by Aneko Yusagi
Prologue: Cal Mira Superstitions
The rhythmic sound of the crashing waves was soothing as I gazed at the blue ocean and sky.
“The beach is so peaceful. It’s hard to believe that the ocean is so rough out there.”
“Mr. Naofumi, isn’t there still a storm raging off shore?”
We were at a resort island called Cal Mira, but we weren’t there to relax. The island was in the middle of an activation phenomenon, so we’d come to reap its benefits.
The activation event was something similar to what happens in scheduled MMORPG events. It was a set period of time where the amount of experience points received by players was dramatically increased. So while the phenomenon was occurring, we would receive much more experience than usual for the same amount of battling.
Experience points seemed like such a strange idea, but I’d gotten used to it. This was a completely different world, after all.
“See? If you squint way out at the horizon, you can just make out some black clouds.”
“Hm . . .”
I strained to see them, but it was so far away that I couldn’t be sure. I guess I did see a dark line over the ocean.
The waves looked higher out there too. The breeze was wet.
“Raphtalia, you seem to know a lot about the ocean.”
“Well, I am from a fishing village. I have a sense for these things, I guess.”
“Oh yeah.”
Why were we relaxing and watching the waves roll by? Well, we did have a fair amount of time to kill until we could act on the next phase of our plans.
To explain what I was doing in a completely new world, I should explain from the beginning.
My name is Naofumi Iwatani. I used to live in Japan as a member of a normal, modern society. I used to be a university student with otaku tendencies.
One day I stumbled into the local library to kill time and found an old-looking book called The Records of the Four Holy Weapons. I started flipping through it and before I knew what was happening I lost consciousness and woke back up in a new world, apparently summoned there to serve the role of one of the characters that had been described in the book: the Shield Hero.
The book had told the story of a disastrous phenomenon called “the waves of destruction.” These waves were threatening to destroy the world. Standing against it were four heroes, each summoned from another world, each wielding a legendary weapon.
The weapons were the sword, spear, bow, and of course the shield.
Sure, the shield doesn’t really count as a weapon per se. Nevertheless, that’s the role I was summoned to play.
But the book wasn’t complete. The text continued just until the section detailing the Shield Hero, and from that point on all the subsequent pages were blank.
And that’s pretty much how I ended up here.
Anyway, this world was very different from my own. People here accrued levels and experience points, as if it were a game.
Whenever you battled and defeated monsters, you were awarded a certain amount of experience points, which would raise your abilities and level.
They called this system “status magic.” Whenever I concentrated on it, I could see my various status attributes and their values spelled out before me in mid-air.
It was an interesting world. It rewarded you in direct proportion to your efforts.
But the Shield Hero was really a defense specialist. I was only able to defeat monsters indirectly.
If I didn’t have party members to battle with, I was severely limited in what I could achieve. It was essentially impossible for me to defeat a monster on my own.
But it wasn’t all bad. The Legendary Shield had a whole host of abilities and skills that I could use.
The Legendary Shield itself grew more powerful by absorbing monsters and various materials, and it could transform into other powerful shields.
So the plan was to level up and grow as powerful as I could before the waves came.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out that way. The country that summoned us, Melromarc, clung to a historical vendetta against the Shield Hero.
Because of the persecution I experienced, I was unable to recruit party members of my own. Eventually I was able to recruit someone, but just when I thought I’d earned her trust and appreciation, she betrayed me. I was framed for a crime and sent out into the streets penniless and alone.
It was a very dark time, but I eventually found a party member—actually I purchased one. She was a slave when I bought her, so she didn’t really have a choice in the matter. Nevertheless, together we were able to face the first wave of destruction and come out of the ordeal alive.
That doesn’t sound very good, and it wasn’t. But it is the truth.
The slave’s name was Raphtalia, and she was only a young girl. I purchased her for a paltry sum and forced her to fight monsters on my behalf.
“What should we do next?”
“We can’t go out into the open ocean until the storm blows over, so I guess we’ll just kill time here on the island.”
The girl next to me on the beach, the one who now cared for me sincerely, was Raphtalia.
She appeared to be around 18 years old, but in truth she was younger than that.
She was a demi-human, a type of person that existed in this world. There were different races of demi-human, among which she was a tanuki-type.
If you think of her as a girl with tanuki ears and a puffy tanuki tail, you’ll be pretty close to what she looks like.
She had a symmetrical face framed with smooth red hair. Her skin was white and fine like porcelain.
Ten out of ten people would call her beautiful.
Demi-humans grew differently from normal humans. Even if they were young children, their bodies grew in proportion to their level, not their age. Because Raphtalia started battling with me when she was only a small girl, her body grew into a young woman nearly before my eyes. This unique way that demi-humans grew up meant that she was actually younger than she appeared to be.
When the first wave of destruction washed over the world, it took Raphtalia’s village and family with it. In the ensuing chaos, she was captured by slave traders and forced into servitude, leading to an extended period of darkness in her life.
In the end I bought her as a slave, and the rest is history.
After I was betrayed, framed, and persecuted, I lost the ability to trust others.
But I was eventually able to put my trust in a slave, knowing that she had no option but to tell me the truth and could never betray me.
It may seem ridiculous, but Raphtalia was eventually set free from her life as a slave—then she voluntarily became a slave again to earn my trust. I might have lost faith in humanity, but I wasn’t so far gone that I could witness such sincere devotion and remain unmoved.
Now she is my most trusted ally.
She was a very serious person.
Her sense of purpose was her highest priority—one that she never forgets. When my temper gets out of control and my language gets rough, she’s always there to reel me back in.
Because of the loss and suffering she experienced during the first wave, she was extremely dedicated to fighting them.
She didn’t want anyone else to endure the hardships that she’d been forced to suffer through.
To put it plainly, I respected her very much.
“Filo.”
“Whaaaat?”
I called out to Filo. She was just down the beach, swimming and playing in the water.
“We’re going to head over to the market. What do you want to do?”
“I wanna keep swimming!”
“Fin
e. Swim all you want.”
“Okaaaay!”
Filo was the second friend I’d made, after Raphtalia. She was a monster and a young girl at the same time.
We received a stipend from the crown after surviving the wave of destruction, and I used the money to participate in a lottery game where you choose a monster egg from a crate for a set price without knowing what kind of egg you are going to get. Filo was the monster that hatched out of the egg, but for some reason she eventually acquired the ability to transform into a young human girl with small angel-like wings on her back.
When she was in human form she looked like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl of ten.
Her hair was glossy and smooth. Her eyes were clear and blue like the sea, her skin white like snow. She looked like a foreign pop idol who ran around barefoot, a snapshot of carefree youth.
One look at her face and you knew that she was as naïve and carefree as they come.
Her innocent face and expressions and her absurd, playful antics always cheered me up.
Sometimes she took things a little too far and could be irritating, but even that could be endearing.
Her real form was a filolial queen. Filolials were giant bird-like monsters with a penchant for pulling heavy objects (like carriages), and when raised under certain mysterious conditions they can mature into filolial queens.
She was much bigger than I was when in her filolial queen form, and she looked something like a mix between an owl and a penguin.
Filolials were giant birds, but for all the power they held in their legs, they were unable to fly. It might help to think of them as this world’s equivalent of ostriches.
Her feathers were mostly white, though there were patches of pink here and there.
There was one other thing immediately noticeable about her that differentiated her from other filolials: she had a giant feather crest that rose vertically from the top of her head.
When she was in human form it manifested as a huge cowlick in her hair. It was very distinctive and memorable. It was her trademark.
She looked like she was around ten years old, but if you didn’t take her seriously you’d end up in a lot of pain.
She was very quick on her feet and much stronger than she looked. I’d grown to trust her with my life.
As for our levels, I was at level 73, Raphtalia at 75, and Filo at 76.
Those two were my only party members, and my only real friends.
To be honest, I was starting to think that I needed to recruit someone else.
If this were just a game, then we should have been able to overcome any difficulty just by leveling up enough to overpower the enemy. But this was reality, albeit a different one than I was accustomed to. No matter how high our levels got, we were eventually going to need another pair of hands.
“How should we prepare for the next wave?”
“I think we need to find another party member.”
“What about Melty-chan? She proved herself powerful during the time we spent together.”
“Melty? Sure, she’s powerful enough. But I don’t think we can just commandeer her for our own purposes.”
Melty was Filo’s friend and also the princess of Melromarc.
A lot had happened and we’d ended up fighting with her for a time, during which she had demonstrated what a powerful fighter she could be. But the waves were dangerous, and it didn’t make sense to put the heir to the throne in the line of fire.
Oh, that reminds me. I mentioned that I had been framed for a crime. Melty actually had a lot to do with that.
But to explain I need to back up and tell you a bit more about the country that summoned me to this world: Melromarc.
Melromarc had a religious vendetta against the Shield Hero.
The national religion was called the Church of the Three Heroes, and they worshiped all the heroes aside from the Shield Hero. So the citizenry had always equated the Shield Hero with villainy and deceit.
Now you might be wondering why a religion like that would even exist.
The roots lie in Melromarc’s widespread human supremacy and the oppression of the demi-humans that accompanied it.
As you might expect, there were countries that embraced the opposite of that philosophy. There were demi-human supremacist countries out there too, places where humans faced unjust discrimination.
Melromarc had a long history of war with one of those countries, where the demi-human population had long worshiped the Shield Hero among the other gods of their pantheon.
When I was summoned to Melromarc, the king who was serving at the time immediately discriminated against me, then saw to it that I was framed, prosecuted, and sent out into the streets penniless and alone.
But a royal conspiracy alone isn’t enough to explain everything that happened next.
The world was currently under the existential threat of the impending waves of destruction—there was no time to spend dilly-dallying over how to treat the Shield Hero.
The true ruler of Melromarc was not the king, but the queen. The queen sent Melty as an intermediary between myself, the Shield Hero, and her father, the king.
Melromarc was traditionally a matrilineal country—all the true power lay with the queen.
When all this happened, the queen was traveling around on diplomatic missions to try and rally the disparate nations of the world against the threat of the waves.
It was a particularly perilous time for diplomacy. Realizing the threat of the waves and the need to call on the heroes, an international agreement had been reached. The heroes would be summoned by a mutually agreed upon country. But in the queen’s absence, the king had teamed up with the Church of the Three Heroes and summoned the heroes to Melromarc without conferring with the international body. Understandably, this act of defiance angered the rest of the world, and the queen had her hands full simply trying to prevent the outbreak of war, which seemed imminent.
Were it not for the efforts of the queen in those dark days, Melromarc would probably no longer exist as a sovereign nation.
At the time, Raphtalia and I had no way to know what was really going on. After surviving the first wave we slowly saved money by selling various trinkets. That was the only way to secure the funds necessary to update our equipment from what we’d started with, which wasn’t anywhere near powerful enough to ensure our survival.
Our traveling merchant life was boring but had plenty of advantages. Of course, I hid my identity as the Shield Hero and instead called myself the saint of the bird god, because Filo was pulling my carriage and she really stood out in a crowd. Citizens actually started to respect the saint of the bird god.
We were eventually able to secure better tools, materials, and equipment through my mercantile efforts. In the end, we managed to become at least as powerful as the other heroes.
But the Church of the Three Heroes didn’t like the idea that I was traveling free under a pseudonym.
The other three heroes had caused some trouble on their travels, and it was starting to foment doubt among the populace. Realizing that its status as the national faith might soon be shaken, the church decided to become an active player in the events unfolding in Melromarc.
They concocted an elaborate plan to tarnish my reputation further. I was accused of kidnapping the very princess that the queen had sent to repair the strained relationship between the king and I: the heiress of the throne, Melty.
The crown sent the other three heroes to bring us back in while we fled from them in an attempt to prove our innocence.
Along the way we ran into all sorts of trouble. We battled the very same nobleman that had once imprisoned and tortured Raphtalia. And we had to take down a massive monster that he had released from its magically sealed prison.
There’s more. We ended up running into the queen of the filolials after that fight, and finally, after the smoke had cleared, the church decided to dispense with its shadowy operations and came after us directly. They called it
a holy war, and they were out for blood.
In the end I was forced to use my last resort. The cursed, dark side of my shield contained an unbelievable power, and I used it to destroy the head of the church itself: the high priest. At last, my innocence was proven to the people.
The queen returned to the country and heavily punished her husband, the king, and Melty’s bitch of an older sister—the one who had originally framed me. She had their names officially changed to Trash and Bitch.
At long last, things were as they should have been from the very start. I was considered equal to the other three heroes, and my actions were officially supported and sanctioned by the crown. Finally, we were free to dedicate our efforts to fighting the waves.
Or so I thought. It wasn’t long before new problems started showing up.
“Why did they have to be our enemy? I wanted to invite them to join our party.”
“I know how you feel. They were very powerful and kind. They were the kind of people we could have depended on.”
“. . . Yeah.”
On the ocean voyage to the Cal Mira islands we had coincidently shared a room with two other adventurers: L’Arc Berg and Therese.
L’Arc seemed really nice, like a dependable older brother type of guy.
He was very experienced in battle, he was considerate, and he was fun to be around. To be honest, I didn’t hate him.
Therese was very skilled with magic, and because my party didn’t have a lot of back-row support, she was a very valuable asset during the time we spent together.
Both of them had been extremely powerful in comparison to other adventurers I’d met.
But in the end they turned out to be compatriots of the enemy we’d met at the end of the third wave of destruction: a mysterious woman named Glass.
During our exploration of the islands we found an underwater temple. Venturing inside, we found a dragon hourglass, which was a mysterious object that counted down the time until the next wave of destruction appeared. The wave came, and after a large battle, we fought an Inter-Dimensional Whale, which was the wave’s boss monster. Immediately after the monster fell, L’Arc and Therese turned on us.
