Okano The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 12

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7183-2122-9
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 12, 250 Seiten

Reihe: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

After untangling themselves (well, mostly) from the series of complicated messes that ambushed them in the royal capital, Rentt and Lorraine finally head back to Maalt with Grand Guildmaster Jean Seebeck, the man Wolf asked them to retrieve.

Meanwhile, in Maalt, Rina has been training with Alize under Isaac's guidance. Yet even with her newfound vampiric abilities, she remains an Iron-class adventurer, and being surrounded by so many capable individuals begins to erode her self-confidence. Thankfully, there's a tried and tested cure for that: adventure!

While Rentt journeys back to Maalt, apprehensive of the trials that await him there, his junior in all things adventuring and vampiric faces a trial of her own. The curtain rises on volume 12!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Okano, Yu

Weitere Mitwirkende

Jaian

Li, Jason

Leseproben

Chapter 1: An Increase in Saints and the Return to Maalt

Lorraine and I weren’t particularly surprised by Elza’s proclamation. After all, divinity was pretty much the only factor that Lorraine, Elza, Lillian, and I had in common.

The issue, however, was how we should respond. Not that it was much of an issue, really—possessing divinity didn’t have to be any kind of big secret. We could just be straight with her.

Divinity wielders were rare, of course, and hardly the kind of people you bumped into on a regular basis when strolling through a city’s streets. Still, the fact that a bronze-piece-a-dozen low-rank adventurer like me actually had the blessing of divinity—even if it was extremely weak—was proof enough that it was well within the realm of possibility for a real nobody to possess it.

So why had I purposefully been evasive with Elza, you ask? Well, that was because I was afraid I’d be exposed as a monster.

I couldn’t ignore the very real chance that I would be found out, no matter how small that chance might be. There was also the danger that someone would assume I could hear Pochi talk because we were monsters—Sister Mel had thought that he was one, after all. But since that didn’t seem to be the case, being honest probably wouldn’t be an issue.

Speaking as an adventurer, though, I still wanted to keep my divinity under wraps as much as possible. It was a power that could become my secret trump card one day—but on the other hand, it wasn’t as if there weren’t already a decent number of people in Maalt who knew. I mean, had been the one to tell those people to begin with, since I’d figured at the time that my dregs of divinity would never rise to that level. But my hypocrisy aside...

“Yeah, I have divinity,” I said. “A long time ago I repaired an abandoned shrine near my hometown, and the divine spirit that dwelled within it blessed me—probably on a whim. It’s not really anything to boast about.”

My divinity grown to the point where I could wield it in combat, but I figured there was no particular need to give out that information.

“Very interesting,” Elza said. “Lillian and I received ours from Pochi. Although I imagine you’d already guessed that, considering that the same thing just happened to Mel.”

She didn’t seem especially surprised that I possessed divinity—a reaction I owed to divinity’s general reputation. It wasn’t as though having it was bad in any way.

Being found out as a monster, however, would be a totally different story—albeit a very story that ended in a swift execution.

“My thoughts go in that direction, yeah...” I said. “But why did you and Lillian receive yours as children and Mel only a short time ago? Is divinity really something that can just be handed out so freely?”

Lorraine and I had received our own divinity on a whim too, but we could save my concerns about that for another time. Since it looked as though Pochi had blessed Mel because Elza had requested it, that would imply that Elza was able to bestow divinity unto anybody she pleased—and that was a big deal. I, at least, had never heard of anything like that happening before.

My conjecture, however, was soon overturned.

“No, Pochi had been planning to bless Mel all along,” Elza explained. “Lillian and I were actually secondary, or something like that. However, after Pochi blessed us and we started to understand him, he told us to protect Mel. We didn’t understand what he meant by that at the time, but once Lillian and I started receiving invitation after invitation from various religious organizations, the meaning quickly became clear. Did the same not happen to you, Rentt?”

“No, not really,” I replied. “I was probably spared that because of where I lived.”

In short, unlike monsters, who were discriminated against and hunted down, divinity wielders were coveted by religious organizations in general. Any unaffiliated wielders would be hounded by recruiters as a result. In my case, my divinity was awfully weak, and while I’d had no problem talking about it, the subject only ever came up in certain situations, like when someone asked me what I was doing when I purified water. The knowledge that I could use it just hadn’t really spread around.

Of course, there was also the undeniable and sad truth—since I’d been a solo adventurer at the time, I just hadn’t had any friends to talk to anyway...

Normally, however, if it came out that you could use divinity, you’d experience exactly what Elza and Lillian had gone through.

Another major reason that hadn’t happened to me was probably because Maalt wasn’t a particularly active hub for religious groups. If you squinted, you could maybe say that the Church of the Eastern Sky was of active there, but that was about it. Because of Maalt’s location out on the frontier and various other factors, the people there cared more about improving their own capabilities than they did about religion.

But here in the royal capital, things were different. The Church of Lobelia being very in-your-face was one example of just how different it was, but even the Church of the Eastern Sky here was far more pushy than it was out in Maalt.

If word got out that you were a divinity wielder, you’d practically be drowning in overzealous recruiters.

“There was quite a big fuss around Lillian and me,” Elza said. “But since we were here at this Church of the Eastern Sky orphanage, the director at the time protected us...for a while. Eventually, that became difficult, and the director advised us to decide the shape of our own faith by picking an organization to join. After that, Lillian and I both joined the Church of the Eastern Sky.”

If they had become adventurers, they would have been able to travel the world and leave such bothersome complications behind. But I figured that both Elza and Lillian were the type to cherish the connections they had made, such as the one they had to this orphanage. Cutting ties and leaving it behind had probably been impossible for them—and maybe the orphanage director had recognized that too. Since Pochi had asked them to protect Mel, they couldn’t have gone far from the orphanage anyway.

Given that, joining the ranks of the Church of the Eastern Sky had likely been their best option. Its teachings were moderate and gentle, so it wasn’t a bad choice in that sense either.

Not to imply that organizations such as the Church of Lobelia were bad or anything—it was just that they had a lot of members who were ambitious about climbing the ladder or felt quite strongly that they had a duty to spread the teachings of their religion.

That could be a little scary sometimes...

“We thought that the same would happen to Mel eventually,” Elza continued. “After all, she was originally intended to be the blessing’s main recipient. Pochi actually made several attempts after he blessed Lillian and I, but we stopped him for the reason I just explained: we were worried about the constant invitations that would come knocking at her door. Mel also said she wanted to become this orphanage’s director one day, so Lillian and I thought it best to hold off on it for a while—at least until we grew capable enough to protect both her and the orphanage. After some thought, Pochi eventually agreed with us.”

?????

“Pardon me if I’m prying too much, but why did Pochi want to bless Mel?” I asked. “The fact that he blessed you and Lillian with divinity first and then asked you to protect her seems to imply there was some awfully important motivation behind it, but...well, I guess that’s kind of what divinity is supposed to be, actually.”

Cases like Lorraine and I, where someone received divinity for no particularly special reason, weren’t exactly uncommon, but if you were to ask why gods and divine spirits blessed people with that kind of power, most would say that it was because those who were blessed had some kind of important role to fill on behalf of the gods or the world. If you looked at the various myths and legends that were still told to this day, you could find examples of stories where divinity wielders achieved some kind of great feat and had their names carved into history. Some of those accounts even featured the exact instructions that the gods had directly given to these wielders, laying out the duties they were supposed to fulfill. That was all in the distant past, of course, and it was difficult to say how many of those stories had actually happened, but the fact that they’d stuck around to be told today likely meant that they had at least a grain of truth buried within them.

Given all of that, it seemed reasonable to assume that Mel had some kind of role to carry out too. It didn’t seem like her case was similar to Lorraine and mine, where we were blessed because we performed an offhand good deed.

To begin with, if Pochi truly was a divine beast, then—while this might be rude of me to say—instead of a run-down orphanage like this he could be at any random church of his choosing, and they would more likely than not treat him like royalty.

Nevertheless, he had remained by Mel’s side. I figured it wasn’t that farfetched to suspect that there had to be a reason for that.

After a moment of thought, Elza...