The Rising of the Shield Hero Vol 14 Read online

  Prologue: Planning the Q’ten Lo Invasion

  “I’ll start by reviewing the current situation. First things first . . .”

  It was the morning after celebrating our victory, and I had gathered everyone at the house in Q’ten Lo’s port town in an attempt to decide what to do next.

  Our venue was in a general state of disarray. The most likely cause was the celebrations from the night before, which had included much drinking and singing. Perhaps due to this being a nation much like Japan, I was reminded of the mess left behind after Japanese people had finished with their silly spring “flower watching.”

  “Owww . . . my head . . .” Everyone other than my friends was looking pretty unenthusiastic.

  “What’s with you guys? I thought you wanted this rebellion? Raphtalia leading the charge, you said! Was that all just talk?” The energy on display the night before had completely drained away, leaving people looking pasty-faced and sickly.

  “Can I g-get some water?” one of the men groaned.

  “This is all Sadeena’s fault. She’s the one who challenged them to a drinking contest,” Raphtalia said.

  “Is that so?” Sadeena replied.

  “T-the rumors were . . . all true. The talk of so many lives lost . . . to drinking with the priestess of carnage . . .” Her latest victims could barely croak out their side of the story. Indeed, they all looked ready to die—any moment, just drop dead. Four of them had scurried off to puke, and they hadn’t come back yet. Seriously, did they all have hangovers? Were these guys really going to cut it?

  It seemed a good idea, for now, to skip those who had just joined us here and decide what to do with the companions I had brought with me.

  Q’ten Lo was suffering under the canker of corrupt politicians, placing a terrible burden on the people. The ones who made the attempt on Raphtalia’s life had apparently done so under the influence of the pus that passed for the leaders of this nation. Our advance into Q’ten Lo had therefore brought plenty of those sympathetic to the revolution out of the woodwork. Their long years of suffering were perhaps the reason why they basically threw a parade the moment we captured the port.

  The resulting partying was still going on, in fact, with a general clamor of enjoyment ringing out from beyond the building’s walls.

  “She’s one loved by Dionysus, that’s for sure. We thought she was just still out there, somewhere, drinking.”

  “Of course, it all makes sense. She travels with a monster, after all, one who eats the source of a brew so foul even the god of wine would run from it.” Why was everyone looking at me? Was it really so sickening to them that I would eat the rucolu nut?

  “I just don’t understand why you call me a monster. Really, I can’t think why,” I grumbled.

  My name is Naofumi Iwatani. Originally from Japan, I’m currently the Shield Hero in this parallel world. Well, it might be more accurate to say that I was summoned to this parallel world and had the role of Shield Hero forced upon me.

  Taking into account everything that had happened to me recently, in that moment I was in the middle of contemplating once again just how differently the Shield Hero gets treated, simply depending on the country.

  Before I get into that, though, I should probably explain about the world into which I’ve been summoned. Here everyone has a level, just like in a video game, and by defeating things like monsters you can earn experience and increase that level. The world is built on a foundation that anyone familiar with modern Japanese games will have no trouble understanding, including other elements such as stats. It’s even possible to check such things as the details of your abilities just by concentrating; overall, it’s not far off the mark for someone to think that I basically got summoned into a video game.

  Taking that too literally, however, can also lead to misunderstandings.

  I was summoned to this world in order to fight a disaster that threatens to destroy it, called the Waves, and to keep this world safe. As one perhaps overly familiar with works about a “chosen hero” and being “summoned to another world,” this all started out as a pretty ideal situation for me, but guess how long that lasted? As it turns out, the country that did the summoning, Melromarc, also had religious reasons for thinking the Shield Hero is basically the devil himself. That led to me getting caught up in all sorts of plots and conspiracies. And although this may sound strange coming from the one it happened to, it resulted in me becoming one bitter and twisted individual.

  Let’s take a moment to consider what might have happened if instead I’d been summoned to Siltvelt, a nation that worships the Shield Hero. Siltvelt is a nation populated by races of what they call demi-humans and therianthropes. If I’d been summoned there, well, I would definitely have been treated as a god, given all due respect. But how could I forget all the nobles of the land bringing in women to form my own little harem, each more desperate than the last to be blessed with a divine child?

  Which would you choose, pray tell, between being framed for a crime you didn’t commit and cast out, penniless and alone, or being little more than a stallion at stud for the rest of your exhausted days?

  Me, well, I don’t want either of them. No way. I’m also really starting to hate the kind of story that I now have to live in.

  In any case, I’ve made it through my fair share of plots and dangers, and here I am.

  “How utterly deplorable,” commented Atla.

  “For once, we agree,” was Fohl’s reply. The two of them were still looking over the decimation wrought by the drinking.

  These two were slaves that I purchased and both part of a race called “hakuko,” which was apparently quite elite in Siltvelt. At a glance, Atla just looked like a young girl. Inside, though, there beat the heart of quite the warrior. For example, her putting a most persuasive beatdown on some hotheads in Siltvelt was still fresh in my memory. I might have wanted to comment on that incident to her, but it had all turned out okay, so for the moment I was staying quiet.

  According to the leader of Siltvelt, anyway, her personality was the very epitome of the spirit of that nation. Considering the extreme loyalty that she showed me—and we are talking super extreme here—I personally found that a little hard to believe.

  Fohl just got thrown in when I picked up Atla. No, hold on. That’s not right.

  He started out playing the role of the good big brother, tending to Atla as she suffered from her sickness, but after her recovery she started driving him to his wits’ end. In actual fact to start with, I thought he was the one I’d get more use out of, so I paid for Atla in order to get him. As it turned out, she ended up being the stronger of the two, although, credit where credit was due—he was working to close that gap.

  He could use a white tiger therianthrope form now, and you know what, he’d even grown a bit taller too. Although the conditions remained a mystery, it seemed he could even undergo a full beast transformation. That definitely sounded worthy of investigation.

  We had to come through Siltvelt in order to reach Q’ten Lo, and the pair of them had been a big help during that journey. I wasn’t quite seeing it myself, but they had been pretty big in Siltvelt. They’d definitely have work there leading the nation even once my duties were finished and I was “happily” back in Japan.

  “You two are still minors. If someone enticed you two to drink, I’d give them a piece of my mind,” I told them.

  “Mr. Naofumi could ask me to drink poison, and I’d finish off every last drop!” Atla sounded like some kind of cultist.

  “What!” Fohl turned on me. “You plan to have her drink poison?”

  “Use your head! Of course not!” Man, that I even had to s
ay it. This was how it always was with these two. “Anyway. Where’s Itsuki and the others?”

  Itsuki Kawasumi, the Bow Hero, was summoned here from a different Japan than the one that I came from. Just like me, the poor guy had suffered his fair share—another one of Witch’s victims. In fact, thanks to her machinations, Itsuki’s head was still a major mess. He definitely needed some treatment, but seeing as he could still fight, I was still making good use of him.

  “They went with Rishia to check out some writings on Q’ten Lo. They should be along soon,” Raphtalia explained. Fair enough. Probably not a problem if they weren’t here. Rishia was serious enough that she wasn’t going to let anyone in her charge lose themselves in drink. Right now, that also included Itsuki, but in the past that same Itsuki had treated Rishia pretty badly.

  After that, with her abilities in battle reaching their full potential, Rishia defeated the corrupted Itsuki after he fell into darkness and persuaded him to come back to the light. Yes, I know. She sounds more like the hero here, doesn’t she? She’d been lying low a bit recently, but originally she was more of an intellectual type than a fighter. For my part, I’ve come to rely on her considerably in terms of both her personality and abilities.

  “You need to get these hungover men back on their feet first, anyway. We don’t have time to waste. You do understand the situation?” Seriously, why did they think all of this was happening?

  Raphtalia. My connection to her was the start of all of this.

  Raphtalia was akin to my right hand, someone sworn to fight alongside me. When we first met, our relationship was a little different—that of slave and master. Now I’m more like a father figure. The cause of all this was more recent than that, anyway, when I put Raphtalia in a miko outfit in a village that I govern. She wore one like it in the world that Kizuna came from, and it suited her so well I made her wear one again.

  The problem was, ironically enough, that it was an outfit with special meaning in Q’ten Lo, the homeland of Raphtalia’s parents. On top of that, it also turned out that Q’ten Lo had been keeping tabs on Raphtalia all her life, the nation’s agents quietly watching from the shadows, doing nothing but observe even during the harshest misfortunes that she faced. Dressing her up, anyway, ultimately led to them making the utterly insane declaration that they would continue to send a succession of assassins until Raphtalia was successfully killed.

  I’m not open-minded enough to just let something like that go. Raphtalia had actually come to have a pretty high priority in my life. After all, when I was at my very lowest, she was the only person who had come to my aid.

  So I decided to make those Q’ten Lo bastards pay—to get the guys who gave the order to kill Raphtalia. Direct action had seemed best, and so that’s why we were here invading the country.

  Not that just getting here had been easy. Q’ten Lo wasn’t surrounded only by the ocean, but also by a powerful barrier. During our attempt to gain access to a trading vessel out of Siltvelt, assassins attacked us on the open sea. We managed to drive them off, but out of the frying pan and into the fire—Raphtalia, Sadeena, Gaelion, and I promptly got sucked down into the ocean by the Water Dragon defending the waters of the island. The dragon ended up helping us out though, and we managed to land first in Q’ten Lo.

  That led to us meeting with Raluva, the mayor of the port and representative of a resistance against the Heavenly Emperor, the sort of king of this land, and in turn we defeated the corrupt officials who were treating the port like their own piggy bank.

  Other things happened along the way, such as meeting the master of the old guy from the weapon shop, but I won’t go into that now. We were still in the middle of taking down the imbeciles behind this mess and had plenty of better things to be doing.

  The main issue was the existence of this ruler, the Heavenly Emperor, who was a relative of Raphtalia. Apparently, the only way to stop the stream of annoying assassins was to defeat this blowhard and prove that Raphtalia is the one who should be in charge. Therefore, we were now planning to advance our forces from our newly acquired base of operations, this port town.

  Luckily for us, the current Heavenly Emperor of Q’ten Lo had implemented a ridiculous edict against harming living things, dishing out punishment to anyone who killed monsters. This meant he had lost the faith of the people and the country was ripe for revolution. The perfect opportunity to implement a little regime change.

  The explosion of the people’s dissatisfaction was clear, just from the intense celebrations still going on after our victory.

  “Kwaaa!”

  “It looks like the festivities are still going on. Maybe I can go and have some fuuun!” Filo chirped.

  “Kwaa, kwaa, kwaaaa!”

  “Bleh! Master likes me best!” Filo went on.

  This exchange came from the garden, where Filo and Gaelion were staring each other down. Filo was a bird-type monster called a filolial, which developed in special ways when raised by a hero. Her current form was that of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young girl with wings on her back, but that wasn’t her true form. She actually looked like . . . Let’s called it what it is: a crazy ostrich-like thing, round and fat with powerful legs. Something like that.

  All of that from a prize I won from an egg lottery that I took part in on a whim.

  She’s been a little down on her luck recently, but having been reunited a short while back with Fitoria, queen of the filolials, she’d received various blessings as a result. It looked like she’d had a considerable boost to her fighting power.

  Gaelion, meanwhile, was a dragon—a race that has never got along well with filolials.

  He normally spent most of his time in a seemingly just-born-baby-dragon state. But at crunch time, he turned into a big dragon to fight. “Multiple personality” didn’t quite fit the situation, but he had two different consciousnesses inside his body.

  One was the baby Gaelion, the true owner of the body and the one currently in control. The other, hidden personality, the father Gaelion, could be called out as required and was once a dragon zombie I fought. Anyway, Gaelion has both of those inside his body.

  I’m his owner, but he’s being raised by one of the slaves from my village, a girl called Wyndia. At that moment, though, Wyndia was putting her all into biological research in Siltvelt alongside Rat, an alchemist from Faubrey, which was why Gaelion was currently with me.

  This beastly pair, Filo and Gaelion, were really useful if something needed squishing, but they also didn’t get along at all and were always bickering and fighting, which means it was business as usual and should be fine to leave them to their own devices.

  “My point is, if we don’t decide our next move quickly, our current opportunity may slip away,” I said.

  “You’re not wrong,” Raphtalia agreed.

  Then, with a painful groan and still shaking his head to drive off the hangover, Raluva, the mayor of the port of Q’ten Lo, also joined the discussion. I continued. “So here’s what I need to know. Where in Q’ten Lo is this Heavenly Emperor to be found? If possible, I want to take care of him real quick and just bring an end to all this.” I spread out a map of Q’ten Lo and took a good look. It wasn’t as large as Melromarc or Siltvelt, but it had a density that reminded me of Japan.

  Our current location was the port on the west side.

  “The current Heavenly Emperor is here, in the city that’s also our capital.” This enticing nugget was accompanied by a finger pointing to the east of Q’ten Lo. The landmasses didn’t really match up at all, and so this is pushing it, but Japan-wise, if we were currently in Kagoshima, then Raluva was pointing at Tokyo—or maybe Chiba.

  Yeah, forget the whole Japan comparison. I suck at geography anyway.

  This revelation of our destination also had Sadeena tilting her head.

  “Hold on. The capital wasn’t there when I lived here.” Sadeena also originated from Q’ten Lo, arriving in Melromarc along with Raphtalia’s parents. She had become the �
�big sister” to everyone in the village, someone everyone relied upon, and in particular played the older sibling role to Raphtalia.

  She was also a fiend when it came to drinking, often dragging others down into the depth of drunkenness.

  Then there was her personality, that of an overly cheerful airhead. To be quite honest, she annoyed the hell out of me. Strength-wise, though, there was no telling the depths of her abilities. An eastern-style beauty with the ability to turn into a killer whale therianthrope.

  “When the current Heavenly Emperor came to power, the capital was moved from the one the previous emperors used. That’s why I think we should stay by occupying the territory now known as the “old city.” It’s well-positioned and should make a big contribution to our subsequent activities.”

  “Pretty bold, leaving all that tradition behind.” Raluva nodded in agreement at this comment from Sadeena.

  “There were a lot of opposing opinions, but the policy was forcefully pushed through. The new capital is still under construction in some places,” Raluva explained.

  So all of this, as well as an edict on not harming living things? It looked like this guy didn’t have a clue, except maybe where to find the next pothole to put his foot in. Even things in Melromarc were going better than this.

  “So the real reason for the move was, what? Lining his cronies’ pockets?”

  “Ah, well. The opinion of a certain wicked woman who was intimately involved with the emperor before the last one had a large say in things. The climate in the old capital was bad for her skin.”

  “That sounds suitably suspicious. Surely she’s the one pulling the strings behind all this?”

  “Yes.” Raluva nodded at my comment. “The wicked Makina is the one who really sits in the seat of power.” Hah, I was right? If things were this corrupt, no wonder the people are so keen to see Raphtalia as the true Heavenly Emperor.

  Then there was the old city. A place that was no longer the capital, due to that same corruption.

  “There’s another reason for aiming for the old city. There we can also perform the rituals of the Heavenly Emperor for Raphtalia.” Geographical matters were one thing, but I didn’t quite follow the logic of this statement.