“Haa… Huu…”
A pain-filled sigh escapes through clenched teeth. I finally manage to raise my crouched body, letting go of the hilt of the longsword embedded in the ground.
My head was foggy. Was it due to the exhaustion from overusing my spiritual power? Or perhaps because of the arrow that had precisely pierced through the gaps of my torn armor?
“Ugh, kuuh…!”
Gritting my teeth, I pulled out the arrow lodged in my left arm. The sharp arrowhead scraped against bone and tore through muscle as it came out along with a stream of blood.
…Ha, this really hurts like hell.
I gnashed my teeth as I threw the extracted arrow to the ground.
I’ve become somewhat accustomed to pain through my life as an adventurer and fugitive… but even if you get used to it, it doesn’t mean you become numb to it.
Getting accustomed to pain simply means being able to endure it and continue fighting. Being cut, stabbed, and burned still hurt terribly.
Brunhilde’s second engraving trait, <Ice Heart>, does have the ability to dull pain sensations… but it was meaningless since I couldn’t use it at all.
The technique to activate Ice Heart was dozens of times more challenging than using spiritual power, to the point where I’d fail nine out of ten attempts if I tried to activate it consciously.
During all this time on the run, I’ve only managed to properly activate it twice. Aside from those times, I had to endure all other injuries purely through my own willpower.
It’s a shitty situation.
Crack!
I lifted my foot and stomped down in anger, causing the half-dead body beneath me to cough and spurt out a gush of blood.
“Kuhak…”
What was his name again? Jason the ‘Intruder’, was it?
A patroller who ambushed me while I had briefly sent Friede to the village.
Now he lay sprawled with his legs severed and his heart pierced, but as an adventurer with a proper title, he was no ordinary opponent.
I’d say he was probably among the top ranks even among silver token adventurers.
If it weren’t for the antidote potion I had recently obtained, I might have been defeated by his first strike due to poison.
Moreover, despite being just a patroller, his swordsmanship even surpassed that of an average knight. I was barely able to subdue him only after my armor had been torn to shreds.
Are even guys like this coming after me now…? What’s next, will gold token adventurers or the royal knights be deployed?
It was a bleak situation.
Most of them are probably too busy blocking off the deep dungeons to have time to chase after a mere wanted criminal like me… but that’s just for now.
As my notoriety continues to rise like this, eventually even they will start targeting me.
* * *
Several hours later. As the Intruder Jason, whom the returned Friede had been pounding as a stress relief, was gradually turning into Particle Jason.
“…This can’t go on.”
I muttered in a low voice mixed with a sigh as I wrapped bandages around the sword wounds etched all over my body.
“Huh…? I-I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”
Friede turned to me and asked. Perhaps she had been too focused on dissecting Jason to hear my voice.
“Mmm, well…”
I let out a faint sigh as I got up from my seat and approached Friede, opening my mouth again.
“I don’t think we can keep running away like this anymore.”
As I wiped the blood splatter on Friede’s face with my sleeve.
“That’s…”
“The pursuers chasing us are only getting stronger, but how long can we keep this up? There will be a limit eventually. For both you and me.”
A future so obvious it didn’t even need to be said. There was no hope if we continued like this.
Even as a hero and her party member, we were barely different from ordinary kingdom knights in the beginning.
We’ve grown stronger since then, so we might be able to handle three or four kingdom knights somehow, but…
‘In other words, it means we’d be overwhelmed if just ten of them came at us.’
The fact that we were still alive and well was actually close to a stroke of luck.
It was due to the unexplored territories scattered throughout the country making it easy to hide, and the fact that from the kingdom’s perspective, there were far more urgent matters than me.
Either way, these reasons wouldn’t last long.
“…So?”
Friede asked, looking at the bandages wrapped all over my body. Her voice was utterly gloomy, as if she thought all these wounds were entirely her fault.
I’m not sure whether to call this kind or foolish. Come to think of it, all these wounds were entirely the result of my own actions.
Ah. Except for the bite marks on my neck, shoulders, and thighs.
Those were indeed Friede’s fault.
Even if I asked for more, there was no need to bite so hard to the point of drawing blood.
Of course, it was stimulating… but only in the moment. Once the heat subsided, it just stung like a cut.
Well, anyway.
“If we’re going to be caught eventually no matter how much we run, then rather… before we’re caught, let’s try to break through head-on. Somehow, just the two of us.”
“Head-on?”
Friede tilted her head slightly. Her expression showed that she found it difficult to understand what I meant by breaking through head-on.
That’s understandable. I haven’t even started explaining properly yet.
“Think about it. What’s the reason we’re running around like beggars right now?”
“Um… well… because Gunther is targeting you, Hilde…?”
The moment she uttered the name Gunther, a fierce killing intent flashed in Friede’s eyes. It was intense enough to remind one of the eyes of an enraged dragon.
…She seems to hate him even more than I do.
I merely want to kill him, but not to the extent of the killing intent Friede briefly revealed, which seemed to want to chop up even his corpse into pieces and feed it to dogs.
“No, that’s just a superficial… that is, a surface-level reason. It’s not the essence of the problem.”
“The essence…?”
Yes. The real reason we’re running away like this, suffering from the threat of pursuers, wasn’t because Gunther or Heid were targeting me.
The more essential reason, the true reason was none other than-
“The real reason is that we-no, I am weak. That’s what’s wrong.”
Being weak.
That was the fundamental reason why we had become fugitives.
If I were strong enough to beat Imelia, Irina, and even Gunther to death, we wouldn’t have had to run like this in the first place.
I’d still have to be careful of Heid, but that would be manageable as long as I avoided facing him alone where no one else could see.
And it’s not just them. If I were that strong, it would have been entirely possible to make the false accusations disappear in the first place.
If a hero party member stronger than heroes from other countries returned to Rhine with the runaway hero, even the act of deserting the hero party would somehow transform into some kind of admirable tale.
The king would probably step in personally to package me nicely as some sort of secret agent sent to root out traitors within the party.
If I demonstrated such capability at the age of twenty, I would become a core force of the kingdom in just a few years once I entered the deep dungeon and started growing in earnest.
That was the significance of the hero party to begin with.
One of the representative powers of the hero’s engraving was to drastically increase the growth rate of not only the hero but also the party members.
To express it in terms of novels or games, it meant that the experience gained from hunting together in a party was amplified 5-10 times.
As the effect weakens and disperses as the number of party members increases, it’s most efficient to gather about 3-4 companions to fight together?
That’s why they chose the most talented among the youth with boundless potential to place beside the hero.
So that they could rapidly grow thanks to the blessing of the engraving and acquire skills comparable to the core forces of each country at a young age.
You might ask, wouldn’t it be more efficient to attach existing strong individuals instead of young kids?
But that wasn’t the case.
Even if the growth rate increases, it’s meaningless for those who have no room left for growth.
Just as people can hardly expect to grow taller after the age of twenty no matter how well they eat, why would strength be any different?
The age limit to benefit from utilizing the hero’s engraving is early thirties at most, even if we’re being generous.
Those older than that would only get a little stronger by forming a party with the hero, and that would be the end of it.
It’s as if their growth potential was already half-closed from the start.
Rather than wasting the opportunity of the ‘Hero’s Engraving’ like that, it was a hundred, no, a thousand times better to nurture young people who, although weaker at first, had their growth potential wide open.
The efficiency was on a completely different level. If nurtured well, they could even take down dragons or demon lords.
So if I could prove my overwhelmingly, incomparably overwhelming talent, even the king of Rhine would accept me back.
In such a situation, what meaning would the king’s authority, face, or national disgrace have?
It would be like a talent who, if nurtured well, seemed capable of even defeating dragons, rolling back in on their own. He would welcome me rather than punish me.
Of course, this was out of the question for me as I am now.
My skills were at a level where it was questionable if I could even face Gunther, let alone defeat him.
“Because I’m weak, I can’t be confident… because I’m weak, I have to run away.”
“Hi-Hilde being weak is not wrong… No, no, that’s not what I meant!”
Friede, who was about to argue that being weak is not a sin, quickly corrected herself, seemingly realizing that it was essentially the same as pointing out that I was weak.
“Y-you’re not weak, Hilde…! You were my idol!”
With an even more embarrassing compliment.
“Uh… yeah. Right, thanks.”
Idol, what an embarrassing thing to say.
The ‘not weak Hilde’ Friede was referring to meant the original Brunhilde, not me, but the embarrassment still fell on me.
To be honest, the current Friede already possessed combat power surpassing mine. As expected of a hero, I suppose.
While the difference wasn’t overwhelming, there was at least enough of a gap that she would win seven out of ten fights against me.
Someone stronger than me was praising me, saying I wasn’t weak and that I was their idol. Of course, it couldn’t help but be embarrassing.
I could only slightly bow my head, my cheeks flushing red with embarrassment.