Author's Notes:
It has been years since I last wrote anything. Time marches on and lives get busy. Then, sometimes, an idea is spawned and just will not leave you alone. Those afflicted by this know the power of a Plot Bunny. This one has been gnawing on my ankles like the slightly less terrifying grandson of Caerbannog. To stop the chewing, it must be unleashed.
Poor Naofumi. He gets crapped on by just about everyone and everything from the moment he arrives in Melromarc. Few are those that help him behind the scenes. Fewer still are those that help him openly. Catastrophe looms large over the world with a country ruled by a corrupt and fractured royalty. Who would risk helping the runt hero, why, and what might that look like? This will start as a somewhat AU soft cross-over with the potential of being a multi-cross if the story continues. Who knows what may sprout from certain seeds in isekai worlds?
WARNING: For those having found this story other than via Rising of the Shield Hero, the topics in the canon story are brutal. PTSD, racism, false sexual assault allegations, torture, and slavery are in *the first two episodes* of the anime alone. If any of this is beyond your comfort level, this is your chance to turn back now. While there will not be graphic violence or on-screen sexual encounters, there is the potential for very adult topics to follow. For this reason I am setting the story to Mature from the start.
The Rising of the Shield Hero: The Material Plane
Chapter 1: Friends in Low Places
Naofomi's face was set in a hard stare for several reasons. The only reason his arm's weren't crossed over his chest in disgust was the shield attached to his right forearm made the pose rather uncomfortable to hold for long.
The first reason for his expression was his surroundings. A moderately sized canvas tent big enough to house wooden tables, desks, and cabinets lit with flickering lanterns attached to beams and poles above. The faint scent of flowers was only partly covering the smell of unwashed flesh, fur, and bodily waste coming from outside the tent.
The second reason for his look was the other occupants of the tent.
A dirty mangy raccoon girl cowered on the floor by one set of cabinets, her ears drooping and frazzled tail pushed against the floor. All she wore was a loose hempen sack as a ratty dress and three metal shackles, one each around her wrists and the last around her neck. She was turned away from the tent's last occupant, her arms crossed below her chest protectively.
The last occupant of the room was the slave trader Belokaus kneeling next to the raccoon girl. He was clothed in a black circus master's outfit complete with top hat and tails. His vest was purple matched by large purple feathers protruding from around his neck, hiding the collar of his jacket. The man's eyes were obscured behind a pair of spectacle glasses and a constant crooked grin adorned his face. In his white gloved hands were a small paint brush and a saucer sized dish with a murky dark liquid.
Belokaus dipped the paint brush into the dark liquid before reaching towards the girl, painting a circle of the liquid onto an intricate purple brand on her chest. The liquid sizzled and the purple brand glowed, the raccoon girl whimpering in obvious pain. His work done, he stood back up, still keeping an eye on the cowering raccoon girl.
"What's with that?" Naofumi said in a low and hard tone to match his facial expression.
"Nothing to worry about," responded the trader with that eerie crooked grin. "The pain will dissipate soon. That slave crest on her chest will make it impossible for her to defy you."
Naofumi was more than slightly disturbed by the changes and pop-ups to his status magic HUD. Seeing stats for a new party member and the party display was fairly normal from a game mechanic perspective. That the slave interface prominently displayed command and punishment options was not.
"There you go good sir," continued Belokaus, having moved to the opposite side of a table now between the two of them. "She is all yours." The pained whimpering from the far side of the tent changed to a fit of coughing was all but lost on the hero.
"Thirty silvers, right?" half asked, half snarled Naofumi to the trader as he dropped a small coin sack on the wooden table. Not waiting for an answer, the shield hero turned away from the trader and walked toward the raccoon girl still on the floor. He stopped a couple feet away from her, his figure looming over her.
"There is one extra in here!" piped up the trader, leaning over the table to better look at the hero and his most recent sale on the floor.
"That's your commission," Naofumi stated, not turning his attention away from the girl whimpering quietly and coughing more loudly on the floor. "You were going to wring it out of me anyways weren't you?"
"You certainly know your stuff!" the trader declared with a small amount of glee, clasping his white gloved hands together.
"Well, I guess I am supposed to know what your name is, right?" the hero asked with the same hard tone looking downwards. He waited only a moment as she continued to cough before ordering, "Well, tell me your name."
"I said, what's your name?" he asked more forcefully, taking a half step towards the little girl.
She didn't notice the movement, eyes closed and focusing on getting a lung full of air to abate the coughing. She sat up a little though still cowering, arms again covering her chest protectively. "I'm called Raphtalia," she gasped out in a low and squeaky tone.
"Raphtalia, huh?" he asked almost rhetorically, leaning down and putting a hand out to drag her up. He had every intention of leaving this disturbingly clean tent in the middle of an appalling dirty place as quickly as possible.
"Asking her name may be the first decent thing you have done since coming here," came a boyish if oddly rumbling voice from behind him. Naofumi stopped mid-motion, not having heard that voice since he arrived in the large slaver tent.
"What?! How did you get out?!" exclaimed Belokaus, the surprise in the man's voice causing Naofumi to turn towards him. His expression was one of confusion, his perpetual grin replaced with an open mouth. Naofumi's eyes followed the trader's gaze to see what had intruded on the occupants of the tent.
At the back of the tent a canvas flap was fluttering from having been moved. Standing just inside it was what Naofumi Realized was a beastman child. Unlike Raphtalia that had human skin over most of her body with a couple animal traits, this boy was covered from pointed feline ears to furry padded feet in a dark grey and dirty fur. He too wore a hemp sack but more like a skirt tied around his waist and down to his knees, a long thin tail swishing behind him. The sack on this lower body left a furred chest exposed. Like Ralphtalia he had shackles around his wrists and neck though unlike her the chains were still attached. His face leaned decidedly more animal than human and reminded Naofumi of a larger wild cat, his mouth and nose protruding a bit. His eyes were noticeably feline reflecting lantern light below a furred brow pulled down into a scowl. The boy's posture was of someone trying to stand tall but for which doing so was laborious.
Naofumi had taken only a moment to look at the newcomer but that was enough time for the trader to have apparently noticed something else. Belokaus's tone was far less shocked coming over Naofumi's shoulder, now sounding a mix of caution and curiosity, "And where has your slave crest gone?"
That got Naofumi to focus on the boy's chest. The fur of his upper chest behind the chains was plain grey and undistributed, no sign of a purple crest on the fur or below on the skin that could be seen. Instead Naofumi noticed the shape of some kind of metal object sandwiched between the chains and the gray fur below. The implications of a missing crest caught up with Naofumi who brought his shield up defensively, putting himself between the boy in front of him and the softly whimpering Ralphtalia behind him. This wasn't just a slave that got out of its cage. It was a loose child beastman staring at them, potentially upset for a number of reasons Naofumi didn't want to ponder. 'Correction,' Naofumi thought to himself, 'he is staring mostly at me.'
The feline boy only spared the trader a glance at his question before looking back to the hero. "It got replaced with something else," the same boyish voice rumbled gently as he took a couple more steps into the tent, chains hardly making a sound. "You both will be thankful for that in a minute."
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Naofumi finally spoke to the interloper, his tone firm and somewhat threatening. "I haven't even seen you before." Naofumi wanted to keep the boy's attention away from the trader that kept him locked up. The hero wasn't sure how well the trader could defend himself without the protection of a crest. If the trader ended up dead while Naofumi was in the tent, the rumours about him could only get worse. The already infamous Shield Hero should be able to defend himself from a child beastman, at least until the trader could summon help from other cages.
"I wanted to see if you really are the Shield Hero," the boy said, reaching a hand up to move the chains on his chest. With the rings pushed to the side the metal object underneath was more visible. It looked like a golden star stylized with light coming out in long twirling ribbons and a face in the middle of the star. The metal star was about as wide as the boy's hand was thick and hanging off a thin chain the boy's fur was mostly obscuring. "Protection Amulet!" the boy exclaimed and the amulet glowed, shifting to a silverish oval metal plate of a similar size with the symbol of a sword stuck into the ground on it. "Cast Sanctuary," the boy followed with.
An icon popped up next to his and Ralphtalia's names on Naofumi's HUD. Focusing on the icon caused a notification window to pop-up briefly.
[Status Effect "Sanctuary" active. Attacks on caster may fail and the caster cannot attack while the effect is active.]
"A magic amulet," the trader commented aloud. Naofumi turned his head just enough to see the other man out of the corner of his eye while watching the boy. A gloved white hand was stroking the man's chin as he looked down the furnished tent, his earlier shocked expression replaced by a decidedly neutral one. "No, it must be much stronger if it removed your crest and is allowing you to speak like this in such a short amount of time. Then there is your improved health too."
"Glad you noticed how bad off this body was," the feline beast-boy replied in a deeply sarcastic tone. "Speaking of healing," he continued, looking to Naofumi and then nodding to Raphatial while raising furred hands in an apparent show of not being a threat, "I intend to help everyone in this tent in one way or another. With your permission Sir Shield, may I start with her?"
The 'Sir Shield' comment struck Naofumi in two ways. One, an obvious attempt at showing respect. Second, it harkened back to how Myne referred to him before betraying him so spectacularly and thoroughly. While having more than enough reason to say 'no', the possibility of this encounter leading to a deeply discounted price for his troubles gave Naofumi pause. Those thoughts focused Naofumi and made his choice somewhat nuanced. "If you hurt her in any way, you will regret it," he said, pulling back the side of his cloak to reveal a couple orange balloon monsters chewing on his side.
"I won't hurt her," the gray feline boy said simply. Keeping his hands held up, he slowly walked over to where Raphtalia was sitting on the floor. Her coughing and whimpering had given way to only laboured breathing, likely some adrenaline from the encounter allowing more air into her lungs. She started pulling away as the boy came near followed closely by her new owner, the human looming over them both while the beastboy kneeled and sat down next to her. "Hello Raphtalia, my name is.." he paused, tilting his head for a moment as if in thought. "Please call me Panthro for now."
That name sounded familiar to Naofumi making him take a breath in but not saying anything, to focused on how close the feline was to Raphtalia. The hero was ready to jump in and help her at the slightest sign of trouble. He had repositioned the arm with the shield over his chest, muscle tensed and ready to backhandedly smash the boy with the shield if he was anything but true to his word.
Raphtalia looked from the boy up to her new owner and back again, unsure what to do. The boy seemed to be looking her over while her new owner watched closely. After a subtle approving nod by her owner, she lightly wheezed, "Ok Panthro." She mostly resisted pulling away when the boy reached out a furred hand and placed it delicately on her shoulder.
"Healing Amulet," he said, the same golden star with a face symbol returning from earlier. Naofumi Noticed the status effect icon disappear from his HUD. One final look between the boy and the girl seemed to bring the boy to a conclusion. The boy's eyes lost focus, staring through Raphtalia as his voice dropped noticeably and he intoned more than said; "Divine Plea: Lesser Restoration". His body illuminated with a pale golden glow. The light concentrated down onto his arm, then hand, then passed into Raphtalia. Her breathing eased significantly in moments, the raccoon girl sitting up straighter.
Naofumi opened his mouth to say something when the beastboy teetered and all but fell over, catching himself on the furred hand opposite the one that had been on Raphtalia. The near fall and a fit of his own coughing had Raphtalia standing up and backing away.
"Note to self; don't make divine pleas often," wheezed the boy, visibly steadying himself on the floor while the tip of his tail fluffed into a convincing imitation of a wire brush.
"Divine," Belokaus repeated, the suited man having walked up to stand near Naofumi. "Just what is that amulet boy?"
A few deep breaths and the feline boy looked up, not a poor imitation of Beloukas's own grin on his face. "At the moment, this is the symbol of Pelor, a deity known for many things including mercy, healing, and fighting evil. My old Dungeons and Dragons group would be freaking out about now."
Naofumi caught what he realized was a second reference to another world, his eyes widening ever so slightly. His mind flashed back to his first night speaking with the other Legendary Heroes, each trying to figure out where the other came from.
Looking down at the still struggling furred boy, Naofumi decided to see if his suspicion was right. "Where did you go to high school?"
"George Washington Senior High School," the boy answered with a half smile. He reached a hand up to the cabinet behind him and used it to help pull himself back up. "It's in the Appalachian Mountains, inland from the east coast of the United States."
"American?" Naofumi pondered, letting his arms relax, the shield once again coming to rest at his side. "Who won World War Two?"
Panthro flinched, his furred face scrunching up in a grimace looking up to the larger man. "We did with help from the British and Russians in the west. As for the east, well, we introduced the world to nuclear weapons. Twice."
"How did you end up in that body? Naofumi asked, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "You sound like you are from another world, maybe mine, but we don't have beastmen."
"Something I want to know as well," Belokaus interjected, looking between the beastboy and the much improved Raphtalia. "How much more of my merchandise do I need to check?"
Panthro reached up to the metal star resting on his chest, a short claw slipping from the end on an index finger to tap the metal. "Best guess is whoever put this on me. I was a much bigger and older human until one night I went to sleep and woke up here in a small furry body. That was a few days ago." He let his arm down until it was sticking out in front of him, opening a furree hand palm up. He turned his attention to the trader with a frigid glare. "I woke up sick, alone, and in a cage. How should I know if any others are like me? I was about ready to try escaping when the grumpy green giant here walked through with you. That changed things."
The beastboy's eyes moved in a curious pattern before a blue glow enveloped his upturned hand. Something small and shiny materialized as the glow subsided. A flick of a wrist had three gold coins tossed up onto the table, his gaze returning to the trader. "I know where I am now and who you are. That is payment for my freedom and a down payment if anyone else like me arrives."
Belokaus snapped up the coins from the table, turning one of them over in his hand to inspect them. "Not a coin I know but gold spends all the same. If there is more where that came from, I look forward to their arrival!"
Panthro huffed and promptly coughed, a hand coming up to cover his mouth for a moment. "For their sake I hope none do."
Composing himself as best he could, the small grey feline stood to his full if diminutive height. "Now for the last person here," the boy said, feline eyes staring up at the looming Naofumi. "Hello Hero of the Legendary Shield. I am the Hero of the Artifact Amulet and I think I have been sent to help you on your journey."