Changing out their equipment doesn't help much either, as their options are extremely limited. Glad I bought that light robe now I guess. (They actually could use the red jacket if we had a third one.)
Imp strats? Imp strats. That magic defense is genuinely pretty good, even.
The rest of their setup.
In retrospect the charm bangle was a bit silly, because this "dungeon" doesn't even have random encounters.
Also the encounters it does have are just more of these guys from that one factory chest. They're... not any harder to kill now than they were then.
This is funny though. Magic points are formation based, not enemy based, and you get more for fighting three of them than you do for fighting four. 
Ironic. Although I think one of these is actually an ice rod normally too?
Boss time.
Flame eater is honestly kind of toothless. We already know the hazils are a nonissue, and two of our three party members are immune to fire, so. Heck, Archer could've been too if I'd thought to move either the red jacket or the cure ring off of Goten.
The fight does take a while though. Everything is immune to ice, and shortly afterwards flame eater buffs itself with both safe and reflect, so I can't even check any other elements and just have to beat it down with halved physicals. "Doesn't Rei have dispel, though?" Yes, shut up, I didn't think about that.
Flare is the only legitimately scary move that flame eater has, but we have just enough bulk that it's not the end of the world. Even Archer could probably survive it if it weren't for the fire spells constantly eating away at their health.
The other possible add. It has the potential to be very annoying, with sky high defense and absorption against... whatever element Goten's current claws are. That's been a recurring problem in this dungeon, so I've lost track of what they're swapped to right now.
Fortunately it can be cleaved.
And that's the end of that.
With as wimpy as hazils are, Iria just completely no-selling the lot of them actually feels fairly plausible.
Thanks for the lead, Archer!
However, I don't recall telling you you could stop being an imp. 
Fuckin' finally. Nobody in this party had learned life yet, and I stupidly put Maduin on Iria, not even thinking about the fact that they fuck off immediately. What's more, they don't even have the decency to formally leave the party until right here, so it's only now that I'm able to reassign Maduin to someone else.
Oh yeah, there is this spear for sale if we wanted to un-imp Archer, but it's barely even an upgrade over the mythril pike, so uh, let's not.
The walk to the mountains is uneventful. I'm sure we could find some actually new enemies if we fucked around for long enough, but whatever.
The enemies in the mountains themselves are... also mostly repeats, specifically from the sealed cave. It's weird, because it does feel like the randomizer keeps the existing encounter tables intact a lot of the time, but I definitely don't remember these two places having any enemies in common normally.
Okay, this spear is worth un-imping Archer for.
Yeah, looks good. And the magic boost on the pearl lance doesn't hurt either.
These are actually different seahorses from the ones in the sealed cave, I believe, and they have even more HP. As in like, close to 3000.
Also they're undead.
The friendly bugs are back too, and we can add remedy to their list of possible counters.
Huh, don't think I ever noticed before that this is just the Baren Falls background again.
Don't care for this room much. Luckily we've got some plot to get through before we need to deal with all these blind jumps.
I like how with these color palettes, it almost looks like Ultros is just a fourth statue.
Welcome to Ultros round 3! There... isn't that much to say about it, except elemental absorption is continuing to piss me off.
At least it prompts me to give sandstorm a try and discover that the damage is actually pretty good.
Ultros does have this thing where he slowly scoots forward like a tonberry. Is that normal? I honestly don't remember. Either way, it never amounts to anything.
So yeah, we just smack him around for a while until Megumi makes their entrance.
And then we smack him around some more because nobody on this team has sketch. Speaking of which, Megumi's commands aren't exactly filling me with confidence...
An actual reward? What the fuck is this bullshi-
-Ah. Complaint withdrawn.
No.
Credit where credit is due I guess, you do have better base stats, barely. However, that command list is not what I'd call a recipe for success. If you're gonna devote a whole command slot to a single spell, it'd better be something you can just throw out whenever and get at least some value out of it. Level 3 muddle is very much not that. And wow, it sure is great that our first repeat command other than the basic fight/magic/item is fuckin' runic. /s
The nicest thing I can say is that Megumi is somewhat easier to equip than Archer was.
We are gonna shift charm bangle duty over from grandparent to grandchild though. Also note that Megumi still starts with a memento ring.
Moving on, I do at least appreciate that there's a save point up here. It helps save time when you screw up.
Hole number one leads to two treasures. A solid armor upgrade...
...and a WoR chest encounter. Joy.
Both snail and shell have AoE they like to use, and the shell can also functionally one shot a single target.
Timing is everything here. You don't want to line up a bunch of attacks only for the snail to suddenly retreat inside before they go off.
A lesson which I learn the hard way. 
As a result, I play the rematch extremely cautiously, eventually settling into a rhythm where the only offense I throw out at all is double ice 3s from Rei immediately after the snail reveals itself. Goten and Archer are on permanent healing duty, and Megumi's job is just to shovel tinctures into Rei's mouth so the ice 3s keep on flowing.
Our reward is a lore we apparently hadn't learned yet as well as an excellent weapon upgrade for Goten. Tragically, the dragon claws are also holy elemental, so we're still not free from random immunities fucking us over. Even so, I'm tentatively willing to call Goten a good party member now, despite their love of explosions.
Hole number two is progress. Oops, back to the top we go.
Another new enemy. They have sneeze as I think a death counter, but that's about all there is to them.
Hole number three has a much less exciting treasure than hole number one.
One last repeat encounter for the road, and we're ready to advance the plot!
There's, uh, a lot of it, so I'm going to abridge things even more than usual and skip straight to the next point of interest: playable Leo.
He's... actually fairly tame relative to the other temporary characters? Granted part of that is down to how far our own equipment options have come in comparison, but even then there's nothing quite on the level of say, Banon's loadout.
Huh, I do kind of vaguely remember this being a thing, but I don't think I've ever personally tried just fucking off before.
Anyway, it doesn't seem like Leo's equipment actually matters all that much? I don't think any of his armor absorbs anything, but he's still functionally invincible for this initial battle.
Of course, we all know things don't end well for General Leo, and I'm not here to do airship glitch shenanigans.
Speaking of airships, the gang's all here!* This is a great place to take a break before tackling the floating continent.
*Iria notwithstanding
And so I leave you with a huge thank you to Ted Woolsey for doing his best to un-creepify this line.