WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Order

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◈ I Became the Dark Knight in the Game World ◈

Chapter 3: The Wordless Horse and the Silent Knight (3)

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A scream-like sound cut into the struggle between the Bicorn and Kriel.

Crack.

Neither side welcomed the sound. But it was a worse sign for Kriel. The Bicorn's horn, gripped in his right hand, was breaking.

If the horn broke before its neck, snapping the Bicorn's neck would become even harder. Even knowing it would lose a considerable amount of magic power, the Bicorn had no choice but to do everything it could to break its own horn.

Would the horn break before the neck, or would the neck break before the horn?

The Bicorn won.

The horn that had received Kriel's opening greatsword strike was bound to shatter.

The crack at the base of the horn finally split apart. Now, only Kriel's left arm strangling its throat held the Bicorn in place. It intended to tear apart Kriel's arm and kill the knight with its lone horn.

But before it could.

The horn Kriel held in his right hand pierced its eye socket.

[Kiaaaaaaah!]

A terrible scream echoed through the forest. The curse engraved in that sound was so dense that it withered the nearby vegetation.

Unfazed, Kriel clenched his right fist.

Then he punched the horn lodged in its eye.

The Blood Energy carried in his fist, together with Kriel's hard-won monstrous strength, added force to the Bicorn horn's sharpness, already enough to pierce plate armor.

The Bicorn's horn pierced straight through its skull.

It did not scream again.

* * *

Even after the Bicorn's screams subsided, Kriel moved carefully. Truly vicious Demonic Beasts sometimes revived even after their necks had been severed.

Conversely, anything not that vicious died when its neck was severed.

After confirming that the father and daughter were still safe within the circle, Kriel pulled his greatsword from the old tree. He raised it, ready to sever the Bicorn's neck in a single stroke.

[Oh.... Ooh!]

A sound that might have been a scream or a cry of joy suddenly came from the Bicorn, and pitch-black darkness flowed from its fallen body.

As the darkness drained away, the Bicorn's body gradually turned white. The darkness leaving its flesh did not go anywhere else, instead gathering in the Dark Knight's shadow.

It was Resentment of exceptional purity. An ordinary Dark Knight would have cheered. Absorbing Resentment that pure would allow one to accumulate immense Resentment.

Kriel was not an ordinary Dark Knight.

'No, no!'

The side effects of using Bloodlust were already flashing before his eyes. The forest, which had merely been dim until moments ago, now looked like a sea of blood. That was the warning sign.

There was little use in accumulating Resentment anyway. Kriel wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

He took an uncharged Mana Crystal from his clothes and threw it toward the Resentment. Black, murky energy crept over it and stained the crystal. As soon as Kriel confirmed that the Resentment had been absorbed, he swung his raised greatsword with all his strength.

[Noble knight! Huh?]

At that very moment, a pale horse-head shape burst from the Bicorn's corpse.

[Kraaaaaagh!]

* * *

'What is that?'

Since first encountering this world as a game called Tirnanog RPG, Kriel had never heard of anything like this. He watched the horse ghost that had emerged from the horse's corpse warily.

The translucent white ghost gave off a faint glow. It looked exactly like an ordinary horse's head, except for one unusual feature: a single horn growing from its forehead.

'I killed a Bicorn, so why did a unicorn ghost come out?'

The horse ghost was just as wary of Kriel.

It had barely managed to restrain the body consumed by Demonic Nature after receiving the curse of corruption, earning itself a chance to die.

Originally, it had been a being akin to a mountain Spirit. To the horse ghost, the body was short-lived, but the soul was eternal. It had to seize the chance to purify its soul, even at the cost of physical death. Even through its clouded mind, it had sensed someone resisting Demonic Nature.

The scent of iron shrouding that figure reached deep into its heart. Surely, this was a knight who had come to hunt it. It restrained the body that tried to flee to cling to its wretched life, forcing it into a fight.

It thought it had met its death at the hands of a noble knight, just as planned.

'Is that really a proper knight?'

Before it stood a lunatic with bloodshot eyes, hacking at a corpse with a sword.

Its memories of the time when Demonic Nature had ruled its body were hazy. Still, one impression remained clear. That suspicious thing resembling a knight was well versed in the Abyss's dark arts.

[Uh....]

"Who are you?"

[This is troublesome right now. Wait a moment.]

The black knight raised his greatsword. Blood from what had once been its body dripped from the tip of the blade.

Normally, a spiritual body could not be harmed by ordinary physical attacks, but that knight looked skilled enough to harm one.

[Wait! Wait! Don't you want to know where the missing women are?]

'Was that the wrong thing to say?'

It wondered whether saying that to someone who had held two people captive and talked about living sacrifices would only create more victims, but the words had already left its mouth.

* * *

The ghost was saying something strange. I considered whether to put my sword away.

When a Monster said something like that, nine times out of ten it was a trap. The other time, it was nonsense meant to avoid death.

Still, I couldn't simply ignore it.

If what the horse ghost said was true, it would increase Nobility by a fair amount. If it was lying, I wouldn't gain Nobility, but if I ignored the chance of finding survivors, my Nobility would decrease.

Nobility. One of the exclusive stats granted to knight-type classes in Tirnanog RPG. It increased the chance of resisting mental status effects and accelerated recovery speed.

Of course, there was no guarantee that the game's settings still applied exactly now that they had become reality. At the same time, something like a system that supported learning and using skills definitely existed. The proof was that the methods for using Bloodlust and Resentment, active skills I had never learned, were etched into my mind.

'They're skills I can't even use, so I've only trained my swordsmanship...'

More than anything, experience showed that actions likely to raise Nobility sped up the removal of debuffs. That was why I kept pretending to be a knight despite it not suiting me at all.

Dark Knights were originally a class that could turn mental debuffs into buffs if they fell completely into the Abyss. Overcoming mental debuffs that way was no longer an option now that this was reality, since it meant throwing away all my humanity.

"Fine. I'll believe you. But only you and I will go to your nest. I'll take those two back to Laurang, then return."

[Uh... I'd appreciate it if you came back as quickly as possible. Those young women must be hungry.]

"Huh?"

'You didn't kill them?'

* * *

Young men stayed awake through the night at Laurang's wooden palisade, holding weapons crudely fashioned from farm tools or hunters' tools. They spotted a massive shadow approaching from afar.

They thought it might be the mountain ghost, but it was moving strangely slowly. Trembling, they gripped their weapons tightly.

As it came closer to the palisade, they saw what it was. The figure looked far taller and larger than an adult man because Kriel had the mountain ghost's corpse slung across his shoulders.

The father and daughter who had traveled with Kriel followed behind him.

The young men hurriedly opened the palisade gate.

Kriel carried the mountain ghost's headless body across both shoulders, with its severed head tied to his waist by a rope. The mountain ghost had said, "I am not bound to my body," but Kriel did not readily trust a Monster's words.

A knight carrying a horse's corpse was enough to draw attention even in the middle of the night. Especially when that horse was the mountain ghost that had plagued Laurang for so long. The villagers found themselves following Kriel.

By the time Kriel threw the mountain ghost's corpse into the yard before the church and turned around, most of Laurang's people who were still awake had followed him to look at it.

Perhaps hearing the noisy crowd, Priest Jakabil opened the church doors and emerged. He saw the exceptionally large horse's corpse, its pure white fur so beautiful in the moonlight that it seemed almost radiant.

"It is the mountain ghost."

Priest Jakabil stared at the pure white fur.

"The color... is different, isn't it?"

[The horns are different too!]

The horse ghost suddenly popped out from Kriel's waist. Kriel heard the priest let out a startled cry, but decided to pretend he had not noticed for the old priest's dignity.

"T-The horns are different?"

[The number of them.]

Kriel lifted the mountain ghost's head for him to see. The twisted, goat-like horn lodged in one eye socket remained exactly as it had when Kriel killed the ghost, but the base of the broken right horn and the left horn were gone. In their place was a single straight horn extending from the center of its forehead.

Priest Jakabil stared blankly and uttered the animal's name.

"A unicorn?"

Kriel had brought back the severed head of that sacred animal. Shock and fear filled Priest Jakabil's eyes.

[Oh, that's right. Back in the days of the Old United Kingdom, I even held an official post as a unicorn, an auspicious beast. I received some strange curse and grew another horn.]

"...Wait."

As the most learned person in Laurang, Priest Jakabil was also deeply knowledgeable about local legends. In an age when the powers of gods and Demons threw the world into upheaval, studying such legends was a priest's natural duty.

"You are Orisin, the Spirit of that mountain?"

[And the mountain ghost that tormented the village these past few days, as a bonus. I'm sorry about that. But if I didn't want to kill people, I had no choice but to-]

As the horse ghost tried to ramble on, Kriel tapped the flat of his blade. At the metallic chorus of gauntlet meeting sword, Orisin quickly got to the point.

[The people I kidnapped. They're all still alive! How about lending me a cart?]

Footnotes:

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