Prologue: The Search
Filo pulled our carriage across a ravaged land as I looked for the other heroes. How long had I been searching for them?
“Ren! Itsuki! Motoyasu! Time to face reality, guys! Come on out!”
“Mr. Naofumi, can’t you try to sound a little nicer?”
“I can’t help it. We’ve been at this for days.”
In order to explain why we were frantically searching for the other heroes, I’ll have to go back a bit and start from the beginning.
My name is Naofumi Iwatani. I’m 20 years old.
Back in modern Japan, I was a college student with otaku tendencies.
I was bored one day, so I went to the neighborhood library and started reading a book called The Records of the Four Holy Weapons. Before I knew what was happening, I found myself summoned to another world.
The book had been going on about the deeds of four heroes, and I had been summoned to serve as one of them: the Shield Hero.
The new world was under the threat of a horrible destructive force called “the waves,” and it was my job to help defend the world against the existential threat it faced.
At first I was thrilled. The world was like a dream. And I had been summoned to save it! But things didn’t go quite so smoothly—I was falsely accused of rape, arrested, and thrown out into the streets, penniless and alone. To make matters worse, the Shield Hero wasn’t capable of actually dealing any damage to enemies. The tradeoff, however, granted me incredible defensive capabilities.
So that’s how my life in the new world began: framed for a crime I didn’t commit, completely without friends or connections, and without the ability to fight on my own (which meant I couldn’t gain experience or level up).
That brings me to my next point. The world was a strange one indeed. Like an RPG, the people had levels that could be raised by defeating monsters in battle. Whenever your level increased, so did your abilities. It was a world that directly rewarded effort. On the other hand, it also meant that as long as your level was high, you wouldn’t have to exert much effort at all.
Getting back to the story, I saved a little money and bought myself a slave. Slaves were under a special sort of magic that prevented them from disobeying their masters, which I hoped would prevent another betrayal of the sort I’d already endured.
Because all I could do in battle was defend, I needed someone on my side that could take care of the offense. So I added the slave to my party and forced her to fight monsters on my behalf. It was the only way I could gain the experience necessary for leveling up.
I know it sounds a little unethical, but it was the only option I had.
“But this leaves a bad aftertaste, doesn’t it? Something about this doesn’t seem right.”
“I know what you mean. It all feels . . . unfinished. There’s no sense of accomplishment.”
The girl I was talking to was that very slave, the demi-human girl Raphtalia.
Demi-humans were a race of people that didn’t exist back in modern Japan. They were basically humans that also shared features with different animals, usually their ears or tails.
Raphtalia was a raccoon type, so she had tanuki ears and a tanuki tail.
If you just looked at her, you’d think she was 18 or so. With her clear, bright skin and composed, gentle face, she was a classic beauty. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. Whenever a breeze caught her red hair and it streamed out over her shoulders, she looked like she’d just stepped out of a painting.
Demi-humans had another notable characteristic: when they leveled up, their apparent age changed along with their battle abilities. So when I first bought Raphtalia as a slave, she looked like a 10-year-old girl. But as we both leveled up, she grew into an adult before my eyes.
Her hometown was destroyed in the first wave of destruction. A horde of monsters overran the village and killed nearly everyone there. After the monsters left, the slave hunters came. Then I bought her from the slave traders, and we’ve been battling together since.
Then came a time when Raphtalia got the opportunity to free herself from the slave magic. She had grown to trust me, though, and so she decided to remain a slave in hopes that she might earn my trust in return. I told her that she didn’t need to remain a slave, but she insisted.
Anyway, now she’s my most trusted partner.
She had also become unbelievably strong. She had recently defeated a very powerful monster, the Spirit Tortoise.
She was my Raphtalia. I watched over her like a surrogate parent.
She tried very hard at everything she did and was generally a very serious person. Whenever I stepped over the line—which I often did—she was always ready to put me back in my place with a stern word or two. If anything happened, I’d be there to protect her from it. I had to. She was like my daughter.
“Filo, you better help us find Ren and Itsuki and Motoyasu.”
“Huh? But I can’t smell them at all!” the monster pulling our carriage yelled back to me. She was a giant bird-like monster called a filolial. Her name was Filo.
She wasn’t like normal filolials though—Filo could transform into a little human girl with wings on her back. When she did, she looked just like an angel.
Filolials liked to pull carriages. It was instinctual for them. But whenever a hero raised a filolial, it grew into a filolial queen (or king), which was different from other filolials by virtue of its rank and ability.
As for Filo . . . Shortly after Raphtalia decided to remain as my slave, we stopped by the slave trader that I’d purchased her from. The trader’s nefarious business had to be hidden from public sight, so he ran a cover operation where he sold monster eggs in a sort of lottery game. I bought an egg from him and it was Filo that hatched from it.
She was a naïve little girl, a voracious eater that never knew when to stop talking.
When she transformed into her human form, she had blonde hair, blue eyes, and looked like she was about 10 years old. Like Raphtalia, she had a pretty face. Even I had to admit that she was pretty cute.
To sum it up, she was exactly what you picture when you hear the term “lolita angel.” Of course, she was also a giant bird monster that never stopped eating. But that last thing she said was a little over the top, even for her.
“Smell them?” I asked. I had to remind myself that she was a monster, so of course she had a different way of searching for things than humans.
She was a wild thing, but I sympathized with her. It wasn’t fun to keep hunting for people that probably weren’t anywhere nearby.
You see, we were looking for the other heroes, the ones that, just like myself, had been summoned here from another world. Each of them came from a different version of Japan. And each of them already knew a great deal about this new world, because it was similar to video games they had played back in their own worlds. Thinking they knew everything, they got to be supremely overconfident and ended up acting like fools.
When I was framed and persecuted, they seized the opportunity to get rid of me—okay, that might not be fair—but they had ignored the truth when it was staring them in the face. They were a bunch of fools.
The person that framed me and saw to my persecution was none other than the bitch princess of the kingdom. Her piece-of-trash father, the king, helped her the whole time. Eventually, the queen, who was the real monarch of the kingdom, stepped in to clear my name and prove my innocence.
As you might imagine, many things happened to get me to that point. The bitch princess had a younger sister named Melty (Filo ended up becoming best friends with her). Melty ended up being harassed, and we all had to go into hiding. Of course, after we ran away with Melty, it was widely reported throughout the kingdom that we had kidnapped her. Relentlessly pursued, we were able to slowly get to the bottom of the conspiracy that tried to destroy us.
In the end, it was the national religion of Melromarc, the Church of the Three Heroes, that had been behind it all. We had to face the high priest in battle to clear our names, but we were successful. Funny thing—the three heroes I was searching for, at the moment, were the very same three heroes the church worshiped. After all the scheming was made clear to the public, the church lost its reputation and support and it was officially declared heretical by the crown.
“If they’re not here, we’re just going to have to widen our search.”
“You’re right. And a lot of these suffering people are still not safe.”
Once my name was finally cleared, the kingdom started to support me in my efforts to protect it from the waves of destruction. The queen arranged to have me sent to the Cal Mira islands, which were in the middle of an activation event at the time. That basically meant that we could earn double the experience for any battles we fought there.
We went to the islands to continue our training, and we were able to level up very quickly. Before we left for the islands, all four heroes had a meeting to share what we knew about how to power up our legendary weapons. I learned a lot from that meeting, and I was able to put my new powered-up weapon to the test while we trained in the islands.
I guess I should probably explain a bit more about the other three heroes we were looking for. I’ll start with their names and personalities.
I’ll start with the Sword Hero, Ren Amaki.
I think he was 16 years old. He was younger than me, and shorter too.
He had a cool, kind of androgynous face that was framed with glossy black hair. He liked to wear black clothes, so most of his equipment was black too. Maybe it had something to do with his age—a lot of teenagers go through that sort of phase.
As for his personality, he was cool and standoffish—a loner for sure. He was a terrible communicator, which caused me no shortage of strife.
Back in the world he came from, they had games called “VRMMO,” which basically let players completely immerse themselves in online worlds. The game he’d played that was similar to this place was called Brave Star Online.
The Spear Hero is next, Kitamura Motoyasu.
He was 22 years old. So he was a little older than me. He was tall and the most handsome of the heroes. His hair was long and streaked with brown, and—I hate to say it—he really was actually pretty handsome. The only thing you need to know about his personality is that he was constantly hitting on girls. The second he laid eyes on a woman, he lost all self-control. But once he decided to trust someone, he would never give up, no matter how awful they were. That made him do some pretty stupid things in the past. I’m only just starting to understand that he didn’t mean to be as awful as he was. He was just tricked by that woman of his.
Speaking of that woman, she was the one that falsely accused me of rape and had me thrown out in the streets. After my name was cleared, the queen striped her of her princess title and had her name officially changed to Bitch.
According to Motoyasu, the world we’d been summoned to was the spitting image of an online game he’d played in his own world, a game called Emerald Online.
The last hero was the Bow Hero, Itsuki Kawasumi.
I get irritated just thinking about him, but I guess I need to explain what sort of guy he was. I shouldn’t neglect to do that.
He was 17 years old, and was about the same height as Ren.
His hair was styled and fell in soft curls. From the look of him, you’d think he was an artistic, sensitive kind of guy. He wouldn’t look out of place running his fingers over a piano. I suppose that if you only had his appearance to go by, he was an attractive person.
But his personality betrayed all of that. He was selfish beyond belief, and thought he could do whatever he wanted, so long as it satisfied his own puffed-up sense of justice. I could never get along with Motoyasu because of his relationship with Bitch. But taken at face value, Itsuki was the worst person of the bunch.
He’d made so many people cry, one of which is important to my story— but I’ll get to that later.
He insisted that the world we were in was copied from a console game he’d played in his own world, a game called Dimension Wave.
So the three heroes were all very different people, but they each thought they knew how the world worked. When we all sat down together to discuss the best methods to accrue power, all of them had conflicting ideas. The meeting quickly devolved into a shouting match.
Specifically, details they thought they knew about the world didn’t quite line up with what the other heroes were saying. The methods they’d learned in their respective games to power up their weapons didn’t match either.
Each of them was so stubborn that they refused to listen to, much less believe, what the other heroes had to say.
In the end, I experimented with all the methods they’d indicated, only to find that each method actually worked as long as you truly believed that it would. It was a messy answer, but as far as I could tell, it was the truth.
Luckily for me, it was exactly the information I’d needed. When I arrived in this world, I’d been the only hero without any previous knowledge of the world or its mechanics. But because of that, I was the only one that had really studied and practiced. I was able to put all of their individual methods to use, and in the end, I quickly outpaced the other heroes in levels and power.
“Mr. Naofumi? Where do you think the other heroes have gone?”
“We need to get to where they were last seen. It’s still pretty far from here.”
“Judging from reports we’ve received from people in the area, it doesn’t sound like anyone has spotted them.”
“That’s what worries me. Still, they aren’t dead, so they must be hiding somewhere.”
Filo and our carriage kept rattling across the wilderness, following the giant footprints that dotted the landscape.
Thinking back on it, we were already in danger.
When we first left for the Cal Mira islands, we ended up sharing a room on a boat with two people named L’Arc Berg and Therese.
At the time, I’d thought they were typical adventurers, but they ended up playing a pivotal role in the events that followed.
L’Arc Berg (who I normally call L’Arc) was a really friendly older brother sort of guy. His friend Therese was quiet and conducted herself with deference and courtesy. She was like Raphtalia in that way.
Everything was fine until we found a temple under the ocean near the islands. A giant dragon hourglass stood inside, and it was counting down the remaining time to the next wave of destruction. Worse yet, there were only a couple of days to prepare. We quickly told the other heroes, recruited the kingdom’s military and its freelance adventurers, and made a stand against the wave when it arrived.
When the most powerful monster showed up—if it was a game, it would have been the boss—we were able to defeat it without much trouble at all.
But the moment the boss fell, L’Arc and Therese appeared and rushed to attack us. They didn’t just want to win. They wanted us dead.
I still don’t know why. L’Arc had said it was for the good of the world. He’d also said that their mission was to kill all of the heroes.
L’Arc proved to be a formidable opponent. He knocked out all the heroes with one wave of his weapon. They floated in the ocean, unable to move, much less fight. So it was up to Raphtalia, Filo, and I to fight them off.
Surprising even myself, we held our own and even turned the tide. But just when it looked like victory was within reach, a powerful enemy we’d met during the second wave of destruction appeared: Glass. With Glass on their side, we weren’t able to fight for very long and soon were exhausted. Defeat was imminent.
I still can’t believe we actually survived.
Because we’d fought her before, and because of the special abilities of a shield I just happened to have, we were able to hold off Glass and L’Arc. But I don’t know if we could have done it again. They both had abilities that rendered my strengths useless: defense-rating attacks and defense-ignoring attacks.
Because all of my abilities were built around defensive tactics and skills, those two attacks were a serious threat. Luckily, I was able to avoid most of their attacks, but because they moved so fast, I wasn’t able to escape unscathed. It was very dangerous.
There were other problems during the battle. L’Arc had an ace up his sleeve, too. He had a bottle of soul-healing water, which was used to replenish SP, the stat necessary to use skills. And he dumped the whole bottle on Glass. Her power grew exponentially. It was all I could do just to defend my party from her relentless attacks.
In the end, they retreated before they were able to kill us.
After all the drama blew over, I sat the other heroes down for a chat, thinking that I had to impress upon them how useless they’d proven in the battle. Because I was the Shield Hero, it was very difficult for me to take on an offensive role in battle. If only one of the offensive heroes could manage to acquire the same amount of power that I had, the battle with L’Arc and Glass wouldn’t have ended with their retreat. It would have ended with our victory.
But when I tried to talk to them about it, they refused to believe that I could have become as powerful as I was by applying the very tactics they explained. Unable to admit that they might have all been correct, they stubbornly refused to listen to each other and accused me of cheating instead.
I tried to tell them that they had been right, but they were more interested in fighting than they were in actually getting stronger. We had to cancel the meeting.
We did agree to start training when we returned to Melromarc from the islands. It was easy to understand what level you were at. But there were other ways to exercise power as well, like actually learning how to fight. So we agreed to study under a master of the Hengen Muso fighting style. We were all surprised to discover that this master of martial arts was actually an elderly woman.
In hindsight, I should have known that the other heroes wouldn’t take it seriously. By the end of the first day, they were loudly complaining about every aspect of the training. Soon enough, their complaints morphed into straight-up sabotage, and before long they stopped coming all together. They were just about to leave the country for distant, less-troublesome lands when the queen suddenly appeared with a request. If the heroes were able to accomplish the task set before them, then she would permit them to pass through her country’s borders and leave the kingdom for good. That was enough to convince them to accept the mission.
I suppose I don’t need to tell you that this simple mission turned out to be the start of an incredible sequence of events.
The mission sounded simple enough: mysterious monsters were appearing throughout the country—no, the world. We needed to get rid of them.
It turned out that these monsters were really all servants of something much larger called the Spirit Tortoise, though no one knew that at first, because we weren’t able to read the full names of the monsters like we normally could in battle.
The first monsters we came across were giant bats that had tortoise-like shells on their backs. I shared all the information I had about them with the queen and the other heroes, but the other heroes kept their own information to themselves. They acted on their own, in secret.
I suppose it doesn’t matter now. We found out the truth anyway.
Because the monsters were servants, they had to be serving something. That something turned out to be a monster called the Spirit Tortoise.
The other heroes went after the Spirit Tortoise without telling anyone, and the Spirit Tortoise started to advance and invade country after country, possibly in response.
The Spirit Tortoise was so enormous it defied belief. It was larger than a mountain itself, and actually had a mountain range covering its back.
The other heroes had attempted to attack the monster from the front, but that was the last report we received about them before they went missing.
The good news was that, with Raphtalia, my other friends, and the support of the coalition army behind us, we were able to defeat the monster. And yet the blue hourglass that appeared in my field of view, when the Tortoise first awoke, never disappeared when we defeated it. So I felt like we might not be out of trouble.
“Looks like we aren’t going to find the heroes until we get to the place where the Spirit Tortoise was first sealed away.”
“Master!”
I was muttering to myself when Filo shouted and took off running, dragging the carriage behind her at a breakneck speed.
“What is it?”
“I can hear someone screaming off in the distance!”
“Take us there!”
“Yup!” she shouted and kept on barreling down the road.
Sure enough, there was no doubt about it. This wasn’t over yet.
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