At that utterly shocking statement, countless question marks were being generated in my head in real time.
“W-what do you mean by that?”
As if driving the nail firmly into my question, Veronica said it once more.
“I mean exactly what I said. Would you like to officially join the Hero’s party?”
The Hero’s party.
Hero, Veronica Cygnus.
Mage, Signica Violet.
Saintess, Ariel Frederica.
Archer, Elladrien.
It referred to the party made up of those four.
Humanity’s all-purpose problem-solving group, handling all sorts of incidents and accidents that occurred across the world.
Especially when it came to matters related to the demonic, no one was rated higher than the Hero’s party.
Of course, at this exact moment, there were powerful people who were stronger than the Hero’s party.
Their current evaluation was the result of people’s expectations for the path they would walk in the future.
But it was true that, when it came to matters related to the demonic, there was no one quite like the Hero’s party.
All power has a nature.
It’s often called an attribute,
and the most representative ones are fire, water, wind, lightning, and earth.
People call these the Five Primordial Attributes.
The reason they’re called primordial is because those attributes were the first to manifest,
but honestly, just because they manifested first doesn’t mean there’s anything special or grand about them.
They simply became the Five Primordial Attributes because they were easy to imagine and easy to draw in one’s mind.
For example, imagining attacking someone with fire is fairly easy.
By a similar logic, aura came into being before magic,
and up to a certain level, aura has greater killing power than magic.
I mean, imagining setting a sword on fire and attacking something with it is easier than suddenly creating fire out of thin air and attacking with that.
Ah, but don’t misunderstand.
Does that mean magic is inferior to aura?
Is aura easier than magic?
No, that’s not it.
Let’s say you try to express something called love through your mental image.
Right.
Seems like it’d be hard with a sword, doesn’t it?
With magic, it’s easy to imagine some fox beastwoman throwing out a charm spell, but it’s hard to create a similar feeling with a sword, right?
That’s why magic is far superior in terms of versatility.
Well, anyway, why did I bring this up?
The reason the Hero’s party is the best when it comes to the demonic.
That reason is precisely because of the attribute only the Hero can wield: “Light—Demon Extinction.”
On the outside, it looked no different from any other light-attribute aura or magic.
However,
strangely enough, the Hero’s light attribute contained the power to destroy the demonic.
Thanks to that, whether the opponent was human, demon, or anything else, the Hero always held an advantage against evil beings.
Ah, of course, as I said earlier, don’t misunderstand just because I said, “The Hero has this power, so she has the advantage.”
The other members also possess historic levels of talent and skill.
It’s just that the Hero’s Demon Extinction attribute is quite symbolic, and it’s what sets their party apart from others.
Since I’ve brought this up, to make things clearer, I did say there are powerful people stronger than the Hero’s party members right now.
But in truth, aside from Masters, there aren’t any.
The Saintess was already the most outstanding among those who performed similar roles such as support and healing,
the Mage had reached the 7th Circle at the mere age of nineteen, a level that even those called the talents of the century only reached after turning sixty,
and the Hero and the Archer were known to be upper-level Experts, just below Master.
Objectively speaking, they were absolutely an excellent fighting force.
They simply weren’t the strongest yet.
Anyway,
for me to join the Hero’s party, a group made up of people like this, would be proof that I possessed the most radiant talent, comparable to theirs.
It meant entering a position where I could grasp all honor and wealth at once.
From a mercenary, one of the lowest positions,
to a member of the Hero’s party, standing at the very top.
With a single word, my status would skyrocket.
Of course, I still didn’t know exactly in what way she meant for me to join them, so I might be getting ahead of myself.
Even if I officially joined, if the work I continued doing was the same, people would still look at me with a certain amount of negativity.
But even taking all of that into account, just the fact that I was a member of the Hero’s party would definitely change how I was treated by 180 degrees.
“What do you think…? This way, your support won’t be cut off, and it should be less dangerous than before. It won’t be completely safe… but if a dangerous situation comes up, we’ll be right beside you to help.”
It sounded like a fairly good offer.
In the first place, I had entered the mercenary selection tournament because of the imperial support,
and she was saying that wouldn’t be cut off while also guaranteeing at least a lifeline.
I didn’t want to survive in an unsightly way, but that didn’t mean I wanted to die like a dog either.
Yeah.
“Sounds good.”
This was something I had to grab.
***
After that, I followed Veronica out of the village.
To an empty clearing with nothing in it.
Upon arriving there, the Hero took out the pendant hanging around her neck.
“Would you hold my hand?”
She held out her hand to me, looking slightly shy.
I’d thought this quite often until now, but whenever she did something she wasn’t used to like this, it really was unexpected.
There were truckloads of men who shouted that they wanted to join the Hero’s party just from seeing her face, so I never would have guessed she’d be this unused to dealing with men.
For some reason, I felt unnecessarily pleased.
It felt a little unpleasant because it made me feel like some kind of pervert… but this, too, was an unavoidable force majeure.
Anyway, that aside.
—Squeeze.
I held her hand.
It was warm and soft… a hand far removed from a sword.
“Teleport.”
The activation word for magic left Veronica’s lips, and a cluster of light enveloped us.
—Thunk…
A moment later, as its name suggested, nothing remained in the clearing.
***
“Ugh…”
I knew something was going to happen, but this was a move I hadn’t expected.
After all, there weren’t many mages who could use teleportation, so I had never once moved like this in my life.
“They said you can use teleportation starting from the 7th Circle… Well, I guess this was possible.”
It felt like I was praising the Hero’s party too much,
but what had just happened was extremely impressive.
A 7th Circle mage had placed a spell of the same level as her own circle, not even a lower one, into a pendant so that it could be cast instantly whenever needed.
According to rumors, normally you could only make something like that with magic two stages lower than your own circle.
It really was an incredible talent.
Well… but honestly, that wasn’t what mattered right now.
“What matters is where this place is.”
We had suddenly teleported from a clearing to somewhere surrounded by walls on every side. How could I have time to stand around admiring things?
Naturally, being on guard came first.
Of course, I doubted she would have brought me somewhere strange, but still…
As I looked around,
fortunately, she kindly explained where we were first.
“We’re inside Marquis Roten’s castle. To be precise, this is an underground space used for teleportation.”
“A space… used for teleportation?”
“Ah, I don’t know the details either, but according to Nika, there can’t be any objects around the target when teleporting.”
“I see…”
Nika was probably referring to the party’s mage, Signica Violet.
“Follow me. There’s somewhere we need to go.”
I nodded and followed behind the Hero.
***
—Creeeak. Thud.
Once we went up to the surface, familiar scenery definitely entered my eyes.
If it was inside the marquis’s castle, I had occasionally come in while doing mercenary work.
“It’s here.”
Hero, oh Hero.
If you suddenly bring me to a room and say, “It’s here,” do you think anyone would just nod and say, “I see”?
“Ah, um… you have to greet the party members… since you’re officially joining now.”
“Pardon?”
Wow, you really hit the core of the matter!
Right, we do need to greet each other!
But so suddenly…?
I’m not mentally prepared ye—
—Creeeak.
Ah.
Damn it.
“Huh… huhhh??”
“Bell?”
“Haaah…??”
Before I could say anything, Veronica opened the door.
And what I faced were three people who seemed to be sharing the same feelings as me.
A narrow-eyed Saintess clasping her hands together as if in prayer, wearing a startled expression,
a Mage who had apparently not heard the news and had been sitting at a desk researching something,
and the elf Archer, known to be the hardest person to catch sight of in the Hero’s party, wearing an expression that said she couldn’t understand this situation.
And…
“Hehe. Everyone, say hello! This is Evan, who’ll be newly joining our party!”
The Hero, simply bright and innocent without a single thought in her head.
No one could have predicted what sort of ripple would arise from the five of us gathered here.
***
“So… I thought maybe he could just officially join our party.”
Apparently, Veronica had done all this on her own without even discussing it with the party members.
Considering their reactions just now, that was obvious.
Of course, if you asked who the party leader was, it was naturally Veronica, so it might not be much of a problem for her to make some decisions on her own.
But I still think a decision of this magnitude should have been shared with the party members beforehand.
So the sight of Veronica standing with her hands raised as the price for belatedly sharing it was purely the result of her own karma.
Fortunately, after hearing my circumstances, all the party members agreed.
If they hadn’t, I would have simply been an unemployed young man.
“So you’re a mercenary, then? And a swordsman?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
The one speaking with me right now was the elf, Elladrien.
Ah, there’s no need to worry about her speaking casually from the first meeting.
It’s not that she has a bad personality—no, a bad elf-ality. It’s just that almost every human in the world is younger than an elf.
An elf using polite speech with someone would actually be stranger.
“Good. We happened to be short on vanguard members, so that works out. Oh, don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying Bell’s skills are lacking. It was just a little awkward in terms of holding space.”
True.
No matter how outstanding the Hero was, in the end, there was a limit to the area one person could cover.
On top of that, Veronica wasn’t just an ordinary vanguard; because she possessed the Demon Extinction attribute, she couldn’t focus solely on maintaining territory.
She also had to leave her area to attack enemies.
But if that happened, the rest of the party relying on the Hero from behind would become unstable.
It did seem like having one more vanguard to take exclusive charge of that sort of thing would be good.
“And these kids lack experience. You were picked through the mercenary selection tournament, right? They held that because these kids are completely hopeless when it comes to dungeons, since they were at the Academy.”
“Ah…”
To be honest, I had felt something was strange from the beginning.
If someone’s martial strength was overwhelmingly excellent, they usually had related knowledge as well.
And when an unexpected situation occurred, they could simply force their way through with strength.
“We did need someone to fill in the experiential side of things. This works out.”
Just as we were continuing such a constructive conversation with each other,
Veronica, who had been wearing the innocent expression of a cheerful puppy beside us, suddenly cut in.
“Instead of things like that, how about we get friendly with each other first? Like recreation!”
““……””
A still silence suddenly settled over the room.
“U-um.”
Veronica’s flustered reaction to the freezing response was just a bonus.
“…Go stand with your hands up again.”
At Elladrien’s words, Veronica once again stood quietly in the corner with a dejected expression, her hands raised.