I, Who Also Couldn't Become a Hero, Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job Too

"Why…"

Aimless, scattered thoughts went round and round inside her head. Her churned-up heart squeezed tight for no reason at all, and it hurt, and it hurt, and she had no idea what to do.

— The incident that had hit Amada's Royal Capital Store right in the middle of its grand-opening sale. For the three days since that demonkin disturbance, the store where Airi worked had voluntarily suspended business. None of the customers had been injured, fortunately, but the damage to the interior was severe, in no state for the store to keep operating, and on top of that, the manager's failure to act on the demonkin radar's reading during the promotional event had turned into its own problem… and so Airi, as an employee, had been ordered to stay home.

A fierce irritation and a crushing sense of helplessness gnawed at her no matter where she was or what she was doing. Knees drawn up on the bed, Airi let the words escape as if gasping them out.

"Why, why doesn't anything ever work out!!"

— The memories of when she'd been happy, she could barely call them up anymore. The friends she'd played with, the name of the stuffed animal she'd treasured, the faces of the family she'd loved.

What was burned vividly into the back of her mind was that night. The white flash that seemed to swallow everything. The red flames licking at the town, and the silhouette of a demonkin laughing in delight. The smell of the burnt ruins through which she'd wandered, searching for her scattered family, after that devil had wreaked all the destruction it could. The taste of soot spreading through her mouth. The unbearable heat of the smoldering rubble… The transformed bodies of her parents, when she'd finally found them.

At seven years old, her family had been taken from her by the demonkin that attacked her hometown, her house burned down, everything lost. Living in a shabby orphanage alongside other children in the same circumstances, she'd thought there couldn't be allowed to be any more children like this, and so she'd set her sights on becoming a hero… Airi, naturally clumsy and not particularly quick to learn, had always been pushed to her limit, never with so much as a moment to spare for making friends, but on the strength of her iron will and her desperate effort, somehow she'd been permitted to advance her schooling.

And yet the hero-prep academy she'd at last managed to get into seemed to Airi to be filled with nothing but unserious people who had no real intention of aiming for [Hero], and she couldn't forgive that, no matter how she tried. Stewing alone, working herself ragged just to make sure she'd never lose to people like those, before she'd noticed, she was being snickered about behind her back as "All-A"… but Airi actually took pride in it. The nickname felt like proof that she was different from the people around her… And yet.

The moment she stepped out of the academy, the [Hero System] was abolished, and even the [Hero Exam] she'd been scheduled to take was never held… All that was left for the girl they'd called "All-A" was the cold reality of having to repay the scholarship money she was supposed to have paid back by becoming a hero.

— The first company she'd worked at, that she didn't want to think about anymore. A president who couldn't tell company money apart from his own, and a rotten organization staffed entirely with his cronies. The shouted insults and the quotas that rained down on her. A job that was unreasonableness incarnate, inside and out. Since she couldn't cry on the clock, she'd always cried on the walk home instead.

"… Why…"

… Compared to back then, the work at Amada was better, she supposed. But it still wasn't right. This wasn't what she wanted to do. This wasn't what she was meant to be doing.

What she was supposed to be doing was defeating demonkin, saving everyone. That was what she was really…

"Just what the hell is your 'real' work supposed to be?! There's no such thing!"

The moment that thought formed, the words that had been hurled at her back then came rushing back, and Airi flinched in spite of herself.

"You're just averting your eyes from reality, chasing after a fantasy that doesn't exist… saying you'll defeat demonkin for everyone's sake, but in the end aren't you just running away?!"

"It's not true! I'm not running away! I'm not running away! I…"

A nameless dread and fear came welling up out of nowhere from the depths of her body.

… She'd be swallowed up. Swallowed up, dashed to pieces, broken apart. The instant that premonition seized her, she couldn't bear sitting still another second. Before she'd realized it, she'd jumped up from the bed, and Airi bolted out of her apartment as if something were chasing her.

The bustling air of the streets at dusk. Airi pushed her way out of the busy quarter and wandered, dazed, until she'd ended up at the center of town… the main thoroughfare facing the plaza, the one she always took to work.

Children and adults, old men and old women, and young people just about her own age. Among the countless people coming and going on the street, Airi caught herself wondering just how many of them were carrying around an indescribable feeling like hers.

… Just like that person had said. Reality was always unreasonable, but even so, everyone else surely accepted it properly and made their peace with it, and the thought made every person in her field of view both hateful and enviable, almost unbearably so… why couldn't I be like that?

So many people right in front of her, and yet a piercing loneliness suddenly took hold of her. Something came slowly welling up from deep inside Airi's sunken heart.

"— hk… … …"

A sob slipped from the mouth she'd hastily clapped a hand over. The inner corners of her eyes turned hot, the back of her nose stung, and the tear that had swelled on her lower lid rolled down her cheek before she could stop it.

— Wait, no, why am I crying out here…

The one most bewildered by the tears spilling in fat drops from her eyes was Airi herself. She had no idea why she was crying… But it wouldn't stop.

Tears that wouldn't be hidden by simply ducking her head. Strangers turning curious looks on the girl who had abruptly stopped in the middle of the crowd, her voice catching as she burst into tears.

… That was the moment it happened.

"— hk… … …?"

All at once, someone tapped her on the shoulder. What appeared in Airi's tear-blurred vision as she jerked her face up was a fluffy, yellow lump.

A mascot suit whose design seemed to be a lion and a star, two things with practically nothing in common, fused together on sheer willpower alone. The shabbily-built suit that had tapped Airi's shoulder as she stood rooted in the crowd quietly lifted an arm in front of her as she blinked her tear-wet, indigo eyes in confusion.

— A fuzzy mascot-suit hand, reached out toward Airi.

It gently wiped the tears off her wet cheek, and her head, as her eyes went round in spite of herself, it patted, pat, pat, as if to soothe her… … … was it, comforting her?

"— hk… … …"

In that instant, the thread of Airi's heart, drawn so taut for so long, snapped clean through.

Everything she'd been carrying all by herself up until now spilled out as if a dam had burst, and from her tightly-clenched throat, a voiceless voice escaped.

As if moved by all the tangled, snarled feelings inside her chest that she couldn't put into words.

Before she'd realized it, Airi had thrown herself, weeping with all her might, against the mascot suit standing in front of her.

"… Sorry, breaking down crying on you all of a sudden like that…"

Sitting side by side on a bench in the plaza. Pressing a handkerchief to her still-damp eyes, Airi asked, "… Your work, was that all right?" and the mascot suit gave a small nod.

"Thanks for stopping for me… I, um, how do I put it, a lot of things have been going on…"

At long last, calming down a little. The moment Airi tried to explain herself to the mascot suit, she remembered the original reason she'd been so down in the first place, and ended up letting out a small, self-mocking laugh.

"… You know. There's a person I've been looking up to, for a long time."

Narrowing her indigo eyes shyly. Airi's softly-spoken murmur, her bashful expression.

"At a school full of nothing but frivolous people, he was the one person who was different. — Raul Chaser. Only he was always ahead of me, seriously, honestly aiming to be a hero."

— Raul Chaser.

The instant she heard that name, the mascot suit sitting beside her shifted ever so slightly, and Airi didn't notice.

… A wistful color rising in her eyes, Airi quietly opened her mouth.

"That was the day of the hero-prep academy's graduation exam —"

 

*

 

— Surrounded!?

In spite of herself, the girl clicked her tongue in frustration.

Her limbs, heavy with exhaustion. The dragon's roar making her eardrums shudder, the sound of the subterranean river running just nearby. The palm gripping her sword was slick with sweat, and she could feel her heart pounding violently with impatience.

Roughly three meters from end to end. Four-headed dragons, towering enough that she had to crane her neck, had Airi caught between them in the cramped chamber of the dim cave: two in front, one behind.

Airi whirled, sensing the dragon at her back move, and as she sprang aside, a voice suddenly reached her ear.

"'Output Raise'!"

The moment she caught that familiar voice, Airi's chest pounded as if being squeezed tight… And yet.

The next instant, faced with the head of a dragon, one with a green jewel set in its brow, that came rolling to her feet, spraying body fluids as it went, Airi was struck speechless.

"Heh, even 'All-A' screws up sometimes, huh?"

Gripping the dazzlingly glowing hilt of his sword tight. The boy who had slid in right in front of Airi looked up at the dragon, thrown into half-mad frenzy by the loss of one of its four heads, and reset his sword in front of his body.

"You learned it, right? These guys' four heads have to be cut off in the order 'Green,' 'Yellow,' 'Red,' 'Blue.'"

"Wha— hey, wait a sec!!"

Before the dumbstruck Airi could stop him, the boy's sword flashed in a single stroke. The dragon's heads, each one as thick as a log, dropped one after another in exactly the order he'd called out.

The boy shook his blade once as if flicking off the spray of blood, made a slightly smug face, muttered "'Keep'," and Airi, finally coming back to herself, let out a full-throated shout.

"You idiot!!!!!"

"Huh…?"

"You, do you even understand what you just did!!?"

The girl he'd presumably just saved was, for some reason, yelling at him at the top of her lungs. At the boy's feet as he stood there blinking, several of the dragon's freshly-severed heads gave a thudding pulse.

"— wha, you've gotta be kidding me!?"

The cross-sections of the severed dragon heads bubbled upward and welled out. The countless meat-sprouts that grew out swelled in the blink of an eye and shot up enormously with a slithering hiss.

"The order to cut the 'Four-Headed Dragon's' heads off in is 'Green,' 'Yellow,' 'Red,' 'Blue.' Don't insult me, I remember that much! That's not working, that's the whole problem!"

In front of the desperately yelling Airi, the dragons' bodies were taking shape before her eyes. One, two, three… three of the four severed heads were multiplying into three new dragons, and combined with the one Airi herself had already multiplied, that made five… Honestly, what the hell did he think he was doing!?

Despair made her head swim. The points deduction would hurt, but there was nothing to do now but run… And yet, surrounded by five dragons each with four heads of its own, just how was she supposed to escape?

Airi was racking her brain when the boy beside her muttered, almost to himself,

"A variant species, huh… right, now that you mention it, the shape of the horns might be different."

In a strangely casual tone. As he dodged the incoming dragon's breath, the boy laid his hand against the blade of his sword once more.

"'Output Raise'!"

"Hey — wai— you idiot!! What if they multiply even more!?"

— The remaining combinations of orders to take down the four heads in came to twenty-three. Sure, not an impossible number of trials. But this dragon multiplied every time you got it wrong, and any way you sliced it, this was way too reckless!

But ignoring Airi's protests entirely, the boy's magic-infused sword flashed, and as she watched, helpless, the dragons' heads were lopped off one after another, Airi couldn't help but pray to the heavens. Please, grant us a miracle…!

… A fizzing, sizzling sound, like countless bubbles popping at once.

Watching the bodies of the "Four-Headed Dragons" dissolve and crumble into the dirt, Airi found her mouth hanging open.

— It was, the right answer.

The boy really had taken the dragons' heads off in the right order… but. Airi blinked in confusion. The order no one was supposed to know, how had he gotten it on the first try…?!

"How did you know the order!?"

"… Huh, you didn't know?"

At Airi's almost-interrogating tone, he looked vaguely surprised… Sword gripped in hand, the boy answered as if it were nothing at all.

"You crush the 'Green' head that's in charge of the regenerative ability first, then take off the 'Blue' head with the vein running through it to cut down their fighting strength, that's the reasoning behind the 'Formula.' 'Yellow' and 'Red' are just a matter of which is easier to cut off, so really either one can come first… in other words, all you actually have to do is take down the regen head first. So even if you went in blind, the odds'd be—"

"Wha… …"

In front of Airi's wide-eyed face, the boy struck at the head of yet another dragon as it bared its fangs.

"And the fact that the first order multiplies into three new ones means the fourth head was the one that killed the regenerative ability. Which means… in this guy's case, you start with the 'Blue' head, right?"

— A flash of pale-white blade, and a head bearing a blue jewel rolled to the ground with a dull thud.

The boy dropped down next to it and gave a small shrug.

"… Well, if you just memorized it, no wonder you didn't get it."

"… …!"

At the boy's offhand remark, Airi bit her lip in frustration, then drew the sword at her hip and ran a "Magic Circuit" across its surface.

"…'Boot'!"

As if trying to match the boy, who had already taken down two of the dragons. The tip of the slim sword the girl whipped around pierced the 'Blue' head of the dragon roaring in front of her.

The last dragon's head dropped, and its massive body fell with a heavy crash. After the dragon's corpse had finished its hissing dissolution, Airi caught sight of what was left, and her eyes went wide.

"No way, a gold orb…"

"Gold? … Huh, I figured silver at best. Maybe being a variant species came with a bonus."

— The monsters in the exam dungeon had orbs embedded in them, and gathering them up was the content of this exam. The color of the orb varied by the monster's rank, and there were only a handful of rank-SS monsters with gold orbs in the entire dungeon.

Peering down with interest at the orb Airi had picked up, the boy grinned.

"Lucky you, 'All-A.' Looks like a perfect-score pass for you again."

"… Raul Chaser."

"Huh, you know my name?"

The moment Airi said his name, the boy's… Raul's eyes went round. At his obviously put-on reaction, Airi couldn't help narrowing her own.

"What are you saying. You're the top student."

"No, on the written exams, you're normally above me, right? And you always get a perfect score on the practical too… and you took down the 'Four-Headed Dragon' in one shot once you knew the order, didn't you?"

"… A guy who pulls down 120 on practicals has no right to say that."

"Nah, that's just the grading criteria. Professor Metric, the head instructor, always grades me ridiculously high, but Professor Sniffer rips me to shreds every single time. I've taught myself so much my form's a mess at this point, and there's no fixing it now… but you really are 'All-A,' huh? Your magic's straight out of the textbook."

"Wha— what is that supposed to mean!!?"

The moment Raul said it without thinking, Airi turned a sharp, glaring eye on him.

"Huh… n-no, um, I meant, like, your fundamentals are really solid, which is great…"

Raul's flustered face, as if he couldn't tell what she was angry about. But even that came across to her as a jab at her unimaginative, clumsy self…

"What's that supposed to mean, are you trying to be a smartass!!?"

"Hey — whoa, watch—"

Airi had gone hot-headed and lunged at Raul, and that was when it happened.

"— hk!!?"

All at once, the rock under Airi's feet gave way in a huge chunk, and beneath her as she went airborne, the crumbled bits of dirt fell pattering down, swallowed into the flow of the subterranean river.

"… Honestly."

… Still holding on to Airi's arm, Raul let out a sigh of dismay.

"You're kind of a klutz, huh?"

But it was as if she couldn't hear Raul's words at all. Hauled back up by Raul, Airi dropped unsteadily to her knees on the spot, gazing at the river running far below, and murmured blankly.

"The orb…"

"Huh…?"

The instant she'd lost her footing, it had tumbled from her hand and been swallowed by the current. The gold gleam was nowhere in sight… and in front of a Raul who was left at a loss for words, Airi slumped forward.

"… After making it… all the way… here…"

… Pushing herself too hard to keep up with Raul as she'd taken down the "Four-Headed Dragon" had left her with almost no magic power. In her current state, the best she could hope to kill was a monster with a bronze orb. Forget perfect scores, even passing was in danger now… Blaming her own stupid self, Airi bit down hard on her lip.

"… …"

… With a faintly awkward look, Raul stood for a while looking down at the girl crouched at his feet, her shoulders trembling… and then, after a moment.

"… Here."

What the boy abruptly thrust out at her was the orb, glowing gold.

The instant Airi saw it, her eyes went wide… and after a moment, she lifted her face.

"… What is this supposed to be?"

Tears trembling in her eyes. In a strained voice, Airi murmured,

"… What are you… seriously, what are you… stop it… pity, that kind of thing… why are you doing this…"

— Raul Chaser. From the very first time she'd met him, she'd felt that he was somehow the same as her, and ever since then, she'd looked up to him, always, but had never been able to even speak to him, just watched him from the shadows. Her only rival, the one she admired… she wanted to be acknowledged. She wanted to stand as his equal. She wanted to become someone he wouldn't be embarrassed to stand next to, and she'd worked herself even harder for that… she'd never wanted to show this person, of all people, her weakness.

Frustration, embarrassment, helplessness… so many emotions crowding her chest that Airi lost track of what she was even saying.

… Her voice catching, the girl finally burst into tears, and in front of her, Raul scratched at his head, looking a little troubled, but after a moment.

"… This is just a practice run, right?"

The moment Raul said it, Airi blinked rapidly in surprise.

"Our goal isn't to get good marks or to take first place… it's to become heroes, right?"

The boy spoke as if making a point of looking away from Airi, bluntly and offhand. But the moment Airi heard the words, her chest squeezed tight.

— Becoming heroes. The goal she and the boy had been pursuing, straight and serious, all this time. The one and only thing they had in common, the thing that had connected the two of them when they'd never so much as exchanged a word. The dream neither of them would ever, ever give up… their dream.

"I mean, I know you've got the skill, so… so just take it, all right? Retesting'd just cost extra money. It'd be a waste for you to fall here."

Rattling it off as he spoke, the boy forced the orb into her hands… Lifting her still-damp eyes, Airi opened her mouth uncertainly.

"… B-but! What about you, then!?"

"Hm… ah, looks like a good one just showed up."

As he spoke, the boy looked up, his gaze running ahead of him. From deep in the cave, a horribly grating sound was coming closer… at the unmistakable roar, Airi went pale.

"A 'Steel Dragon'… wait, you've gotta be kidding!? It's impossible! Its skin's hard as actual steel!!?"

"It'll be fine. If it's steel, I'll figure something out."

Brushing off Airi's panicked protests, Raul drew his sword from its sheath.

"…'Boot'."

The instant the boy spoke the boot command, what rose up on the blade was a "Magic Circuit" so complicated it was hard to believe he'd assembled it in a single instant.

To Airi, who couldn't help but catch her breath at the sheer quality of it, Raul lifted one hand in a casual wave.

"See you. Don't screw up on the real exam, 'All-A'… we'll meet at the investiture ceremony, all right?"

… Saying just that. And.

Magic-laden sword in hand, Raul disappeared into the depths of the cave, and Airi, clutching the orb tight, could only stare after his retreating back.

 

*

 

"— He's my ideal, you see."

Before she'd noticed it, the sun had set completely. The faint white light of the magic streetlamps poured down over the bench in the plaza where the two of them were sitting.

Even in the dark, the bustle of people showed no sign of letting up, and against the buildings whose lights had begun to come on, the voices of people mingled with the sound of the fountain in a busy hum.

"… So the other day, when I ran into him again for the first time in two years. The fact that he just happened to be working the same job I was, it was such a shock. Even if I couldn't make it, he was the one person who'd absolutely make his dream come true. He'd make my dream come true for me, that's what I'd selfishly assumed."

Nodding along now and then, the mascot suit quietly listened to Airi's story. As if the feelings that had been knotted up inside her chest had been sorted out, the expression of the girl talking to the mascot suit had become, before she'd noticed it, awfully calm.

"… But I was wrong."

Looking somehow refreshed, Airi quietly lifted her face.

"… You see, he scolded me, and I got really down about it. We chased the same dream, lost the same dream… we're in the same position, and yet he accepted reality long ago and is doing his best, while I'm the only one still dreaming… that person really is always ahead of me… Wait, oh no, what was I even talking about?"

The way she shook her smooth golden hair softly. The girl, her expression softening with a small smile, shook her head and glanced over at the mascot suit sitting beside her.

"Sorry. You just somehow don't feel like a stranger… um… … … thank you."

A beaming, angelic smile on her finely-shaped face. Airi, who had spoken her thanks bashfully, suddenly seemed to have an idea, and unwound the ribbon tying her hair with a small whish,

"… This is one of my favorites."

A blush rising on her cheeks, whispering in a gentle voice. The girl quietly tied the green ribbon around the mascot suit's wrist.