Chapter 1
Home Tate no Yuusha LN Sekai no Owari no Encore

Chapter 1

Chapter One: A Royal Summons

“Huh?”

I’d gone to the library to do a bit of reading .

My name is Naofumi Iwatani, and I’m a sophomore in college . I’m also aware that I am more of a nerd than the rest of my classmates . Ever since I first became interested in video games and anime and otherOtaku past-times, I’ve given them more of my time than I give my actual studies .

My parents know this about me, and so they gave up on me early on . Instead they sent my brother to a famous prep-school in an effort to “secure his future . ” But the pressure was too much for him . He got worn out with all the studying and turned into a troubled teen, dying his hair and yelling obscenities around the house . For a little while, the whole family was miserable .

But then a savior appeared to save the day: me!

He was always scowling and mouthing off to everyone, but I had an ingenious plan up my sleeve: I suggested he try playing a game, a popular one . It was a dating simulator, the kind where you get to go on dates with cute girls .

“What the hell?”

“Just try it! You don’t have to commit to liking it . ”

I said that because I knew the real reason he had turned into such a punk .

When we were growing up, our parents had always given me whatever I asked for—but he had never received the same treatment . He wanted the freedom that I’d always had . I’m a specialist when it comes to having fun though, so he was interested in the game I suggested, if only because he knew I was an authority on fun . He told me this himself, later on down the line .

I’ll just skip right to the end: there’s one more Otaku in the world now .

If you walked into his room now, you’d see posters and figurines from the very same game I introduced him to . Not only that, but he also rededicated himself to his studies, got into a great school, and is apparently at the top of his class .

My parents were so happy about my intervention that they spoiled me even more as a result, so I am currently leading a very free life as a college student .

Ok, so that was a bit of a digression . I had gone to the library to do a bit of reading .

My parents give me an allowance of 10,000 yen every month . The naughty games and magazines, light novels and manga that my friends and I go through eat up that allowance pretty quickly . I have a part time job that brings in about 50,000 yen a month, which is great, but the various festivals I take part in during the summer and winter months use all that money as well .

My brother is not the sort of person to go out of his way to participate in a festival, but my parents rent a room for us near the festival grounds to encourage his participation . Well whatever, they have their own lives to live so they can’t give me all that much money . They try to help cover tuition and rent, so that’s plenty . So whenever I need to save money, when I don’t have all that much, I go to used bookstores or to the library to read . If I have free time, I like to play games online, but if you really want to be good at them there’s no end to how much time you could sink into a character .

Besides, I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, and I’m not really the type to invest all my time in one particular thing . That, and even when I do get into a game, I don’t really care about leveling up my character . I just end up obsessed with gathering money in the virtual world . Even as I’m writing these words, I have characters and rare items that I collected up for sale .

Thanks to those sales, I somehow managed to secure free time for myself in the real world .

Ok then, so I was there in the library when all this craziness started .

I was looking over an old bookshelf in the corner that was dedicated to fantasy novels . I think that fantasy has a history at least as long as recorded human history . I mean, if you really think about it, even the Bible is a type of fantasy novel .

The Records of the Four Holy Weapons?

This really old-looking book just fell off the shelf . The title was pretty hard to make out, and I guess whoever had been reading it last hadn’t taken the time to put it back securely . Whatever . Figuring it was probably destiny, I brought it back to the table, sat down, and opened it .

Flip… Flip…

It was the kind of book that starts off by telling you about the fantasy world itself . To sum it up, it seemed to be about a different world, one with an apocalyptic prophecy to worry about . The prophecy said that many waves of great destruction would wash over the world until nothing was left . To stave off disaster and escape destruction, the people would call for heroes from another world to come and save them . Or something like that, anyway .

Hmm, well the idea seems pretty cliché now, but something about the book being that old felt, ironically, fresh .

So the four heroes each possessed a weapon .

Sword, spear, bow, and shield .

I started to wince at the content . I mean, when you think about it, a shield is not even a weapon at all . Anyway, I started to skim ahead .

The four of them went on a journey to train, gather strength, perfect themselves, and stop the prophesied destruction of the world .

My head jerked . I’d nearly fallen asleep in my seat . It was all too much, I was yawning . And the book was so old-fashioned . I mean, there were no cute heroines at all . The only girl was the princess, and she was horrible because she was manipulative and obsessed with the heroes . She kept casting flirtatious glances at all of them, pitting them against each other . I wished she would just pick one of them to focus on .

The Sword Hero was active and powerful; the Spear Hero valued and protected his friends, and the Bow Hero would never tolerate injustice . All the heroes were good people with great personalities . There aren’t many stories like that these days . You know the kind where all the characters share the protagonist spotlight?

What’s this? The story was shifting to talk about the Shield Hero .

“Huh?”

I turned the page and let out an involuntary yelp . All the pages after the introduction of the Shield Hero were blank . I kept flipping, kept looking them over, but they were all blank, white pages . There was nothing else in the book .

“What the heck?”

I was thinking over how strange it all was when I started to feel dizzy .

“Huh? What’s…” I heard my own bewildered whisper and felt my consciousness slipping away… I’d never dreamed that I’d be transported to another world .