“Shield Prison!” I protected the two girls with a cage of shields.
“Powder Snow!” Raphtalia shouted. She unleashed a skill that forcibly extracted the magic of an opponent on the Gauntlets Hero. He grunted as it took effect.
“You won’t take us alive! Tornado Axe X!” the girl with the axe shouted. She spun around like a tornado as she closed in to protect the Gauntlets Hero from Raphtalia. “Bedrock Breaker X!” With a heavy thunk, the axe smashed out a crater and an earthquake rippled out. Raphtalia leapt backward to avoid the attack. Then the Axe Hero grabbed the Gauntlets Hero and fell back. She was working to save her ally.
Even as that happened, Ren was incanting magic.
“Liberation Magic Enchant!” he shouted, gathering the residue from Melty’s cooperation magic into his sword. “Lightning Sword!” Then he unleashed it. Lightning crackled around his blade. Ren glared the enemy down. He looked like a brave and powerful hero. He was a flashy swordsman out of his own adolescent dreams. Looking at him in action, I could tell he wanted to graduate from that aspect of his personality. He had things he was good at and things I relied on him for.
“Lightning . . . Hundred Swords X!” Ren raised his sword and countless blades wreathed in lightning rained down around him. The Piensa forces were using those same cloths to deal with the rain of swords. The Axe Hero was just smashing them away. But she couldn’t handle them all and was bleeding from numerous places.
“The Sword Hero . . . is so hard to fight!” the Axe Hero said through gritted teeth. She was glaring at Ren.
“Naofumi, about those two,” Ren said.
“Yeah. Those are vassal weapons, aren’t they?” I said.
“Looks like it,” Ren said with a nod. “They’ve handled some of the attacks I launched as though they’ve seen them before.”
“That goes both ways,” the Axe Hero said. She was listening in on our conversation. “You have a Gauntlets Hero among your allies.”
“And he’s better than your guy,” I said. I’d only taken a few blows from the guy, but it felt like he didn’t have any life force training. I’d been able to damage him by using a reverse of the defense- ignoring or defense-rating attacks and sending it back to him. Fohl would have discharged that and let it flow away. He was definitely better in that regard. The weight of the weapons might be a factor too, but that could be down to a difference in support magic.
“I’m not going to let you write him off that easily,” the Axe Hero said, “but I have to admit . . . you’re strong.”
“Has your holy weapon hero been taken hostage too?” I asked directly. Her reply was silence, just like the first two. When she eventually spoke, it was just the normal bluster again.
“For the sake of our world, and the sake of our hero, we can’t lose here,” she said. I decided to try something. It couldn’t hurt.
“Can you tell us the power-up method for the axe?” I asked. It was a vassal weapon from a different world, but maybe we could use the seven star weapon axe power-up method to enhance Ren. That was something that the shield couldn’t do.
“Naofumi, that was too blunt,” Ren said.
“It’s muscle enhancement,” the girl replied. “The details are complicated. It would take time to explain.” That was interesting. Any enemy we asked in the future would have shot that down at once. In that respect, I much preferred this time period with its serious heroes who fought with a sense of duty. “I’ll tell you what I can—”
“Enough wasting time with chatter!” the Piensa leader cut in, earning a glare from me. She had just been about to spill the beans! “Retreat! I’m not happy with this result, but we’ve managed to cause some injuries. Now we just need to wait for them to weaken and then come back. The only way to heal those wounds is to come to Piensa. I hope you make the right decision.” The countless spears returned to the leader’s hands while the Axe Hero lifted the Gauntlet’s Hero onto her back and rushed away as well. Then they used the same kind of cloth as the first squad to vanish completely.
A bunch of new heroes had shown up as reinforcements, after all. They had no idea what else might happen. A tactical retreat made sense for them, especially if (they thought) they’d caused incurable wounds.
“They backed off,” I said. “That’s pretty different from all the brain-dead resurrected and religious cults we’ve been fighting up until now.” They were heroes and soldiers thinking about winning the war, not the battle. Their reactions were also totally different from when I dropped that monster train on them during our prior conflict. Fighting at this more personal level, they would be a force to be reckoned with. They had these strange weapons too. They probably hadn’t used the swords because they were scared of Ren copying them. Even if they had been rigged to self-destruct if they fell into enemy hands, all Ren had to do was grab one during the fighting, copy it, and everything could turn in our favor.
“We survived, but they’ve deployed some annoying new faces,” Melty bemoaned.
“Looks like the ones who assume the name of god are pretty worried about us,” I commented. “They’ve taken the heroes from other worlds hostage to make their vassals fight us.” I explained everything we had learned while I healed Ren and the others.
“An efficient way to fight an opponent who possesses the ability to kill them,” Melty replied. “Really lowers the risk to their eternal stinking lives.”
“They use the same dirty tactics in the future,” I said. It felt like we were dealing with the same shit back there. After we killed one of them, maybe they had switched their approach to prevent any more deaths. It sounded plausible. They had also seemed to enjoy a big theatrical performance, so it did feel a bit different.
“It seems Piensa—and those behind them—want to cause incurable wounds to us and use that as leverage to take things in their desired direction,” Melty said.
“Yeah. Either kill us outright or threaten us into working for them,” I replied.
“For that to work, though, their incurable weapons have to actually be functioning,” Melty pointed out.
“Right. I’m sure they have some backup plans if they discover the weapons aren’t working,” I said. I could heal the wounds, which was definitely something, but they would still prove deadly to almost anyone else inflicted with them.
“If we let the other nations know that Piensa has joined forces with the ones who assume the name of god, we might be able to form our own alliance, but that wouldn’t be easy,” Melty pondered. She made the same expression Trash did when thinking about a tricky operation.
“I’m sure some of them would sign up for it, but more of them would be too scared of the ones pulling the strings and choose to surrender rather than fight,” Raphtalia concluded. It didn’t sound like an effective solution. We also didn’t want to have to answer questions about why my allies and I—the only ones who could actually kill this terrible evil Piensa had shacked up with—were avoiding direct conflict. Piensa might make a big thing about it or they might not. We needed to work with Mamoru to narrow down our strategy a little more.
One thing we had definitely learned was that we’d moved beyond the point where extracting the Bow Hero would solve this problem.