Author's Note: Okay now, tada Saturday just like I promised! Also this'll probably be the only Shield Hero story I'll be working on for a while. No offence guys but I am getting a little tired of writing the same story over and over. So tune in tomorrow as I begin publishing a new story that has nothing to do with the present continuity. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 71: The Sword Hero who Forgets to Check her Equip Bonuses
The banging of a gavel indicated that the meeting of the council of Katarina's had begun.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?" The chairman of said council didn't look like she was taking the recent appearance of a shadowy skeletal dragon and a pack of literal shadows right in front of her very well, nor for that matter that they were following her orders.
"It would appear that these terrifying shadow people that use to be the other kind of terrifying shadow people is a by product of our dark magic." Intellectual Katarina looked like she was only barely suppressing her own freak-out even if she explained where these things had come from.
"That doesn't make me feel better!" Cheerful Katarina was anything but at the moment pulling on her hair from the stress. "We didn't even get any XP from those guys." On account of Tanya standing right next to her at the time. "What if whoever dies around us for now on going forward automatically becomes a shadow monster!? I don't want a to be followed around by a constantly growing legion of shadow monsters!"
"What if they follow us back to our world!?" Hotblooded Katarina stated holding the sides of her head. "Dark magic is super illegal over there and we're going to be followed by hordes of it!"
"What do we do!? What do we do!? What do we do!?" Timid Katarina was more timid by the second as she seemed to break down into a full blown panic attack.
After Katarina's brain crashed the rest of her party had no idea of what to do. So Elena was found, the matter explained to her, and reluctantly she simply picked Katarina up and took her with her into the office and sat her down on a couch as she went back to her paper work. A few moments later she looked back up and saw all of Katarina's shadows hovering over her desk.
"Do you mind?" Elena asked her tone of voice addressing obstructive assistants who were blocking her light. "Thanks to you people I have a report I need to write to the royal family." The shadows took several steps back while Elena just shook her head in annoyance. "I swear I leave you alone for one day..."
In the meantime Sadeena had turned her harpoon into a bundle of rope and was using it to cocoon and suspend Fohl in the air above a bucket of water.
"Who told you kids to do something like calling out Q'Ten Lo's shadows? Do you have any idea how hard I've been working to keep them off of our backs!?" Sadeena asked as she glared angrily at Fohl.
"We need the hammer-" Sadeena used the rope harpoon to dunk Fohl's head, the only part of his body not cocooned in rope, into the bucket of water she had prepared prompting gurgling noises from Fohl wherein she eventually pulled him up, if for no other reason than drowning him would keep her from torturing him more. "-And the dungeon-" A second plunge into the water. "-They were going to attack us any-" A third time. "IT WAS KURO'S IDEA!"
"What madness have we been caught up in this time?" Tanya was on standby while Sadeena got her blatant torture in on Fohl, she completely believed the part about it being Kuro's idea.
"'Mad' is the most appropriate word I can think of for Q'Ten Lo." Sadeena held Fohl up as she glared at him angrily. "Did you at least find out what that whore Makina is up to before you came back here?"
"Apparently the capital has been moved." The vein in Sadeena's head immediately popping indicated that Fohl has just made a massive if not fatal mistake.
"What's so special about the capital?" Tanya asked suspiciously.
"It's where the Heir to the throne receives the blessing of our Dragon Hourglass to become the emperor." Sadeena's eye was twitching at this seemingly very important piece of information. "Without that ability the link to the land to the empress there are all sorts of things that are going to go crazy." Tanya looked like she wanted examples leading to a roll of the whale woman's eyes. "Q'Ten Lo is a country supported by barriers. Barriers that are powered by various monsters in a sealed state dotting the country. What do you think will happen if they lose control of them?" Yeah. That might be bad.
"Is it possible for them to move the Dragon's Hourglass?" Tanya asked and Sadeena shook her head in the negative.
"The land is a living thing with veins of it's own where the XP that fuels life flows, the Dragon Hourglasses are the needles stuck into the veins to extract that life blood and give it purpose. I won't say that there's no other place for that Dragon Hourglass to retain it's use, but Q'Ten Lo is a land of volcanoes and water, to on top of finding a place suitable to live to also demand that it be a location suitable for a dragon's hourglass to do it's duties?" Sadeena shook her head in the negative. "Well there's a limit to foolishness anyway, they shouldn't be able to top this." Sadeena being a optimist chose to look on the bright side of the situation.
"The killing of monsters has been banned, something about all life being sacred." Fohl stated fully expecting his head to go into the water again. Sadeena clenched her fist so hard that her fingers crunched.
"Including the wave monsters?" Tanya asked and in response Fohl did his best to shrug his shoulders, bound up as they were. "So in addition to the dungeon there's in all likelihood three or four hordes of wave monsters roaming about the country side and no one is willing or able to do something about them?" Tanya was liking this country less and less the longer that this conversation went on. "By this point in time sneaking into the country and spiriting away whatever Reincarnated has the hammer now and sneaking our way into the dungeon to get their magic seems like the most sane that this situation can get."
"You're not wrong. But I don't think that'll work without a oracle." Cue Fohl immediately clamming up. "What is it?"
"If I tell you you'll get mad at me and dunk me in water, and if I don't tell you then you'll get mad at me and dunk me in water. What's my motivation here?" Tanya decided that he had suffered enough for starting a fight in the middle of the town and so had Sadeena release Fohl. "They've got a oracle already."
"And this would make me mad why?" Sadeena asked sounding suspicious.
Fohl sucked in the air, turned his gauntlets to the Spirit Tortoise shell with the highest defence stat possible, circulated the flow of Ki throughout his body to expel any incoming point attacks, buffed his speed using wind magic, and crossed his arms over his mid section.
"You have a sister, she's the Oracle." Fohl immediately ran away as a dark shadow covered Sadeena's body while her mouth warped into a crescent shaped smile and overwhelming killing intent escaped from every pore of her body.
"My, My, My. It has been too long since I've been back home. Raphtalia chan can look after herself now, and she has little Maple-Chan, so I can run wild a little bit right?" Sadeena's tone of voice was of someone who was getting all nostalgic about the homeland they haven't seen in so long.
"You shouldn't think about just pushing off responsibility to go have fun." Tanya stated perfectly aware that she was likely talking about Sadeena flying off the handle and making a river of blood cut across Q'Ten Lo. "Even Raphtalia is diligently thinking up new methods of attack."
Raphtalia was seated a ways away from them, having a staring contest with none other than Raphtalia herself. After a moment one of the Raphtalia's disappeared revealing a small raccoon like animal in it's place.
"So if I understand this correctly, after we got back from the other world you've just been running around hunting monsters and raising your level?" Raphtalia lost track of the little monster after she got back, to her regret.
"Rafu!" The little monster, little clone of her to be more exact, nodded in the affirmative.
"How? You can only use illusion magic, you're too small to use a blade and everything around here is in their forties!?"
"Rafu!" The little familiar replied proudly as if it explained everything.
"What do you mean you have dark magic!?" Raphtalia snapped in reply angrily.
"Rafu!" The Shikigami quickly ran over to a nearby pen where a boar was being kept to be slaughtered for it's meat. "Rafu!" Raphtalia's shikigami poofed up her tail much like what Raphtalia herself does when she's casting magic. The boar twitched, eyes rolled into the back of it's head, before it upper half of it's body rose up and something like black smoke escaped the animal's mouth. The boar collapsed but the smoke wasn't done yet, transitioning into a cloud before turning into a rain of needles which then pummelled a nearby rock face.
"Well that is impressive." Maple commented looking mildly concerned.
Raphtalia recalled very clearly what the characteristics of Shadow magic was, the key phrase was very often hunger. Normally in order to neutralise another castors spell you need to have the same affinities for magic and be able to either guess or tell what spell they're about to cast in advance. Shadow was the exception, if you cast the magic against your opponent before they could start spitting out spells then you could neutralised roughly twice as much magical energy as you put out, but if you wanted to neutralise a spell that they had already cast, it would cost you ten times the amount as what your opponent had used to cast it. But no where in that did Raphtalia read about a spell that would drain your opponents blood and turn it into a storm of blades.
"Come over here." Raphtalia stated as she put the creature into her lap and opened it's stat menu. "Where did all these stat bonuses come from!?" There was a significant amount of food bonus, several attacks somehow purchased using a function called 'war god,' it was somehow trained in Dragon Pulse and Ki manipulation and there was the soul from a Nue at it's core. "Are you my familiar or Sadeena's?" Raphtalia asked looking down at the little creature in offended shock.
"Rafu!" The monster replied cheerfully. Raphtalia noted that she was going to have to have a word with her adoptive sister whenever she was finished taking out her anger on Fohl, first she learns that she's had some kind of secret life all this time, now she learns that Sadeena was tampering around with this mini her.
"Maybe you should be looking on the bright side Raphtalia." Maple stated as Raphtalia slowly turned her head to face the other girl and glared as if saying 'enlighten me.' "You scatter illusions of yourself around to confuse your enemies in a fight right?" To be more accurate Raphtalia's exact fighting style consisted of a combination of illusions, invisibility and floating swords as a consequence she could convince her opponents that one of the illusions was the real her by casting a spell on the blade or convince them that she had gone invisible by casting the correlating spell on one of her blades and sending it into a blade lock with her opponent, usually both at the same time. Anyone who can see her ears or tail knows what kind of magic that she can cast, either she can try to hide that fact or she can embrace it and squeeze her offensive power for all that it's worth, and now it looks like she has a little more squeezing to do.
"Fine you can come with us!"
"Rafu!" The little Shikigami climbed onto Raphtalia's shoulder as she and Maple turned to face their guest.
The group that Fohl called out was not the only group to attack the village. It was quite a scare seeing the group of shadows pop out of no where and try to take her head, even more so to see Sadeena freeze the poor bastard responsible and drag him off. Syrup properly followed up, whipping over several of his seeds and lodging them into the skin of the opposing Shadows grafting parasitic paralysis type plants onto their bodies effectively rendering them immobile.
"We didn't think this through. Can they tell us anything if they can't move their jaws?" Maple asked as she poked one of the men's faces with her finger.
"We'll call over the trader, he has ways of making people talk." Raphtalia stated as she cracked her fingers. "For now it seems that we have to focus on rescuing Fohl."
Sadeena used Fohl for the rest of the day as a outlet for her stress while Tanya focused on contacting Kuro.
Raluva took a coin's worth of flesh between two talons and squeezed, not for the first time for the night, and confirmed that he wasn't dreaming when he felt the pain.
"Escaping from reality is not a good way of resolving your problems mister." Kuro stated as she continued to rifle through the Shukaku's belongings.
"No one wants to hear that from you you little gremlin!" Raluva snapped glaring angrily at the people who kept looking through his things.
"What are we looking for again?" Otto looked curious.
"Lots of things, anything that can tell me where we can find the hammer, the dungeon or dirt on Makina that we can use to dismantle this broken government or we can use to turn the Oracle against them." Kuro stated her vision that looks at the history behind objects was on since she broke into this place but she thus far couldn't find anything that would be useful to her.
"I'm not letting you dismantle my homeland you little monster." Raluva stated bluntly.
"We're not going to destroy it we're gonna save it." Kuro replied matter of factly.
"And how is that?" Raluva asked with blatant suspicion.
"We know where the legitimate empress is." Kuro stated smirking with her nose pointed high.
"The what?" It occurred to Kuro that based on the water dragon's story the last legitimate ruler of the country was a male. No matter, Kuro simply whipped out the Crystal Ball sword and projected a image she had taken while still at Cal Mira of everyone and their parties and subsequently zoomed in on Raphtalia's face.
"Does she look familiar?" Raluva stared at the image Kuro had produced and proceeded to lean over progressively further and further trying to get a closer look until he flat out collapse his face onto the floor. "Ladies and gentlemen we have a wiener!" Kuro half shouted gleefully and with a touch of sarcasm.
Raluva scrambled to his feet using his desk to support himself and glared maddened at Kuro. "How do you know the Prince's Daughter!?"
"Lemme tell you a little bit about the prince and his family after they left your... fine little country." Kuro's tone implied she thought it was anything but. "Firstly he moved to a sleepy little village in Melromarc, maybe he wanted to get as far away from here as possible, maybe Siltvelt didn't know what to do with him and his family so they shoved him off on Melromarc, doesn't matter. Few month's ago the waves became a thing and the prince and his wife were both killed, then on top of losing both her parents Raphtalia, your new empress, was caught by slavers. Before she got far the fat bastard responsible was caught and killed by my fellow hero the Shield Hero."
"The Shield Hero?" Raluva asked and Kuro pointed out Maple in the picture, Raluva gave a look of confusion and instead indicated Elena who was standing behind Maple at the time of taking of the photo.
"The only thing this joke is missing is Tanya shooting the ceiling again." Kuro replied deeply amused where Tanya would be violent and with a itchy trigger finger.
"Joke?" Raluva didn't understand the pun going on here.
"The Shield Hero is this girl who looks like she's thirteen years old but is actually fifteen. If you wanna give me some gripes about the weapons not picking small little girls to wield them..." Kuro gestured with her swords, and had them change forms several times. "I can fire off some skills if you like, sadly unlike the others this weapon is not very-!" Suddenly Kuro received another shock from her weapon. "It's the little things like this that proves my point."
Raluva sat down cross legged as he rubbed his temples trying to fend off the migraine he was feeling and by all accounts had failed spectacularly before he breathed out a sigh and looked straight at Kuro.
"There are a variety of situations that need attention. If the empress is to set foot on Q'Ten Lo's soil then we'll need to deal with the barrier around the country. We can disable part of it if we can take control over the nearest Sera Lumina." Raluva had a resigned look on his face.
"Sera Lumina?" Kuro looked to Atla who shrugged her shoulders in confusion. "The sacred trees of Q'Ten Lo, together the seven of them project a field around the country that protects it from intrusion and increases the rate by which we level up."
"Sounds like the Bonus field from Cal Mira." Atla stated to wit Kuro nodded her head. "If they truly do call themselves specialists in taking down heroes then dealing with the portal skill is a absolute must, which is the reason why we need to look after this tree." Kuro stated and Atla nodded in agreement.
"Taking the tree will not be easy. I don't know how powerful you heroes are but there are weapons designed to end you, and they will be guarding the tree." Raluva warned with a glare. Kuro's smile was all teeth and malice.
"If I don't give the mentally disabled a handicap then it would only be bullying the weak." Kuro took the members of her party to the top of the building closest to the enemy barricade around the tree that she could without getting the guards all up in arms against them.
When the anti-hero weapons are deployed Kuro won't be able to use her skills anymore. So before they deploy it, she will so utterly wreck them that there won't be anything left for them to fight back with.
"Thousand Swords!" Kuro produced the one thousand swords as usual. Different though was the thing that she had them transform into, for the usual magnetic iron blades or the length of red hot plasma that she made when she decided that a rail gun wasn't enough weren't here. No this was another original creation.
"Change Blade: Gravity Tungsten Great Sword." Gravity magic was about repulsion and attraction. For these blades Kuro equipped two gravity magics, the first being attraction multiplying the force by which they hit the target by augmenting their weight before she drops them out of the air. The second magic is repulsion, not just making objects lighter but also pushing them away with great force if necessary. Kuro used her legendary sword and the magics of the gods to hurl thousand bombs at the enemy garrison, she would've kept some in reserve but as it turns out they were some how applying their countries legendary blacksmith techniques to the building, forging rebar by hand and shaping the stone with their hammers. It took all three thousand of the matter repulsing super heavy blades before the building had been completely annihilated without a spec remaining, the sacred tree that it was protecting the only thing that was left standing when all was said and done.
"...overkill?" Welt simply asked as if he was stating a fact.
"Overkill, under-kill. When you think about it it's so hard to find a even medium." Kuro gestured with her hands as if she was comparing the weight of two objects. "If I have the choice I'd rather over do something than risk under doing it. The first is a success and the other a failure." While Kuro was waxing poetically a pulse of pink went through the air around them and all of their stats dropped dramatically.
"Ah. That would be the anti-hero weapon." Kuro has just been stripped of her heroic growth bonuses, she had no skills from her countless unlocks and the dual blades that have been at either side up until this point were now reduced to the mere base form of the legendary sword. From the roof top Kuro could see the people from the government gathering, they saw her destroy the fortress, they had the anti hero hammer in hand made with pink stone that use to hold the troubled and ill defenders of this world.
Kuro should be no stronger than a average level 80, she should just be a little girl, she should be up against thrice her parties numbers, due to the effects of her legendary sword she can't even pick up a different weapon and fight them with it, and yet catching sight of the creature looking at them from the roof and they felt the feeling that they had locked eyes with an apex predator.
"Greetings brave and foolish soldiers of Q'Ten Lo!" Kuro shouted gesturing widely to the area that she herself had scorned of modern civilisation. "Welcome to my arena!"
"One of the Implement's wielders!" The large bear of a man who was carrying around a hammer didn't look to pleased by this development.
"Right now my legendary sword can't even butter my toast I'm afraid." The various soldiers could feel the magic in the air surging. Dragon's Pulse. "Right now I'm just a world class forger." Weapons all suddenly appeared in the hands of everyone in Kuro's party. "Luckily shoving divine magic into whatever random swords suit my fancy is a lot cheaper than trying to make noble phantasms!" With that the group went on the offensive, Kuro had been conducting experiments with the divine magics anyway and now was the perfect time to test it out: which divine magic makes the best implement of murder?
"Welt." There were many ways to manipulate gravity for offensive purposes, for instance you can make a weapon lighter so that it's easy to swing, or heavier so that it hits with more force. You can apply the power of repulsion to rip your enemies apart after you strike them, or attraction to draw them to you and crush them into meat paste. "Get wrecked!" Kuro created the most brutal chopper you could possibly imagine for Welt to wield. When he swings the blade it is as light as air, but when he strikes his enemies the contact with flesh causes the blade to increase it's weight to ten thousand tonnes, ripping through one of the enemies Kuro concluded that the name she coined for it 'Ten Thousand Tons of Air' or the 1 Man-Tonne no kūki had been appropriate.
"Berkia!" Time was one of the most vicious of mistresses, but it was also the one with the most direct correlation to stats, speed was after all a matter of how fast you move in comparison to everything else. But that was not even the most vicious application, for time also perpetuates rot, or it can be used to heal the most grievous of injuries, while wielding the rapier Immortal Rotting Blade or 'Fumetsu No kaiten Ha' you are effectively immortal, no wound lasts longer than a moment, time cannot touch you, and you move as swiftly as the wind. Berkia left a hundred holes everywhere he went and no one even knew she was there. "Farrie!" Metamorphosis was the most vicious of the magics when applied to combat. When your flesh is cut by organic warping magic it will stay cut. Healing magic? What foolishness are you talking about, after having your flesh warped by that thing then that is the proper form of your body, the blood spraying out of your chest or the bloody stump where your arm use to be aren't injuries they're new features courtesy of divine magics, a fact that the person Farrie had just cut down with the Never Healing Blade or 'Burēdo o iyasu koto wa arimasen' was now coming to terms with. "Tersia!" But if you want raw destructive power then you go with space magic, increasing distance, decreasing distance, warping the very space itself into a all severing weapon, ripping apart and crushing, if you want to annihilate everything in your path then the All Severing Space or the 'Subete no setsudan supēsu' is just the butcher's knife for the job. Course none of this would be possible without creation binding her magic and skills to inorganic materials.
"You're enjoying this aren't you?" Atla asked watching the members of their party rampaging through the town and destroying everything in sight. "I would be down there with them too if it wasn't for a certain stupid sword always cranking up my crafting bonuses and getting all it's transformations locked out." Byakuya responded to Kuro's sarcasm with another jolt of electricity. "Thank you for making my point for me."
'The Hero could've avoided this situation entirely.' The sword bluntly informed Kuro but the latter wasn't following.
"And How's that?" Byakuya brought up the list of weapons Kuro had already unlocked and selected the 'Sitera Destiny stone hammer sword.' Kuro remembered that now Takt had one too! Now that she thought about it he would've had to originally go to Q'Ten Lo to get the hammer in the first place now wouldn't he? "Well... Drat." So Kuro opted to look through the weapon and figure out how it worked.
Author's Note:
RonaldM40196867: Slow and painful deaths was an art form for them, unlike Nowadays when we aim to get it over with quick and painless. In my opinion if you think someone deserves to die so badly that you want to kill them they should suffer first. I think they have their place in society, a unfortunate one, but necessary. I want more plot and less filler.
Dakota Bruder: It depends on the reinforcement method. Proficiency for example tends to make a weapon look more used, that isn't to say worn out, but more along the lines of the reliability that 'this has been tried and tested in the field.' Rarity enhancements on the other hand makes them shinier looking, like they're made out of whatever metal you used to reinforce them. Enchantment tends to add whatever raw material you used to the design, like making the bucklers spiky from adding porcupine quills to them. As for the Cursed weapons their cursed symbols become progressively more intricate the higher level they get.
Nightshadegirl: Kinda yeah.