The Rising of the Shield Hero Volume 02 Page 18

  Dried Seed Growth: mutation range expansion

  I was starting to get it… This must have been the abilities of the BioPlant.

  It must have meant that the seed was developed to produce a lot of food, but its mutation rating was so high that it got out of control.

  To think, the old alchemist had gone out of his way to leave that message of warning too… he couldn’t have been all bad.

  And the immunity rating was low, which must be why the weed killer had been effective.

  I looked for the special ability icon, and when I selected it a number of different options appeared, along with a few special messages. It was possible to sacrifice or augment different attributes.

  It would be a real shame if the village had to return to its days of famine.

  So I decided to experiment a little.

  Propagation…4. This was simple. It was just how quickly the plant spread. It seemed too high, so I lowered it.

  Production…15. This, no doubt, controlled how much food the plant produced. It should be high enough to solve the famine.

  Vitality…6. This would help the plant grow in any type of soil. I lowered it a little.

  Immunity…4. This was how the plant fought off disease. At the current level, weed killer worked fine. So I left it where it was.

  Intelligence…1. What was this supposed to be? A monster’s intelligence? Why would you want to raise this?

  Growth…15. This was how quickly the plant would grow once planted. I raised the level.

  Mutation…1. This must have been what turned the plants into monsters.

  Special Abilities: I unchecked the box that would expand the range of mutation and decided to add the ability of quality improvement.

  Dried Seed Growth: quality improvement

  “There. I’m done.”

  “What did you do?”

  Raphtalia was fighting off a yawn when she replied to me.

  “Oh, I’m just working a bit more on that thing from yesterday.”

  “You’re still working on that?”

  “Well, we can’t just leave things the way that they are.”

  If we did, the famine would just come back. So we had to do something to stop it. I thought about going to another village and buying food for the place, but there were too many people living here to make that a viable option. It would be hard to get them to pack up and move… considering how settled they were here.

  “Okay then…”

  I climbed down from the carriage and dropped the seed into some dry soil.

  It happened so quickly. A large plant emerged from the seed and covered a portion of the wilted, brown village.

  “What the hell is going on?!”

  Villagers that had been resting came over to us in shock.

  “Oh, yeah—sorry. I’m just experimenting a little.”

  “What are you doing?”

  They must have been afraid of the plants, because their voices wavered as they asked.

  “I’m trying to turn this into a safe version of what it was.”

  I’d set the propagation level low, so once the plant reached its size it wouldn’t spread beyond a certain range.

  And then…

  Red, juicy, tomato-like fruits popped into view all over the vine. The majority of the fruits looked just like tomatoes.

  “Looks like I was successful.”

  “Woah…”

  “The main problem is that’s really only making one kind of fruit now. It’s up to you whether or not you want to use it. But if you don’t want it then make sure you to take care of it before things get out of control.”

  So the mutation and mutation range expansion were the real problems… they allowed you to grow a lot of different kinds of fruit, but at the risk of the plants turning into monsters.

  I sprinkled weed killer over the plant and it returned to a seed. I picked it up and gave it to a man who seemed to be the governor.

  “All right, we’re out of here. Later.”

  Filo woke up and stuffed her cheeks with the remaining tomatoes before taking her place at the front of the carriage.

  “Wait just a minute!”

  “Huh? What?”

  “We haven’t shown our gratitude yet, so please take this…”

  “Those idiots… They just tried to pass their excess onto me. Didn’t they?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Our carriage was now three cars long.

  Filo pulled the front carriage, but now we had two additional carts hooked to the back that were loaded down with fruits and vegetables from the BioPlant.

  They’d given us the carts and the food, probably because it would have all rotted if they didn’t get rid of it. They just passed it off on me and even had the gall to ask me to come back anytime.

  Their faces were beaming when they gave it all to me, so I wasn’t going to refuse it. Even still, I couldn’t help but feel that they were just foisting their problems off on me. Oh, and by the way, even though we were three full carts now, Filo had no problem at all pulling us.

  “It’s so heavy, I love it!”

  Filolials sure were weird monsters.

  Our carriage rattled down the idyllic road, and our journey went on.

  But this all had me thinking. I could use this weed killer as a weapon, right? If so, I was determined to try it on any Torrents that we came across.

  But when I got my chance, it didn’t work at all.

  Apparently it would only work on plants that had parasitic tendencies.

  These rules were seeming more random by the minute.

  Maybe the BioPlant wasn’t really a monster at all but just a plant.

  Whatever, it didn’t matter. With how strong Filo and Raphtalia were getting, I didn’t need to worry about attacking by myself.

  The first thing we needed to do was figure out a way to get rid of all this food. The last thing I wanted was it rotting on me. But hey—Filo was chomping it down so quickly… maybe it wouldn’t be an issue at all.

  “Where should we go next?”

  We were talking it over and trying to figure out where we should go next when we started to hear rumors about a land to the east that was having problems with some kind of infectious disease.

  So we decided to make a bunch of medicine and head in that direction.

  “All right, we’re going east!”

  “Okay!”

  Chapter Eighteen: Diseased Village

  We ended up camping that night.

  We had left all the food just sitting in the carts, but Filo seemed to be having her way with it, so we’d just leave it like that for a while.

  During the time we had spent on the road, we heard rumors of another famine in the North. We decided to take a detour to the southwest to pick up more food. They would have trouble keeping it anyway, and we could probably sell it for a good price.

  “I’m hungry!”

  Filo stuck her head under the tarp we’d covered the carts with and started fishing around for food.

  “Oh, Yummmmmmmmies!”

  I’d heard that before.

  Filo had finished with her growth spurt but still ate a ton of food. The amount she went through every day was pretty unbelievable. She paid for it by pulling us all down the road at a brisk pace. It was almost too brisk, really. We had to stop and make repairs to the carts relatively frequently.

  “What happened?”

  I thought about changing out the wooden parts for metal ones. Filo was always complaining about how light things were. But thinking about the improved durability made me wonder just how much it would end up costing.

  Raphtalia had started to get over her motion sickness, but Filo ran over all the dips and jumps in the road so quickly that most of our passengers ended up puking. We should probably add springs or something to the axels, something to cushion all the shocks.

  We’d made quite a lot of money recently. I was looking forward to visiting the weapon shop.

&n
bsp; After spending some time wandering around the country, I could now say with certainty that that old guy had the best weapon shop in the whole kingdom.

  I didn’t know where the other heroes were getting their equipment, but in all of my travels I had yet to come across even one shop that was as good as his was.

  “Master!”

  Ugh… Filo ran over and leaned on me with her heavy wings.

  “Ehehehe.”

  “Ugh…”

  Raphtalia, for some reason, sidled up close to me.

  “He, he, he… We’re all so warm and cuddly.”

  “I’m hot, actually.”

  “Filo, you back away. If you back off then we’ll be super comfortable.”

  “No! Raphtalia should back away! You can’t just keep Master all to yourself.”

  “I’m not keeping him all to myself!”

  “Both of you go the hell to sleep!”

  “But…”

  “But we should sleep together! Masterrrrrr!”

  I went over our stocks of medicine and soon realized that we were not going to have enough. I quickly began working to make more. It bothered me that there was no way to know whether or not I’d made enough… but I guess that’s just part of the job.

  “Bu….”

  Filo sulked and dragged her feet as she went outside.

  At the same time, Raphtalia climbed into the carriage. I guess it beat sleeping on the hard ground.

  “All right.”

  It was my turn to watch the fire, so I sat down and starting working on my compounding.

  “Mr. Naofumi.”

  “Huh?”

  I turned to look at the carriage. Raphtalia was there in the back, motioning for me to come over.

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s sleep together.”

  “Not you too! You two sure are needy. Did you have a bad dream or something?”

  She used to have such bad dreams that she couldn’t sleep without someone there next to her.

  Granted, she had good reasons for having bad dreams. Considering how she’d lost her parents and all that.

  “I did not!”

  She protested. But no matter how much she might look like an adult, she was still a kid on the inside. She must have wanted a parental figure.

  “That’s not it? You should get Filo to turn into a girl, then you can sleep with her if you are lonely.”

  “It’s not that I’m lonely, exactly.”

  Raphtalia, suddenly embarrassed, turned her eyes to the floor.

  That reminds me, just when did she stop crying in the night? It felt like a very long time ago.

  “Mr. Naofumi… Back in your own world… Was there anyone you… liked?”

  “Huh? No.”

  What the hell was she talking about? I had no idea what she wanted.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing. I… Mr. Naofumi? What do you think of me?”

  Huh? Ugh… Suddenly an image of the Bitch flashed through my mind, and I was pissed off. It wasn’t Raphtalia’s fault though. Why did I have to think of that Bitch at a time like this? I didn’t understand it myself.

  “I feel like I work you too hard. That I push you too hard for a slave.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I want to raise you to become a great person. You know, I want to take over for your parents.”

  I answered, but my tone of voice made it clear that I was a little confused by all the questioning. Raphtalia was making a weird face too.

  “You said that you believed in me so… So I kind of think of you like my daughter. I want to take care of you.”

  We hadn’t been together for all that long when you thought of it as a period of time. But I had known her since she was very small.

  Like I’ve just mentioned, she looked like an adult now, but on the inside she was still a kid. She was trying really hard to act like an adult, but without someone there to protect her, there were definitely things that she wouldn’t be able to handle on her own.

  “Oh, um… Okay! But wait, isn’t that kind of weird?!”

  “It’s not weird. We have a long day tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  She nodded and smiled, but I could tell she was still turning some doubt over in her mind. She slipped back into the carriage and tried to get some sleep.

  I, for one, turned back to my compounding work.

  Oh, that reminds me: As we’d been traveling around, we still were fighting monsters. We’d leveled up a bit lately.

  Naofumi: Level 37

  Raphtalia: Level 39

  Filo: Level 38

  Now even Filo was stronger than I was. Why did I level up so slowly?

  No, it was just because the two of them were both attackers. And Filo was so quick and agile she could take enemies out in the blink of an eye. That was why she was leveling up so quickly. Raphtalia, too, rushed into combat—even to the point of ignoring my orders. Even still, she wasn’t as fast as Filo.

  “Master!”

  “What is it, Filo?”

  I was still working on my compounding when a sleepy Filo reverted to her human form and came to lean against me.

  “Master! Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

  “I haven’t finished compounding all this medicine yet. I’ll sleep once I finish with this stuff.”

  “Oh…”

  “You get some rest. You’re working the most out of all of us, after all.”

  Even if she said that she liked pulling the carriage, that didn’t change the fact that it was still hard physical labor. She said it was easy, but I still needed to think about her health.

  “Aren’t you lonely, being awake all by yourself?”

  “It’s all in how you think about it. I can watch you two sleep, and then I’m not so lonely myself.”

  “Really? Ahahaha.”

  Filo looked happy, and she giggled to herself. She didn’t seem very exited though. Maybe I was just imagining it.

  “What is it?”

  “Master…. Well, if you aren’t lonely when you watch me sleep, then that’s good!”

  What the hell?

  “Um… Master? What were you thinking about when you chose me?”

  “What?”

  I hadn’t really been thinking of anything. I chose her at random.

  Even further: I’d picked the egg thinking that I didn’t care whether or not I got what I was looking for.

  “You know what? I feel really lucky that I got picked by you.”

  Well, when you think about it, I felt pretty lucky too. She was a strong attacker. She was fun to have around, and cute too, and I felt myself growing parental to her too. I couldn’t deny that.

  Both Filo and Raphtalia were still just kids, even if they were on their way to looking like adults.

  I knew that I really shouldn’t have them fighting for me. It didn’t matter what world we were in—regardless of the world, no one with a good heart would push little girls to the front lines of battle.

  Did it even matter if they wanted it to be this way? I was in the wrong, and I knew it.

  What I really should have done, had it been possible, was to make a safe place for Raphtalia where she could escape the horrors of battle.

  But the reality was that I wasn’t powerful enough to do that—and I didn’t have enough money.

  As for Filo—she was a normal girl now, and I didn’t really have any business getting her to fight either. If we were free to do whatever we wanted, I’d just set her free. Monsters should get to do whatever they wanted to. Like… pull carriages? I guess that wasn’t so different from what we were actually doing.

  Whatever… However you looked at it, I was the bad guy.

  “Hey, you know what I heard? I heard that I was cheap.”

  “Huh?”

  Filo just stated talking.

  The day I had left her at the slave trader’s tent, she’d reached out her hands for where I’d been and was cryin
g and calling for me. The slave trader had whispered to himself:

  “It’s so strange… That egg I sold him was just some cheap thing… Why had it mutated so much?”

  “Qweh?!”

  The slave trader might not have known that Filo could understand human speech, so he had just blurted it out to an assistant of his.

  “Let’s double check this. This Filolial was from two flightless birds… and was supposed to be raised for her meat, correct?”

  The assistant nodded.

  “Well, the egg was worth 50 pieces of silver… same as an adult specimen…”

  “Gwehhhhhh!”

  Filo had flapped her wings in anger once she found out how little she was worth. She started balking.

  “Is this all from the Hero’s power? Or is it because of the monster’s meat she ate? She’s turning all white too… Yes… if we are careful here, we could make a lot of money.”

  “What should we do with this Filolial?”

  “We need to study her. Just think—a 50 pieces of silver specimen has advanced this much! What would happen if we supplied the Hero with a higher quality sample? We could make even more money. The worst we could do is fix our weaker specimens and sell them for a higher price… but think what we could do if we gave him a better Filolial… or even better yet… a dragon!”

  “Qwehhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!”

  “Oh no! The cage!”

  Filo had gotten so upset that she broke her cage. I guess she wanted to show off how powerful she was… especially considering the way they were talking about her.

  She wanted me to decide what she was worth. She’d do anything I asked. If I didn’t, she didn’t understand where she fit into the world. She wanted, more than anything, to emphasize that she was MY Filolial.

  “Master… Don’t abandon me. I want to stay with you…”

  Her eyes were filled with tears. I tried to calm her down.

  “If you behave yourself, I won’t abandon you.”

  I had just chosen her at random, but you could also say that because of my actions she was now faced with a different fate than she would have had.