In the end, Filo took the morning star with her back to the village and played with it like a toy together with the slaves. It was a fun weapon that made pillars of fire wherever it hit. The little brats even wanted to use the weapon to make a campfire. It wore me out just making sure they didn’t set any buildings on fire.

Our second match was the following day.

“Our next opponent is . . .”

I guess there was no point in checking our opponent’s team name or anything, really. Our objective was to win every match and come out on top, after all.

As I stood there thinking, the gong rang, and then we made our way into the arena, and . . . when we saw our opponents, we all immediately went on the defensive. There were three griffins inside of a cage.

“Kweeeeh!”

They were all riled up and ready to go. So these were those dangerous wild monsters, huh? We’d never fought a griffin before . . . griffin elite. The griffins’ monster name appeared in my field of vision. I guess they were some superior type of griffin, then. I had no idea what level a normal adventurer would need to be to defeat one, but apparently it was a relatively interesting fight card, because there were more spectators than yesterday.

We just had to get stuck with a troublesome opponent, didn’t we? This was exactly the kind of match that drunkard woman had warned me about.

“Grr . . .”

Filo started acting menacingly. That reminded me, filolials and griffins apparently didn’t like each other. I seemed to remember reading something about griffins regarding horses as enemies in some fantasy book once. I see . . . It must have had something to do with both taking pride in being used as a means of transportation and fighting over who was the best. Filolials didn’t get along with dragons, either. It sure seemed like were a lot of monsters filolials didn’t like. Oh well . . . At least it had gotten Filo motivated.

“Humming, are you going to be able to hold back?”

“Grr . . .”

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. She was probably going to go all out.

“Alright, Humming. When the match starts, you fling that morning star I gave you at them. Whatever you do, don’t change into your filolial form.”

There were sure to be nobility and others among the spectators that would realize we were the Shield Hero and crew if they saw Filo, the bird god. Never mind the fact that a monster that could turn into a human would surely draw way too much attention. I wanted to defeat the enemy before that happened and without standing out, if at all possible.