by Aneko Yusagi
Prologue: On the Run
“Jeez! That brain-dead harem sure is persistent!”
I was so annoyed that I was spitting insults involuntarily.
But it was only natural. We’d been accused of abducting and brain washing Melty, and we’d been on the run for a while.
We’d turned onto some overgrown mountain roads in an attempt to lose the soldiers chasing us.
But they were still close behind.
“Dammit! Nothing good has happened since I came to this world!”
My complaint brought everything that happened over the last few months freshly back to my mind
My name is Naofumi Iwatani.
Back in the modern world I’d been, I admit it, an Otaku. I was a 20-year-old university student.
But that was before everything changed. I was killing some time in the local library when I found an old book called The Records of the Four Holy Weapons. I had been flipping through the pages when, all of a sudden, I passed out and woke up in a completely new world.
Not only that, I’d been summoned there as one of the four heroes that the book had been about. I was the Shield Hero—the only hero that couldn’t attack.
In the beginning I was thrilled. The world was like a dream—and I was a hero! I couldn’t wait to get out and start adventuring. But some wicked, cowardly people set a trap for me and framed me for a crime I didn’t commit. My reputation was completely ruined, and I was heavily persecuted. They accused me of rape and sent me out into the world on my own, even though I couldn’t attack, and I didn’t know anyone. I had to find some way to make it on my own.
However, there was a strange phenomenon called “The Waves” that were threatening to destroy the world.
When the wave occurred, I was automatically (forcibly) transported to the scene of destruction. I had to fight monsters to protect a world that had treated me so poorly.
Even worse, the Legendary Shield that was attached to my arm was impossible to remove. It felt like a curse of some kind.
So not only did I have to put my own life on the line to save the people that had hurt me, but I couldn’t even run away if I wanted to.
Because of the shield, I couldn’t use other weapons at all, and even if I punched enemies with my fists, I wasn’t able to deal any substantial damage.
On the other hand, the shield had the ability to absorb defeated enemies and materials, and doing so would unlock new abilities and new shields. The Legendary Shield was capable of transforming into different shields with different attributes.
This new world I found myself in functioned, in many ways, like a video game. There was a type of magic called “status magic,” and it basically let me level up by defeating enemies. When I leveled up, I got stronger.
The abstract concept of levels might not make sense immediately, but basically the harder you worked, the more powerful you got—typically in proportion to the difficulty of the task you completed. I was pretty used to the way that the system worked from reading manga, anime, and games, so I was able to pick it up pretty quickly.
I was at level 39. I’d leveled up that much after all that I’d been through.
“Did we shake them?”
“No, they’re still coming.”
“Damn!”
I was being chased by a person named Motoyasu Kitamura. He was 21-years-old.
Like me, he had also been summoned to this world from another place. He was from a modern version of Japan too, but it was different from my own Japan. He was the Spear Hero.
Among the four of us heroes, he was the best looking. We are both guys, but I can admit that.
But he was a womanizer of sorts. He only thought about girls.
Motoyasu and the other two heroes all seemed to know about this world as they had played games similar to it before. They knew where to go and what to do to level up as fast as possible.
Despite knowing all that stuff, Motoyasu refused to teach me anything, and he played a big part in having me framed.
If he had enough free time to bother me, shouldn’t he be fighting to save the world or something?
There were two other heroes. The Sword Hero was Ren Amaki, and the Bow Hero was Itsuki Kawasumi. Both of them had also been summoned from other modern versions of Japan.
Ren was 16 years old. He had black hair and looked very “cool.” He was the silent swordsman type.
Itsuki was 17, I think. At first he looked kind of quiet and boring, but he seemed to be very good with his hands.
It didn’t look like Ren or Itsuki were chasing me. They must be harboring some suspicions about all that had happened.
“Should I hide us with magic?”
“Sure.”
The girl suggesting the magic was named Raphtalia.
She had the ears and tail of a tanuki because she was a raccoon-type demi-human girl.
She looked to be around 18 years old. Standing a little shorter than I did, she looked healthy, and attractive, and serious. You didn’t have to be friends with her to notice how attractive she was.
Her hair was long and brown, with languid curls and a notable sheen. Her arms and legs were long and slender. She really did look like a model.
After I was summoned to this world and framed and left to my own devices without friends or equipment or money, I met Raphtalia. Actually, I bought her as a slave with the spare money I was able to make on my own.
She was under a slave curse that gave me complete control over her, including whether she lived or died. I could set rules for the curse, and it would cause her pain when she broke them. After I was betrayed and framed, I completely lost the ability to trust people, and that was why I bought a slave, because they had no choice but to do as I said. With the slave curse on her, Raphtalia wouldn’t be able to lie.
I wasn’t able to inflict any damage on enemies, so she held a sword and fought on my behalf.
When I bought her, she was just a young girl—around 10 years old.
But demi-humans grow up differently than normal people. When they are young, their bodies mature with their level.
She leveled up quickly enough, and that’s why she looks older these days.
That maturation process is probably why demi-humans and humans are treated so differently here.
Before the first wave came, Raphtalia and I were able to level up and get good enough equipment to survive the disaster. But later on Motoyasu heard that I was using a slave, and he challenged me to a duel—even though I wasn’t capable of attacking at all.
The king of the country that summoned us, Melromarc, demanded that the duel take place, and he even saw to it that I lost through some cowardly intervention. So Raphtalia was freed from the slave curse, but she decided that she still wanted to stay with me. She’s still here by my side as my slave.
However, she never does anything that would activate the slave curse, and I took off all the curse settings that could have impacted our relationship. So she was really just a slave in name only.
Raphtalia wanted to fight with a hero to save the world… She wanted to fight against the waves.
In the past, before the waves came, Raphtalia lived in a village with her family. She lost everything when the waves came, including both of her parents and the village itself.
That was why she wanted to do something about them.
The heroes were charged with fighting against the waves, and she had lost everything to the waves—our goals were perfectly in line.
Originally I thought of Raphtalia as an easily usable slave, but now she is my dependable partner, my right hand, and I have parental feelings toward her. I really wanted to protect her, and keep he
r out of harm’s way, but Raphtalia was driven to battle, and I couldn’t stop her.
She was at level 40.
“Leave it to me.
“Thanks—sorry.”
“What are you talking about? We’re on the same side here. You don’t have to feel bad.”
“You’re right. It’s just… this guy is so damn persistent!”
“I know.”
There I was again, complaining without thinking.
“What should Mel and I do?” asked Filo.
“Good question. Filo, you stay in human form. If there’s trouble, turn into a Filolial. Melty, you just stay quiet.”
“Okaay!”
“The way you phrase that, it’s like you think I’m making a racket back here!”
“Yeah, yeah… Okay, Melty, you keep watch to the rear.”
The two people yelling at me were both young girls.
The first one was Filo.
She was a 10-year-old girl with little wings, blonde hair, and blue eyes.
She had wild, innocent blue eyes, soft cheeks, and a naïve demeanor.
She wore a one-piece dress with a large ribbon on the chest. It was a simple dress, but it brought out the cuteness factor of her little face and wings.
But she was really the Queen of the Filolials—giant carriage-pulling bird monsters. Something like that anyway.
In her real form she was a giant owl… or penguin… some kind of bird bigger than a person. She could run very fast.
Her feathers were mostly white, with little flecks of pink mixed in.
Personality-wise she was very childish and innocent. She ate like a pig, though, and was downright crazy compared to what her composed appearance would suggest.
She was such a glutton that she’d eat anything. Once she even tried to eat the rotting flesh of a dead dragon.
We met when Raphtalia and I went to have Raphtalia’s slave curse reapplied. The slave-trader had a booth set up at the back of his tent where you could pick a monster egg from a large box of eggs. I picked an egg, and out hatched Filo.
She was born only two months before.
For some reason that I don’t really understand, she gained the ability to transform into a human girl with little wings on her back. Now she spends most of her time in human form when she isn’t pulling the carriage.
More than anything, she loved pulling heavy carriages. She’d always look over at me when she did it, as if she wanted me to give her approval.
But she had recently made a friend and discovered that there are more important things in life than eating, sleeping, and playing.
Still, it was because of Filo that we were able to travel around selling things, and that was how we’d made all our money.
Filo thought of me as her owner, and of Raphtalia as her big sister. Honestly though, I had started to think of Filo as a daughter of sorts.
She was at level 40—the same as Raphtalia.
“Mr. Naofumi. Your hand, please…”
“Sure.”
Raphtalia’s tail fluffed up as she prepared to use a magic spell.
I took her hand and squeezed it.
“Hey! Big Sister and Master are cuddling! I want to cuddle too!”
“We are not CUDDLING! Think about the situation we are in, please.”
“But… But, Sister! You’re keeping Master all to yourself!”
“That’s fine, but if you don’t stay quiet we won’t get away from the bad men. Melty—help keep her quiet.”
“Very well. Filo, you have to calm down for a second.”
“Booo! Big Sister! You know that Master likes me best!”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you don’t hurry up, they’ll catch us!”
That was Melty.
Her real name was Melty Melromarc.
She was the same size and age as Filo, but her hair was a bright blue—very noticeable.
She kept her hair in pigtails. Her face always portrayed a look of heavy purpose. She normally dressed in frilly gothic dresses, but at that moment she was dressed in cheap, tattered, farmer’s clothing.
She was as attractive as Filo or Raphtalia. You could tell that she’d be a real beauty when she grew up. As for her personality, I didn’t really understand her that well. She was picky with her words and ended up sounding sarcastic at times.
A few moments ago I told everyone to be quiet, and she told me to stop freaking out.
When we first met she spoke very politely and considered her language—but the more time we spent together the less patient, and more stern, she became.
That was only natural when you thought about it.
This Melty girl was the younger princess of the country that was currently chasing us. Her life was in danger, and so she didn’t have any other choice but to run away with us. But by sticking with us, she put us in danger too. It’s why we were being chased.
Melromarc did not think well of the Shield Hero. When I started traveling around and helping people, the populace started to question if I was really as bad as they said. Those were doubts the Crown wanted to suppress. To do so, they framed me for yet another crime, and now I was a wanted man.
The story went like this: Melty, the younger princess, also happened to be first in line for the throne. So she was the heiress to the kingdom, and they accused me of kidnapping her.
You might think that we should just turn her over to the authorities, but unfortunately it wasn’t that simple. There was another person in line for the throne after Melty, and there were reasons to think that that person was plotting Melty’s assassination. If we were to just hand the princess over to someone like that, they were sure to have her killed.
So in the end we were forced to cooperate with one another.
If we wanted to prove our innocence, we were going to have to bring Melty to her mother, the Queen of Melromarc. Just to make matters worse, the queen was not currently in Melromarc but was on a diplomatic mission in a foreign country. We weren’t going to just run into her on the street.
Furthermore, Melty and Filo had become best friends.
Melty was borderline obsessed with Filolials, and she and Filo were clearly on the same wavelength. They were fast friends.
Her mother, the queen, had apparently sent Melty back to Melromarc to improve relations between the king (her father) and me.
But lots of things had happened since then, and we weren’t exactly on the best of terms.
I’d been calling her “Princess” for a while, but then she screamed at me and demanded I call her by her name. So now we are on a first-name basis.
Like Filo, Melty seemed to think of Raphtalia as a dependable older-sister type.
She was at level 19. Since she started traveling with us, she’d leveled up once.
“So, Ms. Raphtalia, what spell are you using?”
There she was, being polite to Raphtalia. Why wasn’t she polite with me anymore?
I was mulling that over when Raphtalia finished casting her spell.
“I am the source of all power. Hear my words and heed them. Hide us!”
“All First Hiding!”
A tree appeared, formed from magic, and dropped its leaves over us. We were completely hidden from view.
I ducked down inside the leaves and held my breath.
A moment later Motoyasu and his retinue came running around the corner.
“Where’d he go?”
That was Motoyasu, the Spear Hero.
“Mr. Motoyasu, don’t you think they have moved on?”
Motoyasu had three party members with him. They were all women.
The one that ran over and spoke to him was someone I didn’t know.
“Let’s move on.”
“Sure, but don’t forget that Naofumi has Raphtalia with him. They could be hiding around here somewhere.”
How obnoxiously intuitive, he was right.
Still—if he was going to find us, he’d have to use magic of his own
, or at least a skill from his legendary weapon.
If he did, we might be in a tough spot. But without a defined target he’d never be able to hit us with a spell.
“Huh? Footprints! I found footprints over here!”
Motoyasu shouted for the three women.
The footprints he’d found were not ours, and they led him in the opposite direction of our hiding place.
We’d sent Filo around to make fake tracks leading in the wrong direction. It was a good enough plan, and it looked like Motoyasu was going to fall for it.
“Let’s go after them. Ah… my precious Melty. I can’t believe you’ve been kidnapped and brain washed by the Shield Demon! I swear I will save you!”
The person who just spoke, who called Melty by name and called me a demon, was the very same person that had originally framed me and had me kicked out of the kingdom: Bitch, the princess herself. She went by the “adventuring name” of Myne Sufia, but her real name was Malty S. Melromarc.
She was Melty’s sister.
She was a real monster—a bitch if I’ve ever met one. She loved to watch others suffer while, at the same time, she lived a life of luxury.
I had plenty of good reasons to suspect that she was behind everything that was going on with Melty and us—that she was the one pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Because of her wretched behavior and personality, her parents had decided to make Melty the heiress to the throne, despite the fact that Bitch was older.
Actually, the last time we fought she basically made her intentions as clear as could be when she started hurling attacks directly at Melty.
I hated her, and I’d taken to calling her “Bitch.”
Someday I’d make sure that she got what was coming to her.
“We should get going, Mr. Motoyasu. I want to catch them as soon as possible.”
Bitch sent Motoyasu off first, and after he’d gone she started snooping around the area.
“Why do we have to go through all this trouble? We could just burn the whole area.”
She said, slipping a bottle from her pocket. She uncorked the bottle and proceeded to sprinkle the contents around.
I had a really bad feeling about that bottle.
If I jumped out of our hiding place to stop her, then Motoyasu would catch us for sure—so I had no choice but to sit and watch.
