by Aneko Yusagi
They were hit by the attack once and were instantly paralyzed for the whole battle.
Luckily, L’Arc had never intended to kill them. It had been the sort of attack that you often see in anime or manga—the sort intended to knock someone out without causing any permanent damage or threatening their lives.
If they were so weak that they were knocked out of battle by a single hit, then they were never going to stand a chance of victory.
L’Arc and Therese were both very powerful. I had spent a long time leveling and powering up, and I really thought that the attacks they were using were strong enough to kill me.
I had used a shield with a very high defense rating in the battle. It had skills that had enabled me to keep L’Arc in place. I blocked his attacks and prevented him from dodging ours while Raphtalia and Filo kept up the offensive.
But L’Arc and Therese had plenty of cards up their sleeves.
For example, just when I thought that I had him cornered, L’Arc’s scythe started to glow. He brushed my shoulder with the tip.
I had a really high defense rating, and I’d been able to withstand L’Arc’s attacks up until that point, but not that attack. That one had really hurt.
Luckily, it hadn’t been enough to knock me out of the battle, but he’d found an attack that was extremely effective against me. You might say he’d found my weak point and gone straight for it.
It was the type of attack that turned my defense rating into a liability—a defense rating attack.
It worked by dealing damage based on your defense rating. The higher your defense, the more damage you would take. It was a very rare sort of attack, but I’d seen it before in a game.
This whole world seemed to operate just like a game, so I’d realized that it was a possibility that such an attack might exist. Still, I certainly hadn’t expected to get hit with it right in the middle of a life-or-death battle.
For a shielder like myself, whose greatest strength is their defense rating, an attack like that can be fatal.
There was another problem. I could have switched to a shield with a lower defense rating as a way to get around the defense rating attack, but then I wouldn’t have had a strong enough defense rating to survive their normal attacks.
He really had found the most effective means of fighting against us. For a moment, I thought we were done for.
Then I realized that I could use skills that I had, like air strike shield and shooting star shield, to prevent their attacks from reaching me. That would make their attacks completely ineffective. Still, the existence of their defense rating attacks turned the tide of the battle, and we were put on the defensive.
For the most part, I could use my skills to defend myself. But then I was left with no way to deal any damage to them.
Even if I teamed up with Raphtalia and Filo to get some attacks in, L’Arc still had Therese on his side. I couldn’t figure out what to do, but then things got even worse.
Glass showed up right in the middle of the battle.
Glass also had an attack that was very effective against me, though for the opposite reason. She had a defense rating ignoring attack.
Both L’Arc’s defense rating attack and Glass’s defense ignoring attack were very effective against me. With both of them there, it felt like there was no need for the Shield Hero to participate in the battle at all.
Just when things were looking their worst, we put up an impressive fight and were able to beat the three of them back.
Glass was exhausted and depleted of energy, and it looked like we might win. But then L’Arc pulled out a bottle of soul-healing water and dumped it all over Glass, immediately restoring all of her SP.
I don’t even want to remember what happened after that.
I’d been able to withstand all attacks aside from the defense rating and defense ignoring attacks, but the newly-restored Glass came flying at me with new attacks that were now much more powerful than I was capable of defending against.
Her attacks were unbelievably fast and strong.
They were so quick that Raphtalia and Filo, despite all the leveling up we’d done, weren’t able to follow them at all.
And then, for whatever reason, Glass and the others just retreated. The battle was put on hold.
I’d like to call it a draw, but it wasn’t really like that. We weren’t going to be able to defeat them, and they ran away for some other reason.
If we ran into them again, we would probably lose.
Which brings me to the main problem. If the other heroes were so weak that L’Arc had been able to defeat them in one fell swoop, what would have happened if they’d been challenged by Glass?
The answer was as clear as day. They’d all be dead in a second.
I’d heard that if the heroes died, the waves of destruction would grow stronger. If I could do anything to avoid that outcome, I had to do it.
Besides, if the other heroes could start to manage for themselves, then the burden of fighting Glass and the others wouldn’t fall solely on my shoulders.
I looked over at the queen and she nodded in response.
“Very well, let us begin the second meeting of the heroes. I, Milleria Q. Melromarc, will moderate the discussion.”
All three of them reclined dramatically.
“Discussion, eh?”
“What’s left to discuss?”
“Naofumi’s the only one here who hasn’t been forthcoming.”
I was already getting irritated with them.
“I’ve already told you this, haven’t I? You were all correct about the power-up methods. All I did was what you three taught me to do. That was how I became strong enough to battle through the last wave.”
We’d already had a meeting like this once, before we’d all come to the islands. We’d talked about the various ways to power-up our stats and weapons.
Our weapons had special abilities and power-up methods that weren’t available to other adventurers. That was why the heroes could become stronger than other people.
But when they all started talking about the power-up systems they used, it turned out there was very little overlap. Each one of them had a completely different idea about how it worked. The “meeting” devolved into name-calling and stubborn insistence on their own methods and ended up being called off before we came to any sort of consensus.
But afterwards I tried each of the methods they’d detailed using my shield, and it turned out that they had all been correct.
Melromarc used shadows to deliver messages, so I sent them all what I’d discovered. They refused to believe me. In the end none of them were powerful enough to be of any use during the wave of destruction.
There was a catch though. The power-up methods I discovered only worked if you truly believed that they were going to work.
If you held on to any lingering doubts when you tried them, the weapon wouldn’t respond.
Our weapons, it seemed, were able to turn our emotions into power. If you didn’t believe in the power-up method that another hero explained, the icon that enabled it wouldn’t even appear in your menu.
“There you go—lying again! Isn’t it obvious that Naofumi just found a way to cheat the system? Just fess up already!”
“Yeah! You cheater! You better stop lying to us!”
“You haven’t even told us about the power-up methods that you use! What a coward! Did you do all this just to ruin Whore’s life?”
They were so ridiculous it was hard to stay mad at them. They were too stupid to merit any real anger.
“So you decided not to believe all the things I’ve already told you, and you keep insisting that I cheated to get ahead? Is that it?”
All three of them nodded in unison.
“And besides! Your party members have also powered-up! It’s unbelievable! You expect us to believe that all that is because of your shield?!”
“I already told you how that works. Raphtalia and Filo both level up faster than normal
because of maturation adjustment skills that I unlocked. I also told you that when we finally participated in the class up ceremony, Filo’s cowlick responded and some kind of special class up occurred.”
“It’s true. I was there to witness it,” the queen explained. “From what I saw, that is exactly what happened. Something unique occurred when Filo and Raphtalia underwent the ceremony, and it seems to have affected the extent to which their abilities improved.”
The queen had just confirmed by story, but the three heroes continued to glare at me suspiciously. Why did I have to be interrogated?
“Look, guys. Have you ever thought about this from my perspective?”
“What?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I have. I wanted to figure out how you discovered this cheating method. We need to know that.”
They were impossible to talk to, but that didn’t change the fact that I needed them to be stronger than they were.
It wasn’t necessarily that I thought I was the best, but during the last battle I’d realized—painfully—just how serious of a predicament we were really in.
“Just think about this. I can’t attack. All I can do is defend, right? So how do I benefit from cheating to get more powerful than the rest of you?”
“Well.”
The three of them looked around the room and at each other. They appeared to be at a loss for words. They must have been desperately trying to think of something that would sound reasonable.
“But you DO have a way to attack!”
Itsuki leapt to his feet and jabbed his finger at me.
Was that his burning sense of justice coming to the rescue? Nothing was more irritating than a self-righteous idiot.
“Are you talking about iron maiden and blood sacrifice?”
“Yes! You have those two powerful attacks, so that should give you a reason to want to pull ahead of the rest of us!”
I really didn’t have very many ways to go on the offensive.
One of them was a counter effect that my shield had. It could respond to an attack from an enemy with a counter attack of its own.
So I could use a shield with spikes all over it and that would hurt an enemy if they punched it. But did that really count as an offensive attack?
It was strictly a passive way to do damage.
Then there were the two skills that Itsuki had mentioned: iron maiden and blood sacrifice. Those skills were only accessible when I was using a cursed shield, the Shield of Wrath.
But both of those skills came with problems of their own.
I sighed heavily and turned to answer Itsuki’s accusation.
“Iron maiden works by first using shield prison to enclose the enemy, then using change shield (attack) to activate iron maiden. Doing so uses all of my SP. You have broken through that attack once yourself, so you should realize there is a serious flaw in the attack.”
“Is there?”
I was so irritated with them I could hardly think straight.
Ren tapped his chin with a fingertip, apparently deep in thought. Motoyasu just went on glaring at me.
Finally, reaching a conclusion, Ren opened his mouth.
“The preparations for the attack take too long.”
“Exactly. If the enemy breaks through the shield prison, then I can’t continue with the sequence. Of course I could just try to use the skills as quickly as possible, but that doesn’t do away with this fundamental flaw.”
So using iron maiden required a long and elaborate set up on my end of things, which made it easy enough for an attentive enemy to break the sequence.
“You’ve broken that skill sequence yourselves. You should know this.”
Even if I were able to run the whole skill sequence, it wouldn’t work if the enemy were able to break the shield prison and escape—or worse, if the enemy just broke the iron maiden itself.
The iron maiden didn’t move very quickly, so if another enemy scored a direct hit against it, it was always possible to break the attack.
“Then what about blood sacrifice?!”
“Have you already forgotten? When I use that I have to bear the brunt of an essentially fatal attack. If I survive it, then I end up with a curse that drops my stats by a full 30 percent.”
By the time the wave of destruction was actually bearing down on Cal Mira, I’d managed to recover most of my stats, but it wasn’t like I could just push myself to the brink of death every time I got in a fight. The recovery was taxing and took a long time.
“Those are the only methods of attack available I’ve got, both of which are burdensome and ask way too much of me in payment. Even the Shield of Wrath comes with its issues. I can’t just use it whenever I want, you know?”
The shield was cursed. Using it eroded my very soul.
“But there were others, too! What about that attack that throws black flames everywhere?!”
“That’s only a counter attack. And that skill is tied to the Shield of Wrath, so I can’t just use it whenever I feel like it.”
Every time I used the shield it had an effect on me. It felt like I was going to be swallowed by rage and misery.
So every attack I was capable of using on my own was tied to the cursed shield series. There was no proper method of attack open to me.
If they wanted to call that cheating, fine. They could call it whatever they liked.
But they were missing the point. The actual problem had yet to be addressed.
It was like they bought a game but skipped the tutorial and didn’t read the instruction manual. Then when they realized that a method they knew from another game worked, they stuck with it and never bothered to check to see if there was a better way. They were the worst kind of gamers.
They weren’t using the right power-up method, so it only made sense that their progress would bottom out halfway through.
“Besides, the Shield of Wrath seems to have its own power-up method that I don’t understand. None of your methods work on it, and I can’t get it to unlock any other skills.”
As for the Shield of Wrath, whether it’s iron maiden or blood sacrifice, it seemed like nothing I did would unlock any additional abilities.
“Do you get it yet? I really don’t have any proper attack abilities of my own.”
“Liar!”
Motoyasu screamed at me. I didn’t see any other way to make them understand, so I stood up, walked over to him, and punched him in the face.
I slowly pulled my fist back and then returned to my seat.
Motoyasu looked like he couldn’t believe what just happened. He was holding his cheek.
It hadn’t hurt him at all, I could tell. That was exactly what I was trying to tell them.
“Do you get it now? It seems like you all think I’ve somehow weaseled my way into an enormous amount of power, but don’t you see? No matter how high my defense stat grows, my attack stays the same. I’m never going to be able to attack.”
Motoyasu hadn’t taken any damage.
“Now, if you wanted to try attacking me yourselves, I might be able to make you regret that. Want to try?”
Finally, I got what I’d longed for all this time: all three of them shut up.
Still, they were looking at me as though they couldn’t process what had just happened.
“It doesn’t matter how far ahead of you three I get. It doesn’t help me at all. If only one of you had managed to power-up the way that I have, don’t you think that battle on the sea would have turned out differently?”
I already explained this, but the three of them were knocked out right along with the other adventurers and knights by L’Arc and Therese’s combo skill at the start of our battle. They just stayed unconscious for the entire fight.
“You all like to call this sort of thing a losing event, like we were never supposed to win it. How many losing events do you think happen in a row?”
“Dammit ...”
Ren murmured to himself, annoyed.
Itsuki and Motoyasu’s hands were curled into fists.
“You all need to get it through your heads. L’Arc . . . L’Arc Berg, Therese, and Glass came here specifically to kill the heroes. Luckily for you, they thought I was the only real hero, so they focused on trying to kill me. If they figure out who you really are, they’ll come after you next.”
And then what would happen? I actually already knew the answer.
Fitoria, the queen of the filolials, had told me.
“I heard that the waves get stronger if a hero dies.”
If one of them died in battle, it would only make my life harder.
I couldn’t afford to let that happen.
“If that’s the situation that we are in, how do I stand to benefit from overpowering you three?”
“Obviously, you want to be stronger than us so that you can claim to be a real hero! You want all the glory for yourself!”
“Give me a break.”
Itsuki was getting dumber and dumber.
“I cannot believe the words of a man who strives for nothing other than his own self-satisfaction!”
“Stop making stuff up and then believing it!”
I could have said the same thing to myself, but it was still true. Deciding things in haste will only make your life harder in the long run.
That’s why I decided to believe in my friends as much as I could.
If I didn’t, then I’d never make it out of this alive.
Of course, I still have a healthy amount of skepticism, but I’ve realized that if you doubt everything, you’ll never get anywhere.
“‘You aren’t the protagonist of this story.’ That’s what you said when Bitch framed me. Isn’t that right, Motoyasu?”
Motoyasu had been agreeing with Itsuki, so I addressed him.
“Think about where we find ourselves and tell me, who’s the protagonist here? Ren, you think about it too. One of us is trying to get everyone together to fight against the waves of destruction while the other heroes just sit around and call him a cheater. Who do you think is the protagonist of this story?”
It looked like I finally struck a nerve. All three of them cast their eyes down at the table.
I don’t think I ever said that I wanted to compete for protagonist status. All I wanted to say was that we needed to be realistic about how to deal with the problems we were facing.
