by Aneko Yusagi
The antidote, weed killer, and healing salve could be made from grasses, but I didn’t even know where to get the materials to make anything like gunpowder.
The apothecary’s notes made it seem like you could make substitutions in the case of gunpowder. There was something called Snappy Grass that could substitute, so I did that and tried to make some gunpowder.
It was like a crumbly powder, something like ash that could burn. I gathered it into a bag and made a makeshift bomb.
I set flame to it and planned to throw it at an enemy. It started crackling, but then I dropped it at my feet!
I was scared, but fortunately it didn’t produce anything you could really call an “explosion.”
The acidic water needed to be stored in a glass bottle. It was a liquid that, apparently, was only slightly less acidic than sulfuric acid. It wasn’t made from grasses but was made by taking different natural ores and adding them to water… or something like that. I hadn’t made it yet, so I can’t say for sure… but what kind of person would want such a thing, and what would they want it for? Anyway, I could make some just to absorb into the shield.
The Magic Power Water would restore your consumed magic points when you drank it. But the materials necessary to make it were pretty hard to get your hands on.
If you made it with commercially available grasses, it would cost a small fortune. If we were going to go through the effort of making it, it would be better to sell it than to use it. Just like the Magic Power Water, the Soul Healing Medicine would also replenish the user’s SP. But Raphtalia and Filo didn’t seem to understand what SP was, and they said it just tasted delicious, but like normal water.
The insecticide was easy. You just mixed various herbs that insects hated and either clumped them into a solid or dissolved them in water for a liquid.
So out of my new recipes, the ones that would be good for production and sales were the antidote, the healing salve, and the insecticide.
And the weed killer would be good too. You could make so much of it from so little material that all I’d need to do was give some thought as to where to sell it. I could let the shield absorb the leftovers.
Anti-Poison Shield: conditions met
Gurihosato Shield: conditions met
Medicine Shield: conditions met
Plant Fire Shield: conditions met
Killer Insect Shield Alpha: conditions met
Anti-Poison Shield: ability locked:
equip bonus: defense power 5
Gurihosato Shield: ability locked:
equip bonus: attack from plant enemies reduced by 5%
Medicine Shield: ability locked:
equip bonus: medicine effective range expansion (small)
Plant Fire Shield: ability locked:
equip bonus: fire resistance (small)
Killer Insect Shield Alpha: ability locked:
equip bonus: attack from insect enemies reduced by 3%
I bet the original ability for the Anti-Poison Shield was Poison Resistance (medium). But I’d already learned that skill from the Chimera Viper Shield, so it must have changed to accommodate that.
The Medicine Shield would increase some kind of range, though I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
It could have meant that the range for any particular medicine would be increased, but it could also mean the number of people it could work on, would increase.
What was Gurihosato? It seemed like the name of some kind of weed killer product. As for Killer Insect Shield Alpha, I imagined that you could produce a beta version or something by changing up the kinds of grasses that you used in the concoction.
The effect of cutting 3% from the damage of certain kinds of enemies seemed pretty useful to me.
The real problem was trying to read the magic book. It was very difficult.
Lately it seemed that Raphtalia was starting to get the hang of it. She’d produced certain effects that looked like they were on the right path. She’d been able to produce an orb of light that would float before her for a few seconds. Considering I was the Shield Hero, I didn’t look so great in comparison.
Filo could use her transformation magic too, so I asked Filo about it after Raphtalia had gone to bed.
It was kind of hard to think of what she did as magic, per se, but I thought it would be good to hear what she thought anyway.
“Yeah, so I, um… I just think about my power, like way down inside, right? And I just like, think about what I want to be and, uh… then I be it!”
Right. Whatever. At least I figured out that she wasn’t doing it as the result of some reasoned process.
But what if I could read the book but still found myself unable to practice the magic? I’d heard that magic can be funny like that.
And I came from a world that didn’t have any magic at all, so if it turned out that I wasn’t able to use it that would be… upsetting. I had to learn it. I just had to.
Not to please the witch from the magic shop… but to stay alive.
When the waves came, there wasn’t much need for me to participate in the fighting. Besides, who knew how I would be treated after the enemy had been vanquished? The best job for me would be to protect the nearby villages and towns. And when I was doing that, being able to use magic or not—that might decide whether or not I made it through the day alive.
I could have bought a crystal ball… but if I could learn magic from this book for free, then that seemed like a better way to go. So lately, when we were on the road, I had the magic book in one hand, and I tried to read it.
I asked Raphtalia how she did it, and she said that she synchronized her magic power with the words on the page, and her soul reacted… Just like Filo’s had been, her explanation was impossible to follow.
Granted, I could follow it better than Filo’s… but what was “magic power” anyway? Did it mean they could feel it, like a sixth sense?
My head was filled with questions like that, and it was driving me crazy.
Well anyway, that’s how we spent those last two weeks.
Chapter Thirteen: Take Everything but Life
“Oh wow… To think that I’m riding in a carriage pulled by a bird-god! What a treat!”
“Bird-god?”
A passing merchant had asked for a ride to the next town down the road, so we had given him a ride.
“Haven’t you heard of it? Hm, well… Hey, aren’t you the owner of this carriage? Even if you hide, I can tell.”
He had been chatting with Raphtalia, but now he pointed his finger at me.
We’d been pretending that Raphtalia was in charge, and I stayed in the back making medicines.
“That’s true…”
“You are famous around town. They say there’s a cart pulled by a bird-god that showers people with miracles everywhere it goes.”
The carriage was rattling down the road. I turned to look at Filo.
So people thought she was a god! In truth she was a hungry little pig, spoiled everywhere she went.
But what was this miracle the guy was talking about?
Hm?
“Gwehhhhh!”
Filo looked suddenly startled, and she took off running.
“Woah!”
The merchant, Raphtalia, and I all flew out of our seats and had to throw our arms out to stabilize ourselves.
“Ahhhh!”
“Yasuuuuuu!”
RATTLE, RATTLE!
The carriage was rattling so loudly that we couldn’t hear what was happening outside. Sometimes Filo would just run off like that for no real reason. This was probably the fourth time since we’d started this traveling gig. She kind of just did whatever she wanted.
“I’m not the only passenger here. Take it easy Filo!”
“Okay! But that’s not it… Gweh!”
We whispered to each other so as not to be overheard by the merchant. We didn’t want to attract more attention than necessary, as that would only spell trouble. But I felt like people we
re paying attention to us anyway.
The merchant was already staring at me with a shocked expression on his face.
“I’d heard she could understand language. That’s amazing!”
“I think so too.”
Think about it, if people were so surprised that she could understand language, what would they think about her being able to speak? Her specs must have been really high.
I should think about it as a potential that monsters have… when you look at it that way, she must have been very rare indeed.
“Even still, we’re just normal traveling merchants, we give people rides now and then, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“People are saying that a holy man arrives in a carriage and blesses the sick with special medicine. They are saying you cure people.”
“Really?”
Sure, it was pretty good medicine, but if you saved up a little anyone could have bought it. But I’d discovered that you could tweak the recipe specifically for the needs of the patient as well. The original recipe worked on everything, but not particularly well. I’d been adding different herbs to the recipe to help it treat more ailments.
I’d made it to work on fevers, lung infections, and skin infections. Still, it was just one medicine.
The method had been written out explicitly in the intermediate recipe book. The recipes I’d gotten from the shield had also suggested a few recipe tweaks.
“It’s just normal medicine though.”
I opened a box and took out the medicine to show him.
“This is the miracle medicine?”
He lifted the lid from the jar and sniffed at it.
“Well, it does smell like normal medicine, that’s for sure.”
“You can tell?”
Was he an apothecary? I was curious, so I asked him. But he shook his head.
“No, I can just kind of tell.”
Sure he could.
“So what sort of merchant are you?”
“I’m a jeweler.”
Right, a jeweler… I guess they existed in this world too.
I guess that he normally sold necklaces and stuff to rich people.
“Jewels, eh? So I guess you tend to work with wealthy people.”
If he was carrying around expensive jewels and looking for customers, he would probably need some powerful protection. So it was odd that he was traveling alone.
“You hit where it hurts.”
He gave a light chuckle and then went on.
“Oh, I sell everything there is, from small to large. You could call me an accessories dealer.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Care to take a look at my products?”
He took out a large bag of accessories for my inspection.
I looked inside. It was filled with broaches and necklaces. And bracelets.
But it looked like most of them were made from iron or bronze. And there were jewels imbedded… technically. They weren’t so nice. The word jewel seemed too grandiose to describe them.
“I mostly just sell cheap stuff.”
“Huh… Did you run into some kind of trouble?”
“Not exactly… my current product line was from a rather poor adventurer.”
“Huh.”
According to the accessories dealer, different accessories could be imbued with magic to give different effects to their wearer.
“And how much does one of those things sell for?”
“Right… right… Well, this iron bracelet will raise the wearer’s attack power, and it goes for about 30 pieces of silver.
That was pretty expensive. I couldn’t sell any of my medicines for near that much.
“If we were to apply magic to it we could sell it for near 100 pieces of silver.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
Heh.. That might be worth thinking about.
I had pretty much reached the ceiling of what I could accomplish by selling medicines. We were close to selling out, and that was making us some money, but not a lot. I was also thinking about selling some to different apothecaries—and that wasn’t good for much profit. If I started collecting materials to make more, I would run out of time.
I could have started before I’d moved on to selling things, but if you make things and collect things at the same time, your efficiency starts to go down.
“You a craftsman?”
“I suppose… It’s easy enough to just make the pieces… but once I go ahead and add the magic power to them, yeah, I guess I’m a craftsman of sorts.”
That made sense. He’d make the pieces, and once they had magic put into them they would give their wearer certain powers.
But how do you imbue something with magic? That was the trick…
I didn’t like the sound of it. “Imbue with magic.” That had been all over my medicine recipes, and I’d seen it pop up in the recipe for magic water too.
It meant that if you couldn’t use magic, you couldn’t make any of those medicines or objects.
“Master! Something is coming!”
Filo sounded tense, and after calling out to me, she stopped in place.
Raphtalia and I quickly jumped from the carriage to see what was going on.
We saw someone walking out of the deep forest.
There was a crowd, and they all had weapons in hand. They didn’t look friendly, and they were coming straight for us.
They were all dressed differently, but they all had armor on. They were bandits, probably coming down from the mountains.
“Bandits!”
The accessory dealer let out a shrill shout.
“Ehhehe… leave the valuables behind and just be on your way.”
Hah… what a cliché.
I’d heard of this kind of thing before… Why didn’t they just sneak up and attack?
But Filo had seen them first, so they must have just decided to give up on the surprise and come right at us. They must have thought they could win. They looked haughty. Either that, or they had another plan.
That reminds me, when we were in the last village I’d heard about some cruel faction of bandits forming out in the wilderness.
“We know all about you! And we know that you’ve got a jeweler in there too.”
The bandits were gathered in a crowd, and they were all shouting at us. I looked at the accessory merchant in the back of the carriage.
“Didn’t you say that you weren’t carrying anything of much value?”
“Yes… nothing like that at the moment.”
He slowly slipped his hand into his pocket, and seemed to be fingering something there.
“Though I do have a rather valuable accessory I’m holding for someone else.”
“I see. So that’s what they’re after.”
I’d picked up a troublesome customer.
“I thought that if I pretended that I didn’t have anything of value, then I could cut costs by getting out of needing a body guard.”
“You idiot! I’ll bill you for this later.”
“All right.”
He looked troubled for a minute, and then nodded.
“Raphtalia, Filo. We’ve got trouble.”
“Okay!”
“Right.”
At my signal, Raphtalia jumped down from the carriage and readied herself for battle.
I pulled the accessory dealer with me and followed her out.
“You stay next to me. Got it?”
“Yes, yes!”
I switched from the shield I’d had on to unlock its ability to one that was better for combat.
“What… What’s with your shield?”
“Oh…”
When the accessory dealer realized that the owner of his bird-god, miracle cart was none other than the criminal Shield Hero, he looked visibly shaken.
“What’s this, you’re gonna fight us?”
“Sure. I didn’t think it would be right to rain fire down on you from back here.”
I glared the bandits down as I threatened them.
The most important thing about the fight would be preventing the enemy from getting what they were after. Basically, I couldn’t let them get away with whatever the accessory dealer was carrying.
“Raphtalia, Filo, are you ready?”
“Yes. I’m ready when you are.”
“Yes, I was just getting bored.”
“Great. Let’s do this!”
When I shouted my signal, the bandits also readied themselves and ran at us with their weapons out.
I quickly looked them over, and there seemed to be about fifteen of them. That was kind of a lot.
“Air Strike Shield!”
I aimed for one of them running at us, and the shield appeared in mid air to halt his advance. I prepared for my next skill.
“Change Shield!”
Change Shield was a skill that would let me change into any shield I needed instantly. I chose the Bee Needle Shield. The Bee Needle Shield had a special effect of Needle Shield (small), Bee Poison (paralysis).
“The Shield! Watch out! Ugh!”
One of the running bandits collided with the shield and fell to the ground, dazed and apparently paralyzed. The skill had worked well.
“Shield Prison!”
“What?!”
The cage expanded to enclose one of the bandits.
That had a time limit on it though.
The Change Shield skill took thirty seconds to charge back up, so you couldn’t use it a few times in a row. Having said that, while it did take time to recharge, it was all the more effective because of that. So it wasn’t all that bad.
Suddenly three of them were right in front of me. They probably thought I looked the fool, standing there with only the shield at the ready.
I jumped in front of the merchant and covered him from an attack.
Fireworks fell away from my shield, repelled with a metallic clash. Apparently their attacks weren’t strong enough to get through my defenses.
