The spear came straight for my face. I knocked it aside - and the bedroom door burst open.
Two villagers stood there. They were still smiling.
They rushed me with farming tools in their hands. I got my sword up on instinct, but before I could move-
"Lord Haruya! I would greatly appreciate it if you tried not to hurt them more than you must-"
"I know!"
A hoe came swinging down at my head. Instead of meeting it head-on, I turned it aside with the flat of my blade. The man stumbled forward as his weight carried him past me. I hooked his ankle with my sword and pulled, spinning him around once.
He hit the floorboards back-first, hard enough to knock the air out of him, and curled up writhing.
"Magnificent!"
Lily swung her holy staff like a club and drove the tip straight into the second villager's solar plexus. The man folded without a sound.
For someone with almost no real fighting experience, her hands didn't shake at all.
"Lord Haruya, you are quite accustomed to holding back2. Is that also what the old woman in the neighbourhood taught you?"
"Yes?"
No. That was Lily who taught me.
In my past life she had drilled the Hero's way of fighting into me - never cut deeper than you have to, never hurt people who aren't your enemy.
That's when I noticed the noise outside.
It was getting loud. The whole inn felt like it was surrounded. I left the groaning villager where he was and cracked the bedroom door just enough to look down the hall.
Smiling villagers were coming up the stairs. Slowly. Unsteadily. Like corpses that had forgotten how to walk.
"My, how they swarm in."
"They have moved faster than I expected," Lily murmured beside me. "They could have simply waited for the hour when the miasma thickens."
"Maybe the ritual is already complete. Who can say."
If something was puppeting the villagers, nightfall would be the ideal time. The dark is when demonic essence3 is thickest, when control takes hold completely. Which meant... had I read the premise wrong?
No. There was no mistaking it. This was no ordinary village of bright, smiling people and cheerful violence.
"How would you wish to proceed?"
"I'll go wild. The caster or whoever's behind this is bound to show themselves sooner or later."
"Then I would greatly appreciate it if you tried not to hurt them if you can avoid it."
Lily preaching the righteous path. We'd had this exact exchange so many times in my past life that I almost laughed.
She was waiting for my answer. I kept it short.
"If I can. All right, let's go!"
I kicked the bedroom door open and jumped into the hallway.
Every smiling face in the hall tilted sideways at the same angle. Then they all smiled even wider.
"Welcome to our village! Nothing suspicious here!"
"You lot are nothing BUT suspicious!"
A lanky man lunged at me with a spear, grinning ear to ear. I didn't flinch. I stepped in, let the tip pass within a hair's breadth of my cheek, and smashed the pommel of my sword into the side of his neck.
A big man came next with both arms wide open. I slipped inside his guard like water, drove my shoulder into his chest, and used his own stumbling momentum to throw him clean over the railing onto a table downstairs.
"Lord Haruya! You are being too gentle!"
"You call these conditions gentle? Honestly."
Then I felt it. A wrongness crawling up my spine. Not human eyes. Above.
A giant bat hung from the inn's ceiling. The second our eyes met, its red eyes flared and it spread its wings. It was huge - easily the size of two grown men put together.
Right. If the villagers were being controlled, the monsters would be too. I raised my sword, but Lily was faster.
"Holy Seal: Cell Hyperactivation - Heal Blast."
Rings of light snapped into place over the bat's head and wings.
Its flesh swelled as if boiling from the inside, then burst apart like it was stuffed with gunpowder. As chunks of scorched meat scattered across the beams, I couldn't help but stare at her.
"...I thought we were avoiding unnecessary wounds? Isn't that monster discrimination?"
"It is distinction."
Before I could answer that, she gently seized a villager who'd crept up behind me and threw him aside. No joke in her face now.
I followed her lead and started tossing them one after another, their bodies hitting the floor with dull thuds.
I shoved through the inn's front doors and leapt out into the village square.
A kitchen knife came flying at my face instantly.
I batted it down with my sword and threw a stone back toward where it had come from in one motion. A hit. I'd held back, so that should only leave a bump.
"Lord Haruya, you really are practised at this?"
"Thanks to one nagging old granny."
A Hero does not wound the innocent. That rule had been beaten into me until I could do it in my sleep.
Smiling villager after smiling villager came at me, and I tore through them all while pulling every blow.
The logic was simple. If I knocked the villagers out, the spell's link should break. The village wasn't large. The controlled villagers and monsters should run out quickly.
That was how it should have worked. But-
"That's strange..."
"...Yes."
It was around the time Lily blew that giant bat apart and I threw yet another villager that I realized nothing had changed.
Villagers who should have stayed down got right back up and aimed those creepy smiles at us again. Even the ones we'd left groaning on the tavern floor came shuffling out like they'd never been hurt at all.
Was the spell's link not breaking?
Dozens of them closed in around us in the center of the square. Smiling. All of them shouting the same thing at once.
"Strong! Strong! Strong! Strong!"
"Good vessel!1 Good vessel! Good vessel!"
"Who's good! Who's good! Who's good!"
"A woman! A woman is good! A woman is obviously good!!"
No variation. No delay. It was like they were all a single organism, one will living inside every mouth, spilling out the same words.
That's when it finally clicked.
"They've been possessed by parasitic-type monsters...!?"
"Parasitic-type? That is impossible."
Lily denied it instantly, but her face told me she already believed it. She'd seen the same wrongness I had.
I didn't want to believe it either.
It was absolutely impossible.
Parasitic monsters did exist - things that burrowed into other living creatures and drove them. There were even types that fused with powerful monsters to make them stronger. Once you knew the trick - the strange wings, the off-color skin - they weren't that frightening, but...
Even so, parasites were high-tier monsters.
They lived not far from Gran Neal. There was no way something like that would appear in Lila Village, a little stop you passed through at the very start of an adventure. Even I hadn't run into one until near the end of my journey in my past life, deep in the dungeons by the final boss.
And this felt even higher-tier than the one I'd fought.
What in the world had happened? Was something going on in this world that I never knew in my past life?
As if sensing our unease, the villagers' smiles stretched thin as crescent moons.
Then, all at once, they pressed their own weapons to their own throats to show us.
"Drop your weapons! Surrender! The villagers are hostages!"
"Hand over the woman! She'll make a good vessel!"
"Humans are weak to this, aren't they! We know! We know, you see!!"
It talked like something that had pulled the hostage trick many times before and won.
Had it taken all of Lila Village that way? Through something that cowardly? If your family or your lover is held hostage, you can't fight back. You just obey.
Damn. This was bad.
Especially with a girl right next to me who was weak to exactly that kind of tactic.
"Understood. If I shall do, then I would greatly appreciate it if you did as you wish."
Lily answered without a moment's hesitation.
Trivia:
- Haruya's repeated internal insistence that the parasitic monster's appearance is "absolutely impossible" for this region hints that the world itself may be diverging from his past-life knowledge, a subtle early signal of larger timeline changes.
- The villagers' escalating chant shifting from praising strength to demanding a woman reveals the controlling intelligence is selecting a "vessel," implying a body-snatching goal rather than mere chaos.
- Lily's instant, unhesitating offer of herself as the hostage trade echoes her role as a self-sacrificing holy figure, quietly mirroring the dynamic Haruya had with her in his past life.
Translation Notes:
1 ↩ A term meaning "raw body" or "base vessel," used in alchemy and possession lore to describe a body suitable for inhabitation or transformation. The monster's fixation on it signals it seeks a host, not just obedience.
2 ↩ Literally "hand adjustment," meaning to pull one's punches or hold back force. The recurring emphasis on this word underscores the Hero's code of never harming innocents, a moral theme central to the chapter.
3 ↩ A term for "demonic nature" or malevolent essence that thickens at night, tied to the setting's magic ecology and the timing of dark rituals.
Notes:
• Haruya - Solo adventurer in the trading city of Gran Neal, formerly the Holy Hero who defeated the Demon King Chronova. Maintains a bronze-rank adventurer status deliberately to avoid responsibility and attention. Slim-built young man in plain breast armor with a longsword and a large hip pouch of adventuring tools. Harbors a singular life goal of losing his virginity at a high-class brothel and building a harem, a dream he loudly declared at guild registration, earning him infamy among female adventurers while being well-liked by male adventurers for his candid lewd talk. Secretly a returnee from death who deliberately destroyed his hero-route reputation.