Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari (LN) - Volume 22 - Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: Origin of the Past Heavenly Emperor

We returned to the Siltran castle and let Melty and the others know that Natalia had been selected as the hammer vassal weapon hero.

“A new Dark Brave has been born! Wield that black power with abandon, oh fallen pacifier!” Filolia crowed from the sidelines. Natalia raised her hammer and took a step forward but then stopped.

“Hey, Filolia! Don’t overly excite her!” Mamoru stepped in to caution her.

“It seems to make sense . . . but it won’t be easy,” Ren said, looking at Natalia with sympathy.

“Why does power always choose those who don’t wish for it?” Raphtalia pondered, also looking sympathetic.

“Oh! I like that phrase!” Filolia responded. I thought it was good too.

“Why am I being counted among these . . . unique individuals?” Natalia bemoaned. I wasn’t pleased with her tone. She was clearly using “unique” as a derogatory term. And if heroes were all “unique,” that would include me. I wasn’t pleased with that at all.

“That’s pretty rude to the spirits of the holy and vassal weapons,” I commented. I had my own questions about how the spirits chose their heroes, but I didn’t feel the same as the pacifier. She probably hated the whole world at the moment. I’d give her some time to settle down. “In any case, this puts Siltran on top. The threat of a Piensa invasion has been totally squashed.” Piensa was left with just the Bow Hero. It didn’t look like they had the Carriage Hero.

“True,” Mamoru said. “I didn’t expect things to develop this quickly.” I agreed with that sentiment. Now we’d be able to take our time and search for a way back to the future. “We should continue to collect the weapons and enhance them, don’t you think?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Collecting them isn’t enough—they need to be strong too.”

“She looks pretty strong already,” Mamoru mused. “We probably don’t need to worry so much.” As we chatted, Natalia suddenly snapped back to herself and looked up.

“Hold on a moment. Now that I’ve been chosen as the hammer vassal weapon holder, what about that hammer I was given the other day?” Natalia asked.

“Restrictions. You won’t be able to use it,” I said.

“That’s how it goes,” Mamoru agreed. After someone was chosen as a hero by a holy weapon or a vassal weapon, they could only use that weapon in battle. That meant Natalia could no longer use the hammer that Holn had given her. Holn nodded upon hearing this.

“Honestly speaking, I’d prefer you used it in combat, but that isn’t an option now,” Holn said.

“Ah, if she can’t use it, maybe I can,” Ruft suggested.

“You’re joking! I’m not giving that hammer to anyone!” Natalia replied immediately. She really didn’t want anyone to hear what it had to say.

“Even if she can’t use it as a weapon, surely she could just keep it on her back. But that sounds like a bit of a waste,” I admitted.

“The weapon will still obtain the information I need,” Holn replied. “It should pick up on her techniques.” If Holn said it, that sounded legit.

“I’m not letting anyone touch this hammer!” Natalia cried out, still raging. “And I’m going to kill that evil alchemist one day!” It sounded like she was trying to calm herself down by focusing all of her hate on Holn.

“I hope she doesn’t let her anger overtake her, Mr. Naofumi,” Raphtalia said. The implication there was Raphtalia wanted to add “like you.” I was wondering about that myself. It depended on whether Natalia hated Holn as much as I hated Bitch. They seemed to help each other out, so their relationship couldn’t be that bad.

“Dafu, dafu, dafu!” raged Dafu-chan, seemingly triggered by Natalia’s anger. But her outburst only made her look cuter to me.

“You’ll only hear all those morose comments at the start. Once it’s finished, it should be an excellent hammer,” Holn commented.

“I hope you’re right,” Natalia said pointedly. With that, we welcomed Natalia as the Hammer Hero. I got the impression she would have liked to disappear, but her new duty would not allow for that. Being a hero really was the worst. It felt like some of these spirits—just some of them—were going to incredible lengths to troll our entire lives.

The night after Natalia was selected as a hero, I was alone in my room, drawing up some accessory designs and compounding some medicine.

“Raph!” said Raph-chan, bursting in.

“Dafu!” said Dafu-chan, joining her. Raphtalia was off again helping Keel and the others with their trauma treatments. We hadn’t slept in the same room for a while now.

“Hey. You two want to sleep in my room tonight?” I asked my two visitors. Raph-chan and Dafu-chan slept in all sorts of different places. They had been helping Raphtalia recently, so they often slept with her.

“Dafu,” said Dafu-chan. She took a step forward, stood up on two legs, and then leapt up into the air. With a theatrical puff of smoke, she turned into the form of the past Heavenly Emperor.

“Huh? What’s up?” I asked, puzzled by the change. It probably meant she had something she wanted to discuss with me. “You don’t turn into this form very often. Any special reason today?”

“It takes a long time to charge up the energy for this transformation, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor explained. “I should have kept more for this purpose.” That explained it. Technically speaking, she was stronger than Sadeena. I would have preferred her fighting on the front lines; the reason she didn’t turn into her human form often was because of the power it consumed. That was quite inconvenient.

“Sounds like you must have something you want to say—and you don’t have long to say it,” I jibed.

“I do not,” the past Heavenly Emperor agreed.

“Shall we have Holn make a few modifications? Increase your transformation time?” I continued.

“I know you like joking around,” the past Heavenly Emperor said, a frown instantly forming on her face, “but stop it. I already look like some freakish teddy bear, eh. I don’t want things to get any worse.”

“Whatever you say,” I placated her. I’d already been pretty sure of this, but it seemed the past Heavenly Emperor didn’t care much for Holn.

“The charge time is improving, anyway—but that only means I’m becoming more accustomed to this body, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor bemoaned. It sounded like she might be able to transform more often in the future. “I’m going to keep this short even though I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

“Go right ahead,” I said. I wondered if she had purposefully picked a time when Raphtalia wasn’t here and what that might mean.

“First, I need to explain exactly what I am,” she started.

“Raphtalia’s ancestor, right? And coming after Natalia, I’m guessing,” I cut in. “But that hammer of yours looked a lot like the one Holn had.” We still had no real idea who this past Heavenly Emperor actually was. There was Raphtalia, Natalia, and her. That was about all the information we had. “In the original timeline, did that turn up later, and did they use it for the experiment?” I asked.

“No. The way that hammer came into being, eh, and its manufacture are without a doubt the same,” the past Heavenly Emperor said confidently.

“Which means . . . you’re residual memories from Natalia?” I guessed.

“Close to that, eh, but not exactly,” the past Heavenly Emperor replied. “The answer is I was formed from that hammer, but further into the future from now when the personality transcription has been completed.” This meant that the past Heavenly Emperor, sometimes known as Raph-chan II, was not Natalia herself, but rather had been formed from a hammer containing a copy of Natalia’s personality. “It might be due to this unexpected trip to the past, and maybe because I’m growing into this body, but my memories are starting to come back to me. It doesn’t feel exactly like I’m remembering them. This is . . . something else,” the past Heavenly Emperor explained.

“Okay,” I said. I had been hoping for some clues on the immediate future of the age we were now in, but that didn’t sound promising.

“I can remember a little of what happened to the hammer after this. It was always taken out of Q’ten Lo as the weapon of the pacifier. An oracle would use its power to let the hammer take over their body and then punish rampaging heroes or monsters,” the past Heavenly Emperor explained. That sounded like the trick Shildina had pulled when we first met her. So the past Heavenly Emperor was the one who got sent out from Q’ten Lo to fix things. She was fated to do a whole bunch of fighting, then. “Once I ended my life as a sentient weapon, there was nothing until Shildina awoke me.”

“So tell me. Do you think the waves have ended in the future?” I asked her. She looked away as she replied.

“I can tell you . . . I recall fighting many new enemies over the years of my life. There were always those like Makina mixed in amongst them, but I cannot be sure they were always the allies of our true enemy,” she admitted.

“I see.” I rubbed my chin in thought. This trip back to the past was definitely an irregularity. More and more things were pointing to that now. We didn’t have any concrete answers yet, but the main issue still stood—we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible. “You don’t seem bothered about talking to the Water Dragon either. Why’s that?”

“I’ve never liked him. He talks too much and telling him any of this isn’t going to change things,” the past Heavenly Emperor said. It sounded like she didn’t get on with him. He didn’t seem to know much that could help us anyway. “If I show them this form, I’m worried about affecting the Heavenly Emperor further from this time . . . the original me, eh,” she continued. I could see that too. Natalia didn’t do so well with being “affected.” She still had a lot of growing to do, mentally. She wouldn’t be able to withstand the shock of discovering what was basically a clone of herself among a bunch of people from the future.

“So putting this all together, you’re a hammer with a copy of Natalia’s personality who’s from further into the future than me,” I said.

“That personality was extracted from the hammer and stored in a different vessel, eh,” she corrected.

“And why do you say ‘eh’ all the time?” I asked.

“I don’t know, eh,” she replied.

“You’re a blend of Natalia’s and Holn’s personalities, perhaps,” I ventured. Holn had that whole “little old” thing when she spoke.

“I hope that isn’t the case, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor said. “It’s more likely I’m just getting old. I recall my verbal patterns being strange prior to my final destruction, eh.”

“Okay then. What else do you need to say?” I asked, moving her along. I now knew this was future Natalia, but the human version of the past Heavenly Emperor looked so much like a slightly older Raphtalia that I found it hard to deal with her. “Are you going to give some speech about preserving the timeline? You’re the one who killed that foxy lady, so you’re in no position to lecture on that topic. That had to be a pretty big blow to the space-time continuum,” I said.

“Huh? That fox woman? No,” the past Heavenly Emperor said noncommittally. I would have liked a little more commitment there. A disturbing golden tail flickered through my memory. “If any changes are happening, I’m the one who wants to observe them. I’m not going to come down on you too hard.”

“Awesome. I’ll go ahead and have Holn make the Raph species rather than the filolials—” I started.

“That is certainly not permitted,” the past Heavenly Emperor said quickly. “Know your place.” I’d hoped she wouldn’t take that stance. “I simply can’t stand how she styles herself as an evil alchemist, eh.” She definitely hated Holn.

“Are you expending all this charged up power just to complain?” I asked.

“No, of course not. There’s something that’s still vague in my mind, eh, but it could be a useful lead,” the past Heavenly Emperor said.

“What is it?” I asked intently.

“Do you remember that device we saw in the filolial sanctuary, prior to coming to this time?” the past Heavenly Emperor asked.

“You mean the things that Motoyasu activated?” I asked. It had looked like a big clock.

“I think that . . . was a facility for the control of time,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed.

“There’s no filolials in this time though, so they can’t have a sanctuary yet,” I said. “Was that shrine there before they came along?” Mamoru had mentioned a “sanctuary,” but I deduced that they had to be talking about those ruins—in our time—that we’d visited during the Church of the Three Heroes debacle. Melty might know where it was, and what kind of facilities they had, but it seemed unlikely there was anything there. This was before the fusing of the worlds. The terrain was pretty different. That made it hard to locate things. Like with Melromarc and Siltvelt, there was a place called the Desert of Confusion on the way to Faubrey—again, in our time—but no such place here.

“If that shrine originated with the sword or spear worlds, that’s going to be a real pain for us,” I murmured.

“The worrying thing is how likely that sounds, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor added.

“Not a laughing matter,” I said, wondering how the hell we would get there if that was the case.

“But we aren’t without some hope. There’s potential to get there if we can obtain the carriage vassal weapon,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed.

“Why would a carriage offer any hope at all?” I asked.

“The carriage is a movement-based vassal weapon, eh. Like the ship from Kizuna’s world. It can trace the response from the sword and cross between worlds even outside of a wave,” the past Heavenly Emperor revealed. That was a thing, was it? Ethnobalt had used the Ship vassal weapon to send us back to this world via an anchor accessory. The same kind of thing could be possible using different weapons.

Still, even if that gave us some hope, I was pretty pissed off to learn that our hope of getting home wasn’t even in this world!

“Even the katana vassal weapon couldn’t transport us over to Kizuna’s world. You sure the carriage would be able to do something like that?” I asked.

“Like I said, it’s just a hope at the moment,” the past Heavenly Emperor repeated.

“Okay then.” The next issue was getting our hands on the carriage vassal weapon. Mamoru made it sound like a vassal weapon that was really picky about picking someone to use it, and we didn’t even know where it was anyway. I was pretty sure that Fitoria was the holder of the carriage in the future; maybe we could take the past Fitoria along with us to look for it. “I get what you want to say, but how do we look for something we have no idea the location of?”

“In this time . . . I recall it being in a place the heroes call the ‘sanctuary,’” the past Heavenly Emperor said.

“So you do know,” I replied sardonically.

“I remembered, eh,” she replied. This was one unreliable Heavenly Emperor. Natalia would probably feel dejected to know she turned into this in the future. I also wasn’t so sure we’d find anything useful in this “sanctuary.” Mamoru made it sound like there wasn’t much there.

“Ah . . . I’m out of time, eh,” the past Heavenly Emperor said, and then she popped back into Dafu-chan shape in another puff of smoke. “Dafu,” said Dafu-chan with a deep sigh. I wondered whatever she could dislike about this vision of cuteness. Maybe this was what Raphtalia would look like if she turned into a Raph species. I now knew this was Natalia as a Raph species, so I reached out to stroke her. Even as I extended my hand, however, Dafu-chan leapt away—sensing danger, perhaps. She even gave a threatening growl. It seemed she knew all too well what I had been planning to do. Maybe another time.

“Thanks for all the info. I’ll talk with Mamoru tomorrow and get him to take us to this sanctuary place,” I said.

“Dafu!” said Dafu-chan. Thanks to the information from the past Heavenly Emperor, I therefore decided to head to the sanctuary.