Author's Note: Not a lot to say right now, Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 39: The Sword Hero's Friend
Ikki's training was going smoothly. He has successfully reached the point where he can control his mana flow and thus turn Ittou Shura off as well as on now. He's also discovered that he can make it even more potent by feeding his SP into it but was still working on getting the balance right. The Ki training was more difficult, Ikki admitted with reluctance that fine tuned control over his body's energy wasn't his thing so much as finely tuned control over his actual body. As such he was still having trouble expelling the damaging energy that 'Granny' as she thankfully insisted on calling herself, he couldn't pronounce her actual name, was pumping into him. On the plus side he was having a excessive opportunity to practice the fancy new healing magic that he was learning, he was even reaching the point where he could use it along with Ittou Shura too, though he didn't dare try it with Ittou Rasetsu: not while he was the only one there who knew healing magic decent enough to put him back into one piece.
"Welp come on then. You lot are doing labour training today." Granny stated letting out a stretch prompting groans from the rest of the party.
"Are going going to raise our grip strength by plowing the farm lands by hand again?" Ake asked dreading the possible knowledge that he already knew the answer.
"No. Wave's going to be here any day so no. So you lot get to help prepare the area in case it's this town it hits." The lessons learned from Naofumi's defence of the first town had spread far and wide.
It wasn't enough to build walls, no the waves are as much a attack from the air as it is a ground battle, if you are not prepared to deal with the foes coming down from the sky, then you are not prepared. Still there was a limit to what could be done without supplies. So Ikki, with the famous legendary sword, was sent into the forest to collect supplies. Walls and balista had one thing in common: wood. Recalling his experience with the mining game Ikki fed a lumber jack's axe to his sword to see what he would get.
'Conditions met: Lumberjack's sword unlocked. Equip Bonus Timber Game 7Hours 55Minutes'
Ikki didn't need to read the description to figure out what this one did. As soon as Ikki equipped the blade Targeting reticules appeared in his vision explaining what kinds of trees he was looking at and the structural weaknesses that he would be able to take advantage of to bring it down. The trees fell like wheat before the scythe and were subsequently stored inside of his legendary weapon for the sake of ease of transportation and for the sake of new weapons. Tree, Wood, Bark, leaf, root. Naofumi wasn't the only one who knew how to chop up materials for the sake of more weapons. Dropping the materials off at the village plans were soon made to erect walls and build anti-air weapons to eliminate air born threats. Again Ikki helped with another Mini-game sword.
'Conditions met: Shovel sword unlocked. Equip Bonus Digging Game 7Hours 55Minutes'
The effect of the new blade was... weird, Ikki could see underground now, locate objects hidden away from his vision, saw the terrain in colour, hard ground was green but turned to yellow and then red as it became softer. As an experiment he sunk in proficiency from a dozen swords he wouldn't be using and unlocked another bonus 'Digging proficiency.' Ikki pushed the tip of the shovel shaped sword to the ground and to his surprise found the ground receding. With the new sword he was easily able to dig two large trenches in the ground, one for the wall, and one for a stake filled moat with a layer of turf suspended above it, anyone who meant to take the town from the ground would be in for a nasty surprise shoved up their rear end. As a added precaution though the towns people smeared feces all over the stakes, can anyone say staph infection? Ikki's shovel sword also came in handy digging out a emergency bunker underneath the village, if they couldn't keep the monsters from falling out of the sky they would at least have a roof over their heads to keep them from being crushed. Which actually led to the next matter of fact.
"Spiders?" Ikki looked perplexed by the request.
"We can use the silk of the giant spiders to construct our crossbows and balista, and we can coat our blades and arrows in their venom. That'll show those hell spawn what we're made out of!" The village chief stated looking very much excited.
Ikki looked to the walls the villagers were making using the timber he brought in, holes big enough to fire arrows and bowling balls through had been left/cut into the walls. With the right people operating the heavy weapons they'd could do some serious damage, but building balista and bows, especially the kind that would make the difference against the waves, demanded that they have high quality materials.
"I wonder if Tatsuya can copy siege weapons?"
That was a terrifying thought, a living breathing weapon of mass destruction gliding through the air wielding a weapon designed to bring low fortresses. While Ikki thought about the implications he spotted a bird caught in a thin line in the air, he stumbled across the spider's nest. At once Ikki set to work sucking as many of the spider webs as he could find into his sword's storage space. He knew that he promised them the spider's webs but he wondered what skill he would get from feeding the spiders into his sword, something that would let him stick to walls? Shoot webs? Poison? Do everything a giant spider can? As Ikki was pondering the implications he found a far more interesting prize.
"Well then: you guys get into all sorts of stuff don't you?" Ikki asked as he pulled off a familiar rosary from a mummified corpse which had been drained of it's vital fluids. "Now I wonder what you were doing in this area?" Ikki gathered together enough webbing to make some decent siege engines as he made his return to the village and planned his next move. "Hey, this is gonna sound weird but... is there anything particularly special about this town?" Ikki questioned while looking at the village head man with curiosity as he tried to think of a reason why the church would be here.
"Aside from the walls and siege equipment you have built for us sir hero, no I'm afraid not." The Head man explained as he noticed the look of disappointment on Ikki's features.
"Have anything unusual been happening lately." Ikki noticed that the number of people here did not seem to line up with the number of houses. They looked large enough that they could hold about two adults and two children, but there was a abnormally large number of children, even for a era where birth control medications weren't wide spread. "Have anyone recently gone missing in the village?" Ikki asked cocking a suspicious brow.
"No one's missing. We know exactly what happened to the people you're thinking about." The headman stated as he took a sip from the cup he was drinking from.
"Are you going to make me ask?" Ikki stated annoyed.
"You've already killed their murderers." The headman stated turning his attention to the spider corpses Ikki brought them.
"If you wanted me to wipe out the spiders you could've just said so." Ikki stated looking at the Headman suspiciously.
"That's because I didn't." Ikki cocked a suspicious brow at the headman. "Wipe out one alpha predator and another moves in to take it's place that we do not possess the means or the knowledge to remove: in the mean time the creatures that they prey on population spikes and we have to deal with it. The birds will wipe out our crops and the diseases spread from their feces will hit us like a storm, we live by the grace of the spiders."
"And die by them." Ikki commented looking like someone who was displeased by the revelation.
"An unfortunate fact of our lives that we have been made to accept, monsters attack villages like ours constantly, our population is not large enough nor our resource contribution great enough that we can provide a provide a decently high enough fund to have the Kingdom establish a knight order here or get adventurers to aid us. We can't get enough funds raised because our man power keeps dying off." The Headman looked like he had done a very thorough, very rational analysis of his lot in life and found it wanting.
"Then why not move?" Ikki asked looking clearly concerned.
"You are under the impression that simply packing up a village and moving it away is a easy task, or for that matter that we would be welcomed in other villages with the ever constant strain of monster attacks vs resources to deal with them." The headman had a defeated look on his face as he soon spoke with renewed vigour. "It's honestly very simple, we fortify, we assemble what arms and armour that we can scrounge and we fight to keep the monster population down by as much as possible while we do as much as we can to maintain a decent population."
The headman's rationalisation didn't matter nearly as much as the implications they carried. People could disappear from this village by the dozens and these people would barely bat an eye, so long as the takers picked off the ones who had been isolated spider hunting, or left behind enough of a mess to implicate the stealthy predators.
"Our conversation has been illuminating, thank you for having it with me. Excuse me while I go investigate something." Ikki couldn't fly like Tatsuya could, instead he started picking through the effects of the swords he got from the spiders, but some how swinging through the forest on a spider web tarzan style wouldn't be helping him. So instead he started looking at the skills he did have unlocked and a thought occurred to him as his eyes drifted over to the video crystal sword. "It won't be subtle, but it'll definitely get the job done if it works."
Ikki commandeered the village's guard tower and produced his hundred sword's skill, turned the blades into the video crystal sword before firing them off into the forest. Again Ikki found himself mass sacrificing proficiency to unlock new abilities for the legendary sword, and he was starting to run out of blades he could sacrifice the proficiency of. Maybe he should just pick the ones he liked and kept them out until he got a new batch of weapons to unlock. But as a result he could store the recordings the blades would be making of the forest and sift through them one by one until he found something close to what he was looking for and eventually found it. A cave connected into the nearby mountains. Another mine, perhaps turned into a bunker? Or a research lab. They never did figure out where they were doing the brainwashing experiments, only that Tatsuya figured out a way of undoing them.
"But how much time do I have to get him?" After that stunt they'd be almost certain that he's there, and if paranoid enough correctly deduce that he's actively hunting them down. "Come to think of it: did I even bother to ask where Tatsuya was going before I left?" Concluding that he didn't have time to waste Ikki gathered together his teacher and fellow students and informed them of what he found in the woods to get there opinion on the matter.
"Are you immune to brainwashing?" Ake asked looking concerned with Ikki's theory and the implications that it carried.
"Maybe." Ikki took a look through the section on his unlocked skills that covered resistances and noted a lack of a mind control resistance. "No. Doesn't look like it." One of the Four Legendary Heroes subjected to some kind of brainwashing curse, placed under the churches control to be sent after the other Heroes or serve as a one man army against the various countries of this world. Yeah, best to avoid that scenario. "What do we do then? There's no way that any normal person can stand up to the legendary replica or anybody with Hero stats that they still have under their control." Ikki sat down cross legged as he thought about the situation. "Have word sent to Tatsuya that he may have to come and find us to de-brainwash us. In the mean time, we're off hunting."
One of the villagers was sent off with a letter from Ikki on the back of his Kirin, hopefully that would be enough to get the crown's attention. Separating them from the third strongest member of their party, short of himself and Granny, was a calculated risk for the sake of quickly securing back up. In the mean time Ikki led the group to where he believed he found the churches hideout, the cave he had found and entered with the others, his blade transformed via a torch into a flaming light in the darkness as he and the others delved deeper and deeper. It hadn't taken long before Ikki found what he had been looking for: prints in the dust from when men had walked through these tunnels, and lines formed from when they had been dragged in via their heels.
"Blades out. There's work to do." Ikki traded in his fancy new fire sword for something smaller, more compact and sharper, some kind of dagger Ikki had received from monster that specialised in invisibility and sneak attacks. The lost of light hadn't delayed them for very long, they found where the church had set up their laboratory glowing with ominous light which served to highlight their experiments. In particular one of the ominously glowing tubes in question had the fragment of some dagger inside, the same shape as a row of other daggers that had accumulated on the table next to the tube.
"The invisibility skill from my dagger only affects me, the rest of you are going to have to hang back." The others nodded their heads as Ikki turned himself invisible and went over to the table with the daggers resting on it. Ikki trailed his finger over one of the daggers and a notification appeared in his vision.
'Conditions Met: Dagger of Mob Mentality. Equip Bonus: Enlightenment 7Hours 55Minutes Main Bonus: Trust Me I Am Your Friend'
The hell kind of dagger is this thing suppose to be!? As that thought passed through Ikki's mind he decided to get more information.
'Skill: Trust Me I Am Your Friend: Individuals who are defeated by the Dagger of Mob Mentality becomes your ally.'
Figuring he knew what defeated meant Ikki went over to the nearest lab technician he could find and proceeded to non-fatally stab him. The man's eyes proceeded to glow the same ominous light as the laboratory equipment for but a moment before he turned around to face Ikki.
"Sir Sword Hero! It's an honour to meet you!" That was the reaction Ikki was afraid of. And what was with this 'Enlightenment' skill.
'Enlightenment: Opens your eyes to the fundamental truth of this world.'
"Nope!" Saying that Ikki swapped back to the invisibility dagger and turned to face his new minion, based on the effect of that ominous skill he was quite certain what this thing's Equip Bonus would do to him. "What are you people doing here?"
"We were trying to recreate one of the weapon transformations from a Seven Star weapon." As the technician explained he gestured to the containment tube and the broken dagger inside.
"Seven Star Weapons? Is this thing that?" Ikki asked vaguely recalling information on the Seven Stars but unable to remember where he heard it before or more information about them.
"It's a piece of one, and the truth is that it came off of only a reputed Seven Star Hero." Reputed hero?
"I've no idea what you're talking about: Explain everything now." Ikki stated decided to just have his brainwashed minion tell him everything that he knows.
"Yes-sir." The man picked up, of all things, a story book as if it held some relevant piece of information to the current situation. "This is a story book about a group of past legendary Heroes and their battle against a demon lord with the ability to brain wash his followers with but a prick of his finger. Our research believes that this Demon Lord was in fact a Projectile Hero of the past who was infected by the Pride Curse Series." Ikki noted that only the Heroes are supposed to be able to use the Cursed Series, which meant that these Seven Stars are supposed to be similar to them. "After the Projectile Hero was killed his weapon forcibly expelled the curse from it in the form of dagger, which to our frustration was then unceremoniously smashed to pieces by the Heroes of the age."
"And these are duplicates?" The dagger itself was absolutely despicable but if they could reverse engineer it then they could reverse engineer weapons that wouldn't make Ikki's stomach churn. "How'd you make it?"
"It's actually quite simple Sir Hero. First we extracted a soul from one of the animals over there..."
"I've heard enough." Ikki officially decided that these people were incapable of doing anything that wouldn't make him sick to his stomach the moment he laid his eyes on the pile of corpses the researcher said belonged to animals but which consisted of mummified demi-human corpses. "If we destroy everything in this cave can you make anymore of these things?"
"That would be difficult but not impossible Sir Hero. We can only make the daggers by painstakingly breaking off fragments from a existing dagger, mixing it together with other materials, and then reforging it via our expert craftsmen." The technician stated with enthusiasm borne of the brain washing and legitimate desire to flex his intellect.
"Meaning there are more of these things else where. How many are there in total?" Ikki strongly suspected that he had either landed at the beginning of or in the middle of a huge crisis that wasn't going away any time soon.
"We have manufactured ten daggers inside of this facility, six of which are on that table over there. The others have been given as gifts to influential nobles we intend to win over to our side, the beautiful thing about the Dagger of Mob Mentality is that it doesn't just brainwash the people injured by it, but also gradually shows the truth to the individuals that comes into contact with it over a period of time, even without being bled."
"Oh that's fucking great!" Ikki was not one to swear but he felt that this situation warranted the use of the cursed words. "Who and how many have you given these daggers to?"
"Four in total: The lords of the Baumiester, Phillip, Hohenheim and most recently the Reichnott territories. Previously they have been strong components of the Demi-human invasion of our country, but through these they will soon be redeemed in the eyes of god for their blasphemous actions." The Researcher had a beaming smile on his features as if he was talking about the most wonderful thing in the world.
"Huu." Ikki had wasted enough time already, he pulled the researcher aside, raised the Legendary Sword in the air and let loose a skill. "Meteor Slash!" With the first attack Ikki smashed the daggers into tiny pieces along with the table they had been resting on. With several more attacks Ikki proceeded to methodically demolish every single piece of equipment and research material that they had in this place and taking the time to ensure that the daggers had been utterly annihilated. "Those people over there?"
"Sadly we've yet to enlighten them to our cause. We are still testing to see the effects of the group enlightenment." The Researcher stated all the brainwashing in the world unable to hide the displeasure he had over seeing his life's work destroyed. Ikki still checked them for any signs they had been infected, if they had so much as a scratch on them then they weren't getting out of those restraints, even then he brought in Granny to see if there was any ki tricks she could use to figure out a way of separating the infected from the clean. She was able to figure something out after looking his new best friend in his eyes.
"Are you the only one here or are there more?" Ikki asked impatiently scrambling for every scrap of detail that they had to work with.
"There were veterans of the Church's forces here before but they've been reassigned, several of the initiated are bringing people from the nearby village to initiate them into the churches army as well." Of course they are.
"Ake, you guys are going to have to intercept that group of 'initiates' and keep them from coming into this place no matter what." When Ikki's group got out of the caves he sent everyone off to go stop the incoming group, Ikki on the other hand took his brainwashed prisoner, added him to his party, before promptly portaling off to the castle.
Author's Note:
RonaldM40196867: That they have. Probably. Not for a while.
Xenvic: I was working from Web Novel Spelling, since I mostly listen to shield Hero on Audio book these days. Also they can class up as early as 50 or as late as 60.
Amatsumi: Glad you like em.
superpierce: Thank you for saying so.
Guest: ...glad your happy.
MarauderPrime12: Thank you for saying so.
