I Reincarnated into a Game Filled with Mods – Chapter 46

Chapter 46

ㅡClank.

The familiar sound of armor began to echo from down the path. I raised my head. Accompanied by the unique yellow and orange glow of torches, knights clad in silver armor were walking towards me.

Familiar armor, familiar weapons.

It was Iris, Rize, and Erika. Rize seemed to be at the front, flanked by Iris and Erika. Their weapons confirmed it.

Rize, who was at the very front, must have spotted me because she said something to those behind her. Then, she strode towards me with quick steps. I also rose from my seat.

Rize secured her weapon at her waist and removed her helmet. Her blue hair, tied in a ponytail, swayed and flowed down her back. One eye, not hidden by her hair, gazed at me meaningfully.

I waved my hand in greeting.

“You came earlier than I expected.”

“That’s the first thing you say when you see me?”

I laughed awkwardly. But Rize didn’t laugh. A piercing gaze was directed at me.

Judging by her eyes and expression, it didn’t seem like she was truly angry with me, but it didn’t seem like a situation I could easily gloss over either. I felt her strong will to hear a clear answer.

“I don’t really have anything else to say… Keheuk.”

Gauntlets grabbed both of my cheeks and pulled me close. Rize’s face was right in front of mine. I tried to create some distance, but her hands held me firmly, and I couldn’t budge.

“I have a lot to say. Don’t you, newbie?”

“It was a joke. I’m sorry. So, could you let go of me now?”

Rize continued to stare at me, our faces almost touching, for a while before releasing her grip. I collapsed onto the floor. Blue eyes looked down at me.

“Why didn’t you tell us beforehand? That you were going to do this alone. You could have told us first.”

This was the question I’d been pondering the entire time I was sitting here. Rize was looking at me as if to say, ‘don’t even dream of giving me a half-hearted answer.’

The most fundamental reason was that if we all rushed in at once, I was worried that the Rock Centipede’s aggro might not focus on one person and would scatter everywhere. However, I couldn’t just blurt that out directly.

There was a chance that the Knight Commanders might interpret it as me implying that they would be a hindrance to my actions. It might be an exaggerated thought, but I didn’t want to give them even the slightest reason to think that way.

It’s absolutely not true, and I never thought that way. They would be more of a help than a hindrance. If it wasn’t a boss that I absolutely had to kill, I was planning to leave the subjugation to the Knight Commanders as much as possible.

Of course, in the early stages, the experience gained from killing bosses is significant, but from the mid-game onwards, when the experience of all regular mobs increases, it’s a gap that can be sufficiently overcome through grinding.

Furthermore, in the case of builds that are viable in Darkest Light mode, as long as you invest enough points in Divine Power and Magic, it doesn’t matter much whether your level increases or not until a certain point.

This means that if you have the control to overcome the gap in levels and specs, the experience points from early boss subjugations aren’t something you need to be too concerned about.

“You can’t just brush it off by saying there were circumstances, can you?”

“Do you think I can?”

Iris and Erika had also approached and were now looking at me with similar expressions to Rize’s. The pressure I felt was immense, with two more pairs of eyes added to the already burdensome gaze of Rize.

However, just like Rize, neither Iris nor Erika seemed truly angry with me.

If Rize was sulking about why I didn’t tell them beforehand, Iris and Erika’s expressions were closer to a slight reproach mixed with their sulking.

“So, what’s the answer?”

I gave them the second reason, and the most obvious answer.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“…?”

For a moment, Rize’s eyes widened. Her expression was one of disbelief, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Iris and Erika behind her had similar expressions.

“Wait a minute. What did you just say?”

“I said I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“…Hurt? Us?”

“Then who else is here? It’s obviously you guys.”

Blue eyes swirled. It was clear that she couldn’t understand what I was saying.

“Newbie, are you worried about us right now?”

“Even if it’s you guys, you would have died instantly if you fell from that height. I think it’s strange that you wouldn’t be worried.”

“How high is that supposed to be?”

Rize’s face crumpled.

It seemed like she had to pretend to be angry, but the corners of her mouth kept twitching as if she was quite pleased that I was worried about them. Thanks to that, her overall expression was quite peculiar.

“I felt like I was falling for almost 20 seconds. Don’t you have a rough idea of how high that was?”

Except for a few special NPCs, all NPCs had no resistance to fall damage. Of course, due to the nature of the game, it was impossible to kill bosses with fall damage, but that was the result of tests conducted by some users.

The way it worked was that damage proportional to your maximum health was continuously added at certain height intervals during a fall. So, at the height of this cave, it was basically guaranteed death.

That’s why you have to negate the fall damage with a plunge attack.

“So you’re saying you could have been fine, newbie?”

“Of course. I’m alive and moving here, aren’t I?”

“And you’re not going to tell us how you did it, are you?”

“It’s not that I won’t tell you, it’s that I can’t. I do it instinctively, not through knowledge.”

I still wasn’t sure if Iris, Rize, or Erika could perform a plunge attack.

They couldn’t deflect enemy attacks, and I tried to make them roll, but there was no invincibility during the roll. They also couldn’t activate the special abilities of weapons other than their own.

It really felt like they only knew what the NPCs knew. It’s much stranger to think that they can do a plunge attack when they can’t even deflect or roll.

Before coming here, I asked them if they knew how to land safely without taking damage by using an enemy as a foothold when falling from a high place, just in case, but all four of them just had question marks above their heads.

I was at the level of ‘I just tried it and it worked,’ so I wasn’t in a position to teach them anything. How would I know why only my roll has invincibility frames?

“Even so, that’s excessive worry, newbie. You don’t need to worry about usㅡ”

“Why shouldn’t I worry about you?”

“…Yes?”

Erika, speechless at my reply, blinked her eyes.

“You’re not invincible, you know. You get hurt when you’re hit, and you can die if you’re injured. So why are you telling me not to worry?”

Even when we were fighting the Rock Centipede, I was planning to explain all of its attack patterns to them. You never know what might happen. I’ll continue to explain it to them whenever I leave subjugations to them in the future.

Right now, their poise is terrible, so if they get hit by a giant boss even once, they’ll get stuck in an infinite stun and groan until they die. Darkest Light mode is even more dangerous because the intervals between attacks are much shorter than in vanilla.

And the most important thing is that if the Knight Commanders hadn’t dodged first and stayed with me up there, they would have fallen and died from the fall damage.

They can’t negate fall damage. Of course, I should be worried.

“We are knights, newbie. If we must die, we are always prepared to do so, and we must do so.”

“You’re humans before you’re knights. You might die someday, but it shouldn’t be today. And it shouldn’t be in the future either. I won’t let that happen while I’m here.”

There are so many monsters that they’ll have to subjugate in my place in the future, so I absolutely won’t allow them to die pointlessly from a fall or to something like a Rock Centipede.

Their lives are my lives. There’s no way I’d let them die.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you beforehand. But in that situation, it was the best I could do. I didn’t want you to get caught up in something I could handle on my own.”

“Newbie…”

When I finished speaking, Rize’s eyes were sparkling for some reason, and Iris and Erika were also looking at me with noticeably different expressions.

‘Did it work?’

I don’t know where I succeeded, but it seemed like I had safely navigated the situation. I breathed a sigh of relief inwardly. It was fortunate that it ended better than I thought.

“So, about what happened after that… Hey, are you listening?”

I was trying to explain the Rock Centipede’s attack patterns, but it seemed like they weren’t listening to me and were lost in their own thoughts.

Rize is always like that, so I’ll let it slide, but why are Iris and Erika like that too?

‘A peculiar fellow.’

That was the thought that simultaneously crossed Iris and Erika’s minds. They couldn’t describe him as anything other than peculiar.

A mere newbie who had just joined the Knight Order, not only had he single-handedly subjugated a monster that even a Knight Commander had failed to defeat, but he had also swept away nearly a hundred more monsters over several days.

A mere newbie who had just joined the Knight Order, not only was there no hesitation in his actions, but he always produced the best possible results.

A mere newbie who had just joined the Knight Order, not only was he on par with them, who had been rigorously trained as knights since childhood, but he was even worried about them.

It was something that shouldn’t be possible. Who was worried about whom? He was even in a situation where he couldn’t fully utilize his innate abilities due to a curse. He wasn’t in a position to worry about others.

‘This is a strange feeling.’

But strangely, being worried about by the newbie made them feel a tickling sensation in their hearts.

They had always lived lives far removed from such things. Fighting at the forefront as knights was something they believed they should do, and death was always by their side.

The Emperor was the same. As the being known as the strongest in the Empire, she wouldn’t care about a mere knight.

Many members had also been sacrificed to monsters. But while they mourned death and feared death, no one worried about dying.

Fear of death is natural, but dying is also natural. There was no reason to worry or be worried about. If you die, that’s just the limit of your life. That’s all they had ever thought.

‘Humans before knights, huh…’

But this man was different. He was saying that what was natural wasn’t natural. This was all new to them.

It wasn’t even a hypocritical act of hiding his true intentions. His eyes held sincerity. He was genuinely worried about the Knight Commanders, who were far stronger than him.

They could have scoffed and said, ‘Who’s worried about whom?’ They could have rebuked him, saying, ‘Worry about yourself after you’ve grown a little more.’ They could have laughed it off as a lighthearted joke.

But none of them did. They didn’t want to.

Because somehow, it didn’t feel so bad.