Prologue
My name is Naofumi Iwatani, I'm 20-years-old, I’m currently attending college, though I don’t really put much effort into it. I'm a bit more of a nerd than others since I usually spend my time watching anime and occasionally playing games.
Eventually, I just stopped being as good at school once I got into these, my parents got mad at me, but eventually gave up and just placed all of their hopes on my younger brother.
Though of course this caused my brother to start being extremely stressed all the time with no way to get rid of it. So I decided to introduce him to the otaku world, and… well, let’s just say he hasn’t been anywhere near as stressed as before.
Ever since then, he started getting incredible scores in school, and thus, my parents have let me do as I please as long as my brother continues like this.
"Won again, huh?" I sigh as I see the victory screen pop up on my computer monitor. This is from my favorite types of games, the guild-managing type of game.
These basically consist of the player forming and managing their own guilds and engaging against other players in grand scale fights involving dozens of different units you have to give orders to. I've always had a knack for these types of games, and since I started playing this game I've gotten my guild to one of the top places in the entire Japanese server.
"It does get boring if it's just a one-sided win, though" The one flaw about it is that sometimes the game matched me with people that were very inexperienced, and after a while winning matches like those just gets boring.
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“Maybe there’s something interesting in the library.” I decided to go to the library, since I don’t really have anything to do right now. I figured I could kill some time if I found something interesting there.
Once I get there, I go ahead and quickly make my way over to the light novel section.
As I start looking through the bookshelves, I spot a book that seems very out of place in this section, it seems pretty old, almost ancient.
"What even is this?" I couldn’t even read the title so I decided to pull it out, and once I do it falls on my head along with a couple more books.
"Damn, that hurt" I curse under my breath while I pick up the book.
Its title reads "The Records of the Four Holy Weapons"
Inside it read: There were once four holy heroes, the Spear Hero, The Sword Hero, The Bow Hero, and the Shield Hero.
"Shield? But wasn't this about weapons? A shield doesn't even have any offensive power!" I laugh, figuring it's just an error or something from the author who was naive and thought a shield counted as a weapon.
The book continued on about its world and seemed to be talking about some sort of fantasy world. It went on about how at some point in time there was a phenomenon, called the "Waves of Calamity"
This seemingly unexplained phenomena having caused great amounts of destruction and death all around the world. And so, to prevent life from being eradicated in their world, the people summoned four heroes, each one with a different weapon. Spear, Sword, Bow, and Shield.
Each of them went their own way in order to get stronger and fight off these waves. Along the way they met different characters, though none of them were interesting enough, and the only girl was this princess, and she was horrible, she manipulated each of the heroes and made them go against each other for her own amusement instead of saving the world.
"*Yawn...*" I was almost falling asleep when I got to the part describing the Shield Hero’s journey. What I saw, or rather what I didn’t see caught my eye.
"Wait, am I missing something?" Oddly enough, the shield hero was nowhere to be found in the book's section dedicated to him. Instead it was just a bunch of blank pages.
"Huh... What the hell...?" That's when I started feeling dizzy, and before I knew it I lost consciousness.