Chapter 28: If You Say I’m Inexperienced, Then Train Me
After regrouping with Raiga and returning to the village, I got chewed out hard.
“How could you go off and act as bait by yourself?!”
And—
“What were you planning to do about our promise?!”
As long as it was just accusations like that, I could handle it. But then—
“If you’d died, I...”
—he broke down in tears, and I didn’t know what to do.
At that point, all I could do was apologize. So I ended up hugging Raiga.
Then he tried to reach out and hug me in return, so I swatted his hand away.
He looked a bit disgruntled after he stopped crying, but—
“It’s fine if I’m the one doing it, but not if you are,”
—I said firmly to shut it down.
About half an hour later, once the sun had fully set, Karen-san and Rizel returned.
I had already heard they’d fought a fierce battle. That said, while Karen-san looked understandably worn out, Rizel seemed to have fully recovered her strength thanks to the rising moon.
For some reason, her clothes were half open, so I rushed over.
“What happened, Rizel?! Who did this to you?!”
Tears welling up in her eyes, she pointed at Raiga.
“Raiga forced me—!”
“Raiga... So you did break our promise...?”
“That’s not what happened!”
Raiga yelled in protest the moment I gave him a suspicious glare.
Watching this unfold, Karen-san chuckled softly.
“You and Raiga-sama really don’t get along well, do you?”
Well, I’ve come to understand through our journey that Raiga isn’t that kind of person.
She was just teasing.
The atmosphere softened into something warm and easygoing.
“Ahem...”
Myudy cleared her throat, clearly fed up.
She had wanted to talk as soon as she got back to the village, but I’d asked her to wait until the other two returned. She had been polite enough to do so.
Still, she looked very irritated.
The villagers, who had rushed in to throw a celebration upon seeing her return, shrank back and scattered under a single glare.
“Then, shall we move somewhere more appropriate?”
At my suggestion, Myudy nodded. Raiga agreed without complaint, and the other two, who didn’t seem to grasp the situation, followed along for now.
Everyone sat down on the sofas in the former village chief’s house.
Apparently, the chief’s home had always doubled as a meeting hall, so the largest room was naturally used for gatherings like this.
By the way, Rizel had changed clothes right away. It seemed she always carried spares, anticipating that her clothes might get torn.
“This is Raiga—the one you’ve been looking for. The ‘Hero.’”
“Oh, him? I thought you were the ‘Hero.’”
“I never said that. I’m the ‘Saint.’ That’s how it’s been presented.”
Ignoring Myudy’s suspicious look, I turned to introduce the others.
“This is Karen, a noble lady from Elgrand and the previous ‘Saint.’ And the one with dog ears is Rizel.”
“Hey, why am I the only one getting brushed off? Brushed off!”
With that, I began explaining everything that had happened since we arrived in this world.
That we were summoned from another world.
That I’d become a girl.
That Karen-san had lost her stigma.
Of course, I left out the things I didn’t want to talk about, but I figured I had shared most of the important information.
That brought us to the most recent incident with the ogres.
“Beings tainted by miasma evolve rapidly. You know what’s necessary for evolution, right?”
Myudy looked at me as if testing me.
…I’m not a science student, but as someone who went to high school on Earth, I at least knew a little.
“Stimulation… right?”
“Correct. Not bad—you’ve got a decent head on your shoulders. The greatest stimulus to a pack is an external threat.”
—Monsters driven mad by miasma have their aggression drastically amplified.
They engage in battle, and the experience they gain is transmitted through the miasma to the leader of the pack. All so they can become powerful subordinates of the ‘Demon Dragon.’
Apparently, the abnormal speed of evolution experienced by this village was due to that.
They had deliberately dispatched small numbers to Elna Village to be killed, accumulating experience that way.
But then, something disrupted their plan.
“Probably, they started sending extra forces to this village because they got rattled when the ‘Hero’ showed up. The Blood Ogre is the top tier of ogres—the pinnacle of their evolution. So now they’re aiming for a slow intellectual development, but then something came along that could wipe them out completely.”
“That actually makes sense, if you think about it. —But there’s one thing that doesn’t sit right with me.”
“What’s that?”
Myudy shrugged.
“How do you know all this?”
“…Hahaha!”
She laughed, clutching her stomach as if it were hilarious.
“Is something funny?”
“No, I just thought you’d be the kind of person to properly question things like this. I’m an ‘Hero’ hunter.”
“…Hunter!?”
At that word, the other three besides me tensed up.
“I think your meaning of ‘hunter’ is probably different. If she wanted to kill me, she wouldn’t have saved me from the ogre pack back there.”
“Right, that saves us time. My goal is to find the ‘Hero’ and teach them how to use their power. After searching for a year, I’ve come to understand the ecology of monsters affected by the miasma.”
“Why do you do that?”
Raiga asked, still cautious.
“Even if you call them ‘Heroes,’ until they grasp the knack of their power, they’re no different from ordinary people. Do you know Abel Bertrand?”
Raiga and I had never heard the name.
But Karen-san and Rizel did.
“I’ve heard he’s a human ‘Hero.’”
“If I’m correct, he defeated the ‘Machine Dragon’ that appeared in Legionia. It’s just a rumor though.”
“I was the one who trained him. When I first met him, he was a novice. But he had surprising talent.”
Ah, the other ‘Hero’ I heard about at the castle.
“So, now it’s our turn to be trained, huh?”
“Yeah. I heard you struggled against ogres, right?”
“Struggled…!”
Karen-san frowned at the dismissive tone.
Having witnessed the brutal fight, she looked dissatisfied.
Meanwhile—
“True enough… we did have a hard time against the Road Ogre. It’s no lie that I worry if we can really beat the ‘Demon Dragon.’”
Raiga seemed thoughtful.
“If you train us, can we get stronger?”
He asked.
I didn’t miss how tightly he clenched his fists.
“Well, that depends on you.”
“I want to get stronger too! Me too!”
“While we’re at it, I’ll give you some training.”
Surprisingly, she seemed quite caring.
Rizel’s offer was accepted as well.
“What about you? You’re the ‘Saint,’ right?”
All eyes turned to me.
I simply said,
“No thanks. I don’t need it.”
“I want to help too! I want to be of use to Raiga-sama…!”
“Hmph, reminds me of a girl who said something similar not long ago. Fine, I’ll teach you about magic.”
Karen-san offered without hesitation, quite unlike me.
Seeing her, Myudy said in a voice loud enough only for me,
“I don’t know who the real ‘Saint’ is anymore.”
I inwardly agreed.
I’m definitely not the ‘Saint.’
“Well then, show me what you’ve got. Today’s probably too late, so come at me one by one first thing in the morning.”
With that, the meeting was dismissed.
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