Knight Order Entrance Exam – 1

About three days after escaping the prison, we had arrived in front of the city gates of a certain city. It was the city where the Knight Order Iris belonged to was located.

For now, its appearance wasn’t much different from the area in my memories. The size and appearance of the city gates were roughly similar, and there were guards standing in front, just like before.

Instead, there were no carriages waiting in line to enter inside, nor people dressed in various colorful clothes forming a long procession.

The horse, showing no signs of fatigue at all despite carrying both Iris and me and having run for three straight days, majestically passed the procession of people and carriages and approached the guards.

“Have you come, Iris Knight Captain-nim!”

As soon as the guards saw Iris, they snapped to attention and spoke in a voice full of military discipline.

“Yes, tell the Lord-nim… that the Second Knight Captain of the Silver Dawn Knights has returned. Also tell him that I will postpone visiting for a report for a little while. I have something to do, so I will return to the castle first.”

“Yes, I understand!”

‘That Lord bastard doesn’t seem to have changed.’

I thought that after seeing Iris hesitate for a long time before adding the honorific -nim after ‘Lord’. Even in the game, the lord of this city was a villain that players could kill without any guilt.

If I complete the Lord elimination quest a bit early, wouldn’t Iris like it? If I push it extremely forward, I could just defeat one more boss and then immediately crush that guy.

“By the way, the person riding behind you is…?”

A suspicious gaze was directed at me, who was riding behind.

Because Iris had gotten me clothes, I was no longer in the state of only having a single modesty cloth covering my naked body, but from the guards’ perspective, a human they’d never seen before was riding the same horse as their city’s Knight Captain, so they must be wondering what’s going on.

“There’s nothing to worry about. I vouch for this person’s identity.”

“I understand. If that’s the case…”

Although he trailed off, as soon as Iris said she vouched for my identity, he obediently stepped back. Iris didn’t even glance at the guard and rode her horse into the city.

As I compared the street scenery with the internal city map of B-Dark 4 in my head, I felt a strange sensation anew.

‘It’s strange in many ways.’

There were parts that directly reflected what was omitted in the game, and conversely, there were parts that followed the same laws as reality.

For example, we still starve to death if we don’t eat food. But conversely, there was no need to go to the bathroom. No matter how much I ate or drank something, they weren’t expelled from my body.

From the start, in Iris’s mind, the concept of excretion itself didn’t seem to exist.

In fact, I had never gone to the bathroom since coming here, and yet, nothing abnormal happened to my body. It was a strange thing.

Clearly, in B-Dark 4, even though neither a hunger gauge nor excretory functions were implemented, one of them acted like reality, while the other followed the rules of the game.

And one more thing.

‘Well… what should I say? Should I say my eyes are feasting?’

Perhaps due to the mod’s influence, the difference in appearance between men and women walking on the streets was truly stark.

The men looked ordinary. People who looked exactly like NPCs from the game were occasionally seen, and even if not exactly like that, most of them looked like ordinary people one could see anywhere.

On the other hand, the women had no blemishes on their skin, and even if you just randomly attached the adjective ‘beautiful’ to anyone, most of them were so outstandingly beautiful that anyone hearing it would be convinced.

If this were reality, even Iris, whose appearance would make every single person on the street turn their heads, was not a crane among chickens (outstanding), but merely a little prettier than the common women scattered everywhere around.

‘Though that still means she’s incredibly beautiful.’

It wasn’t just appearance that was divided by gender. Clothing styles, like appearances, were also starkly divided by gender.

The men wore clothes woven from suitably medieval-looking fabric, fitting the game’s background world, while all the women wore modern clothing with a fair degree of exposure.

Like short jeans and t-shirts, or crop tops that fully exposed their navels, or mini-skirts with high heels, or, in extreme cases, just a single dress shirt over their naked bodies, things like that.

Furthermore, men considered women wearing such outfits as completely natural.

Even if a woman wearing only a single dress shirt walked around on the main street, or stood on the street in a crop top that clearly exposed her underwear and leggings, not a single person stared at them lewdly.

And the women themselves had no hesitation whatsoever about walking around in clothes that were practically bare. It was a world where common sense seemed to have been collectively altered.

‘Well, there’s nothing bad for me in that, is there?’

With so many beautiful women that you could trip over them, and their clothing modern, and all of them showing a lot of skin, what harm could possibly come to me?

It was just that the world I knew from the original B-Dark 4, a world without dreams or hope, heading towards destruction, felt severely and greatly disconnected from this one.

“This is the place.”

How far did we go into the city? Iris stopped the horse in front of a massive castle. Tall castle walls surrounded it, and where the gate should have been, only a large, empty hole was gaping open.

“It’s a castle?”

In the game, it was just an ordinary Knight Order building with a training ground attached.

“It’s an old castle. Originally, that bastard… *ahem*, it was the castle where the Lord resided, but he dumped it on us and built a separate mansion for himself to live in. That’s why our Knight Order moved in.”

Though her way of speaking hadn’t changed much, Iris treated me much more comfortably than when we first met. And I was the same.

Since there was no reason for us to have bad feelings towards each other, it was only natural.

Iris was an NPC who showed such strong trust in the player that her tendency to trust the protagonist too easily became a meme, and I, too, didn’t want to needlessly antagonize Iris and choose a self-imposed hard mode.

As a result, during the three days we returned to the city together from prison, our distance naturally narrowed. That was also why I spoke informally to Iris.

She said that even though she was the Knight Captain, given the circumstances of the Knight Order, there was no need to be overly formal.

“Dumped it? What does that mean?”

“After you join our Knight Order, I’ll show you directly. It’ll be much better to experience it yourself than for me to explain it in words here.”

This was truly something I didn’t know. In the original game, the Silver Dawn Knight Order’s barracks were just ordinary training grounds, and while the Lord was in a mansion, it didn’t feel like he had abandoned the castle.

‘I hope the story hasn’t changed.’

That was the worst-case scenario I could imagine.

After circling about half a lap inside the castle walls, Iris stopped the horse. A wooden door, slightly ajar, was visible right next to us. From inside, the sound of horses snorting could be heard. It seemed to be the stable.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to tie up the horse and come back. It won’t take long, just a moment.”

As I replied ‘Okay’ and jumped to the ground, Iris rode the horse and disappeared through the gap in the open wooden door. After confirming that Iris had completely disappeared into the building, I let out a sigh of relief.

‘I’m really declining a second experience like this, seriously.’

Riding the horse itself wasn’t difficult. Just as characters in a game don’t complain no matter how long they ride a horse, I was the same. It seemed my body didn’t feel fatigue at all.

The problem was the posture.

Since Iris wouldn’t have brought two horses when she came to the prison alone, if we were to return together, there was naturally no other way but for me to ride behind Iris.

Yes, behind a woman wearing only a white sleeveless top and short dolphin shorts.

She even said that since there was nowhere proper to hold on, I should hold onto her waist or shoulder, saying that if I held onto the horse awkwardly and tried to endure, and fell off while riding, I could die.

Since that wasn’t wrong, I obediently hugged her soft, squishy-feeling waist, and thanks to that, throughout the entire ride, I had to pour all my strength into calming my lower body.

Even if recognizing such absurd outfits as normal clothing was due to a change in common sense caused by a mod, she wouldn’t be so ignorant as to not know what a stiffly erect rod poking her butt meant.

Moreover, its size was disgustingly large, so to somehow prevent it from touching Iris’s butt, I had to sit in an awkward posture, leaning my waist far back, which was very difficult in many ways.

At least after entering the city, we only walked slowly, so it was a relief that I didn’t have to hold my body (in that position).

Seriously.

“What are you thinking about so intently?”

Suddenly, when I heard a woman’s voice I’d never heard before from beside me, I, startled, raised my head.

“Hello!”

A woman with blue hair, wearing a white sleeveless top and blue dolphin shorts, was waving her hand at me right beside me.