Free The Rising of the Shield Hero Volume 05 by Aneko Yusagi

it. I was still at level 43.
    Wait a second, did that mean that these clowns were all over level 50?
    “What materials do you need?”
    “The sand from the dragon hourglass.”
    “That’s right . . . .”
    The three of them nodded. But . . . .
    “How did you get them to let you have any sand?!”
    “We just asked for it and they gave it to us.”
    Dammit! I’d only run into those curmudgeon sisters when I was in the church—and they wouldn’t let me have anything at all.
    “Well? So what happened after the transport?”
    “She spent some time teaching Filo how to battle effectively, and then she did . . . something . . . and Filo’s stats shot way up. Then she sat me down and lectured me, saying that the heroes needed to work together. She said that if she didn’t, she’d kill us all.”
    Ha! The three of them looked like they didn’t believe a word that I was saying.
    “If you think I’m lying, maybe you’d like to have a battle with Filo for yourselves? We just went through the class-up ceremony too, so she’s even stronger now.”
    Didn’t they realize that Filo’s stats were nearly double my own?
    Motoyasu had a hard enough time holding his own against me in a battle—he wouldn’t stand a chance against Filo.
    “No. That won’t be necessary.”
    “Okay, I’ll ask the next question. During the battle with the high priest, Naofumi commanded a lot of power. It was unnatural. It came from that ominous-looking shield of his. I never saw anything like that in the game I played.”
    Itsuki shot me a doubtful look and kept on talking.
    “Where did you find a power like that? No, that’s not quite right, let me rephrase: Where did you meet God?”
    “What?”
    “Did you meet God somewhere and receive a cheating shield from him? There’s a web novel I read where the main character gets a special power like that and it enables him to pull ahead of the other characters. Tell me the truth.”
    Ha! I knew the story he was talking about, but nothing like that had happened here.
    I’d been through a lot since showing up in this world, but few questions have irritated me the way that this one did.
    “It’s not cheating!”
    “Oh, yes it is. A shielder shouldn’t really be able to deal any damage at all!”
    Ren and Motoyasu nodded.
    “Where did you get it? If we were able to get our hands on a power like that then we would be unstoppable. You have to tell us.”
    These morons just spat nonsense on top of nonsense. It was starting to really piss me off.
    “Maybe I just worked really hard for it?”
    “Yeah right.”
    They were a bunch of brutes. They had already made up their minds about what a shielder could do.
    But I had a feeling they were mistaken. I think that shielders were stronger than they thought.
    I saw it this way: I worked on getting more and better equip bonuses, and as a result I eventually got my hands on the curse series—that’s how I ended up being stronger than any of them.
    But they seemed to think that I had somehow figured out how to cheat so that I could be as powerful as they were.
    “That shield is called the Shield of Rage. It’s part of the curse series that is contained in the legendary shield. I don’t know exactly what caused it to come out, but if I had to guess . . . I would say that it responded to my own anger. It first showed up when I was dueling with Motoyasu. I was very angry because I was tricked and cheated and everything was unfair.”
    I remembered when it happened. I was so angry and the anger had nowhere to go. I thought it was going to swallow me completely.
    If Raphtalia hadn’t been there to calm me down, who knows what would have happened?
    “It’s all right there in the help menu. It says you’ll have to pay a price for using it. Could you three control it? By the way, I used it to defeat the high priest, but it attacked me too, and as a result my stats are still recovering.”
    Ren squinted and waved his finger through the air. He must have