by Aneko Yusagi
I think I might have found the same cave the last time we’d climbed up on the tortoise’s back, but the mountains had all changed shape since then.
“I’ll take the lead. Let’s get going!”
“Roger that!”
“Everyone! Follow the Shield Hero!”
The army soldiers raised their weapons and shouted their agreement.
We followed a tattered mountain path to the cave opening, battling hordes of familiars the whole way. Finally, we stood before the entrance. I led the way in.
“Be careful.”
“You too,” Raphtalia said and used her magic to summon a glowing ball of light. We needed it to see where we were going.
I led the way inside, followed by Raphtalia, then Ost, Eclair, Filo, and Rishia. Then came the queen, the old lady, and the rest of the troops. Once inside, I recognized it as a cave we had found before, but the layout had changed considerably since then.
The walls were covered in monsters that looked like eyeballs, which hadn’t been there the last time. They were called Spirit Tortoise familiars (installation type). There were other monsters too—large and bulbous maggot-like things—but nothing that we couldn’t handle.
The main obstacle we faced wasn’t the monsters in the cave. No—it was the cave itself. It split into tunnels that led in different directions and wandered, maze-like, without any clear indication of the right way to go. The walls were not made of living flesh. They were made of stone and dirt. It made me wonder if the tunnels would really lead us into the body of the Spirit Tortoise. I started to wonder if we wouldn’t have better luck crawling into the monster’s mouth, not that I really thought that would be any easier.
“Do you know the way?”
“I brought materials that we compiled after the last investigation,” the queen said, unrolling a map to show me.
“That’s great.” Without a map it might have taken days to figure out where to go. That was time we didn’t have. Just as I’d thought, the map showed a number of branching maze-like tunnels. And it also seemed to indicate that there was another entrance on the other side of the mountain, where the town ruins lay.
“Should we see if this path will take us to the ruined temple?”
“That’s a good idea. Perhaps there is some kind of hint in the ruins. We need all the help we can get.”
There was another problem, too. The map wasn’t complete, and it didn’t show how to get to the Spirit Tortoise’s heart. Either they hadn’t finished mapping the tunnel system or the path to the heart was only open when the Spirit Tortoise was reawakened and on its feet. I decided it was probably best not to depend on the map too much, as there was no telling how accurate it was.
“Huh?”
The map indicated that we would soon come to a large open space. It seemed like a good spot to split into different search parties. We had plenty of people, after all. So many, in fact, that it was getting more and more difficult to lead them through the narrowing tunnels.
If the soldiers were as strong as Raphtalia or Filo, then it wouldn’t have been a problem. But of course that wasn’t the case. I decided that it would be best to have the army wait in the large chamber while we split off to find the best way forward. I held up the map and told the soldiers where we were heading, but . . .
“What? Wasn’t it supposed to be here?”
“That’s what the map says.”
We’d followed the map exactly, but instead of opening into a larger chamber, the path had morphed into a winding tunnel unlike anything on the map.
“The map must be wrong.”
“How strange. It’s been accurate up until this point,” the queen said and frowned.
Did the caves change shape when the Spirit Tortoise reawakened? The gnawing sense of doubt in my gut was getting worse. What was going on? We had no choice but to follow the new path. Luckily, there was only one way forward, so we didn’t have to worry about choosing the right path. Had we come to a fork in the road, it would have been better to find a place for the army to wait.
But that wasn’t the case, so the whole group continued down the long winding path.
Eventually, the tunnel opened up into a large chamber of some kind. Was it the same chamber we’d been searching for? Maybe the major rooms and chambers in the cave system stayed the same, but the paths that connected them changed. Anyway, I was glad we’d found the chamber we were looking for, except that . . .
“Damn. Those are big.”
The chamber was certainly large, but there were familiars in the room that utilized all the space.
Compared to the innumerable familiars we’d fought on our way there, these were much . . . larger. The way they filled the room made me think that they were positioned there purposefully to ward off any invaders that made it this far. Had this all been an RPG, I would have called it a mid-dungeon boss fight.
And this was the Spirit Tortoise. So they were probably going to be pretty powerful.
The worst part was the number of them.
“One, two, three . . . There’s kind of a lot of them.”
In the end, I counted seven or eight. Sure, we could have handled one of them, but with seven or eight to deal with, I worried about the soldiers.
“What should we do, Mr. Naofumi?”
There was also the possibility that more might spawn as we defeated them. There was only one way to find out.
“There aren’t too many of them, so let’s try and take them out on our own. I’d like the soldiers to stay back for now. Let them know.”
“Roger!”
“Okaaay!”
“Feh . . . I’ll do my best.”
“Then let’s do this!” I shouted and led the charge toward the familiars.
The monsters were different than the gorilla or yeti-like familiars we’d faced outside. They were more like . . . turtle men? They seemed to be around four meters tall.
When I got closer, their names appeared: Spirit Tortoise familiar (guardian).
“Hya!” Filo shot at one of them and kicked its shell. The shell fell off with a loud crack and the monster slammed into a wall.
“Yahhhhhh!” Raphtalia swung her sword and lopped off a guardian’s head. I knew I could count on her.
Rishia helped Raphtalia and Filo by casting weak offensive spells to draw the guardian’s attention. I tried to draw their attacks, too. Whenever one rushed at me, I used Shooting Star Shield to put a barrier between us. All in all, I was impressed with our teamwork—we’d get a passing grade for sure. But teamwork had never been our real problem. Our real problem was flat-out strength, and we just needed to improve our stats for that.
Anyway, I had to focus on the battle.
“Ha!” Ost stretched out her hands, and one of the guardians immediately froze in place.
Eclair, the old lady, and Rishia seized the opportunity and rushed in to finish the beast off.
“Icicle Needle!” the queen shouted, casting a spell that slowed a guardian down to a crawl. She was pretty good.
“How disappointing,” Raphtalia clipped as she flicked blood from her sword and then plunged it into a guardian, killing it instantly.
She was right—the monsters were weaker than I’d expected.
Considering how strong the Spirit Tortoise was, who could blame me for expecting a tough fight? Was I all worked up over nothing?
No. I had to worry about the soldiers behind us, after all. A little paranoia was just what I needed.
“Yup! I know! They’re kinda hard though!”
“Maybe that’s because you’re only attacking the hard part on the back?”
“But the rest is so soft!”
“Don’t waste your energy.”
The two of them bantered over the most trivial things! It was like listening to two little geniuses bickering.
“Both of you are so strong!”
“Rishia, you’ll be strong too. How are your Hengen Muso studies going?”
“Feh! I
’m doing my best!” she shouted, jabbing her sword into a guardian.
“That’s it! If you imagine that you are attacking our holy saint here, there isn’t an enemy alive that you cannot defeat!”
“You old bag.”
Why would she encourage Rishia to attack me? Obnoxious old woman . . . Then again, I couldn’t argue with the results. Rishia’s sword went straight into the guardian’s chest. Yikes—is that what she wanted to do to me?
Before long, we’d cleared the room.
“I guess there aren’t any more coming.”
“I guess not.”
I had half expected an endless stream of monsters to fill the room when we finished with the guardians, but apparently that wasn’t in the cards.
“Wow,” the soldiers who were all flabbergasted by our display of strength muttered to themselves in disbelief.
It wasn’t that we were particularly strong though. It’s that the soldiers were so weak. I wondered what the average level of the troops was. If they were at level 60 or something, that would be really pathetic.
“My queen. Zield Hero.”
A shadow appeared. I didn’t even know there was one around.
The shadows were special secret agents under the queen’s command. If you picture ninjas, you won’t be too far off. Judging from their bloodstained short swords, they must have been fighting the guardians alongside us.
“What is it?”
“We will uze this chamber az our base of operations.”
“Sure. I didn’t even know you were here.”
“We’ve been entrusted with the zafety of the troops for this operation.”
“Do as you will.”
“Yeah.”
They said they were here to protect the troops, but weren’t they part of the troops themselves? They must have been there to fight, too. Were the Spirit Tortoise familiars so powerful as to deserve all this? I guess it made sense to think of the coalition army troops as a special unit assigned to our mission to imprison the Spirit Tortoise. For a mission like this, they probably chose troops for abilities other than their skill in combat.
“Listen up, soldiers! We’re going to use this camber as our base of operations while we search for the Spirit Tortoise’s heart! Your orders are to protect this chamber while we search for the heart!”
“Roger!” the troops shouted in unison. The air of tension and dread that had followed us dissipated as they spread out to fill the chamber. They began to cautiously relax. They must have been even more terrified and exhausted than I’d thought.
Had they done anything that warranted so much exhaustion? Had they done anything like what I’d done when I had to endure all the Spirit Tortoise’s attacks? Maybe I was different because of the shield. And maybe Raphtalia and Filo were just strange. Whatever the case may be, we had a lot to think about after we defeated the Spirit Tortoise.
“Shadow, do you know what the average level of a coalition army soldiers is?”
“The special troops azzigned to this mission have an average level of 65.”
“That’s even worse than I thought,” I said, turning to the queen. “You’ve got to do something about this. These troops are so weak they are worthless. Raphtalia is only in the 70s, so why is she so much stronger?”
“The level of strength that Raphtalia commands would normally require many years of training.”
Really? Did my maturation adjustment ability really make that big of a difference?!
Maybe Rishia was normal after all, and anyone that didn’t have access to those adjustment abilities could only hope to command a certain level of strength? I shook the thought away. Things couldn’t be that bad. Besides, Itsuki had conspired to remove her from his party because she was so weak. And thanks to the Filo kigurumi, she was even stronger than she had been at that point.
I considered asking the old guy from the weapon shop to mass produce the kigurumis, but we only had the materials to make two more. Mass-produced Filo kigurumis, hm . . . Maybe we could do it if we plucked all of Filo’s feathers.
“?!”
Filo’s feathers suddenly stood on end, moving in a wave from her head to her tail. She looked scared.
“What is it?”
“Something feels weird!”
Had I been speaking out loud? She could be sharp when she wanted to. We probably couldn’t pluck her feathers if we tried.
“The shadows are stronger than the other soldiers, aren’t they?”
I wanted to think so, but I couldn’t send them out to look for the heart if they were going to end up killed by a bunch of little monsters. Come to think of it, I’d never actually seen a shadow in battle.
“We are trained for battle and assassination, so we should prove uzeful in battle.”
“Great. Half of you stay here and protect the soldiers. I need the other half to help us find the heart.”
“Underztood. However, the shadows have zuffered heavy losses in these recent battlez. I hope that your expectations are realiztic.”
“They are,” I said. The planning was just about finished.
We still had a long way to go. I’d send the shadows searching for the heart and let the troops rest until then. In the meantime, we would conduct our own search..
“Eclair, old lady—you two stay here with the troops and fight off any monsters that show up.”
“Understood!
“Roger that!”
“Filo, you go with the shadow search party. Use your nose! I’m counting on you.”
“Okaaaay! No problem!”
As for the rest of them . . .
“Raphtalia, Ost, Rishia, and the queen, you all come with me. We’re heading out the other side of the cave and going to the ruined temple.”
“Alright.”
“Agreed. We need to find the heart, but we also need to find out how to put an end to this.”
“Feh . . . I’ll do my best.”
“Very well. Your wish is my command, Mr. Iwatani.”
I was a little hesitant to bring the queen with us, but when it came to legends and culture, she was more knowledgeable than anyone I knew. We needed her. Besides, she had a lot of bodyguards and was very powerful herself. It was easier to protect her than the army troops.
Chapter Ten: Strangers
“Hya!” Raphtalia shouted, slicing a monster that leapt at her in half.
“They just keep on coming! There weren’t so many of them outside, so I guess I got careless.”
We were working our way through the tunnels to get to the temple ruins, but we were running into so many familiars that our progress was slowing down. The cave system must have been a nest for the familiars. That was the only way to explain it.
Even worse, the map was proving mostly useless. My patience was starting to wear thin.
It was fun to explore dungeons in an RPG, but we didn’t have the time to waste on exploration. We only had the time we did because Fitoria was still locked in battle with the Spirit Tortoise. And it even had more heads than it had when I’d fought it. She was out there fighting for us, in a hailstorm of exploding missiles. It was no time to go exploring.
We had to rely on intuition and luck as we trudged through the tunnels on our way to the temple. And then we came to a fork in the road.
I turned to the queen and asked, “Which way do we go?”
“The tunnels themselves may have changed, but I believe we are still moving in the right direction.”
“I believe it may lie . . . over there,” Ost said. She pointed in the opposite direction of where we thought the town ruins were.
“That’s the opposite direction. Are you sure?”
“Somehow . . . I feel like I can see the way through, very faint, there . . . sorry.”
Do we trust Ost’s intuition, or do we trust in the direction we knew the town to be in?
It was a tough choice, but Ost was actually one of the Spirit Tortoise familiars. She had to be connected to it some way. If so, the
n it made sense to put our faith in her. Besides, she’d proven herself trustworthy by now. If she betrayed us now, I’d personally see to it that her punishment was severe.
“Alright. Let’s follow Ost for now.”
“Very well. Let us go,” Ost said, and we followed her down the path she chose.
It didn’t take very long to realize that I’d made the right decision. Within a couple of minutes, the tunnel turned sharply and we were once again walking in the direction of the ruined city. Had we taken the other tunnel, it probably would have turned sharply too, but that would have dropped us out on the other side of the mountain.
So I was feeling confident about the choice I’d made, but then we came to another intersection . . . and it was filled with skulking familiars.
“Hey!”
“Icicle Frozen!”
Before the monsters could even notice us, Raphtalia was on them with her sword, and the queen cast a spell. Ost used her magic to slow the monster’s movements, and Rishia plunged her sword into a stunned monster.
“Let’s see . . . . where is this tunnel going to take us.”
Ost finished one of the monsters off, and I looked over at her to see a flock of flapping bat-type familiars come rushing around a corner, followed by a group of people.
“Are those adventurers?”
What would adventurers be doing in a place like this? There were three of them.
One of them was a man, and he was a little taller than me. He held a spear in one hand and was wearing heavy armor. All in all, he carried himself gracefully.
The next person was a very white girl with pigtails. She didn’t look childish exactly, but she had a very sharp, alert air about her. She wore light armor, and she didn’t seem very comfortable in it. I got the impression that she hadn’t been doing this for very long. She was shorter than me, but . . . something about her just felt off.
The last person was a woman, and she wore her hair in a short bob. She looked very sophisticated, like she came from a good family or something. She looked like a wizard with a royal bearing. Her hair was . . . red?
