Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 23 – Fire and Flames (6)

After making sure that the monster attack had truly ended and just in time for the others to arrive, I concluded that the quest could only be resolved from the relic room.

Trying to endlessly defend the village until it was overrun would be pointless. I had no clue as to how many monsters there were, and it wasn’t a situation out of a shounen or a generic fantasy story where the village chief was actually secretly a bad guy.

At least, that didn’t seem to be the case.

I wished that the mysterious woman I had met at the start would have left me with more hints. What was the point in asking how difficult I wanted things to be if everything was going to be nearly impossible regardless?

I trekked back across the field to the relic building in the center of the village, eyes tracing the path I had taken and lingering on the deep scrapes in the ground that my uncontrolled tumble had caused.

‘What if I ran into a villager and wasn’t able to stop myself in time?’

‘What if I ruined an important crop that they needed to survive?’

‘What if I ran into the wall and caused it to collapse?’

Such thoughts ran through my mind on the way back. I resolved myself to raise my stats to a level where my mind and body could keep up with such explosive speed before attempting something like that again.

It was too bad that the monsters in that hidden dungeon area didn’t give experience. Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure that they weren’t giving experience, as I was still cut off from accessing the System’s menus—though, I could still use its skills, as I had used «Strike» to initiate my tumble across the fields.

I passed the two guards at the door still tending to the man who had run across the field and warned us of the attack.

After swinging the doors shut behind me, I was alone with the relic.

The golden pillar of light stood in its place, unchanged from the last time I had seen it, yet it somehow seemed to be beckoning me towards it as well.

I approached the relic and held out my hand, slowly placing my palm against it, ready for anything that it would throw at me.

***

‘Do I have it wrong?’

The relic didn’t respond, still in its place.

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‘Maybe…’

I grabbed hold of the energy inside of me that I used to summon my Second System powers, bringing the energy to my hand without materializing it as I usually did.

Vwoooo.

The relic let out an almost inaudible humming noise, pulsing with energy that reacted to my touch.

The pulse of energy spread outward from my hand, rippling along the surface of the relic like a droplet of water in a lake.

Then, as the energy rippled to the edges of the relic, it contracted inwards, back towards my hand.

Warmth…

A warm tingle spread across the surface of my hand against the relic, intensifying with each ripple that contracted back to the starting point.

Heat built up in my arm to the point that it left sharp pinpricks of pain through me.

Still, I didn’t pull my hand away.

For all I knew, that was my only chance to gain access to whatever aid the relic could lend

The tingling heat spread through my body, eventually transitioning from pain to a warm and fuzzy numbness until, before I could fully process it, my vision transcended my body and rose upwards.

My viewpoint went through the ceiling of the relic room, up past the rooms where I had stayed the previous night, and through the roof of the relic building itself.

It continued to rise even higher. Everything below was crystal clear, and I could see it all as if anything I looked at was right in front of me while also allowing me to look at everything else.

I imagined it was how someone with an extremely high perception attribute would see things, everything crystal clear, all at once.

The chief was speaking to the survivors in the area of the village I had saved.

Rodrig was poking through the bodies of the monsters, comparing them to something in his tome.

The guards on the opposite end of the village were pointing out a growing mass of darkness surging through the storm, diminishing with every second but still pushing forward toward the village.

—Monsters.

More than just the shark-dog things that I had encountered, there were also what looked like shorter trolls with long, dragging arms that they used to pull themselves along faster than their legs could carry them.

I understood from that how the monsters had gone over the village walls before—the long-armed trolls had thrown them.

My viewpoint rose even higher still, becoming tinted in orange light as it stopped at the surface of the meteor floating high in the sky above the village.

Way up there, above the origin of even the firestorm, which I could see tilted towards the meteor in its entire radius, I could see outwards into the land beyond.

—Swarms of creatures and monsters as far as the eye could see swarmed around and poked at the storm’s perimeter.

Occasionally, some of the monsters would try to fly above or would get too close to the storm and would be reduced to a pile of ash by the searing heat.

The images of the trolls and shark-dogs again came to my mind—all had seemed squishy or somewhat bloated, and the shark-dogs had been surprisingly soft and easy to kill.

* * *

Reaper Scans

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The monsters were sending highly heat-resistance members of their forces through the storm, bloated with water and moisture that would protect them from the heat in such numbers that, even if 90% of them were killed by the storm, there would still be a significant amount that made it through.

I believed then that I had roughly figured out the origin of the big meteor above the village.

When I remembered the tome and what Rodrig had said to me about the village’s past, it became clear.

The relic… the meteor… the storm… the lack of anyone with a System.

From my understanding, people had been gifted with the power of the Second System rather than the power of the System that permeated the world I was from.

Those people, much like people from my world, had used their abilities for conquest and their own self-gain, going out on adventures, conquering dungeons, and clearing areas for their constant expansion and exploration.

The dungeon appearances had then probably grown worse, building up in number over time until they were impossible to clear as fast as they showed up.

With the buildup of dungeons, dungeon breaks from long uncleared dungeons also became more common.

It had gone on like that until, eventually, humanity was forced to create a final area of refuge for the survival of the race, and thus, the village had been created.

The innumerable monsters were all from dungeon breaks, the relic harnessed power from the Second System to protect the area around it, also severely limiting the ability of others to learn to use the Second System.

Finally, the huge meteor itself seemed to be some combination of fire and earth, much like how my Eruption ability was accompanied by searing white flames.

That was how the village had continued and survived until then

As for what I could actually do with the relic’s power, I could feel the energy within the meteor almost as if it were my own, and I knew that I had the ability to control it.

The problem was my mana capacity.

To take control of the meteor in any way would require me to utilize a huge amount of mana.

Other than that, I instinctively felt that I could release the relic’s energy to empower the villagers, let the meteor fall and remove the spell suspending it in place, or even use my own power to refill the durability of the relic, which measured the remaining power it had.

‘Save the village…’

None of those options could really be considered “saving” the village, could they?

Empowering the villagers would be useless against the seemingly endless swarm, and letting the meteor fall would only wipe out the village, though the mana contained within the meteor would also likely wipe out the monsters.

While refilling the relic’s durability/power would be the safest bet for keeping the village safer for a longer time, it would have to be filled again over time, and I would be stuck there forever as the relic charger until the day I died and left the village again largely defenseless.

So, instead of conforming to the options before me, I created a new one.

—I would wipe out all of the monsters while also ensuring that the villagers survived, nothing less would do.

They already regarded me as their hero. I might have denied it, but I had always wanted to be someone that others could look to for help.

Maybe it was a desperate dream born of a low self-image, but it was true that I inwardly craved affirmation, to know that I was doing what was right.

The others would be able to survive on their own without me. I had only known them for a brief time, anyway.

The world would regrow and become a place the village could expand out from.

I had no way of confirming it, but I suspected that the relic would become inert after the quest, assuming that it wasn’t all just a creation of the System to be discarded after the completion of the quest, which I doubted due to how elaborate everything and everyone was.

If my mana couldn’t handle the power of the meteor and enable me to do what I wished, then the mana in the relic could.

The issue was that such energy couldn’t be channeled by a single human body. At least, not my body.

…So I decided to do away with my body.