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“Hey. It’s about time we set up camp here… ?!”\n
The sun had started to set, and we had walked so far that the surroundings turned red…\n
I found a slightly open area and decided it was time to make camp. As I turned around, I shuddered in astonishment.\n
“Y-Y… What’s with that face!”\n\n
“……?”\n
Confused, I pulled hard on the rope that bound the scum I hated so much that I wanted to kill him.\n
A second after I called Sha, he stared back at me with vacant eyes.\n
His cheeks were wet with tears.\n
Clear drops were continuously falling, so much that it seemed as if his whole heart was melting out of his eyes.\n
I didn’t know how long he had been crying, but the color of his sweater’s neckline had changed, reflecting the color of the evening sun on his neck and collarbone.\n
The silent weeping face of a plain and simple, well-dressed man.\n
The beauty of his face, which was neither expressionless nor distorted with sadness, was overflowing with unceasing thoughts… It left quite an impact on me, to the point that it momentarily stopped the hatred I had for the past eight years.\n
Even I, who had been walking right in front of him for a long, long time, failed to notice it. He cried quietly, secretly, without sobbing even once, as if it was something natural for him to do.\n
I didn’t know how he learned to cry like that, but it was fatal to a human to cry without anyone noticing.\n
“Oh… Sorry. I’ll stop right away. I’m fine. We’re going to camp, right? Let’s start preparing.”\n
“Huh…? I-I don’t understand you at all… Are you a robot?”\n
“Hm? No matter how you look at it, I’m a human. …Just a human.”\n
When I mentioned robot, Shal seemed to smile a little. I felt an unusual sense of relief at that.\n
Shal began to make space to settle down by brushing the grass and leaves with his feet while keeping a vigilant eye on the surroundings as if he were accustomed to it.\n
He didn’t even care that I was hurting him, which made me even more uncomfortable. But then, I remembered that he was a criminal and silently gathered firewood.\n\n
I found myself alone in a strange world.\n
The moment I stepped into the train on my way to the university, the scenery had changed.\n
Had it not been for the villagers from a nearby village who helped me when I collapsed, I would have been monster food not long after.\n
For some reason, they couldn’t get my name right, so I decided to live my life as if I were named Luoh.\n
While helping with farming and work, I desperately honed my fighting skills to survive in this world.\n
I didn’t stand on the front lines and increase my combat power because I wanted to. It’s because it was necessary.\n
I had no idea why I was in this world, thrown away in a place where no one knew me, not even for a reason or role.\n
Still, I wanted to live. I wanted to belong in this world.\n
That was… my reason for fighting.\n
After spending a few uneasy, freezing nights gritting my teeth and continuing to train, I got stronger and stronger. It made me think I had the gift. I was also able to use the fire magic the villagers taught me better than anyone else.\n
I had a body that didn’t age for some reason. Still, I continued to improve myself and protected the village I owed to.\n
Elemental magic users were rare, so they were greatly valued. And, fighting to protect the villagers got me a role to play.\n
And so, as an adventurer in the village, I fought monsters and demons to defeat and drive them out and gained the strength to survive.\n
Then one day, I was to go to the royal capital.\n
Word got around that there was a skilled adventurer, so the adventurers’ guild there called out to me.\n
Eight years had already passed by then, and I was happy that the years I had spent living my life so frantically had finally been needed by someone.\n
When I arrived in the capital, I was taken in by the very caring leader of the adventurers’ guild. They took me to the temple to see if I had the right skills before proceeding with the job.\n
And for the first time, I learned that there was such a thing as status, like the one you’d see in games.\n
And the truth about why I was called into this world.\n
—Profession: Hero.\n
It referred to people who had the potential to defeat the Demon Lord, who continued to send out monsters and harm the human realm, and were summoned from another world using a high level of summoning magic.\n
While I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, there was a commotion all around me. And before I knew it, the king of this land was kneeling before me.\n
—It was their king! He did that to someone like me, who had no identity in this world.\n
“I am deeply ashamed that I have not been able to find you until now. Our true hero, will you hear us out?”\n
The kneeling king began to speak.\n
Eight years ago, they called a hero through summoning magic.\n
The one who appeared in the magic circle was a different person, and they didn’t know that until they went to the temple.\n
On rare occasions, people who were at the same coordinates would both get caught up in it, and one of them would get displaced.\n
And the one who was displaced was me, the real hero.\n
I shuddered but managed to wrap my head around it and asked how the other one, who turned out to be fake, was doing.\n
I figured that if they were caught up in all this, they might be having a hard time being in a strange world as I was.\n
However, the king continued to speak with his face darkened.\n
He said that the other man confirmed that he indeed was a hero. He used the mistake of summoning him as a shield to have him worshiped as a hero and began to act arrogantly.\n
He put on extravagant airs under the umbrella of being a hero and behaved insolently when inside the castle.\n
He stole other people’s achievements, and the people even spread rumors that he might be the next king.\n
“We were unable to stop him because of the debt we owed for getting him caught up in this… However, we knew that the true hero was elsewhere, so we at least told him to use the name of his predecessor so the people wouldn’t find out. Only we, the royalty and nobles of the castle, know the truth about that fake hero… Shal. The people are being deceived.”\n
The king finished speaking in tears and clenched his fists in frustration.\n
He even apologized to me, saying he was ashamed of his unworthy self who had his indebtedness taken advantage of.\n
Seeing him like that, I couldn’t help but feel hatred toward that fake hero.\n
I had lived for eight years trying my best to maintain myself, even though I was about to be crushed by anxiety.\n
Meanwhile, he was a scumbag who had been hailed as a hero in my stead, enjoying his freedom as he pleased.\n
That scumbag Shal said, “I alone can defeat the demon lord.” He then left for the demon realm and never came back.\n
The king said he was most likely dead. But if he was still alive… the king could only shake his shoulders in fear.\n
It was said that only a holy sword that could be wielded by a hero could inflict a fatal wound on the demon lord. I couldn’t see how a fake that couldn’t possess that would be allowed to live.\n
I made up my mind.\n
“King, please lift your head. I will defeat the demon lord as a hero. I don’t mind killing the detestable Shal so that you won’t have to go through this again. I’ll be ready in a month… then I’ll go to the demon realm.”\n
The demon lord who enjoys inciting monsters to slaughter in the human realm, and the impostor who pretended to be me under the guise of being a hero. I will tear them apart with my own two hands.\n
—…or so I swore.\n
Yet why… why would an atrocious scum shed tears for the Demon Lord, whom he supposedly curried favor with in order to spare his own life?\n