I spent the entire day reading.
Two hundred books, pulled from every shelf I could find, searching for anything that mentioned the Shield Hero. Most of them said nothing. A few came close and then wandered elsewhere.
Then I found one titled The Secret and the Unveiling of Truth.
It was the only book in the collection that addressed all four heroes directly.
I read it carefully.
Apparently I was essential to saving this world from destruction.
Hahaha.
Me. Saving the world. I don't care about anything anymore — which means this world chose its Shield Hero with genuinely terrible luck.
I also found something useful: magic. This world ran on it, and it branched in more directions than I'd expected. Fire, water, earth, wind, light, darkness — and secondary classifications like enhancement and healing. I filed it away.
The second morning, I was heading back toward the inn where I'd left Miura when I decided to walk for a while first.
Shield Hero. What a meaningless title.
I heard a commotion ahead.
I found a crowd gathered in the street, voices passing something between them like currency. I walked into the middle of it.
"What happened?"
Someone turned to me.
"It's shocking news. The Shield Hero assaulted the princess. I didn't expect him to be that kind of person."
I laughed.
They all looked at me.
"What's funny?"
"She's a princess," I said. "How exactly would he do that?"
A pause. Then the same man: "That's what we heard. From the princess herself."
I smiled and walked on.
So. They were already moving against me, and I'd been in this world for a few hours.
I made my way toward the inn — not rushing, just reading the situation as I moved. Knights and guards were positioned around the building. I understood immediately: they weren't here for anyone else.
I jumped to the building across the street and threaded through them without contact, then made my way toward the royal palace in different clothes.
The city was still buzzing with it as I walked.
They say someone assaulted the princess.
I laughed again. I couldn't help it. The absurdity of this world and the absurdity of my situation in it were briefly, darkly funny.
Fine. I'll burn this world down if I have to. I stopped caring about things a long time ago.
The palace gate.
I walked up to the guard directly.
"Move."
"Who are you?"
I looked at him with the expression of someone who finds the question offensive.
"I'm your superior, you idiot. The king sent me to report on trade matters."
He let me through.
Inside, the nobles were talking about nothing else. I passed through them without stopping. The topic followed me from room to room like smoke.
How unsurprising, I thought, that someone ends up falsely accused of this. I've known people who did it. I killed them.
I pushed open the throne room doors and walked in.
The king was there. The princess. The prince. The other three heroes standing in a row, having already been briefed, already having formed their conclusions.
"Hello," I said. "Having a meeting without me?"
They saw me and the room went rigid.
The princess pointed immediately.
"He tried to assault me. He tried to poison me."
I laughed.
"She's lying. I don't go for women like her."
No one believed me.
I looked at the princess more carefully.
Wait.
She's the princess.
The girl from the inn — she's actually royalty.
I genuinely hadn't known. I'd thought they were joking. Her father was contemptible in the specific way of a man with institutional power and no personal virtue — he reminded me of the judge. Two of the same thing in different costumes.
The princess was offended that I'd called her what I'd called her. I wasn't sorry. I was angry.
You accuse me of something I didn't do, and you want me to be careful with my words?
I looked at the king.
"What's your evidence? I wasn't in that inn. I didn't touch your food or your drinks — the ones she'd already poisoned for me. What's your explanation for that?"
Then I addressed the room:
"If none of you want me here, that's fine. I don't care. I want one thing: leave me alone."
The king said: "And if we don't?"
"Then I'll kill you."
His guards raised their weapons. He laughed.
"How?"
"Like this."
I threw a small blade across the room. It buried itself in the wall beside his head, close enough that he felt the air move.
He went pale.
"Kill him," he said.
I closed my eyes.
Slowed everything down.
Found my heartbeat. And in the current of blood beneath it — something else. A pressure, a warmth, a substance that moved like intention.
Mana.
I activated enhancement magic without an incantation.
It ignited in my veins — speed, strength, and the quiet internal voice that marks the moment before something is decided.
I drew the wire from my palms, thin as silk thread and harder than forged steel, and wrapped it around my hands. Then I ran fire through it. The strands became something between blade and flame — fine, white-hot, precise as thought.
The archers fired first.
One gesture. The wire split the sky above me and shredded every arrow mid-flight. Two strands looped around the throats of the archers nearest me and I dragged them forward — their wrists came apart in my hands and I threw them into the front rank before the bodies finished falling.
The swordsmen came in a second wave — ten without armor, moving fast.
I was faster.
I moved through them like water finding the lowest point — a pivot, a palm strike to the sternum, a turn that brought me clear of a blade, and I never stopped moving. I stripped a sword from one man's grip and used the angle to open another man's arm to the bone. The wire followed everything, burning where it touched, and the throne room floor began to change color.
The sorcerers called fire, water, light — three elements converging.
I let the wire answer.
A curtain of flame-wire intercepted the fire and turned it. A loop found a sorcerer's ankle and pulled him down mid-incantation. A thrown strand caught a leveled spear and redirected it into its owner's chest. I moved between the spells as they built and broke them before they could cohere, and anyone who came within reach found their arms separated from whatever they'd been holding.
I tore through thirty men.
When the last one fell I was standing in the center of what remained, breathing hard, the wire still tracing slow arcs around me in the air.
I looked at the king.
He had compressed himself against the far wall, small in a way that had nothing to do with his actual size.
"Is this your protection?" I said. "Is this the throne you claim?"
I laughed — a real laugh, cold and without warmth.
"Listen to me, all of you — every one of you calling yourself a fool in this room. I cleaned up this mess with my feet. If I'd wanted to, none of you would be breathing."
I looked at the other heroes directly.
"You told me — we're in a strange world, we should face it together. You remember that?" I raised my middle finger. "Go to hell."
I turned back to the king.
"Here's what's going to happen. Every week, one bag of gold. Genuine gold — if I find it's been diluted or faked, I will end your bloodline and your kingdom in the same night. Are we clear?"
The king said nothing. Frozen.
"Did the cat take your tongue?" I said. "Answer me."
The doors behind me crashed open.
Something enormous entered.
An axe the size of a doorframe.
I ducked in the last fraction of a second. The blade caught the air where my head had been and scraped across my shoulder — deep enough to matter, not deep enough to stop me.
Before I could recover, a kick hit my spine.
I went through the window.
Glass and stone rushed past me. The ground below.
I raised my hand as I fell, closed my fist, and cut the ceiling of the throne room loose from the palace. The wire found purchase and slowed me — I landed on my feet, unsteady, looking up.
I screamed at the open sky:
"Come down here."
A shape dropped from the window.
He landed on both feet. The impact raised a circle of dust around him.
He was enormous. The axe was larger than it had looked from above.
So he's the one who kicked me. This might actually be interesting.
The dust hadn't fully settled when he vanished.
I turned, tracking the shadow.
His fist appeared beside my face — no axe, just his hand.
Where's the axe?
I moved. Felt the air behind me.
Turned.
The axe was already above my head.
I brought the shield up. The impact rang through both my arms like a struck bell and drove me back two full steps. He converted my retreat into an attack — used my backward momentum as the setup for his next strike. The man was strong and he was thinking.
Good.
I jumped clear of a horizontal swing and found a fireball the size of a horse waiting above me.
I raised the shield, sent the wire upward, and cut it apart. The detonation threw me sideways anyway — I hit the ground on my back, ears ringing, vision doubled.
I got up.
He was already moving, the axe catching the light as it came around.
I stepped back. Hit the wall behind me.
There's the wall.
He swung.
The blade opened my stomach.
I went to one knee. Blood on the stone. The world pulling back from the edges of my sight.
Then — from somewhere with no location, no source:
Stand up. You have to fight.
I stood up.
My body was making a sound it hadn't made before. I ignored it.
I took out a cigarette. Lit it. Looked at him.
"I'll give you credit," I said. "That actually counted."
He smiled with the satisfaction of a man who thinks he's already won.
"Time to end this."
"Yes," I said. "You're right."
I snapped my fingers.
Seventeen fireballs materialized around the palace — large enough that their heat reached us from where we stood.
"You," I said. "Or me."
He came.
The axe rose and swung in a single fluid arc aimed at splitting me in half.
I stepped into it.
Not away — into it. I hit the flat of the blade with my palm at the exact angle that converted its momentum sideways, felt the handle torque out of his grip, and in the same motion took his jaw in my hand and drove his face into the ground.
I stood up.
Raised one finger.
Brought it down.
The fireballs fell like judgment — not scattered, but precise, one after another, turning that section of the palace into something that would need to be entirely rebuilt before anyone could call it a palace again.
I walked out through what was left of the gate.
Behind me: smoke, fire, rubble, and thirty-one men who would not be telling anyone I was weak.
End of Chapter 39