Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari (LN) - Volume 21 - Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: The Origin of the Waves

“Here we go! Here they come! The games are getting underway for today, guys and gals!” A high-pitched, already incredibly annoying voice rang out immediately after our arrival. I looked around, trying to work out which moron was treating this like a game. It didn’t sound like anyone I’d encountered so far. I wondered if it could be the Bow Hero from this time. Mamoru and his crew were already here, standing there looking in what I presumed was the direction of the crack.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, looking in the same direction . . . and then I gasped. There was definitely a crack, that much was for sure, but rather than like the cracks we’d seen before, this time it looked more like a mess of 3D polygons. There were countless rings floating around it, and we were seeing a vista that suggested a connection to somewhere else, different than to where the crack was coming from altogether. Within that cut-out space, there was a barrier floating. Above the crack, there was a figure in the air. It was . . . a person, from the look of it, with a microphone in hand and what looked like the head of some kind of cat-mascot costume. They looked super suspicious and appeared to be using some kind of voice-changing device. I thought that they could have been a hero from another world, or another one of the resurrected.

“Roll up, roll up! The game for today is—” A massive roulette wheel suddenly appeared next to the suspicious cat-headed person, and then a drumroll started to thunder out. A dart appeared, also from thin air, and stuck into the wheel with a thud. “Look at this! A thrilling battle between the Bow Holy Hero and the Brush Holy Hero! Let’s give them a big hand! The other heroes will fight to the death against a horde of monsters kindly prepared by our sponsors for today, an eclectic mix of violent beasts and monsters from the heart of the wave!” Countless shapes suddenly appeared from the rings and started to run toward us. “The rules are simple!” the cat-headed figure continued. “You will explore a maze of unbreakable walls! The first side to escape is the winner! You can also use the traps and special tools we’ve prepared to kill the opposing heroes! That’s also a win! I want to see people conniving and people stabbing people in the back! Stab, stab, stab! Do I need to even say that killing opposing heroes will bring you bigger rewards than escaping? Of course I don’t! That’s always the way this works! Good luck, losers!” With that, a gong rang out. “Hold on!” Cathead exclaimed. “Looks like we already have some forces from another world fighting here! Good, good, good stuff! Cameraman, don’t forget the live broadcast!” My allies and I just watched this unfold in front of us, stunned. But Mamoru had his hand on his chest, actually looking relieved.

“Phew. Looks like this is a pretty safe wave this time,” Mamoru said. “It doesn’t look like we’ve got anyone crossing directly over either.”

“What the hell is all this?” I exclaimed when I finally found my words. “What the hell are you talking about?” I looked at Mamoru with a dumbfounded expression on my face—we all did—and pointed at the crazy, complex-looking space that was apparently the wave crack. That was apparently . . . a wave.

“Your reaction tells me that maybe waves aren’t like this in the future,” Holn said, hazarding a guess.

“Just a little different!” I snarked back at her. “The waves we’ve fought in the future are like some kind of natural disaster, with a horde of monsters flowing out of a big crack. That’s it.” Raphtalia and S’yne nodded at my reply to Holn’s question.

“The waves in the future and the waves we know about . . . are different?” Mamoru pondered.

“That’s a little old mystery, to be sure,” Holn said. “If we line up our knowledge on the subject, in both instances the monsters coming out of the cracks are controlled by the ones who assume the name of gods, seeking to overrun the world of men . . .” I paused there for a moment. She said “the ones,” not “the one.” I had Phoenix flashbacks, remembering that horrible moment when that mural on the temple wall had revealed we actually had two fire birds to fight. “The waves were called waves by the original heroes, far in the past, who defended against the first waves.” That was interesting. I recalled hearing something like that in our time. The waves hadn’t been named after a natural disaster, like tidal waves or anything like that, but rather the idea was to defeat wave after wave of oncoming enemies and enhance your own forces. “In the beginning, the word ‘wave’ was referring to something like tower defense against waves of attacks, if I remember correctly,” Holn said. So that was where the word “wave” came from?

I was aware of the genre of games called “tower defense.” They gave you a base to defend—not necessarily a tower, of course—and then you faced hordes of enemies coming along a fixed route, having to drive them off for a fixed period of time. The player placed all sorts of units to protect their base and prevent the enemy from reaching it and then took on wave after wave of enemies.

So we weren’t talking about a tidal wave after all.

“They get harder with each successful completion, and recently we’ve been forced to fight to the death against heroes from other worlds more and more often. They are more like death matches between worlds at this point,” Mamoru explained. I pointed at Cathead, who stood over the crack and gave a running commentary.

“That’s one of those who assumes the name of gods. You’ve never met any of them before?” R’yne asked. I could only nod, still reeling from the information that there were more than one of these guys. We’d never seen anyone who could be said to be behind the waves.

“From my research into the topic,” Holn explained in more detail, “we are talking about beings who belong to a completely different world from those from which the heroes come. It’s a world that has achieved such technological advancement that its denizens have reached the level we would normally attribute to gods. They are immortal and all-powerful, and so they entertain themselves by making toys of other worlds.” I shook my head, stunned. All sorts of records might have been destroyed in the future, but even then, we’d had no idea at all that something like this was going down!

“The level we would normally attribute to gods?” Melty repeated, with a mixture of disgust and anger in her voice.

“You know that a goal of alchemy is to achieve extended or eternal life, correct? We’re talking about beings whose curiosity led them to those answers and beyond and created a civilization powerful enough to be known as gods,” Holn explained. I shook my head, hardly ready for all these answers after all this time. So it was like someone from my time with modern inventions like a TV or lighter going back to a settlement of primitives and showing them off. How would those primitives—which was us, in this situation—react? Just thinking they were a magician wouldn’t even be the half of it. Nope, they would be far more likely to think they were seeing a god.

It made sense. If a world did exist with technology far more advanced than this one—far more advanced than the Japan I came from—maybe they would develop the ability to look into other worlds. If they could do that, they might consider some kind of exchange or invasion. But if this god world had developed beyond even the need to do that, then maybe they would consider just using other worlds as their playthings.

When the worlds crashed together, a wave occurred, and monsters appeared. Those monster hordes had “Dimensional” associated with their names, so maybe they were some kind of defensive mechanism for the world. Considering the Spirit Tortoise and the Phoenix, I realized something else. Maybe they had been using souls as material to try and heal the damage caused to the human world by the waves. This led me to wonder what would happen if the heroes’ weapons could heal that damage without having to use souls at all.

And the ones who assumed the name of gods were taking advantage of this natural defense mechanism and using it as a form of entertainment. Cathead had just said something about a cameraman and a live broadcast. They seemed to be making this some kind of crazy game show in which heroes from different worlds were pitted against each other for the sake of the entertainment of observers.

The whole thing stunk. It was like the coliseum in Zeltoble or some form of public execution. Now I understood why Holn had said she wasn’t interested in research into eternal life. She didn’t like following in others’ footsteps, for one thing, but if this was what it led to, then it already made me feel like throwing up. Was it possible for such desires to exist? Desires that could only be fulfilled by doing something like this? Even with all their advances in culture, did it still take something as lurid as this to entertain them?

But I didn’t care about any of that.

“Of course, the heroes who please them, the ones they like, are rewarded with all sorts of bonuses and can have their wishes granted too. That gives them further advantages in future battles,” Mamoru explained. This was all totally crazy. S’yne’s sworn enemies had said something about a reward for destroying worlds. Maybe this was what they meant. I wasn’t about to take part in this inter-world death match for these losers with a divinity complex though! “I admit, there was a time when I considered trying to win favor with them myself . . . to get my own wish granted,” Mamoru said, each word heavy on his lips. It must have seemed like an appealing way to get Filolia back.

“You were right not to. Who knows what would actually happen if one of them granted you a wish? They’re like kids with a bug under a magnifying glass,” I replied. They also tended to give the resurrected—the vanguards of the waves—some pretty strange abilities too. Seya had been a great example of that, with his ability to instantly create food. Even if they could bring the dead back to life, there was a question of whether the content of that body was the actual soul of the departed person.

In any case, if one of our ultimate enemies was here, then we needed to kill them. This might even help to quell the waves in the future. There was also the possibility that the origin of the waves was here in the past, and in the future, we couldn’t do anything but suppress them. From a gaming perspective, Mamoru and his allies might be fighting the main battle here in the past, and in the future, we were nothing but background mobs.

I wasn’t going to let this chance slip away. If we could kill the ones who set up this insane game, we might be able to bring it to an end.

“That’s the one causing the waves?!” someone muttered before I could even give the order to attack the one who assumed the name of god. It was Ren, and he was already rushing into battle.

“Wait! Hold on! Ren!” I shouted. He crouched down, then sprang forward.

“Yeah, we’ve got to stop these attackers!” Mamoru shouted at me.

“Mamoru is right! If we don’t put a stop to this, we’ll all be wiped out! They started all these crazy events after showing us that we can’t possibly defeat them,” Holn said.

“They started by killing the first hero that attacked them, to set an example, and let us know that this was really a fight to the death. Then they wiped out all the heroes from that world before destroying that entire world itself,” Mamoru replied. He pointed at the rings. They were likely showing us other worlds on the other side. I shook my head, wondering if there was anything this scum wouldn’t do.

“We’ve been stuck waiting to uncover a technique to kill a god or for someone who can kill a god to arrive and help us,” Holn said. I dashed forward, trying to stop Ren, but he was already inside the strange wave area, leaping high into the air to slash down at the one who assumed the name of god.

“Huh?” Cathead suddenly created a barrier out of nothing, blocking Ren’s attack. I’d seen something like that before. Minions from S’yne’s sworn enemies had deployed similar protection. But Ren took out his sword in his other hand and imbued it with life force. With a splintering crash, a crack appeared in the barrier of the one who assumed the name of god. “What’s this now? I don’t think we’ve met before. We don’t have a full understanding of all the worlds we’re connected to here, but it seems you don’t understand the rules,” Cathead said.

“You’re the one causing the waves? Stop it right now!” Ren shouted.

“What an energetic challenger we have here. Ooh, this could be good for our ratings! Throwing some spice into the normal routine!” Cathead dropped back in the instant that Ren shattered his barrier. “Before we get into the main event, then, let’s have an exhibition game!” Cathead suggested. I clicked my tongue in annoyance. We’d caught his notice already. I had wanted to try and hit him with a surprise attack, but Cathead was already looking over at Raphtalia, Fohl, and me. “Well, well, look at this. Lots of new faces. I’m here, so come and get me. Just one on one wouldn’t be much fun. We seem to have some powerful participants gathering here in the world of the Shield and Bow holy weapons. Where did you wander in from, little lost ones? Huh? I can’t seem to track you yet.” It sounded like this one who assumed the name of god didn’t know where we’d come from. So much for the all-knowing part of divinity. “Hmmm. I’d better thin you out a little, or things might not be stimulating enough,” Cathead said.

“Naofumi!” said Mamoru and Melty together, but we had already been moved away—Raphtalia, Fohl, and I were teleported instantly over in front of the one who assumed the name of god. S’yne was left behind. She was swinging her scissors around wildly to try and get some attention. Her weapon was close to ceasing to function completely, so we didn’t need her getting involved in this. I did think for a moment about why S’yne might have been ignored, however. She’d likely be dismissed as being able to do little better than the holy weapon copies that Holn had created. Cathead had been able to tell the difference between Mamoru and me, but maybe S’yne’s weapon really was on its last legs.

In any case, she could leave this to us.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“No need to worry. This space is set up to match the Shield and Bow world that you were already in,” Cathead replied.

“And only heroes will participate, I guess,” I noted.

“Would anyone else have enough strength?” Cathead mocked. It sounded like he didn’t think much of our chances. I looked around to see those who were displayed in the rings were all watching what was going to happen to us, even as they fought. I signaled Mamoru as best as I could that he should concentrate on wiping out the monsters from the waves. Mamoru snapped back to himself, and the villagers rushed in to join the battle.

That was the way. They just had to leave the battle with the one who assumed the name of god to us and minimize the damage outside as much as possible.

“I see you are all heroes. We have the Sword and the Shield, but then the Katana and Fists . . . are those Gauntlets? You two are vassal weapon holders from the look of it. Where did you wander in from? Or were you called here? What means are you using to block us being able to trace your origins? These silly spirits just won’t give up, will they?” Cathead said. He seemed to have a good handle on certain aspects of us, but it also sounded like the weapons were a thorn in his side. If we could kill this guy here . . . it really might end the waves.

“Ren,” I called out. I needed to caution him for dashing in like that. It came from his anger and the pressure from his sense of duty. I needed to help him calm down. Realizing what he had done upon hearing my voice, Ren turned to look back at me and then averted his gaze apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” he finally managed. “When I heard this is the one behind everything . . .”

“It doesn’t matter how it happened. If we had stood out during the fight, I think we would have ended up here anyway. This Cathead sounds like he places his emphasis on entertainment,” I said. His comment about thinning us out made it clear he didn’t want any side to be overly strong compared to the others. If we ended this battle smoothly with almost no damage, you could be sure he would be back next time with some kind of super-extreme challenge for us to take on. It really did feel like the Zeltoble coliseum. The primary motivation for everything he did was to entertain his audience. “He’s making a game of this, trying to toy with us. We can use that to kill him outright as quickly as possible,” I said. Time to teach him that when you play with fire, you burn the whole bloody house down. We needed to wipe him out with the rest of these scumbags who were causing the waves. None of this changed our plans.

The role of the heroes might just be to buy some time until the one who could kill the gods came along—just to survive until that happened. To win, however we could, and get away. He did look like an extension of the kind of enemies we had been fighting all along. That meant we might have a chance against him.

“Okay. Naofumi, just give me the word,” Ren replied.

“I will. Bearing in mind who we’re fighting here, I expect better than your best effort,” I told him.

“You bet,” he replied, gripping his swords tightly. “We’re taking this guy down!”