Dual Shields
I am firmly of the opinion that dual shields are the most aggressive weapon there is.
Armor only protects the parts it covers. You never quite feel fully safe wearing it. Every gap it leaves becomes a weakness the enemy can obsessively target.
What fills that incompleteness is the shield.
With a shield in hand, you no longer have to fear an enemy's attacks. You can move your arm freely and actively intercept whatever comes at you. Even ranged fire needs no cover. Threats simply vanish against a single shield.
Just by gripping one, we escape the fear of pain and become free to act aggressively. From that moment on, the shield sheds its purely defensive nature and turns into something far more offensive — a tool that stops the enemy's blows while letting you press the attack yourself.
So if you hold not one shield but two… just how much stronger does that make you?
More is better. Flawless logic.
That was what dual shields were.
…In truth, "too much of a good thing" fit dual shields better than "more is better."
What were they thinking when they made them? Dual blades exist, so why not dual shields? Shield discrimination, maybe?
Well. Whatever the backstory, who cares?
I was starting purely for the fun of it.
Thud—!
Shield and flame collided. Sparks scattered in every direction.
But the shield did not give ground. I became a wall and held my place.
I peeked over the rim to check the situation beyond.
———KAAaaaaa!!
The Kakari hopped in place, roaring. Frustrated that every attack had been stopped, maybe. When the roar ended, it scraped the ground twice with its feet, then launched itself forward, crest lowered for a charge.
I stayed put, right shield raised, waiting for it to come. The Kakari only accelerated harder, never easing its momentum.
Bare-bodied, that crest would have sent me flying without question. With a shield, it was different.
The instant before crest met shield, I drove power into my lower body with a sharp breath and swung the shield sideways, batting the attack aside.
Just Guard. Parry.
The Kakari's body lurched hard to one side. Its head whipped sideways, the charge cut short, and a brief stagger seized it.
In that opening I brought the left shield up and smashed it into the dazed Kakari's skull.
The follow-up strike after a successful parry.
Crack—!
———KaaaAAK!
The thing that had taken the shield full in the face crumpled and thrashed on the ground.
The so-called tray karaoke.
Dual shields were not a cutting weapon that severed parts. They were a blunt weapon that battered and broke. Keep hammering a monster's head and it seemed to get a concussion — it would collapse without recovering its senses.
The concussion effect from blunt weapons was shorter than the groggy state from a proper part break, but even a brief window of free damage was golden time.
I planted myself in front of the Kakari's head and beat it senseless with the shields. Overhead smashes with both hands. Alternating shield punches. Having two instead of one doubled the impact.
Cracks spidered across its crest as the seconds passed, and the final blow shattered it completely.
Still got the feel for it.
That made three times already — three times the Kakari had gone down to tray karaoke.
I was hunting Kakari with dual shields right now, using live combat to reawaken the muscle memory. Of course, just killing it would have been boring, so I leaned into the dual shields' strengths: no essence powers, no other body parts — just the head, relentlessly.
Call it cruel if you want. Nothing else was better for relearning the dual-shield feel.
The whole point of dual shields was the parry.
Hunter Land had only two kinds of parry: greatsword parry and shield parry. Dual-shield parrying, in particular, was the official playstyle itself. You could block or parry with either hand, so posture recovery was faster than with a single shield, and the defensive profile outclassed every other weapon.
In party play, the dual-shield user was often the last one standing. Selfishly surviving alone, if you wanted to put it that way.
The drawbacks? Aside from the follow-up after a parry, attack power and reach were generally low. And because part breaks were blunt rather than slashing, you could never cut off a tail. Everything had been poured into defense alone.
Still, the hit after a successful parry was fun. You smacked the parried body part once as a follow-up. Parry a head-based attack and the downward shield strike became tray karaoke.
The timing was tight, though, and not every attack could be parried or blocked. Knowing which ones you couldn't stop mattered. Low-grade monsters were weak enough that everything was parryable, at least.
Which meant the Kakari's attacks had never once touched me. Every single one had vanished in front of my shields.
And the Kakari itself was about to vanish the same way.
In the end it collapsed without strength. Its head was pulp, blood trailing as the curtain fell on its life.
I looked back and forth between the mangled, ruined Kakari head and the shields gripped one in each hand. Blood and scraps of flesh dripped from the round shields.
A thoroughly grotesque sight. Enough to make a person want to apologize.
What I learned sparring with the Kakari was that dual shields drained stamina fast and left you exhausted. Batting aside a monster's heavy attacks one after another was not as easy as it sounded. In the game you just clicked a few buttons and it was over. Here I had to control every single action myself — focus on which pattern was coming, make the body respond. Mentally, the fatigue hit hard and fast.
But it offered a different kind of fun from any other weapon. Whatever else, the hand-feel when you cracked a shield into a skull was something you had to respect.
The reach was so short I whiffed a lot, though…
"Th-that was amazing!"
Pina burst out of the undergrowth where she had been hiding, full of admiration. Twigs and leaves stuck in her hair, which looked ridiculous. I plucked them off for her and drew my skinning knife.
"Ah, um, Alice-nim. Could I try doing it instead?"
"Hm?"
"The, um, skinning…"
I tilted my head slightly, then handed her the skinning knife.
"You sure?"
"Y-yes… it's fine. It's not moving anymore…"
Pina took the knife with a trembling voice. Standing before the Kakari's remains, she swallowed hard, crouched, and drove the blade in.
She peeled the hide with a soft rip and scraped away the fat membrane clinging to it. Her movements were a little rough, but the handiwork was decent.
"It's not that different from the lowest-grade monsters."
"They're all pretty similar."
"Wh-what are you going to take?"
"Hmm… hide, claws, oil sac."
Working the hide seemed to give Pina confidence; her hands moved more freely after that.
Claws, hide, and the red oil sac.
No essence, unfortunately. I had only hit the head, and still nothing. Having one or not didn't really matter, but maybe extreme stress could shock an essence into breaking…
As always, materials alone were pure loot-system RNG.
I wrapped the materials Pina handed me in cloth, wiped the blood from the knife, and put it away.
The commission was done.
I had my feel for the shields back, too. At this level, heading out for an Ekriki shouldn't be a problem.
Absurdly enough, starting the day after I returned from the Kakari hunt, rain fell over the marsh without pause.
Thick, violent rain hammered down and swallowed every sound in Antico. One of the occasional torrential downpours that visited the marshlands.
I stared out the window, praying the weather would clear soon. Living a hunter's life of repeating commissions over and over had left me with no sense of what to do on a rainy day like this. It was the first rain I had seen since coming to this world.
I hated rain.
When it fell like this, my chest turned sentimental without my permission.
"It's really coming down…"
Noah rested a hand on the window and spoke softly.
"It's been a long time since we had rain this heavy. Everything's going to be damp for a while."
"Ugh…"
"Heh. Well, nothing we can do about it."
Noah sat down beside me.
We sat at the table and watched the rain fall. When would it stop?
Both of us had things to do, but with the rain like this we could only sit and stare.
"Did you know? There are monsters that call rain like this. Research is incomplete and they're not well known, but… there's an old city that was completely submerged because of one of them. They say that region still rains even now."
"…I see."
The Responsive Dragon Amazara.
The monster Noah was talking about was one of the top-tier monsters. Their numbers were few, but each one possessed enough power to overturn the entire surrounding ecosystem on its own — true monsters in every sense.
"Could humans even kill a monster like that?"
Noah's voice trembled slightly.
Beings that were natural disasters simply by existing. Monsters that even other monsters fled from. Facing them with human strength would be like throwing eggs at a boulder.
But it might not be entirely impossible. I believed that because, in the game, I had toppled top-tier monsters with a human body.
"There's no monster that can't be killed."
I answered her question with confidence.
Noah was silent for a long while after hearing me. Eventually she opened her mouth.
"…Yeah. You're right."
She gazed quietly out the window and smiled a little.
"Alice, what are you hunting on your next commission?"
"Mm, Ekriki."
"Really? Already Ekriki. That's fast. You'll be able to handle it, Alice."
Noah spoke in a clear, bright voice.
"I should start taking other commissions again soon myself."
"You're going out on a job?"
"Yeah. Not gathering or anything like that — commissions that match my rank. I need to get back out there. If I keep taking it this easy, you're going to catch up to me for real. I'm done with training for now. This should be enough, I think. Live combat is still the best, after all."
It was a strange thing, but that day Noah's smile looked especially free and unburdened.
If Noah left on a commission, I might not see her for a while. Unlike me, still a newcomer, she would head deeper in and hunt the stronger monsters inside the marsh. Or she might leave the marsh entirely and take work in another region.
"Once the rain stops, I'll go pick up a commission too."
"It'll take a while, right?"
"Probably?"
Noah said it casually.
"There's nothing left for me to teach you now."
Thanks to Noah, I had adapted well to this world. Over the past month I had learned and gained so much from her — every step of the hunt, settling in here, all of it.
And at some point I had stepped out from under her shadow. That was why I had vaguely sensed that our shared life was drawing to a close. Lately the time we spent running into each other had been shrinking, too.
As long as we were both hunters, we couldn't stay together forever.
I had fallen into this world alone and met good people who brought me this far. Without Noah among them, would I even be sitting here now?
Noah was not an NPC I had seen in the game. She had probably been one of those nameless hunter NPCs who simply walked past on the road.
What was certain was that Noah was alive and breathing right in front of me.
"I might head into the marsh, or I might go somewhere else — I don't know yet… but once the commission is done, I'll come back to Antico. Well, I'll probably be back soon. Or it might take longer. Until then, Alice, if you're still here, let's catch up on everything we've missed."
Noah said it with a smile.
I could only nod.
Until the rain stopped, we stayed closer than before inside the lodging. We prepared meals together as if we had forgotten we were parting. We drank tea and talked. We went out under umbrellas to buy food, and browsed clothes one more time.
The pleasant hours slipped by quickly.
The rain stopped on the night of exactly the fifth day.
The next morning, Noah packed her things and left.
Our last meal was rather quiet.
The final goodbye was extremely simple.
One hug.
That was the whole of our farewell.
She taught me one last thing before she went — that hunters were people who merely brushed past each other, and that was why they could be so calm about parting.
But I couldn't do anything about the hollow feeling left behind.
I lay on the bed and stared blankly at the ceiling.
My steps felt unsteady, dizzy.
I got up at once and collected the dual shields and greatsword that had been shoved into the corner. The Luga-lac essence socketed in the greatsword and the Galori essence set in the shields glinted.
Right. Better to kill monsters than waste time thinking like this.