WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Order
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◈ I Became the Dark Knight in the Game World ◈
Chapter 35: A Short Recollection, a Long Recollection (3)
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Kriel tilted his head as he watched Armede continue huffing in anger. It was not as though they had parted on particularly bad terms, so why was she acting like this?
He decided to get to the point. It was time for an expert opinion.
“What I need you to look at is this.”
“This?”
Kriel took out the Horn Dagger and handed it to Armede, hilt first.
The curved blade, tinged with red, looked rather sinister, but Armede had grown used to Kriel by now. This much ominousness was nothing.
Besides...
When she focused, she sensed extraordinary Divine Power. It was absurd for something shaped like this to be a holy relic, but she decided to accept it.
Kriel himself looked like a Dark Knight who had crawled up from the Abyss, yet in truth, he was the sort of person who belonged in the lead role of a chivalric romance.
“You even carry a sword that looks like you.”
It was praise twisted around by embarrassment. The majesty on the surface might be frightening and fierce, but beneath it all, Kriel was nobler than anyone.
Kriel thought of Orisin’s crude way of speaking. He had worked so hard to at least look like a “noble knight.”
“No. How could you say that?”
Orisin could not agree with Armede’s assessment either.
[Argh! Just because you’re a count’s daughter, you think you can say I resemble the person who cut off my head?!]
“What?”
Armede’s mind froze for a moment at the Spirit’s absurd words. Kriel answered calmly, as if nothing were strange.
“You deserved to be beheaded.”
[That’s true.]
It was a truly bizarre conversation. Perhaps Orisin had said it half-jokingly from the start, because Orisin readily accepted Kriel’s answer and launched into a long speech about how handsome the dagger looked regardless.
Kriel let Orisin’s chatter go in one ear and out the other. That horse-headed bastard must have been terribly bored while waiting.
“Its core is currently contaminated by the Abyss.”
Startled, Armede cast a detection spell. The dagger’s structure was sealed beneath layer after layer of Divine Power. There was not even the faintest trace of the Abyss.
Still, something about that “seal” felt unusual. The Divine Power was intertwined in a structure far more complex and durable than necessary.
“I’m told it’s some kind of curse. For the time being, the dagger has something like an automatic purification function, so it undergoes regular purification. But at its root, nothing has changed.”
“Wait,” Armede said, then spent a long time examining the Horn Dagger.
Beyond the tightly woven barrier of Divine Power, something that clearly was not Divine Power did seem to be slowly growing. Even at a glance, the source of the contamination was highly advanced and exceptionally vicious. Though the curse’s influence was reduced every moment through Divine Power, it continued multiplying endlessly, leaving its core untouched.
“This won’t be done in a day or two...”
“Is that so? Then it can’t be helped.”
Kriel spoke quietly. At his indifferent words, phantom pain from Armede’s past washed over her. Another calm farewell without any promise of return, just like back then. She wanted no part of that.
“Wait!”
She braced herself against the table and stood. The force of it rattled the objects on top. In an instant, Armede put on a confident expression and declared,
“E-Even if one or two days aren’t enough, three days will do! That’s enough time to identify the source of the curse!”
Her stammered first words revealed the anxiety she had failed to hide. Kriel answered with the same expressionless face.
“There’s no need for that.”
Both now and in the past, it sounded like a declaration that she was of no help to him. Armede felt as though someone had gripped her heart with an icy hand, leaving her unable to breathe.
But Kriel was not finished.
“There’s plenty of time, so I meant that you should examine it thoroughly. I have no other appointments at the moment.”
“...Really?”
“Would your schedule be a problem? If so, tell me where the next Society conference will be held, and I’ll visit then.”
The tension that had made Armede’s entire body rigid suddenly vanished. She nearly collapsed back into her chair before speaking weakly.
“No. I don’t have anything to do either. I’ll tell you where I’m staying, so come by around noon tomorrow. I’ll be in the duchy for about a week.”
“You’re not taking the dagger with you now?”
“I came here for an academic exchange meeting, that’s all. I didn’t prepare reagents or anything. Shouldn’t a wizard be given time to prepare?”
Kriel nodded readily. Preparing high-powered magic naturally required a great deal of time and expensive reagents. It was different from battle, but complex research likely consumed similar resources.
“All right. Noon?”
“Yeah. Don’t eat lunch.”
* * *
Kriel found an inn nearby that advertised itself as the cheapest place around and went inside. Cheap inns were usually dens of filth and poor hygiene, but perhaps because the duchy was wealthy, its facilities were at least average despite the low price.
Of course, “low” was measured by the duchy’s standards. Compared to a truly rural inn, it was not cheap at all.
Still, it had a roof and blankets, so he had no reason to complain. The moment he entered the room, Tuon transformed into human form.
“Master. Dagger.”
“Here.”
Tuon’s sentences were getting shorter and shorter. Tuon insisted it was not disrespectful, but compressed language for efficient communication.
Kriel handed the Horn Dagger to Tuon. Orisin seemed to have no complaints about their new body being cleaned and simply watched as Tuon took out oil and cloth.
[Say, you care quite a bit about money, don’t you?]
Apparently, Orisin had been thinking about something other than watching the dagger’s maintenance. Kriel gave a casual affirmative response.
“Who doesn’t like money?”
“Master. What truly matters is not money, but honor. You should know that wealth and glory are best obtained by honorably extorting them from the Abyss.”
“You get talkative at times like this.”
“And one more thing. A Dark Knight...”
“I told you to watch what you say where someone might hear you.”
It was an ordinary conversation between Tuon and Kriel. Orisin, who had overheard their pointless exchange, bobbed their head.
[You say you like money, yet you stood alone against the Wild Hunt and only took one coin?]
Kriel stroked his chin. It was a rather complicated story.
“It’s not as if I always accept only one coin as payment. When I worked as a mercenary, I received fair compensation.”
* * *
[What? Then you weren’t in the county because of mercenary work, you just happened to stop by?]
“No. I visited the County of Kett because I accepted the Count’s request to subjugate Monsters.”
[Uh... and?]
Orisin sensed something strange from the very beginning. Had Kriel not accepted a Monster subjugation request and fought vicious Monsters?
And then taken only one coin? Orisin had heard Morgina occasionally call Kriel a knightly-virtue-obsessed bastard, but...
“The situation was somewhat strange at the time. Count Kett, who should have led the Monster subjugation, suddenly collapsed during the expedition. Still, the Monsters around the county were only goblins and wild animals that had become Monsters. Though the employer had collapsed, the subjugation ended safely.”
The mercenaries were paid, and having received their payout, they began spending freely since they were already staying in a prosperous city. Kriel recalled that ominous things began happening two evenings later.
A Banshee wailing in the cemetery. Plants withering despite it not being winter. Above all, winds growing unnaturally fierce. Violent gusts that defied the laws of nature while the Spirits remained silent. Every one of these signs foretold the arrival of the Wild Hunt.
“The Kett Family wanted to renew the contract, but the original contract had already ended. The mercenary companies had likely used up the military supplies they brought as well. Most of them collected their payment for the Monster subjugation and left. I did the same.”
Only, he went in the opposite direction. The Wild Hunt usually came from the west, beyond the horizon where the sun set.
While the other mercenaries headed toward the sunrise, Kriel began walking toward the sunset.
[Why in the world would you do that?]
“A knight shouldn’t look as though he ran away. After doing the math, I figured I could still leave the county well before midnight even if I headed west.”
Kriel sighed. What he had said was not entirely false. But some unspoken truths were mixed in.
As Kriel was about to leave the county, he thought, ‘Considering the matchup in Tirnanog RPG, couldn’t I win?’ Then he stopped walking.
Among boss Monsters that led armies, the Wraith King was rare in being willing to engage in one-on-one duels.
“But I couldn’t.”
[...Are you an idiot?!]
“What else could I do? There were no allies nearby. There were too many enemies to break through the encirclement. The method with the greatest chance of survival was to hold on until dawn.”
Kriel added that, as a mercenary, he had already been paid. No one had ordered him to fight the Wild Hunt, and he had brought the battle upon himself, so he had no right to demand compensation.
“I said I did not need anything, but they insisted on giving me something, so I only took one coin.”
After hearing that answer, Orisin thought, So in short, he fought the Wild Hunt and only took one coin because of his own beliefs?
‘This bastard. Wasn’t the part about heading west to leave the county a lie from the beginning?’
Footnotes:
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