The Rising of the Shield Hero Volume 02 Read online

  I wondered if she could have been bought by a normal customer and just lived her days out on a farm somewhere. Granted, if she was raised for her meat, it wouldn’t have been an ideal life, but maybe that’s just what life was like for Filolials.

  When you think about it that way, it was all my fault. It was my fault that she had to throw herself into battle like this.

  Was that… Happiness? Being chosen for some role without your input is a tough hand to be dealt. I knew that first-hand. Who had asked me to be the Shield Hero?

  “You promise? If I break my leg or something, you won’t sell me off and buy yourself a new girl?”

  “Yeah, I promise. And I don’t lie… normally. Yeah, you’re good.”

  “Yes! I’ll do my best.”

  “I hope so.”

  And then she leaned against my back and started snoring.

  C’mon… What was she so afraid of?

  I suppose the real root of the problem was me. Sticking with Raphtalia and me, she must have been growing used to being told how awful we are, and never getting a word of thanks.

  Maybe she was afraid that I would think she was worthless, like the rest of the country seemed to consider us? Maybe she’d been afraid of that from the beginning.

  But I was the one who was really afraid. What if Raphtalia and Filo just decided they didn’t want to fight anymore?

  I was contradicting myself. The only reason that I was able to fight was because Raphtalia and Filo were there with me. Maybe, originally, they didn’t have to fight at all. But when I chose them from the slave trader’s place, I changed their fates.

  That was why I needed to think about my responsibility to them.

  Once the world was at peace, I’d have to make a place for them, a place where they could live out their days happily.

  We arrived in the eastern territory.

  The trees were all wilted and cracking, and the air felt heavy. It wasn’t supposed to be particularly cold there, but the sky was black, and the whole land seemed bathed in darkness.

  I looked to the sky, which was covered in a thick layer of clouds. We were approaching a mountain range. It felt ominous.

  “Um…”

  We reached a fork in the road and stopped to check the map.

  “Filo, head toward the mountains.”

  “Okay!”

  “Both of you get some cloth to cover your mouths—just in case. There’s supposed to be a disease spreading around here.”

  “Okay.”

  I covered my own mouth with a strip of cloth as well, and readied my nerves for defense, in case we needed that. We made for the farming village.

  To simply describe the village: It was dark. The sky was covered in thick clouds, and the whole village was black and dark.

  “Are you a merchant? I hate to… tell you this but… our village is very sick. You should escape… cough… while you can.”

  A miserable looking villager told us about the situation in between coughs.

  “I know about all that. We’ve come to sell you medicine.”

  “Have you? Wonderful!”

  The villager took off running, telling everyone that a medicine man had arrived.

  Honestly, the place was looking pretty bad. I wasn’t sure if we would have enough medicine to take care of everyone.

  As if to further stimulate my insecurity, a wave of village voices swelled, calling for medicine.

  “The bird-god carriage! We’re saved!”

  Oh no… With all these expectations, what if my medicine didn’t work? They’d lose all trust in me.

  Oh well.

  “Who needs medicine?”

  I climbed down from the carriage, explaining that my medicine was most effective when administered by myself.

  “Over here, Beloved Saint.”

  Man, they were calling me a saint right from the get go… Something about it made me uncomfortable. Even still, it was better than being the despised Shield Hero.

  They led me to a long building filled with sick people. The building itself stood apart from the other buildings in the village.

  A cemetery stood behind the building, and there were a number of fresh graves there.

  If I said that it smelled like death, you would know what I meant, that horrible atmosphere that hangs around hospitals and graveyards. I was confident that it was all the same.

  I wasn’t sure if my medicine would solve the problem here.

  They were only intermediate recipes, so I shouldn’t be overconfident with them. If the medicine didn’t work, there was no back-up plan. Or no… It would be expensive, but I could administer more expensive medicines to them.

  I wished I could be more flexible with my products. I wish that I could make stronger medicines, even if it meant struggling through another book. It was better than running out of options. The next time I passed that apothecary, I’d have to ask if he would sell me a book of higher-level recipes.

  “Please, help my wife!”

  “Sure.”

  There was a woman there, coughing endlessly. I pulled her into a seating position and gave her some medicine.

  Poof… A glowing light appeared radiating out from her center.

  Color returned to her face. Excellent. It must have worked.

  “Next!”

  I raised my eyes to see the villager standing there, a look of astonishment on his face.

  “What is it?”

  “I… um…”

  The man pointed to a child lying down next to the woman.

  The child had been coughing, just like the woman, but now the coughing had suddenly stopped.

  Why? Did he die?

  I leaned closer to check to see if the child was breathing. He was. Good, he was still alive.

  But the child had been coughing so violently only a moment earlier. Now he appeared very calm.

  “What happened?”

  “When you, Beloved Saint, healed my wife, at the very same time, my child’s coughing stopped.”

  Hm… could that have been because of the medicine efficacy range expansions (small) ability?

  Expanding the range of a medicine… now that was an awesome ability.

  It seemed like the medicine would be effective on anybody within a radius of one meter.

  This shield had access to all sorts of tricky specs hidden away, didn’t it?

  But I bet that the ability wouldn’t help very much in a battle because how often were we within a meter of one another in battle? The enemy would have to be pretty weak.

  “Well that makes things easy! Anyone that needs healing, crowd around! This medicine will work on anyone within this circle here. We can cure everyone at once. Hurry up!”

  “Yes sir!”

  There weren’t enough people there to help, so Raphtalia and Filo helped carry the sick to the center of the room, where I administered medicine to someone in the center.

  It helped us save medicine, and it was easy and fast. With that one bottle, we’d managed to heal the entire building’s worth of patients.

  After some time had gone by, we realized that while everyone’s symptoms had improved, no one had completely recovered from the disease. I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

  “I suppose that’s about all I can do with the medicine I’ve got.”

  “Thank you so much!”

  It was nice to have some gratitude, but I honestly wasn’t totally satisfied with my results.

  There was still a risk of infection, and we hadn’t managed to eradicate the disease.

  “Can you tell me where this disease came from? Is it endemic? Or is it contagious, and you caught it from a traveler?”

  If the medicines I had weren’t able to cure it, then it must have been a pretty severe disease. Who knows when we would catch it ourselves? In the worst case, we’d have to turn tail and get the hell out of there.

  “Well, a doctor told us that the disease blew down on the wind from those mountains over there. Those mou
ntains are full of monsters though.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “You can ask him yourself.”

  In my world, a doctor would have understood science and how to use it to cure people. Here, a doctor used magic to the same effect.

  He had been working in the village for a while, trying to compound a medicine that would be effective on this new disease. Just as we’d arrived, he was holed up in that building with the patients, and he helped us out.

  “Hey, can you make better medicine than an apothecary?”

  “Yes, I’m making some right now. And yet, after seeing what you, Saint, were able to do with your own medicines, and the dramatic improvement among the villagers, I don’t think my own project is necessary anymore.”

  “I’d get back to that as soon as you can. We haven’t managed to completely cure the disease, which means it will probably come back.”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Wait.”

  The doctor had run back to his tools and was about to enthusiastically throw himself back into his work when I called for him to wait.

  “You said that this disease came down on the wind from the mountains. Why do you think so?”

  “Yes, well… about a month ago the Sword Hero was in these lands, and he slew a powerful dragon that had his territory in those mountains.”

  Oh yeah… I think I had heard something about that.

  “Dragons typically make their nests far from human villages but this was a strange dragon.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well, at the time, a great number of adventurers gathered here to watch the Sword Hero work. They climbed the mountain afterwards, and everyone took pieces of the dragon with them.”

  I guess you could make really good weapons and equipment from dragon materials…

  I was a little jealous, actually.

  “And?”

  “This is where it gets good. Everything was fine until the adventurers stripped the dragon down to its bones. It actually brought quite a lot of money to this poor village. The problem started when the dragon’s remains started to rot. Some adventurers went to see the body, and they came back sick.”

  “So the dragon’s body is the source of all this sickness?”

  “I believe so.”

  If they had gone up there to strip off what would be good for equipment then I can imagine what was left. The meat. No matter how awesome a dragon was, a dead dragon’s meat would rot just like anything else.

  There might have been connoisseurs out there that would have a little interest in the meat, but the majority of it would be left to rot. I’d read in stories that dragon meat was so delicious, that nothing would go to waste. But by the standards of this world, who knew? Maybe it was poisonous or something?

  Then there would be the organs. Livers rot very quickly.

  Ren would have been after more useful materials, so I am sure they left the organs there.

  What about the heart? I felt like the heart was sure to have some sort of magical purpose.

  “If you know what the problem is, why don’t you take care of it?”

  “The mountains are crawling with powerful monsters. You’d have to be a pretty experienced adventurer to go in there and hope to come out. None of these famers are able to undertake such a task.”

  “Then why not get an adventurer to help you?”

  “By the time we noticed, the whole ecology of the mountain range was thrown off balance. The air turned to poison, and the sickness is so strong—normal adventurers would never make it out. Not that they come anyway. Everyone is afraid of the disease, and no one comes by anymore.”

  Dammit, Ren… I sure wished he would clean up his own mess.

  Ren was the youngest of us heroes. Had I been a high schooler, I probably wouldn’t have given any thought to the lingering effects of dead dragon either. These effects wouldn’t happen in the games he was used to, so I suppose it was to be expected.

  “What should we do, Beloved Saint?”

  “Did you send a report to the Crown?”

  “Yes, we are waiting on a medicine delivery.”

  “What about the… heroes?”

  “They are very busy, so we are probably not a high priority for them.”

  Whether it be Motoyasu or Itsuki or Ren… it didn’t matter. They all pissed me off.

  “Have you already sent money to the Crown for their support?”

  “Yes…”

  “If you cancel, will the money be returned?”

  The doctor caught my eye and looked at me straight and deep.

  “Are you going to take care of it, Beloved Saint?”

  “Well, if it is going to be a while before the medicine arrives, I might as well. If I succeed, I’ll accept your payment.”

  “All right… Well, it should take another half-day, at least.”

  “Okay great. I’m going to go take care of the dragon remains. I will take the money that you previously sent to the crown.”

  “Yes sir.”

  And so we left for the mountains to see what we could do about the dragon remains.

  Chapter Nineteen: Curse Series

  “Wow! There are so many monsters!”

  The surrounding lands had always been pretty barren, but once we were in the mountains everything was crumbling boulders.

  There was a mountain path that led to the eastern countries, and because of it we were able to make progress, however slow.

  We had been climbing through the mountains for thirty minutes or so.

  I had brought restorative medicine, as well as healing medicine… and because the air was poisonous I also brought some antidote.

  Back in the village, before we left, I had declared my intention to leave the carriage behind.

  “No! These carts are all filled with my most treasured memories!”

  And Filo threw a fit until we agreed to let her pull the carriage.

  How long had she even been alive? A month? And here she was telling me about life.

  But I guess she had been pulling that carriage for more than 90% of the life she had lived, so it was only natural that she would have grown attached.

  As for the monsters, there were a lot of poison trees, and poison frogs… basically a lot of poisonous things.

  After defeating them, I let the shield absorb what it could.

  Poison Tree Shield: conditions met

  Poison Frog Shield: conditions met

  Poison Bee Shield: conditions met

  Poison Fly Shield: conditions met

  All the shields were poison-types, and the status booster abilities they came with related to Poison Resistance.

  The only shield that broke the pattern was what I got from butchering the poison bee and letting the shield absorb the parts.

  Bee Needle Shield II: conditions not met

  Equip Bonus: attack 1

  Special Effect: Needle Shield (small), Bee Poison (poison)

  The defense rating hadn’t changed much from the original Bee Needle Shield, but its special effect had changed from paralysis to poison.

  But let’s put all this aside for a moment. There were tons of monsters around. We’d beat them down, and more would come. Then we would beat THEM down and even MORE would appear.

  The wind was full of disease, and it blew over the harsh landscape, which seemed to ooze poison from every crack and crevice. It would have been a difficult undertaking for an average adventurer.

  “No matter how many we kill, there are more. Filo! Get us out of here!”

  “Okay!”

  Filo leaned into it, and pulled at the carriage with all of her strength.

  Running at full speed, an enemy or two got trampled here or there in the process. So we were actually still gaining a little experience.

  Down the road we came upon a new monster that seemed to be made of mud, but Filo kicked it to the ground so quickly that I never got a chance to let the shield absorb it.

/>   “We made it.”

  We’d found the dragon’s corpse, and the air reeked of rot and poison and death.

  The dragon was around ten meters and looked like what you picture when you think of a European dragon. Or must have looked like that before it had died. It was hard to make it out in its current state.

  It wasn’t even possible to tell what color it had been, as the rot and decay were so far advanced. Here and there blacked skin stuck to the bones.

  It appeared to have been killed by a single strike to its belly. There was a deep cut there with rotting organs spilling from the open wound. It smelled horrible. There were clouds of Poison Flies gathered over the rotting meat, and the whole place looked really creepy.

  “I’m hungryyyyy!”

  “How can you look at this and say you’re hungry?!”

  Filo stuck her head into the carriage and started fishing around for something to munch on. I looked in after her.

  “Raphtalia, you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Raphtalia had always had weak lungs, so I was worried that the air quality would bother her. But she said that she was feeling fine.

  “If you don’t feel good, make sure you lay down.”

  “Yes.”

  We beat back the Poison Flies and inched closer to the dragon corpse.

  Ren and the other adventurers had already picked it over for materials. The horns and claws, scales, skin, and wings were pretty much gone. Even the tongue was gone. There was really only a pile of meat and bones left.

  The skin was gone too, as if they’d taken it in one giant sheet.

  The air smelled so bad we all twisted our noses up involuntarily. It was really awful.

  I had abilities that lent me some Poison Resistance, but I wondered if Raphtalia would be all right.

  “Filo, you take care of these flies while Raphtalia and I butcher what is left of the dragon. It’s too big to use right now.”

  Had we buried it, it might continue to impact the land, and its rot could stay on the wind or in the water. No—better to absorb it into the shield and get rid of it.