Chapter Two: Spirit Tortoise Familiar (Human Type)
I expected the next day to be just like the last one—we’d spend all day looking for the heroes, but we wouldn’t end up with anything tangible. But after we finished our breakfast at the castle and teleported back to the town we’d visited the day before, it was immediately obvious that we’d arrived right in the middle of something significant. The streets teemed with a chaotic mass of screaming people.
“Ahhhhhh!”
“Heeeeeelp!”
People rushed past us from all directions.
“What’s going on here?!”
“Mr. Naofumi!”
“Master!”
Raphtalia and Filo called out to me. They were pointing in the opposite direction that everyone was running.
Once, a long time before any of this stuff happened with the Spirit Tortoise, we’d been forced to face the giant reanimated corpse of a Dragon Zombie in battle. The monster was huge, but it wasn’t anywhere near the imposing size of the Spirit Tortoise. So the tortoise was the largest opponent we’d ever faced. But the giant black shadow creature now bearing down on the town was pretty damn close.
I had to squint to make out the details as the beast moved closer to the town.
Spirit Tortoise familiar (amalgamated parasite type) Gulp. It was one of the Spirit Tortoise’s servant creatures.
What did amalgamated parasite type mean?
The monster stood about eight meters tall—an imposing figure. Judging from the way it looked, it must have been a giant reptile of some kind— something like the dragons you see in fantasy games. It had the muscular, scaled body of a dragon, but the head of a lion, and scythe-like arms that reminded me of a praying mantis.
And it was heading straight for us.
Chimera—that was the word for it. A traditional chimera had the body of a lion with the head of a goat and a dragon stuck onto it. I’d fought one or two before, and those chimeras had snakes for tails.
But this new monster was different. It had the body of a dragon, the head of a lion, and the scythe-like arms of a praying mantis. As it approached, I saw that it had another head—the head of dragon—and that a giant tortoise-like shell covered its back. That shell had been the only consistent characteristic that the various servants of the Spirit Tortoise shared. But what the hell was it?
Just a second now . . . The monster seemed to be dragging something heavy behind it. I tried to make it out, but it was still too far away.
“We’re stopping that thing, now!”
“Yes!”
“Let’s go!”
Raphtalia and Filo shouted their agreement, and we took off running straight for the monster. Filo transformed into the filolial queen form and led the charge.
“Be careful!”
“I will!”
Between Filo, Raphtalia, and I, Filo was by far the fastest on her feet. She also had the strongest attacks. I put my life in her hands, but she wasn’t the most cautious person. She was rushing straight for the mysterious monster. We didn’t even know what sort of attacks it would use against us.
But she was on the beast in a flash, and before I could even blink, she had reared back and delivered a crushing kick to the monster’s dragon-like head. The moment her claws connected with the beast, a huge spray of blood burst from the head. It was torn to bloody ribbons that went flying from the creature’s body.
“Ew! Master! This thing is rotten!”
The Spirit Tortoise could infect dead bodies and use their abilities, which meant . . . it must have been controlling this corpse. We were facing a Chimera Zombie.
“But, um . . . Something’s weird about it!”
“What is it?”
Filo cocked her head to the side in thought, sidestepping a strike from the monster’s scythe-like arms. It was a good strike. The monster was fast on its feet.
“Air Strike Shield!”
I followed the movement of its arms and deployed a magic shield just at the point where the arms were weakest. The joint of the scythe slammed against the Air Strike Shield with a clang, and soft chunks of flesh flew into their air where the bone tore from the arm. The scythe fell to the ground with a loud slam.
“Ew.”
Raphtalia clapped her hands over her mouth. She looked sick.
I couldn’t blame her. It was a really disgusting sight.
“Oh, hey! I got it! Master!” Filo shouted, turning to face me.
“This little guy isn’t rotten! He’s all patched together!”
“What?”
As if it were trying to put my confusion to rest, string-like tendons appeared from the fallen scythe and head. With a crunching sound, the tendons stretched out to the body they’d been torn from, pulled themselves back up, and reattached themselves to the creature.
What the hell was going on?
“This monster . . . I feel like it’s more than one thing! Like there’s more than one? I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep attacking it.”
“What do you mean by that?” Raphtalia shouted. She charged up for a powerful attack, swung her sword down hard, and cleaved the arm of the monster from its body.
At the moment, Raphtalia and Filo were both in the upper seventies, level-wise—so you can bet that their attacks carried considerable weight.
After participating in the class-up ceremony, the highest level limit was moved to 100. It was easy to see how much more powerful they’d become recently.
The arm hit the ground with a heavy thud and then quickly started to wiggle and writhe in the dirt. Raphtalia dashed forward and sliced through the string-like tendon.
I would have been thrilled if that were enough to stop the monster’s strange regeneration, but Filo’s outburst had me suspecting it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Um, you know? When you like, bam crash him, there’s, um . . . more!”
“Can you please do a better job explaining yourself?!”
Filo was unbelievably bad at explaining things to humans. When her friend Melty wasn’t around to translate Filo’s ramblings, it was nearly impossible to make heads or tails of the things she said.
Any attempt to parse Filo’s intentions from her mishmash of words required enormous stores of understanding, trust, and energy.
“Mr . . . Mr. Naofumi!” Raphtalia shouted, pointing at the severed arm.
I was confused for a second, but then it all became clear. The arm wiggled and twitched, and then a tangled crowd of Spirit Tortoise familiars (bat type) burst from the severed end of it.
Damn! Any attempt that we made to cut this monster down to size only resulted in making more and more of the familiars?! The monster’s name suddenly made perfect sense. It was a parasite amalgamation because the monsters had infected a giant corpse and were controlling it, even as future monsters festered inside!
A week had passed since we defeated the Spirit Tortoise.
The original, dragon-like monster might have died during the Spirit Tortoise’s original rampage, but would the whole corpse have rotted through in a week? If the temperature and all the conditions were right, then it was possible. But that didn’t explain where it would have accrued these other body parts.
It had the head of a lion. Was that part one of the Spirit Tortoise’s familiars too?
“Filo, Raphtalia. If we aren’t careful with the way we approach this, we’re just going to end up with more enemies to fight. But that doesn’t mean we are totally helpless.” I had a hunch that a powerful fire-based attack would be effective against this sort of monster. To put that in modern terms, maybe a bomb or a missile would do the trick.
But I wasn’t in Japan. The closest we could get in this world would be some kind of magic. There was ceremonial magic—powerful spells that had to be cast by groups of people all working together.
If we couldn’t attack it with powerful magic, then we’d have to tear the thing apart and focus on killing each and every monster that emerged. That sounded nearly impossible to me. There was probably some sort of core that we could attack. If we could hit it there, then it might self-destruct.
Yes—that was our best option. We had to go after whatever looked like its weak point.
“Focus your attacks on that moving part there. Where it looks like a lion.”
“Understood,” Raphtalia said and began to focus her magic power into her sword.
“Got it!” Filo shouted, crossing her arms in front of her and preparing to use her special move.
Both of them had mastered a couple of very powerful attacks, and I could really depend on them when push came to shove. As for myself . . . what was I supposed to do?
“Shooting Star Shield!”
I used a skill that formed a protective force field with myself at the center. It was large enough to protect Raphtalia and Filo as well.
That was the first step. I looked around quickly to make sure the townspeople had evacuated the area. They had.
The skies were filling with clouds of furiously flapping Spirit Tortoise familiars (bat types), but we couldn’t do anything about them until we dealt with the enormous monster before us.
That settled it—we had to take down the big guy. But how?
We slowly approached the monster, keeping our eye on all the enemies, and made sure that we got within range of my skills.
“Mr. Naofumi. I’m ready.”
“Me too!”
“Right! Air Strike Shield! Second Shield!”
I used my shield’s skills to produce two magical shields in the air—one at the monster’s torso, one at its feet—to make it hard for the monster to maneuver around the battlefield. I had the ability to make one last shield if I needed to, but I decided to wait and see how the monster reacted.
“Gahhhhhh!” The monster slammed into a shield with its torso and let out a pained cry before it tottered back slowly, thrown off balance.
“Now!”
“Right! Ying-Yang Sword!”
“Spiral Strike!”
Raphtalia and Filo unleashed their attacks on the monster’s restrained lion head. After the strike of Raphtalia’s sword, the beast’s head was nearly torn free of its neck. Filo’s follow-up attack sent the head flying with a spray of blood.
The monster lurched and swayed, its giant body suddenly unstable on its feet.
“Yeah!”
If that had knocked the massive thing down, that would be enough. Tons of bat-type familiars would come pouring out of the corpse, but we’d just cross that bridge when we got to it.
At the exact moment my heart leapt at victory, I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “I truly hate to bear this news, but the monster still stands. See for yourself.”
Whoever was behind me pointed to the object the Spirit Tortoise familiar was dragging.
“That is where it replenishes itself. Watch.”
Just like the voice said, to replenish the missing head, the back portion of the monster twitched, and then a giant eyeball grew out of its body.
Gross.
“That thing in the back is not really the monster’s true form. It is Legion . . . It infects whole groups of monsters and amalgamates them into one beast. If it runs out of something it needs, it simply takes it from somewhere else. To defeat it, you must use a more powerful attack.”
I was still using Shooting Star Shield. It was a powerful defensive spell that would block everything, except my own party members, from passing through it. So there was a problem. How could someone be standing behind me telling me what to do?
Nothing could pass through the force field, so that meant that whoever it was must have materialized inside of it. I quickly turned around to see what was going on.
“You!?”
A mysterious woman was standing behind me. I’d seen her before. Once, just before the Spirit Tortoise started to terrorize the countryside, I’d seen this woman in the castle courtyard when I was standing there alone.
She had shiny red hair tied into a chignon and sharp Chinese-looking eyes. She looked like she could eat another human without batting an eye. Despite having grown accustomed to beautiful women like Raphtalia, this woman’s face was so stunning it was noteworthy.
A strange air of innocence and charm hung unmistakably about her. Anyone would notice it. She wore a heavy robe that completely concealed her body from the neck down—a very mysterious woman, indeed.
She looked like she would instinctively speak in a whisper
Like the queen and Bitch, her skin was healthy and bright, full of hot blood—she looked vivacious, and also like she would have no qualms with using people to get what she wanted. Yes, she gave off the distinct impression of power. And she was standing right behind me.
“Now is not the time for discussion. We must first defeat the foes that stand in our way. I will restrain the monsters, while you finish them off,” she whispered softly. Then she stretched out her hand toward the monster and glared at it.
The beast completely stopped moving.
What kind of magic was that?
“Whoa . . . Um . . . Hurry! Now’s our chance!”
“Understood!”
“Filo! Use a magic spell—the strongest one you know!”
“Okay!”
Filo began to chant the spell’s incantation, and Raphtalia prepared to use Ying-Yang Sword again. They approached the newly immobile monster and unleashed their attacks with remarkable speed.
The monster was slashed to shreds. The shreds fell to the ground and wriggled like snakes, but unlike last time, they didn’t turn into other familiars, and they didn’t reattach themselves to the main body. The mysterious woman must have been preventing it somehow.
“I’m gonna use that powerful spell that Mel-chan taught me!” Filo shouted, sounding impressed with herself. She had been spending a lot of time with Melty lately. She said they were studying.
“Filo, the source of all power commands you. Hear the truth I speak, and destroy them with the angry sky’s fierce tornado!”
“Drifa Tornado!”
So she could use the Drifa class of spells now. Impressive.
I’d figured that Raphtalia would learn to use those spells first, but I guess Filo had managed to beat her to it. Although, come to think of it, Filo had learned to use the Zweite class without having to consult a magic book. I guess she was pretty talented in that area.
The sky filled with roiling clouds, and they spiraled together to form a massive tornado directly over the monster. The howling funnel of wind slowly touched down, sending all the houses in the area soaring through the air.
The debris caught up in the swirling wind ripped and tore at the monster’s flesh. Soon, violent spurts of blood filled the tornado and were carried up into the sky, a red pillar of blood in the wind.
But when the wind subsided, the monster still stood, and the bulk of its mass was still holding together.
“Whew! This is one tough monster, master!”
“Damn. I guess I don’t have a choice then.”
I looked back to see if the woman understood what I was saying, then I slowly stepped forward. I only had one option for a powerful attack that worked over an area. It was my last resort, a special shield that I tried to avoid using as much as possible.
“Raphtalia, Filo, you should get back.”
“You’re not going to . . . Are you sure?”
“It’s too dangerous to let this thing be—I have to take care of it. If we had a group with us that could use ceremonial magic, I might have avoided this, but . . .”
“Please be careful.”
“I know. I won’t let the rage control me.”
We were talking about the Shield of Wrath, a dangerous weapon that ate away at my very heart as I used it. The last time I used the shield’s most powerful skill, I was so badly hurt that I nearly died, and when I was finally able to get out of bed, I discovered that all of my stats had fallen by two thirds due to a curse the shield had put on me. I had only recently recovered from the last time I used it, so you can see how I would want to avoid it as much as possible.
And yet faced with an enemy too powerful for Raphtalia and Filo to defeat on their own, I didn’t see any way around it. I tightened my grip on the shield and transformed it into the Shield of Wrath.
When I did, my field of vision dimmed considerably and I felt a long-slumbering rage and anger begin to stir in the depths of my heart. At the same time, I remembered Raphtalia telling me she believed in me. I remembered her saying that she knew I didn’t commit any of the crimes I was accused of. I felt a tender warmth at that recollection, and I used it to contain the howling rage that was beginning to surface.
The warmth was winning . . . for now.
I saw Filo out of the corner of my eye. Her legs and claws were engulfed in black flames. She shared a connection with the Shield of Wrath, and when the rage grew powerful, it affected her as well.
But thanks to Raphtalia and Filo, I’d learned to control my anger. They’d taught me to stay in control.
I took another step toward the monster. Then another. With each step, my feet felt like they were burning. Soon, I was very close to the beast. I turned to shoot an accusatory glare at the woman. She nodded and slowly lowered her hands.
As she did, the power she’d been using to stop the monster’s movement faded, and it lunged at me, swiping with its scythe arms. I raised an arm and easily blocked its attack with my shield. The moment the scythe connected with my shield, the shield erupted in tongues of black flame.
You see, the Shield of Wrath had a special counter-attack called Dark Curse Burning S—and the monster had just activated it by attacking me. The flames used my own internal rage for fuel, and they leapt from the shield to burn the whole area.
“ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!”
“Guruuugahhhhhhhhh!”
The dark flames from the Dark Curse Burning S enveloped and burned the monster.
Then I saw the monster’s skin buckle and bend, and a flapping flock of bat-type monsters came pouring forth out of the beast. They tumbled into each other in their desperate attempt to escape, but the dark flames found them. When they fell from the sky, they were clouds of ash.
Huff . . . Huff . . .
I waited until I was sure the enemy had fallen before changing my shield back to its original form.
“Oooooh! It kind of stings!” Filo shouted, shaking her hands and feet. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“Oh you’ll be fine. I’ll heal you later.”
“Okay.”
First things first—we had to see what we were dealing with. What had happened to the Spirit Tortoise familiar (parasite amalgamation type)?
Part of the corpse was clearly nothing more than ash. Raphtalia hesitantly poked it with the point of her sword.
“It certainly looks dead.”
“I hope you’re right.”
I really didn’t want to use the Shield of Wrath. But what choice did I have? I was the Shield Hero—I didn’t have any other way to go on the offense. So I was forced to rely on the only shield that offered me a way to attack. If there were any other way, I wouldn’t have done it.
“Thank you for restraining that thing. So? Who are you?”
“Mr. Naofumi. Might this be the person you mentioned before?”
“Yeah, the mystery woman that showed up before all this Spirit Tortoise stuff really got going.”
“Hm?” Filo chirped. She’d turned back into her human form and was sniffing at the woman.
The last time I’d met her, she appeared behind me speaking nonsense. She’d asked me to defeat her. What was that supposed to mean? She also referred to me in the strangest way, calling me “he who holds the holy weapon.” My shield even reacted to her presence. There were too many mysteries around this woman. When I turned to ask for an explanation, she vanished—like a ghost.
“Excellent job. You have saved many in this area from certain heartache. And yet . . .” She trailed off, her eyes on the western horizon. The last time I saw her, she’d gazed off to the east. There was only one way to make sense of that—she was looking towards the Spirit Tortoise. “You still haven’t defeated me. You who hold the holy weapon, you must defeat me soon. Already, I cannot fulfill my role, so you must defeat me quickly.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about? Who are you? Explain yourself!”
“He’s right. If you wish for Mr. Naofumi’s help, you first need to tell us who you are. How else will we be able to help you?”
The woman nodded silently after listening to Raphtalia and I.
“The last time I saw you, I was in a rush because there was so little time left to resist. But now I have the time necessary to properly explain.”
“Hey, master!”
Before the woman could start to explain herself, Filo came running over.
“Filo, be quiet for a minute.”
“But you know what? This lady—she’s not human. She’s not even a demi-human!”
“What?”
I didn’t know what to make of what Filo was saying, but I realized it soon enough.
“That’s correct. I . . . I am the Spirit Tortoise. To speak more categorically, I am a Spirit Tortoise familiar (human type).”
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