The Rising of the Shield Hero Vol 09

by Aneko Yusagi

  That was Kizuna’s favorite attack. It didn’t work against human opponents, but it was devastating for a monster. She sent the attack flying at the sword.

  It was a powerful attack, but it wasn’t enough to destroy the sword, which was tougher than I had thought. Yomogi herself was unharmed, but the vines wrapped around her arm had been destroyed by Kizuna’s attack. She quickly dropped the sword.

  “Yes! Good one!” I shouted, grabbing the sword where it lay.

  It must have decided that I was its new target, because it shot more of its vine-like appendages at me.

  Heh . . . I wasn’t dumb enough to fall for that. I wasn’t like Yomogi. I wouldn’t let myself be taken over by some kind of monster sword!

  “Aaarrrggh!” I drew back and threw the sword with all my might. I sent it right out through the hole in the wall.

  “I’ll follow up!” Glass shouted, sending another of her Circle Dance Attack Formation: Flower Wind attacks hurdling after the sword.

  Her attack hit the sword while it was still in the air, and it went careening off into the sky.

  That was a good hit. Did her attack have a homing ability?

  Finally, the sword exploded in the air.

  “I’m glad we got rid of it. It would have been bad if that thing had exploded in here.”

  “I cannot believe that Kyo’s masterful invention would malfunction like this . . .” Yomogi muttered holding her wounded arm and wincing in pain.

  “Well you don’t have a weapon anymore, so what are you thinking of doing now? It looks like that thing managed to sap a lot of your strength before we got rid of it.”

  Did she think we were just going to let her run away?

  “Before you think of running, I should let you know that we have the Hunting Hero with us, who is better at hunting than anyone. If you want to run, then go ahead. It will be hunting time.”

  “You make me sound so evil when you put it that way,” Kizuna said.

  “Don’t worry about it, Kizuna. He just enjoys threatening people,” Glass said.

  I could go without her commentary, but she wasn’t exactly wrong either.

  “Ahh . . . well, let’s leave that up to Mr. Naofumi, shall we?”

  “Rafu.”

  “That was some explosion. Oh look! The light is coming back to Master.

  The light from the explosions fell like snow, slowly falling back toward me. What did it mean?

  “So what’s next?”

  We had better start by punishing this crazy person who came to kill us in the middle of the night. We could tie her up and torture her for information. She looked like she would just tell us the truth regardless though.

  “Ugh . . . Kill me!” Yomogi shouted, raising her hands in the air.

  “Fine, we’ll let that greasy old man take care of you. Raphtalia, wasn’t there a monster that looked like a pig demi-human around here? I think his name was Oak?”

  “I’ll survive whatever torture you can think of!” she barked.

  “Heh. Don’t go thinking that you’ll come out of this in one piece.”

  “How do you ever think of these things?”

  “Naofumi, you get all this from your otaku days, don’t you? Particularly from the ‘adult’ stuff,” Kizuna gave me the side eye. But, wasn’t that obvious?

  Besides, it actually sounded like something Eclair would have said, like something she’d say to a prisoner.

  “Anyway, your name is Yomogi, right? Well Yomogi, we’re going to tie you up now.”

  And so we succeeded in capturing Kyo’s midnight assassin alive.

  Chapter Five: Together, With Conditions

  “Let’s head to the castle for now.”

  “Let’s lock her up, so we have guards watching her.”

  I had a feeling her stats were high enough to break out of a jail cell if she wasn’t watched. In the last world, they would reset your level when you were thrown in jail. From what I could tell, that wasn’t the case in this world.

  “We can torture her for information after we get to the castle.”

  “You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you? But I guess you’re right.”

  “Well, we have a war to win here, don’t we? This girl came after us wielding an invention created by the very enemy we are trying to defeat. This is our best chance to find out what we are up against, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll bite my own tongue off before I say anything to you!” Yomogi shouted, and tried to bite through her tongue.

  “Zweite Heal.” I immediately touched her face and healed her.

  “You’d prevent me from hurting myself? You bastard!”

  “Can we gag her for now?”

  “But I—maghfm!” I stuffed a ball of cloth into her mouth to keep her from trying to bite her tongue again. Then I realized it had been a dirty dust cloth. The torture was starting early. Oh well.

  Yomogi squirmed uncomfortably.

  “Good thing we have healing spells,” Kizuna said. She hadn’t noticed that I used a dirty cloth. Raphtalia and Glass noticed though, and they both were just about to mention it . . .

  “Alright.”

  Just then reinforcements from the castle arrived.

  “Ms. Kizuna! Ms. Glass! The hero from another world! Master L’Arc has sent us to request your assistance!”

  “What happened?”

  “Advance enemy troops are attacking the castle and they are surprisingly strong. L’Arc is unable to hold them off on his own!”

  They must have been assassins Kyo sent. He was coming after all of us. He planned all these attacks out in advance. He must have been serious about trying to kill us. I looked over at Yomogi—she looked shocked. Ha!

  She came charging after us like a wild boar—hadn’t she known that Kyo had other plans in the works? Kyo had been right to keep it from her. She seemed like the sort of person to run her mouth. He was like a yakuza boss, probably treating his assassins as disposable.

  “We better hurry!”

  “Yeah . . . But something about this bothers me . . .”

  Glass nodded along with me, “I know what you mean. We had best proceed with caution. Something tells me that Kyo has other plans we don’t know about.”

  Kyo was smart. He would have thought long and hard about a plan to kill us. Think! What sort of attack would he expect to be effective against us?

  If I were Kyo I’d try to use the technology available to me in the country that I had taken control over. This is the same man that invented things that took control of the Spirit Tortoise. His ambition was a forced to be reckoned with—no doubt his actual plans would outstrip whatever I came up with. I was just guessing, but I thought he’d try to do something to disrupt us, to keep us distracted and confused.

  If there was one thing I’d learned since coming to this world, it was that the people here were always coming up with inventions to overcome their limitations.

  “We’re going to the castle no matter what, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we’d normally use Portal Shield, or Kizuna’s return transcript skill, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  I tried to use Portal Shield to teleport to the castle, only to find that something was interfering with it. The skill failed.

  “Something is messing with my Portal Shield skill. Better assume that Kyo has a deeper plan than it seems.”

  “How are we going to get there in time !? We need to hurry!” Kizuna said, flustered.

  Glass tried to calm her down, “Relax. How can we be sure that this isn’t part of his plan?”

  “We can’t. But we can’t dillydally either!”

  “Kizuna, Glass. Calm down and think. All the countries that Kyo has allied with had vassal weapons, didn’t they?”

  Raphtalia had taken the katana vassal weapon from the country that owned it, which had robbed that country of its power. But, the country with the mirror vassal weapon had fallen under Kyo’s control. Was he after the technology in
those countries? If so . . .

  “What if they are after the dragon hourglasses?”

  “Huh?”

  “Kizuna, I know you remember what we saw. That guy that was after Raphtalia—hadn’t he invented some way to replicate the dragon hourglass’s teleport ability? What if they are using that to attack us?”

  I don’t know how it worked, but they had found some way to replicate the Return Dragon Vein teleport ability. They might have been using it to attack the castle.

  The hourglasses were placed in important spots in the national capitals. If they could use this new technology to send as many soldiers as they wanted straight into the heart of a city, then the possibility for destruction was immense. They wouldn’t have to defend themselves on the journey here, so they could dedicate all of their resources to the attack itself.

  Granted, I didn’t know much about how wars worked when the soldiers had levels and status magic. But if they could teleport as many soldiers as they wanted past our defenses, then they’d eventually overpower us, no matter how high-leveled we were—the battle might already be over for all I knew.

  This was all hypothetical at this point, but I couldn’t deny the possibility that Kyo already had access to the technology that would make it all possible.

  “Kizuna, what do you need to use Return Dragon Vein?”

  “You need to have visited and registered the hourglass you want to warp to, and you need to be at an hourglass to use it.”

  “To replicate it you’d need special materials, and you’d need a certain amount of power to make it work.”

  “We thought of that. The security has been strengthened on that account.”

  Of course, Glass had thought of that. She wasn’t stupid.

  The hourglasses in other countries were all closed to the public. Guards would only allow holy heroes or vassal weapon holders to approach.

  “If they’ve broken through the defenses and managed to register the hourglass, we’re in serious trouble . . . it might have already happened!”

  “Jewel people have set up a special system to prevent any non-specified persons from teleporting in using the dragon hourglass.”

  So that’s how they prevented us from using Return Transcript.

  “Whatever the case, I’m guessing the attack on the castle is a diversion. Their real goal must be the hourglass. If L’Arc is busy fighting them off at the castle, the hourglass might not be watched as closely as it should be.”

  “Let’s use Return Transcript to warp to the hourglass and check it out,” Kizuna suggested.

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “What about her?”

  I looked over at Yomogi, who was sitting quietly with an overjoyed look on her face.

  “Are you coming with us? If you get lucky, you might even find a chance to escape!”

  She didn’t enjoy being toyed with. She leaned forward and struggled against her ropes.

  “We don’t want her biting through her tongue before we can get information out of her.”

  “True. But, in order to include her in the teleport, I have to invite her into our party. What a pain. Why don’t we just leave her with the soldiers here?”

  “I guess so.”

  But, I sent her a party invitation anyway, just for the heck of it.

  Huh? She accepted?

  Well, I certainly wasn’t going to bring her with us, so I immediately kicked her out of the party. Then she whined through her gag and started kicking and squirming.

  “What’s going on over there?”

  “Nothing? I sent her an invite and she accepted, so I went ahead and kicked her out of the party.”

  “If you want to keep her around, we could just bring her with us.”

  “Are you serious? She just tried to kill us. You saw that right? Why would we bring her with us?”

  “I know that, but . . .”

  “Mugh! Mugguh!”

  “I wonder what she’s trying to say. What should we do?”

  I guess it was worth hearing her out. She couldn’t speak through that dirty old rag.

  If she tried to bite through her tongue, or to cast a spell, I could always just jam it back in.

  I pulled out the rag, and immediately, she stuck her tongue out at me and glared with spite.

  “What? If you’ve got something to say then you better spit it out now.”

  “What’s going on ?! ”

  “Who knows? It sure sounds like you’re not the only assassin that Kyo sent out tonight.”

  “That can’t be! I was the only one involved with this!”

  “I guess he doesn’t trust you to get the job done. Either that, or he used you as a distraction.”

  That sword she’d had would have exploded and taken her out with it. That might have been his plan from the beginning.

  “Let me find out what’s going on!”

  “Ha! Do you understand the situation you’re in?”

  She tried to kill us in the middle of the night, and now she thought I’d just take her with us so she could satisfy her curiosity?

  And yet, she seemed to say everything on her mind, which was a sort of honesty. She was serious too.

  “Kyo wouldn’t do that! I know he sometimes has contradictory ideas, but he saves a lot of people! He’s a good person!”

  “We must not be talking about the same guy.”

  She really glorified Kyo in her head—kind of like what Raphtalia did when she thought about me. I wanted to be the sort of parent that she thought I was.

  But Kyo wasn’t like that. I remembered how angry he got when Rishia lectured him. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t the sort of person that Yomogi seemed to think he was.

  “What should we do, Mr. Naofumi?”

  “Hm . . .”

  “If she’ll listen to us, then we might be able to give her a little freedom, no?”

  “I guess. And if she tries anything, we’ll just kill her.”

  “Ahh . . . Even though I lost the battle, I cannot believe I must suffer through this. I suppose I will have to endure this punishment.”

  Seriously, who did this girl think she was?

  We didn’t have to do anything at all for her. Didn’t she understand that?

  “She thinks that we’re wrong about Kyo, and that he’ll come rescue her before she’s executed.”

  “You can read my mind ?! I didn’t realize you had such powers!”

  My god she was simple. Even if I had that ability, I wouldn’t have use it to read hers.

  “Then let’s make a deal. We’ll take you with us, so you can find out what’s going on. Then when you find out that things aren’t as you wished, you tell us what you know. Deal?”

  “Very well. I am a warrior, and I keep my promises.”

  She certainly was forthcoming. She didn’t understand the predicament she was in at all, but she couldn’t resist making promises and swearing to keep them.

  “Kizuna, Glass, if she tries anything, don’t hesitate to kill her. I’m not feeling merciful.”

  “I know.”

  “Your name’s Yomogi, right? When you discover the truth, don’t you dare try to escape from it. And don’t think that you’ll get away. If you do, we’ll torture you for information.”

  “I wouldn’t!”

  She probably wouldn’t. She was obsessed with honor—she lived in a fairytale.

  If she decided to turn on us it could be trouble. If only I could have used the slave sealing magic from the last world!

  “Mr. Naofumi! Please don’t look at Rishia that way,” Raphtalia scolded me.

  How couldn’t I? She was the only one I could still use the slave spell on.

  “I bet you were thinking what a help the slave spell would be in this situation.”

  She read me like a book. But it really would have been helpful.

  “Oh yeah, you said something about that before. So . . .” Kizuna said, running to grab a ofuda from the partially destroyed storeroom, “You can use this cont
rol ofuda. I never thought I’d use it, but here we are.”

  “Kizuna, would you really . . . ? ”

  “Don’t we need it to ensure that Yomogi keeps her end of the bargain?”

  Yomogi looked at the ofuda in Kizuna’s hand and nodded.

  “I understand. If that will help you to trust our agreement, I will submit to it.”

  Huh? That was convenient.

  It must have been like the ofuda that had been stuck on Filo back where we found her.

  “What is that thing?”

  “It’s an ofuda that uses magic to control people. They have a bad reputation. You’ve probably seen them before in . . . Chinese zombie movies?”

  Ah . . . those zombies with the ofuda hanging down off of their face or hat. Right.

  “The ofuda lends you control over their subconscious. If you’re good, you can even make it so that they can only move when commanded to.”

  “Sounds pretty dangerous. What if someone used them to take control of us?”

  “It’s possible to resist the ofuda’s power, and luckily, they don’t work on holy heroes or holders of the vassal weapons. But, they can be very dangerous in the hands of a powerful user though.”

  These ofuda things might be better than the slave spell I was used to.

  “What happens when someone tries to resist it?”

  “They have to use all their energy to try and get it off. And while they are occupied, you have a chance to kill them.”

  Heh . . . that sounded like the perfect system.

  So Yomogi would be under my control, just like a slave, but she could remove the ofuda if she really tried. But it would take time to do so, and I could always finish her off while she struggled with it.

  “Let’s set it up so that she can’t get more than a certain distance away from us,” Kizuna said, slapping the ofuda onto Yomogi’s forehead.

  I could see that a great deal of magical power was contained in it. It snapped and crackled with electricity, and slowly peeled off of her forehead. Then a magical pattern flickered and glowed on the ground around Yomogi’s feet.

  Glass and Kizuna were chanting an incantation, and the mandala-like pattern on the ground appeared to react to it. Finally, Kizuna wrote some characters on the ofuda with blood. Yomogi squirmed with discomfort.