Behind you!" she shouted, as if I didn't know. I was the one with the (Sense) skill after all. Still, the fact that she screamed it said they were probably about to attack, and so I swirled around on my feet, thankfully not face planting on the stone floor this time, or worse falling into the sewer water, as I held up my left arm, braced with my right, and willed my weapon to fire.
"Die! Die! DIE!" I commanded, and three bolts of…light? Energy? Probably just safe to call it magic. Regardless, my wrist mounted crossbow fired them, and they were well aimed…this time. Seriously, no aim assist at all on this thing. They didn't curve or anything. Luckily, the bolts were friend-or-foe compliant, so, according to Lucia, those few times I'd hit her with them were annoying, like being pinched, rather than deadly.
To my targets, however, the bolts flew, and all three of the little rat bastards found themselves torn clean in two in the air, their bodies flashing brightly as the energy of my weapon attack clashed briefly with the energy of the Wave that was probably the reason they had glowing red demon eyes and claws that shone in the magelight that Lucia had made for us to see by, allowing me to stare them down as they finally perished.
I spun back around to find her using wind spells to push a few more against a wall, and six shots were needed to end those…there were only four, but I missed two of them. Still, they were dead, and I was breathing heavily, my brow dripping with sweat as I leaned against a wall, trying my best to ignore the slimy feeling on my back as I did so, and wondering what kind of cleaning spells Lucia knew.
"How man*gasp*y does th*gasp* that make?" she asked, and I looked to her, concerned. She was using a lot of her MP, and was already down to less than half her maximum according to my Status Screen on her. For all that, she'd actually managed to go up in level twice while doing this, from twelve to fourteen, and I myself was now level six, so it was a good spend of resources for the gains.
However, I wanted to answer her question, and soon went to another page of my status to find my inventory now contained a grand total of…three-hundred-eighty-six rat tails. Not bad for about three hours of work. Better, I had several dozen other small rewards, including 'beast pelts', 'beast claws', and most important of all 'small Wave Gems', according to Lucia the condensed energy of the Waves that allowed the Rats to be so powerful and smart.
Well, they were powerful and smart, compared to normal rats. It didn't take much effort to kill those sorts of things, not in a military sense, and thanks to one of my skills, we were able to find them with no sweat. (Sense) was an awesome skill. To be fair, observe, identify or inspect skills tended to be OP if you used them right, and at the moment, they had made us some bank.
"Almost four-hundred so far. How many more do you have in you, do you think?" I inquired, as we slowly began to look around the tunnel.
"If you had asked me that this morning, my Lo…Bard, I would have said a dozen at most. Hunting these vermin with you has proven most invigorating," she said, actually smiling through her soot covered face, a gift from my first bright idea when we found a rats nest in a pipe, and had her fling a fireball down it. Turned out sewer gas was flammable. Luckily it hadn't taken anything other than a few HP off us, instead of catching the whole sewer alight.
"Heh, stick with me, and we'll hunt all kinds of vermin down. Maybe even upgrade to pest at some point," I told her, and she smiled, genuinely smiled. Apparently I actually had some charisma points in this world. Of course, I knew she wanted me for my Bow more than anything, and standing up, I plucked the string on it, sending a pulse of magic into the sewer to hunt for more targets.
Luckily, there weren't that many more. The nests were easily dealt with by a few bolts from my crossbow, and her wind magic, as I'd nixed the idea of flinging a lightning bolt around for the same reason as a fireball, and earth magic might collapse the tunnels, was able to clear and even kill a few of the bastards for us. Better, my (Auto-Loot) skill applied to the whole party, instantly doing the work of taking the usable stuff from their bodies.
I had asked if we should deal with them beyond that, but she showed me that, since they were 'Wave' infected lesser creatures, removing the gems from their bodies caused them to 'decay' turning into ash. Apparently the Waves were not so kind to living things, turning them into little more than monster fodder that had to be exterminated by the peoples of the world, lest they harm the innocent.
Mind, she noted the greater creatures, basically anything above a pig, would not be so kind. Their bodies could persist like normal, but were filled with various toxins and poisons that required the church to deal with, though Heroes could apparently purify them in the same way. I was actually curious to try that out, as purifying something sounded like it would at least look really cool.
Regardless, we kept going. Four-Hundred was soon breached, and I got another level. Sadly, my meters did NOT refill from this, so I was starting to run low on stamina. It regenerated the slowest of my resources, and everything seemed to have a small cost. By the time we were at five-hundred dead rodents, I was ready to call it a day, directing Lucia and I towards the nearest exit.
It was on our way that we heard it. The sound of a Boss…I mean, I didn't know it WAS a Boss, but the roar, the way it shook the ground from the sheer volume of it. Yeah, it was gonna be a Boss of some kind, and I quickly motioned for Lucia to toss a glowing ball of light down the tunnel, where I thought it had come from, while using (Sense) again…and then trying to make a saving throw against peeing my pants.
What I sensed, and what her magelight globe lit up was a terrible looking monster. I remember an old horror game with some mitochondrial creatures being mutated from the animals and people in New York City. This thing looked like a giant version of one of the rat enemies in that, a face split in half, exposing the brain a little, while the tail was split into three wicked sharp looking stingers at the end.
"A Nest Mother!" Lucia shouted, pointing towards it. The hide was thick, obviously, but I still fired about half a dozen bolts into it as it came towards us, doing next to nothing to its body, as the bolts drove in, and then vanished. That did at least make it mad, however, as we started to run as it reared back its head and then breathed out, a plume of thick, smoke-like fog spilling from its jaws. I was well versed enough to know not to breathe that in, and as I saw a corner, I grabbed Lucia's arm and yanked us around it, the stream, luckily, billowing out much slower as we kept moving away from it into the side tunnel.
"Info on this thing?" I asked as we turned another corner, not even having to look back to know the thing was scrambling after us.
"Nest Mothers! They're like the Queen of Rats! I've never even heard of one in a city this size, they usually make their homes in deep woods. This one must have found its way here during the chaos of the First Wave. It would explain all the Wave infected rats," she said as I turned around briefly and fired a few more bolts into the thing. They did piddling damage, but they slowed it a bit as we turned yet another corner.
"Weaknesses?" I asked, and she looked at me with those green eyes, but seemed unable to say anything. That said it all. These things were just HP bags. You did enough damage to take it down, and it died. Nothing complicated, but nothing we could take advantage of either. That left us in a pretty bad spot. Hopefully someone above had heard this thing's roar, and was already sallying some adventurers to come to our aid.
We wouldn't last that long, however. My Stamina was almost drained, and while she didn't have that stat, I could see she'd put most of her MP into our hunting earlier. She had maybe a magelight or two left. Nothing that would directly help in this case…not without some support, and I actually smiled as I started to form an idea in my head, looking back to find the rat was still around the corner from us.
I quickly surfed into my menu, looking around. I had more skill points to spend on some unlocks, though nothing for the transformation ability tree, this would still get me something useful, and within a second, my Bow began to glow, as we dove around another corner, making the complete circle of this part of the sewers, luckily, the fog dissipated quickly, allowing us to freely move forward, at least until I put my arm on her shoulder and stopped her, spinning us both around.
"What are you?" she asked, but before she could say anything more, I used my new skill (MP Transfer). My Weapon shined brightly in the darkness over the sewers, tendrils of it moving from my arm and into her body, causing my own blue gauge to go down to nothing, but filling hers back up…like a tenth of the way, but it would be enough, as I pointed forward.
"Cast when I say so!" I shouted, leaving her no room to argue, and like a trained adventurer, she steeled herself. I did too, truth to tell, as this might not work, but, hey, better to die than be killed, right? And who knew what would happen to me if I died in a fantasy world.
The next instant the Nest Mother came barreling around the corner, actually thudding into the wall outside the passage, and causing the whole sewer system to shake around us, bits of dust and debris creating a small cloud between us and it. Then it reared back its head, rather than charging us, just like I'd hoped it would, and I held myself against Lucia's back, bracing her body.
"Lightning bolt!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, and she wove her staff before her, lights running up and down the wooden thing for a moment, before she pointed the end of it forward, and a bolt of electricity leapt from that into the air.
Luckily, the dust in the air worked to keep the sewer gas from igniting, a welcome bonus honestly, as I'd expected us to be burned, but the bolt, as I'd hoped, instantly set the fumes of the Nest Mother's gas attack ablaze, transforming the green-black cloud into an orange and black bit of hellfire, even as it began to race towards us, the light of it nearly blinding, and the hair on my skin tingling from the heat.
"Wind spell, as strong as you can!" I commanded the moment the lightning bolt was done, and she quickly shifted onto her heels, as she spoke a single word, and a huge blast of wind erupted forth, coming from her whole body, not just her staff. The kickback from it was even stronger than I'd expected, as we were both sliding along the slick stone sewer floor for three meters or more.
It had the desired effect, however, as the wind slammed into the fiery inferno, and kept it from rolling over us, instead forcing it to move backwards, right into the face of the Nest Mother, which let out a truly unholy shriek for several seconds that overpowered even the crackle and spitting of the fire, before finally the flames were in her lungs, and it became a terrible wheezing noise that slowly wound down like a balloon running out of air.
Then it was over, when the flames had consumed everything about the monster before us, leaving nothing by the horrid odor of burned hair and meat. Its skin had melted off of most of its flesh, and the head was eyeless now. The place where I'd noticed the slightly exposed brain was now empty, and I could only guess that it had been burned to ash too. The thing was very, very dead.
Exhausted, mentally and physically, we were left standing there, both panting hard, sweating, for a long, long moment, before finally we collapsed onto the floor. She was looking around, shocked, and then turned to me with a smile, and I started laughing, rather relieved at not being dead, and noticing I had some 'pop up' messages I dismissed for the moment as I wasn't exactly feeling up to parsing them at the moment.
We both got up after a few minutes, just as several people in armor came charging in, guards not adventurers, and they looked at the still smoldering corpse behind us. Lucia confirmed what had happened as one of the guards helped her keep on her feet, and we literally limped from the sewers, and back into the light of the sun. The bright, stinging sun as it turned out we'd only been down there for about three hours, and it was only just passing into the afternoon.
Still, we rode that high of being kick butt adventurers all through the town, as the sound had indeed translated up into the city itself, giving us a nice little parade of people, including some surprising Demi-Humans in the mix. Not many, but hey, some were better than none, and at least said the racism wasn't complete and total, so maybe I wouldn't have to deal with that during my time here. Then when got back to the Adventurers' building(Which I learned was called their Hall)
"Just what in the Abyss did you get up to?!" screamed the woman at the counter as we came in, and every eye turned to us, the entire line of waiting adventurers with it, making me really wish I had an invisibility power at the moment…that was a Spear exclusive in Dimensional Sign, but maybe it might not be here. Regardless, the woman literally leapt over the desk, revealing she herself was a Demi-Human, possessing a panther tail.
"Um, Ray, we fought a," began Lucia, but before she could finish, the woman, Ray, was standing right in front of us, and making wild gestures with her hands.
"I KNOW what you fought, Lucia. You know how I know?" she asked, and then pointed towards a corner of the Hall, where my tray had been left…the tray that was overflowing with rat tails, five-hundred-twenty-two of them to be precise, along with dozens of other things, and most noticeably, the heart of something who's heart was larger than my fist, which meant it was likely the Nest Mother's.
"I see. So the (Loot Cache) skill worked," I said, and walked over to the tray, ignoring the look Ray gave me as I began to shuffle through the contents. My status window immediately popped up at this point to tell me all the wonderful things I could unlock with these things, by adding their mass to my shield. Most specifically, the pelts could get me something called the (Beast Bane Bow), which promised increased effectiveness against such things.
"It worked alright, it worked to make this place stink like the sewers…wait, why don't you two?" she asked, and I realized she was right. Despite spending the last few hours in one, we had apparently had most of the smell literally burned off us by that last attack. That was…useful, though it did make me wonder why my clothes hadn't been burned in some way, and even seemed to be clean now.
"We had an...explosive end to our fight with the Nest Mother, and I think that helped with the smell," I told her, finding a rat claw that looked particularly shiny in the loot pile, my Bow could use that to do some (Claw Bite) skill unlock, which sounded useful.
"Wait…you really found a Nest Mother down there?" she asked, and I nodded.
"We did. We were slaughtering its children, and it popped up to try and kill us, but the Hero of the Bow was able to kill it!" said Lucia, smiling as she walked over to me, and I shook my head at that.
"No, I helped, to be fair, but that was all you, Lucia. Her spells won the day here, and I think, if there's a reward, she deserves it for killing the thing," I told her, and Lucia seemed about to object, but before she could, Ray interrupted.
"A Nest Mother. A level thirty-five MINIMUM creature, and you killed it? Like, it's not gonna pop back up with one eye missing and a hate on for everyone in the city?" she asked, sounding like a situation that had happened before, but I shook my head.
"Unless they can survive having their skulls emptied of eyes and brains, and apparently I have its heart crystal thing here too, so I'd wager it's not getting up again any time soon," I said, hefting the gem up from the pile, much to the shock of everyone there, as the thing had apparently been missed in the sheer volume of other loot.
That got the whole Hall abuzz as everyone began to question us. Asking things about where we'd seen it, and how it felt to kill something that was apparently typically the sort a whole army of adventurers would be assigned to. That was a nice ego boost, but I admitted that Lucia killed it, again, and more importantly we were only able to take it down by luck more than anything else.
Still, when things died down, I asked about payment, and Ray had us come to the back of the Hall, where she had to open up a real safe, not like the cash sack thing up front. Here, she kept…well a freakton of money. Like, it was a glittering horde, with coins, gems, and even some weapons in it, all built into a space that looked like it shouldn't have held even half that much stuff.
"Expansion Spell. It can't be applied to something that moves, like a bag or the like, but something that's just going to sit there you can do it to," she explained when I questioned it, and then pulled some things out from the space. Namely a not at all small bag of coins, and a much smaller, but far heavier looking bit of metal.
"Now then, if I'd known you were going to kill so many of the stupid things, and stink up my Hall all day," she began, and I winced. I really hadn't thought about that when I'd done this, I'd just thought it would be convenient to have my bounty items appear at the Hall.
"I'd have asked the castle to lower the bounty to half. This is gonna really crimp our relationship, even if you did kill a Nest Mother," she began, as she stacked ten coins together, and then quickly began to do the same, using the first stack to measure them out fast, rather than counting them. It was an interesting system, honestly, and made me wonder how the coins were made so evenly…but I figured it was probably magic in some way.
"More importantly, I would have asked for some gold coins to pay you with. As it is, I'm breaking the petty cash paying out just the rat tails, which does bring us up to a problem," she said, as she finished, and I did a quick count…by which I mean as she slide them towards me my status screen helpfully counted them, providing the number of five-hundred-twenty-two silver sliding into my hands, and then into a bag that I slipped onto the belt at my waist.
"See, the bounty for a Nest Mother is twenty gold. Normally. But today, I don't HAVE twenty gold. Not even half that. As such, I'm gonna have to offer you some…different compensation," as she spoke, she laid three items on the table. The first was a very wicked looking dagger, like a serrated edge, with a bend in it so it looked like a lightning bolt. Better, she tapped it, and it actually crackled with electricity. Awesome.
The second was gemstone, one my status screen said was a decently sized emerald, worth about twenty-two gold. Better, it helpfully provided me with a breakdown of what it could do for me, either being put to use in the construction of mid to high tier accessory of some kind if I could find the proper artisan, or even used directly on my Bow to upgrade it with a new form or ten, all of which would be stronger than the base I had.
The third was a rod, like the one Lucia herself wielded, but of about two ranks in quality higher. It would improve her spells by a factor of almost two, AND it would decrease her MP usage, allowing her to cast more. It was a good piece of gear, all things considered, worth almost twice what Ray had said the bounty was at thirty-four gold, though my skill advised that haggling might change that.
"I can't exactly offer you all three of these, it wouldn't be right, even if he's to be the one who saves us all, I have to make sure I keep the Hall in good order. So, which one of these will you take in lieu of coins?" she asked, and I turned to Lucia, who looked like she was almost salivating at the rod, which made the choice a non-issue. No debate, no hesitation, I pulled the rod across the table, and held it out to her.
"But…I can't, you need the gem, or maybe the dagger yourself, you can," she began, but I just smiled at her, as I rather forcefully held out the thing to her again, almost shoving it into her hands.
"Miss Lucia, it has been an honor to be at your side today, and I would be remiss not to see the slayer of that creature rewarded properly. Please accept this, with my thanks for all your efforts," I told her, and saw Ray roll her eyes, either at Lucia's humility or my speech, but regardless, Lucia soon snatched the new rod out of my hands, and then hugged it, along with her own weapon to her chest like they were babes in her arms.
"Good, now we have one more piece of business then, and I can get the two of you out of my hair," said Ray, as she soon pulled out a sheet of paper from seemingly nowhere, and slapped it down on the desk between us. On it was…me. Like, from my angle my (Translation) skill was providing all the data, and it had my stuff, height, weight, even had my blood type somehow…probably magic.
"What's your adventuring name?" she asked, picking up a quill, licking the tip of it, tapping the bit of metal she'd brought out before, causing it to ring and the tip of the quill to shine slightly, before then placing it on the parchment, where it floated above. I looked at it for a moment, then back to her.
"Do I need one?" I asked, confused.
"Every adventurer needs a second name. It lets us…mingle better with the normal people, and pushes us away from our early lives, before we were touched by the Hourglass," she explained, and I nodded, seeing the purpose. People who became adventurers in this world using such things wanted to be 'reborn' in a way, so they picked new names, which likely meant Lucia and Ray were not either of these women's real names.
That did leave me thinking for a moment that, just as a gag, it might be fun to give my real one for this, just to screw with the world and see what happened, but glancing down at my wrist, I had another idea, and smiled as I leaned forward.
"How's about Corvo? Corvo Attano," I said, and she shrugged, obviously not too concerned about the name itself, just wanting to make sure I had one, as the quill wrote something in their language my translation function said was the name I'd picked. Strangely, I now had the urge to go find a skull mask and a queen to serve, but for now, Lucia and I rose from our seats, and exited the Adventurer Hall, to make our way back to the castle.
Wait, no shit?! You fought a boss?" asked Spe-Motoyasu, as he slammed the cup of…I assumed alcohol of some kind. It fizzed anyway, though to his credit, the guy was able to hold it. That was his third mug, and they weren't small, and he was only slightly red in the face. Ren meanwhile was sipping tea and trying to look all broody, despite sitting with the two of us in the middle of a busy tavern.
Naofumi was…nowhere to be seen. He'd apparently gotten tired of the other two thanks to some bad blood between them. Apparently, after I'd decided to go have a starting adventure, the other party members had been allowed to pick who they went to. Not a bad idea, honestly, they were living people, but given we were the leaders I honestly feel it would have been best for us to pick.
Most especially because of what had happened. Naofumi had ended up with no one, while Ren and Motoyasu got the rest of the eleven members distributed between them, favoring Ren more than even Motoyasu. That was…a dick move honestly. Luckily, one of Motoyasu's ladies(The fact that he called them that made me want to kick him in the dick), had volunteered to go with him.
More, they'd gotten silver, I would too apparently when I went back to the castle tomorrow, as Lucia and I had been turned away at the gates due to the whole Nest Mother thing. They were protecting the King and the nobles inside until the corpse had been dealt with completely. Burning it HAD reduced the amount of toxins in the body, but it did need some purification to get rid of it completely.
So we were stuck out here for the evening in an inn that had come with some good reviews from our party members…and had a bar downstairs which helped. Seemed decent enough to me, and Lucia, exhausted, had already retired to a room, along with a few of the others. Naofumi meanwhile was staying across the way at a slightly more upscale sort of place with his lone party member, a woman named Myne.
That was possible for him because the King was a generous sort of guy, and had given him some extra funds, to the tune of two-hundred silver for a total of eight-hundred, though he'd have to make do with five-hundred silver a month after that just like us. That sounded...really high, honestly, but then, we were this world's only hope of fighting the Waves, and unlike a lot of rulers, this King seemed to get that.
My own funds would be a bit less, I'd learned due to the expense of the jerkin and other clothing I was wearing. It had cost, no joke, around three-hundred silver, but was one of the finest the kingdom made. That was good, but it meant I only had three-hundred more waiting for me tomorrow to begin my adventure with. That said, it still put me on the same level as Naofumi with what I'd made for rat killing.
"It wasn't really a fight. My partner and I ran away from it after pissing it off by killing its children, and then she blew its brains out with a lightning spell. About all I did was give her some MP to help," I explained, and he scoffed, chugging the rest of his drink down, while I looked to Ren who was nursing a…I had no idea. I was having that 'coffee' stuff from the keep, luckily it wasn't super expensive or rare, but he was having something else. Ren was the legal drinking age in Japan…I think. Hadn't asked him about that.
"So, you've already shot up in the levels. Our balloon popping today saw us not go up by a single one," he said, reminding me of where they'd been while I'd been crawling around in the sewer. Apparently there was this field outside of town that had some monsters called 'balloons' of all things, that came in a variety of colors. The ones they'd seen being the weakest variants, orange.
They died in a few blows from any adventurer with a halfway decent strength stat, but the things bites could take off limbs, according to the party, and so they made good fodder for starting quests. Each one had been worth one point of EXP though, and there'd been only a few dozen in the whole area, and they tended to scatter when the guys got close, meaning they'd each gotten barely two dozen kills despite the ease of their prey.
Meanwhile, the rats had been worth three to eight a piece depending on factors that apparently had to do with Wave contamination. That was, in fact, what the EXP was doing. We gained it for killing the things because our Weapons 'converted' the energy from them into power for us. The same happened to adventurers, thanks to the Dragon Hourglasses, but us partying with them boosted their gain rate by at least a factor of two.
Oh, and the Nest Mother had been worth almost a thousand. That was a big part of my gains, and unfortunately, I had to admit we'd been thorough, and there weren't any more rats down in the sewers. Motoyasu was man enough to admit he wouldn't have wanted to go down there anyway. Tight spaces freaked him out, and Ren wanted to find his own prey to level up with, so wouldn't have followed in my footsteps anyway.
We also found out we did indeed have some differences. For instance, I could read…not like the others were illiterate, they could read Japanese fine, and even my native English to some degree, but they didn't get the same translation I did when looking at text in this world, which meant I had a good advantage there…though considering we wouldn't be signing contracts that was mostly useful for gathering info.
Ren, the lucky snot nosed brat, meanwhile had a minimap. Like, in the edge of his vision, the opposite of the status window icon was a map of the local area. It even had markers for people if he knew they were there, and color coded them based on his own thoughts on them. Red for enemies, blue for allies, and yellow for people he didn't care about. That last apparently applied to us, something Motoyasu told him to screw off for.
Motoyasu figured he was just all around better than us, as he hadn't found anything like a map or the ability to read the local language, which I doubted, but I'd let him have it. And neither had been able to get Naofumi to talk to them long enough to really learn what his deal might be. I figured it might be some kind of item buff or something myself, like healing or equipment bonuses were double for him like in Dimensional Sign, but I kept that idea back for now, until I could talk to him in the morning.
We soon drained our cups, and while Motoyasu went to get more, I myself was going to head to bed. Going up the stairs, I took a moment to check in on Lucia, whose door happened to be locked so I left it at that, heading to my own room. The bed wasn't quite as good as the one at the castle, but still, I was old, and it didn't take long, even with three cups of the local brew in me to fall asleep.
I woke before dawn, just like back home, and was sitting in the dark, not surprised at all to still be in this RPG fantasy world, and wishing I had something to do with a computer back home. I was itching for some of my games, as I liked fantasy just fine, but kind of wanted something with giant mechs or the like. Perhaps someone could make one here? Or already had, I'd have to check that out.
Bored, I was surfing my menus, finding out what they did, and did not allow me to do, and interestingly, discovered some hair and eye options. That was…odd, and standing up, I lit a candle to investigate the changes, soon swapping my hair color around, even finding I could do patterns, which was neat, and my eyes could be changed too. I briefly considered going with silver hair and glowing purple eyes, but thought better of it, for now, and switched back to my normal stuff as I smiled, and then came out of my room.
The inn was mostly quiet, save for some snoring coming from a few of the rooms, including one I knew had Motoyasu's 'ladies' in it. That amused me, but as I walked downstairs, and the first stains of gray streaks stained the sky, something happened. Guards, like, a dozen of them, came in, making a racket and waking us all up, and asking us to come to the palace at once, as something had happened in the night.
The others, bleary eyed, and barely awake were still able to follow us to the street, where a carriage was waiting for us, and then we rode out, the party members being woken up and taking one. I noticed then that no one had gone into the inn across the way, though two guards were waiting outside the door at attention, making me wonder just what the heck had happened, and if Naofumi was in trouble.
To be fair, he was. So much trouble in fact that when I saw him again, I'd beat the ever loving shit out of him. Myne, the woman in his party, the one who'd volunteered for that duty in fact, was weeping openly as she told her story, and showed off the marks on her body, marks that had many possible explanations, but she gave us one of the most damning ones between fits of sobs.
When she was done, when she literally collapsed into the arms of Motoyasu who nearly ran out of the room, saying things about how he'd go out there and kill the bastard himself. Drunk or not, it was no excuse for what he'd done, and I for one agreed. Still, the King advised we give the man his day in court. He didn't doubt the woman thought something had happened, but there were other ways it might have been done, without involving him.
He wasn't dragged in, he wasn't forced down onto his knees, but he instead stumbled from a small push and fell forward, showing he was lacking in coordination. Worse, he smelled of alcohol, lots of it, and he blabbered something about a thief stealing all his money and belongings. Gods, that sounded just like an excuse a drunk would make, and as he tried to rise, the King had Myne repeat some of what she'd told us.
The previous evening, while we were in the inn across from him, the drunk had gotten alcohol brought to him, and apparently been deep, deep into the cups, which he hadn't been able to handle. He'd then broken into Myne's room and forced himself onto her, leaving the marks we saw, which looked like they'd perfectly fit his hands. Worse, one of the guards soon brought in a set of lingerie, Myne's by her admission, that they'd found in his room, along with the gear he'd said had been 'stolen'.
That clenched it, and for a moment, it looked like Motoyasu would kill him, the two trading barbs for a moment, Shield even accusing Motoyasu of being behind all this from the way the woman was hanging off him. That he and Myne had somehow planned this all out. That was…absurd was probably the right word, but when he was done railing against it, and the nobles had had their say, a bit more loudly than was really needed, Shield demanded to be sent home.
"Oh, so you want to run away the moment things get tough then? Have you no honor at all?" asked Ren, and I nodded.
"You have committed a crime, young man, and penance must be served," I added with contempt, and Motoyasu shrugged, holding Myne closer to him.
"You know what, let the bastard go home, let him live with this shame for the rest of his damn life," said the blonde, and I was tempted to agree with that, if I thought he felt shame, but he seemed more angry than anything, trying to leap through the guards to get at Myne at one point.
"I'm afraid that's not an option we have, Heroes," said the King, as he leaned back in his throne and placed his fingers of one hand on his temples, looking weary and downtrodden.
"It is said that, until the Waves are defeated the Heroes cannot be returned to their own worlds, and regardless, even if we could, we could not summon a new Shield Hero until such time as the rest of the four have perished," he declared, and we all turned to face him, Motoyasu with shock, Ren with…I'm gonna call that expression dull surprise, and I hoped my own face showed at least some of the anger I was feeling.
"Wait, you mean you can't send us home?" asked Motoyasu, and the King nodded.
"Had we proper warning, we might have sent you back to your world before the Waves had begun crashing into our world, if that was your wish. Now that they are here, however, we lack that ability. I'm sorry I held that back from you," he said, sounding sincere in his apology, as Shield brought our attention back to him.
"So what?! Are you gonna throw me in a dungeon and pull me out whenever a Wave happens?" he demanded, and I turned back, ready to just end him here and now, but the King's voice calmed me.
"No, as much as your crime warrants far, far worse in our nation than this, we cannot afford it. You will be released to your own devices, but news of your transgression is already spreading, and I will offer you no more aid. You will be without friend or ally within this country, until such time as you prove worthy of it," he declared, and I felt that would work. It still might have done to send him with a keeper of some kind, but Shield proved why that wouldn't work a moment later.
He…I have no words for it directly. He gathered an aura around himself, a green glow coming from the green gem in the center of his weapon, and then he flared it out, knocking back, and even knocking down, the guards with spears that had surrounded him, as he began to stalk out, only to stop in a moment, and then pull out some coins from the bracer attached to his shield, tossing the silvery things at Motoyasu's feet.
He ranted about how that was what he wanted, implying again that Motoyasu had something to do with his punishment, and the Himbo proved to be just that as he charged at him, grabbing him by the wrist. Not that he did anything to stop him, Shield leaving us alone in the room, allowed to walk free, if only because the world had need of him in a way that prevented a replacement.
Myne sought comfort in Motoyasu's arms, but I ignored it, walking over and picking up the pieces of silver, actually smiling despite myself when I realized there were thirty of them. I then handed them to one of the guards, honestly not sure what else to do with the things as we stood there. It felt…hollow as I walked over to Lucia, and then had her follow me out of the throne room, so we could continue on our quest to save the world from monsters…like the one that had just walked out of this room.