Why didn't you just kill me?! Why did all my neighbors and family have to die?!
A Hero is someone chosen by God to receive a supernatural 'gift'. A unique existence, only one Hero can exist at a time, with a new one being chosen upon the former's death.
This generation's Hero is an ordinary villager girl named Kyrie whose gift is merely being able to boil water.
When her family and friends are slaughtered, Kyrie is backed into a corner and learns the true value of that boiling hot power, and how well it could be used to fan the flames of revenge that burned inside of her.
The Tale of the Teapot Hero's Revenge ~Although a Hero Was Only Capable of Boiling Water, That Was Enough to Kill All of Those Who Stole Everything from Her~, or just The Tale of the Teapot Hero's Revenge (Yukashi Yuusha no Fukushuutan) for short, is a web novel by NonB. Originally posted on Syosetsuka ni Narou in 2015, it later received a manga adaptation with illustrations by Ori serialized in Square Enix's digital magazine Manga UP! in 2019.
Associated Tropes:
- Blatant Lies: When Kyrie's "gift" was revealed to be the ability to boil water, rather than something flashy and obviously useful on the battlefield, she was told that she could go home to her family and would be allowed to return to her peaceful villager life. Since this came from the king himself, and he personally placed her on the royal carriage, she had no choice but to agree. The moment she was out of sight and hearing, the king and his prime minister sent an elite knight unit to her village to burn it to the ground, pinning the blame on nameless bandits, so that a new "hero" would be chosen by the gods upon her death.
- Dangerous 16th Birthday: Zigzagged. Kyrie was informed she was chosen as the new hero on her sixteenth birthday which was the catalyst for all the subsequent events. However, the tragedies wouldn’t begin until sometime after her birthday.
- Didn't See That Coming: Sending some of the best to kill some girl to cleanse the hero spot for a new potential asset sounds like a great idea on paper. In practice, the sheer survival instinct of that hero plus the discovery of her Lethal Harmless Powers results in the king being down some of his best — and lacking more extensive and powerful people to throw her way or readily find her to kill her again, especially after the reports given had an Assumed Win that let their guards down. Anyone Kyrie runs into would have to be by chance or because of her newfound La Résistance work and revenge plans driving her to hunt them down, one-by-one.
- Driven to Villainy: Kyrie would have been content to be a simple village girl, or if she needed to die for the kingdom to have a new "hero", would have been content if she and she alone were killed. But because the king's elite knight order massacred her entire home village to get at her, including her mother, father, and adorable little sister, Kyrie was left with no choice but to engage in vigilante justice, just to survive.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Kyrie starts the story a simple village girl who, by oracle, is chosen as the next "hero" and whisked to the capital. When her divine "Gift" is shown to be the ability to magically boil water, she's laughed out of the capital and sent home. That very night, the king's elite knights, disguised as bandits, torch her home village to the ground, killing all her friends, family, neighbors, and nearly killing herself. That's when she gets creative with her "gift" and realizes that the human body is 70-90% water, killing the entire unit, save the top commander who, at the start of the atrocity, went to report to the king that the task was carried out before the first of the corpses was set alight.
- Gorn: Ever wanted to see how a human being's body reacts to being mostly water and then inflicted with the absolute power to boil them alive? Kyrie finds out and then gets a little too adept at figuring her powers from there.
- Humans Are Bastards: It's an open secret that the king is a notorious tyrant and started the war with the "demons," purely to extend his territory, and the only humans that are shown to be decent and kind are Kyrie's home village. The rest are cowardly, cruel, greedy, and vindictive, happily bragging about their villainy and having the gall to be offended when Kyrie fights back.
- It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Kyrie is just the latest in a long, long list of "heroes" chosen by the gods and worked as a Living Weapon until they died and a new one is chosen. For her, it's arguably worse, because the other "heroes" died in war with the [Demons], while Kyrie's entire home village was burned to the ground, everybody within horribly massacred for the "crime" of having known her.
- Just Following Orders: When Kyrie turns the tables on the elite knight unit guilty of the atrocity of murdering her entire home village and burning it to the ground, just to get at her, the troops, to the last man, proclaim that they were following orders and had no choice, as they're begging for their lives. Kyrie retorts that she doesn't give a damn, since they ignored the pleas of their victims, and brutally kills them all.
- Lethal Harmless Powers: Nobody in universe, including Kyrie, thought that "Boiling water" would be useful as an ability for combat, until Kyrie's home village is burned to the ground, and Kyrie is fleeing for her life. She's forced to get creative and uses her ability to trigger an avalanche. Then when the squad commander catches up to her and starts sadistically tormenting her, she manages to turn the tables when she realizes the human body is mostly water in an elastic container, putting him through a Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique or two and experimenting with the breadth and scope of her gods-granted power.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The king may be a petty tyrant, but he at least listens to his retainers and gives sound reasoning for his actions. When the oracle declared Kyrie's "Gift" is [boiling], the king doesn't immediately condemn her, but instead has her tested on the training field, in the event the god's naming sense just happens to be different from humans. When his prime minister comes forward and decries the king for sending Kyrie home, rather than executing her on the spot, or even having her ambushed by "bandits" on the way back, the king spells out his reasoning, rather than going My Way or the Highway and killing him on the spot.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Downplayed. It's stated that, in addition to having The Gift and enhanced physical abilities, it's also stated early on that the Hero also gets stronger with each enemy they kill, with monsters providing less than trained humans. While experience is a term explicitly used in a semi-traditional sense, levels aren't, however. Kyrie also makes note that despite getting stronger she hasn’t developed any additional muscle.
- Slave to PR: The reason Kyrie wasn't killed in the royal capital, or ambushed by "bandits" on the way home, is that the king has a certain public image he needs to maintain. If she died in the royal capital, the public would rightly worry about the public order, and there would be too many witnesses. If she was ambushed on the way home, people would worry about the competence of the knight order, since they failed to protect a carriage with the royal seal. If a group of bandits lay waste to a backwater village though...
- Spell Blade: Users of Renki can empower their blades to cut through even steel. The first human enemy that gave Kyrie trouble initially had her on the ropes using this technique before his petty sadism got the better of him.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In theory, Kyrie can basically turn her body into an "Instant Death" Radius by even so much as touching her target directly. But as some training with the resistance leader points out, she not only has to get in that touch range to begin with and most of her targets are going to be wielding weapons that out-range her, but also has to be experienced enough to even hope to cross that distance without being injured in the process; with no inherent healing powers or physical durability for her small frame, Kyrie could easily be killed by any skilled foe that actually took her seriously.
- Take Off Your Clothes: Shortly after meeting Beat, she heals one of Kyrie’s injuries. She then asks Kyrie to remove her clothes, so she can properly heal her. Kyrie complies. In the following scene, Kyrie is clothed again while noting her injuries are healed with Beat heavily blushing.
