Chapter 16 — Don’t Butt In on Random People’s Conversations, Okay?
Hornet, leader of the Crimson Bond, was at a regular check-in meeting. The voyage was going smoothly, with no problems to report. There was nothing that could serve as an obstacle to them, and they were in the middle of the open ocean. If something were to come up, they had plenty of space with which to deal with it. So for now, there wasn’t much work for Hornet to do.
He already had his subordinates keeping watch and patrolling the ship. He was, in a manner of speaking, a special guest. Having a hero like him on board was effectively a guarantee of a safe voyage. He was being used almost like an advertising piece. He wasn’t sure that was entirely acceptable, but he wasn’t really in a position to be picking his jobs.
As heroes became more and more famous, they ended up getting less and less work. Hornet would have been happy to take on any small job, but his clients didn’t bring such requests to him. They felt that if they were going to request the aid of a hero, they needed a task befitting of one. And with incidents that absolutely required a hero being few and far between, Hornet and his group were generally quite bored.
As he lamented his situation, the meeting came to an end. Rising from his seat, Hornet headed back to his room among the first-class cabins on the top level of the accommodations section. Taking the elevator up, he got off on his floor, where he immediately encountered two girls in swimwear.
“Come on, Diane... You can’t be doing this...” he grumbled.
Cheerfully making their way down the corridor were his older sister, Diane, and his younger sister, Miliana. Diane held a large ball, while Miliana carried a floatation ring. They were still quite far from the pool, but it looked like they were already getting into it.
“I-It’s fine, isn’t it? We have nothing to do anyway!” Diane protested.
“That’s not exactly true.”
Short of a sudden emergency, there wasn’t anything in particular for them to do at the moment, and they were aware that they weren’t expected to be acting as the ship’s regular security force. But Hornet thought it would be best for them to be on their guard, just in case.
“We’re not slacking off, though. Yeah, this is part of our mission!” she insisted.
“Going to the pool?”
“Who knows what could happen there? And anyway, look, I’ve got my weapon with me!”
A belt was wrapped around Diane’s exposed back, and her staff was hanging from it. Miliana’s getup was the same, although in her case the weapon in question was a shortsword.
“Fine. But don’t go wild. We’ve got a reputation to think about.”
“I know, I know!”
The two girls boarded the elevator in high spirits.
“I’m still not sure it’s a good idea...”
Harboring doubts, Hornet returned to his room.
“I’m back.”
“Oh, welcome back, Hou.”
“I saw my sisters on the way here.”
His mother was elegantly sipping some tea. He was honestly glad that she hadn’t donned a swimsuit and gone along with them.
“They were so insistent about going to the pool,” she said, “especially after they went through the trouble of bringing their swimsuits.”
“That’s weird. Were they treating this like a holiday all along? Waiting in our room is part of the job...” He sat down at the table as he grumbled.
“Don’t worry. If anything happens, we have you!”
“There are plenty of problems I wouldn’t be able to handle on my own.”
“If pirates show up, you won’t have to do anything, will you?”
“Yeah, there’s another unit ready to deal with them.”
One might wonder why Hornet was even there in the first place, but his presence was more for something that ordinary soldiers couldn’t hope to handle rather than mundane threats.
Hornet of the Crimson Bond was a name known far and wide. Hero, Imperial Sword, High Wizard, and Harem Master. Each was a class of the highest level, and he possessed all four, giving him an astonishingly high value in the eyes of others.
“With no icebergs, we don’t have much to do.”
“Mom, don’t butt in on random people’s conversations, okay?” Hornet remembered the incident back at the port. For some reason, a girl had been worrying about icebergs despite their route being so far south.
“Well, it appeared to be their first time on a cruise! They seemed to be feeling very uneasy!”
“Maybe. She was pretty cute too, wasn’t she?” As he thought back on their encounter, his heart rate quickened slightly.
“Hou...your bad side is starting to show again.”
“It’s not that at all!”
“Simply being a Hero and an Imperial Sword should have been enough, but a Harem Master too? It’s so embarrassing for me.”
“I didn’t become a Harem Master because I wanted to!”
Hornet had plenty of lovers. Without any particular effort on his part, he ended up attracting all sorts of women. And since he had no desire to turn them away, he kept up relationships with all of them. Normally, such a situation could easily devolve into open warfare, but that was where the class of Harem Master came into play. It made the women satisfied to be one among his crowd of lovers.
“Then you’ll leave that girl alone, right?”
“Well...”
He couldn’t bring himself to say it. Now that he had become aware of her, she was hard to ignore. That was pretty rare. Normally, women would come straight to him without him having done anything special, so he was barely conscious of his own sexual appetites. But this time it was different. He could tell that his body was longing for that girl. Of course, that wasn’t something he could plainly say to his own mother.
As he was wondering how to put his feelings into words, the ship began to shake.
“What was that?!” his mother yelped as an unnerving, creaking sound surrounded them.
After a while, the shaking stopped.
“Sounds like trouble. I’m going to go take a look.” Grateful for his luck, Hornet rose from his seat.
“You look awfully relieved, don’t you? We’ll talk about this again later.”
Pretending he hadn’t heard her, he headed for the door, but before he got there, the knob began to turn on its own.
“Are the girls back?” asked his mother.
If it had been his sisters, they would have unlocked the door and come in right away. But whoever was outside was turning the doorknob only slightly. In short, someone was up to no good.
“Mom, be careful!”
Hornet urged his mother back and stepped in front of her. After a moment, the door opened, revealing two men he didn’t know. One was a young man, well-kept, around twenty years old. The other was much older, wrapped in rags and standing behind the younger one.
“That lock was a hard one to pick, which makes sense for a first-class cabin,” the young man said, clearly impressed.
“Who are you?!”
“Couldn’t you think of something a bit more clever to say? That’s NPCs for you, I guess.”
Hornet’s first thought was that they were there to rob him, but the young man seemed far too laid back for that. Using his Discernment skill, he learned that the intruder’s name was Yousuke Hiiragi. He possessed the Gift, with his class being VRRPG Player.
That didn’t tell Hornet much at all. “Player” likely meant something like “participant” or “contestant,” but he had no idea what VRRPG might stand for.
The stranger was level ninety-nine, the upper limit for an ordinary human who had obtained the Gift. His stats were appropriate for his level, and he didn’t seem to possess any particularly noteworthy skills. He wouldn’t stand a chance against a hero.
But could Hornet really write him off as small fry? Judging from his name, there was a possibility he had come from a different world. Hornet couldn’t let his guard down. Visitors from other worlds often had unique abilities.
“Wait, are you a pirate?!” He drew his sword but didn’t attack immediately. Even against an intruder, he was cautious, waiting to see how the situation played out.
“No, not at all.”
“Then what are you doing breaking into someone’s room?”
“Oh, I guess I’m closer to a pirate than I thought. I am going to be taking his valuables, after all,” the other man said to his companion.
“I asked why you’re here!”
“You’re a hero, right? I wanted to see what a hero was like.”
“You could have visited me normally!”
“I’d never seen a lock like that before, so I wanted to see if I could crack it.”
“Are you messing with me? You’re trespassing. You can’t complain if we attack you.”
“That’s right. I wanted to try fighting you. If you’d like to attack first, that’s fine.”
“All right, so you are just a burglar, then!” Hornet couldn’t help but think Yousuke’s behavior was illogical. Maybe the guy had lost his mind, but either way, he was up to no good.
Without moving from his spot, he swung his sword. After a certain level, range meant nothing to a swordsman. For someone like Hornet, who had the classes of Hero and Imperial Sword, a distance of a few meters was nothing. The flash of his blade should have easily severed Yousuke’s arm.
“Jeez, this guy is crazy strong! I guess that’s a hero for you.”
“What?!”
Yousuke had blocked the slash with a pot. It had been placed inside the room as decoration, and while it was certainly a high-quality piece, it shouldn’t have been anywhere near that sturdy. Yet the delicately crafted item blocked Hornet’s attack completely. He hadn’t even seen him pick it up. Yousuke was suddenly just holding it in front of him.
“Yeah, everyone’s shocked the first time they see that,” the intruder remarked. “The viewers probably already figured it out, but I used Bullet Time from the Tactical Support System to grab the pot, then locked it to make it indestructible.”
Hornet realized his opponent must have reinforced the object somehow, but it was still just a small pot that he could hold in one hand. There was a limit to how much someone could defend themselves with it, no matter how resilient it was. There was some other power at work that he didn’t know about.
So he stopped holding back.
“Thousand Slaying Slash!”
If the other man could block a single attack, Hornet simply needed to use a technique that couldn’t be blocked or dodged. He would unleash countless overlapping blows and completely overwhelm his foe.
He swung his sword in every direction. If Yousuke took the attack head-on, he would be sliced so finely that there would be nothing left of him. But something felt wrong. The holy sword that had always served him well suddenly felt extremely heavy in his hands. The recoil from his strikes was so severe that it felt like it could take his arms clean off, and it took him an unreasonable amount of strength to control the trajectory of the blade.
The sensation only lasted for a moment, though. Finishing his routine, Hornet looked at Yousuke with ragged breaths. The intruder remained unharmed. In front of the nonchalant young man, his older companion, who had been standing behind him until that point, had collapsed to the floor.
“This is getting dicey,” Yousuke commented. “Can I actually beat this guy? Oh, I suppose I should probably explain. This guy wanted to deliver some medicine to his grandkid. While the quest is ongoing, he’s immortal. So that makes him a really good shield. And until you finish the quest, you can get a lot of use out of just taking him around with you.”
Although the old man was lying on the ground, he didn’t seem to have any injuries. Even after taking the full force of the Thousand Slaying Slash, he was still in one piece.
“Anyway, you called it the Thousand Slaying Slash, but that was only about a hundred, right?”
“What did you do?” Hornet couldn’t help but question him upon hearing the other man’s words. It was too strange. He couldn’t just ignore what he had seen.
“I turned the difficulty down to Very Easy. Anyway, it’s my turn now!”
Yousuke threw a knife. It was a reasonably strong attack with considerable speed. Hornet dodged it and moved to counter, but the knife embedded itself in his right shoulder.
He had definitely dodged it, and a plain knife shouldn’t have been able to pierce a hero’s clothes anyway. In light of the bizarre occurrence, Hornet stopped. He hadn’t taken any significant damage, so he made to continue his attack with only a moment’s delay, but he was once again stopped by a sudden and intense pain.
“Hou!” his mother screamed.
An attack had come from his flank. A middle-aged man had appeared out of nowhere, plunging a sword deep into his side. This strike wasn’t anything like Yousuke’s. Hornet moved to deal with the new arrival first, but the moment he did, the man vanished.
“Wow, that’s a hero for you. Even on Very Easy mode, he doesn’t die in one hit.”
Hornet couldn’t be defeated this way. Even with his internal organs pierced, he could continue fighting, but he hesitated. This man was completely unlike anyone he had ever fought. He had no idea how to deal with him.
“I guess I’ll explain that too,” Yousuke offered. “The man who just appeared was from a skill I have. Whenever I attack, there’s a chance a mysterious guy will appear out of nowhere to help me. Even I don’t know when it’s going to happen, so no matter how much you watch me, you’ll never be able to see it coming.”
It must have been some sort of Summoning magic. But even knowing that, without any warning at all, there was no way to deal with it.
“The knife was a normal critical attack. Crits always hit and ignore defense stats. You might think they’re unreliable, but there’s a skill that lets you stock them up. So if you build them up beforehand, you can trigger a crit whenever you feel like it.”
Even with Yousuke’s explanation, Hornet was at a total loss. There were some people who called exceptionally well-placed attacks “critical hits,” but he’d never heard anything about them landing on a target who had already dodged, or penetrating the legendary-grade equipment of a hero.
Hornet was being overpowered. He was so much stronger that it seemed impossible for him to lose, but it felt like there was nothing he could do. Of course, if he went all-out, he should have been able to win. But if he did that, it was unlikely that the ship, never mind the other passengers, would come through it unharmed. He wasn’t prepared to risk all of their lives.
“How interesting...” he muttered, startling himself.
But there was nothing interesting about it. The thought had never even crossed his mind, yet his mouth had spoken of its own accord.
“Very well. I’ll take it from here.”
Hornet’s consciousness abruptly shut down.
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