[Gladia has obtained Hero's Blood!]
If this world were a game, wouldn't something like that have popped up?
That was what I thought as I stared at the Hidden Piece—Hero's Blood—courtesy of my young mistress's tear-worthy self-sacrifice.
As I've mentioned before, the First Hero is a figure who existed only in the lore of *Saintess & Hero*, never appearing directly in the story.
A thousand years ago, when humanity had been ground to ruin by the Demon King's assault, she appeared like a comet alongside the Saintess, drove back the Demon King's armies, and ultimately slew the Demon King herself—a legendary hero who saved the world.
She was also the founder of the Libertian Empire, where Stellar Academy now stands.
After the war ended, she married the Saintess and built the Empire, or so the story goes.
She ruled the Empire for a time, then vanished without a trace alongside the Saintess—and since she apparently took every treasure she'd ever collected with her when she disappeared, the only relic officially remaining in the world today is the Holy Sword. Just the one.
Unofficially, however, one more existed.
This: ⟨Hero's Blood⟩.
According to the lore, a dragon who had been beaten by the Hero and was drowning in grief gathered the blood the Hero had spilled, sealed it in a bottle, and kept it as a reminder never to forget that humiliation. A tragicomic backstory if there ever was one.
The warehouse that served as the dungeon's entrance collapsed in an accident once the tutorial period ended, which made this a Hidden Item obtainable only during that brief early window.
The item's effects were simple.
*Upon consumption: maximum HP reduced, recovery rate increased.*
Of those two effects, the recovery rate increase was the one I had my eye on.
Recovery rate increase meant the character's natural HP regeneration sped up, and the amount restored by potions or healing spells increased significantly.
That was how it worked in the game—but now that the game had become reality, wouldn't it help me recover faster from the damage dealt by the ⟨World's Trial⟩?
There was just one thing giving me pause.
"…This is going to taste awful."
Yes. Hero's Blood looked thoroughly unappetizing, and that was why I was hesitating.
Was I not worried about the maximum HP reduction?
No, think about it for a second.
This was blood that the First Hero had shed a thousand years ago, bottled and preserved.
*Is this even sanitary?*
Though I did have a certain confidence on that front.
*…If this actually has any toxicity, there's a good chance it won't affect me.*
My reasoning came down to the ⟨World's Trial⟩.
*They say nothing is all bad—I just never expected the ⟨World's Trial⟩ to have an upside.*
That's right. The debuff ⟨World's Trial⟩—the one that blinded me and still made my life miserable every single day.
In the process of studying it after meeting my young mistress, I had come to realize that the ⟨World's Trial⟩ was not a trait that existed purely to disadvantage me.
To describe the effects of ⟨World's Trial⟩ in game terms: it imposed a permanent debuff on the body and locked mana in a sealed state. That was the short of it.
The crucial point was that this debuff took priority over all other debuff effects.
Thanks to that, I had reached a state of absolute immunity—no poison, no debuff of any kind could touch me, save for the ⟨World's Trial⟩ itself.
…Not that I'd gone looking for that information. I'd simply spent enough time around my young mistress to be poisoned on a fairly regular basis, and I'd figured it out the hard way.
*Her siblings sent poison at roughly once-a-week intervals, after all.*
At least it meant free material for building up my young mistress's poison resistance. Silver linings.
Come to think of it, I'd eaten plenty of spoiled food during my days as a beggar and never once had an upset stomach. I'd chalked it up to the human digestive system being more resilient than expected.
And the mana seal wasn't purely a disadvantage either.
The mana seal, as the name suggested, fixed my ambient mana at zero—which sounded like it would be nothing but a liability, but it turned out that wasn't quite the case.
*It really isn't.*
The key was that it reduced my mana to zero.
In the world of *Saintess & Hero*, every living person carried mana within them as a matter of course.
Even the most talentless dullard still held at least a faint trace of it—that was simply the norm.
In a world like that, having mana that was perfectly, completely zero? That was an anomaly by any measure.
The advantage that came from maintaining that state was simple: I was entirely excluded from the effects of magic.
From a magical standpoint, I registered as an inanimate object, which meant I could pass freely through barrier spells and all manner of security enchantments.
In short, think of it as being in a state like a certain stealth aircraft—invisible to the radar.
That was actually why I'd been able to pass through the mana authentication on my young mistress's room.
Well, physical locks were another matter—but I'd already made a copy of her room key, so there was nothing left that could stop me anyway.
In any case.
Weighing all of these factors, the maximum HP reduction debuff from ⟨Hero's Blood⟩ was very likely to be completely useless against me.
"If only I could get past this nagging feeling of wrongness…"
Ugh. Drinking someone else's blood was deeply, viscerally repulsive.
How do vampires manage this sort of thing?
If it had at least congealed into something solid, I might have been able to force it down somehow—but ⟨Hero's Blood⟩ was still sloshing around in its bottle despite being a thousand years old.
Oh, forget it.
"I am Gladia. I lived as a beggar. There is nothing I haven't eaten!"
Down it goes.
*Gulp.*
A metallic liquid slid down my throat.
At the same time, the taste of iron flooded my entire mouth.
*It's awful—!*
They say medicine is bitter, but this was something I had no desire to ever repeat.
I was still processing that thought when—
[You've finally come? Took you long enough.]
A neutral voice I had never heard before drifted into my ear.
No.
*Is this even… hearing?*
It felt less like something entering through my ears and more like a voice resonating directly inside my skull.
But the confusion didn't last long.
[⟨Sword Saint⟩ reacts to ⟨Hero's Blood⟩.]
*Thud—!*
"Gck—!"
Blood surged from my mouth in a rush.
At the same moment, pain erupted across every inch of my body.
A violent, crushing agony—as though something inside me was being shattered by a hammer—slammed into me all at once.
My knees buckled on their own. My body slipped beyond my control and began to shake.
"Ugh—! Kgh—!"
*It was spoiled after all!*
I should never have eaten something past its expiration date—
Damn it, wasn't I supposed to be immune to poison?!
The shock of my supposedly ironclad poison resistance being breached was bad enough, but there was more.
[Trait ⟨Sword Saint⟩ activates.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ is nullified.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ activates.]
[Trait ⟨Sword Saint⟩ activates.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ is nullified.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ activates.]
Like two forces locked in a standoff, ⟨Sword Saint⟩ and ⟨World's Trial⟩ flickered on and off in rapid succession.
With each cycle, my vision lurched between light and dark like someone flipping a switch—bright, then black, then bright again—making everything even more disorienting.
*What is wrong with you two?!*
I had no idea what was happening.
All I could tell was that Hero's Blood was changing something inside me—
The agony stretched on as though it would never end. When it finally began to subside, I was able to drag myself upright at last.
My vision, which had been flickering like a broken screen, had settled back into darkness.
But.
"This is… remarkable."
My body felt impossibly light.
The lingering pain that had been the constant aftermath of the ⟨World's Trial⟩'s backlash was gone without a trace.
And that wasn't all.
I jumped lightly in place.
*Fwip—*
My body shot upward in an instant—past my own height, clearing two meters before dropping back down.
It was noticeably less than when ⟨Sword Saint⟩ was active, but this level of physical ability with no mana reinforcement whatsoever? It wasn't even in the same league as before.
*At this rate, I could fight even without activating Sword Saint.*
It wasn't just raw physical ability, either.
I went still and let my senses stretch outward.
*Everything around me feels so sharp.*
The precision was on an entirely different level from my existing ⟨Heart-Sight⟩.
I could even detect the outline of my young mistress's expression—lying on the floor, staring up at me, her face a picture of stunned disbelief—
Hm?
"My lady…?"
When had she woken up?
*And why does she look like that?*
Her lips were trembling as though she'd witnessed something she couldn't begin to process, and her eyes were wide with shock.
I wasn't sure when she'd come to, but her expression was anything but ordinary.
Her gaze was fixed on my body and showed no sign of moving.
The emotion I sensed in that look was… fear?
"D-Dia… are you all right…?"
"…Pardon?"
Her body hadn't fully recovered—she was still shaking—and she was practically crawling across the floor to reach me.
I hurried toward her and caught her before she could fall.
"My lady, what are you doing? You'll ruin your clothes!"
"Do you think I care about my clothes right now?!"
"Then what do you care about?"
"You—do you have any idea what you look like right now?! You were bleeding so much—!"
"Ah."
Only then did I register how I must appear to her.
I'd been coughing up blood until just moments ago, so my maid's uniform would be soaked through with it—and I'd been rolling around on the floor on top of that, so there was no way I looked anything close to normal.
My young mistress's hands moved frantically over my body.
"You're—you're okay, right? Dia, you're not dying? Say something! I can't—if you weren't here, I—"
How was I supposed to handle this?
My young mistress had completely lost it.