Saving Rune – 6

-Clank.

From the other side of the path, the familiar sound of armor began to be heard. I lifted my head. Along with the yellow and orange light unique to torches, knights clad in silver armor were approaching.

Familiar-looking armor and familiar-shaped weapons.

It was Iris, Rije, and Erica. Rije seemed to be at the very front, with Iris and Erica flanking her. The weapons they held confirmed it.

Rije, who was standing at the very front, seemed to have spotted me and said something to those behind her. Then, she strode quickly towards me. I, too, got up from my spot.

Rije holstered her weapon and took off her helmet. Her blue hair, tied into a single ponytail, swished and fell long. One eye, not covered by her hair, gazed at me meaningfully.

I waved my hand in greeting.

“You came earlier than I thought?”

“Is that the first thing you say when we meet?”

I gave an awkward laugh. But Rije didn’t laugh. A sharp gaze fixed on me.

Judging by her eyes and expression, she didn’t seem truly angry with me, but it also wasn’t a situation to just gloss over. I could feel her strong resolve to get a clear answer.

“There’s nothing else I particularly want to say besides this… *cough*.”

A gauntlet gripped both my cheeks and pulled me close. Rije’s face was right in front of mine. Even when I tried to create distance, I couldn’t budge, as if firmly held by her palm.

“I have plenty. Don’t I, New Recruit?”

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

Even after that, Rije continued to stare at me for a while, with her face almost touching mine, before finally letting go. I plopped down onto the ground. Her blue eyes looked down at me.

“Why didn’t you tell us beforehand? That you’d do this alone. You could have confided in us first.”

This was the question I had been agonizing over an answer for the entire time I sat here. Rije was looking at me with eyes that seemed to say, “Don’t even dream of giving a half-hearted answer.”

The most fundamental reason was that if several people attacked at once, the Rock Centipede’s aggro might not focus on one person but scatter everywhere, but I couldn’t just blurt that out directly.

Because there was a chance the Knight Commanders might take it to mean that they would be a hindrance to my actions. It might be an exaggerated thought, but I didn’t want to give them any room to think that way.

That’s absolutely not the case, and I have no intention of it being so. On the contrary, they’d be helpful, not a hindrance. If it’s not a boss I absolutely *have* to defeat, I plan to leave the subjugation to the Knight Commanders whenever possible.

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

Moreover, in the case of builds commonly used in Dark Mode, if you just put enough points into divine power and magic, then up to a certain point, whether your level increased or not didn’t really matter.

This meant that if you had enough control to overcome the difference in level and specs, you didn’t have to feel too bad about the early-game boss subjugation experience.

“You can’t just brush it off by saying you had your reasons, can you?”

“Do you think that would work?”

By then, Iris and Erica had also approached, looking at me with eyes similar to Rije’s. With two more pairs of eyes adding to the already burdensome gaze, the pressure I felt was immense.

However, just like Rije, Iris and Erica didn’t actually seem angry with me.

If Rije was complaining about why I hadn’t told them beforehand, Iris and Erica’s expressions were closer to a slight reproach mixed in with their complaints.

“So, your answer?”

I blurted out the second reason, and the most obvious answer.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“……?”

Instantly, Rije’s eyes widened. Her expression was one of, “What did I just hear?” Iris and Erica, standing behind her, had similar looks on their faces.

“Hold on. What did you just say?”

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

“……Hurt? Us?”

“Then who else is here? Of course, it’s you.”

Her blue eyes spun in circles. She seemed to have no idea what I was talking about.

“New Recruit, are you seriously worried about us right now?”

“No matter who you are, falling from that height would have been instant death. I think it’s strange *not* to be worried.”

“How high could it have been?”

Rije’s face puckered.

She seemed to be trying to act angry, but her lips kept twitching on their own, as if she was quite pleased that I had worried about them. Thanks to that, her overall expression was very subtle.

“From my perspective, I fell for almost 20 seconds. Can’t you roughly grasp how high that was?”

All NPCs, except for a few special ones, had no resistance to fall death. Of course, due to the nature of the game, it was impossible to kill a boss with fall death, but that was the result of tests conducted by some players.

The method was to continuously add damage proportional to maximum HP at certain heights during a fall, so at the height of this cave, it was simply confirmed death.

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

“So that means you, New Recruit, could be fine?”

“Of course. I’m alive and moving right 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 teach you, it’s that I *can’t*. I do it by instinct, not knowledge.”

I still wasn’t sure if Iris, Rije, or Erica could perform plunging attacks.

They couldn’t deflect enemy attacks, and while I did manage to make them roll somehow, there were no invincibility frames during the roll, and they couldn’t activate special abilities of weapons other than their own.

It truly felt like the NPCs only knew what they purely knew. It’s much stranger to think that plunging attacks are possible when they can’t even deflect or roll.

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

I just tried it and it worked for me, so I wasn’t in a position to teach anything. How would I know why only my roll has invincibility frames?

“No matter what, that’s excessive worry, New Recruit-ssi. You don’t need to worry about us-“

“Why wouldn’t I need to worry about you?”

“……Huh?”

Erica, speechless at my reply, blinked her eyes.

“It’s not like you don’t feel pain or can’t die. If you get hit, it hurts, and if you get injured, you could die. So why are you telling me not to worry?”

Even when facing the Rock Centipede, I intended to explain all its patterns. Because you never know what might happen. And I’ll keep explaining every time I entrust them with a subjugation in the future.

Right now, their poise is a mess, so if they get hit by a super-large boss even once, they’ll fall into an infinite stun-lock, groan, and die. Dark Mode is even more dangerous because the intervals between attacks are much shorter than in vanilla.

And most importantly, if the Knight Commanders hadn’t avoided it first up there and had been with me, they would have fallen and died from fall damage.

They can’t negate fall damage. Of course, I have to worry.

“We are knights, New Recruit. If we must die, we are always ready for it, and we must be.”

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

There are so many monsters they’ll have to subjugate in my stead in the future; I absolutely cannot tolerate them dying meaninglessly from fall damage here or being killed by something like a Rock Centipede.

Their lives are my life, so how could I possibly let that happen?

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you beforehand. But in that situation, that was the best option. I didn’t want to needlessly involve you in something I could handle myself.”

“New Recruit……”

As I finished speaking, Rije’s eyes were somehow sparkling, and Iris and Erica were also looking at me with distinctly changed expressions.

‘Did it work?’

I wasn’t sure exactly where I succeeded, but it seemed to have passed safely for now. I inwardly let out a sigh of relief. It was fortunate that it ended better than I expected.

“So, about what happens next… Hey, are you listening?”

I was about to explain what patterns the Rock Centipede had, but everyone seemed to be lost in their own thoughts, not listening to me.

Rije is always like that, so I can understand, but why are Iris and Erica like this?

‘A peculiar fellow.’

This thought simultaneously crossed Iris’s and Erica’s minds. He could only be described as a peculiar fellow, nothing more.

He was just a new recruit who had just joined the knight order, yet not only did he single-handedly subjugate a monster that even the Knight Commander had failed to defeat, but he also cleared out nearly a hundred more monsters over several days.

He was just a new recruit who had just joined the knight order, yet not only did he act without any hesitation, but he always produced the best results.

He was just a new recruit who had just joined the knight order, yet not only was he on par with them, who had been rigorously trained as knights since childhood, but he even worried about them in return.

It was something that shouldn’t have been possible. Who was worrying about whom, anyway? He himself was in a situation where he couldn’t fully exert his inherent abilities due to a curse. He was in no position to worry about others.

‘What a strange feeling.’

Yet, strangely, receiving worry from the new recruit made a corner of their hearts tingle.

Their lives had always been far removed from such things. As knights, standing at the forefront of battle was considered a matter of course, and death was always by their side.

The Emperor was the same. As someone hailed as the strongest in the empire, he would hardly care about mere knights.

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

Fear of death was natural, but dying was also natural. There was no reason to worry, nor to be worried about. If one died, it simply meant their life had reached its end. Until now, that had been their only thought.

‘Humans before knights, he said……’

But this man was different. He was saying that what was obvious was not obvious. All of this was new.

It wasn’t even a hypocritical act or words spoken while hiding his true feelings. Sincerity was evident in his eyes. He was truly worried about the Knight Commanders, who were considerably stronger than himself.

They could have scoffed, asking who was worrying about whom. They could have chided him, telling him to say such things after he had grown a bit more. They could have laughed it off as a light joke.

But no one did. They didn’t want to.

Somehow, it didn’t feel bad at all.