I Reincarnated into a Game Filled with Mods – Chapter 45

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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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The familiar sound of armor clanking echoed from the other end of the path.

I raised my head.

Along with the yellow and orange light unique to torches, knights in silver armor were walking this way.

Their armor and weapons were in familiar shapes and styles.

It was Iris, Lizé, and Erica.

Lizé seemed to be at the very front, with Iris and Erica on either side of her.

I could tell by the weapons they were holding.

Lizé, who was standing at the forefront, must have spotted me as she said something to the others behind her back.

Then she strode towards me with quick steps.

I also got up from my spot.

Lizé removed her weapon and hung it at her waist, then took off her helmet.

Her blue hair, tied together, fluttered and cascaded down.

One eye not covered by her hair was looking at me meaningfully.

I waved my hand in greeting.

“You’re here earlier than I thought?”

“Is that the first thing you’re going to say to me?”

I smiled sheepishly.

But Lizé didn’t smile back.

A sharp gaze was directed at me.

Judging from her eyes and expression, she wasn’t really angry at me, but it seemed like she wasn’t going to let it slide easily either.

I could feel a strong will to get a clear answer from me.

“I don’t really have much else to say… Ahem.”

The gauntlet grabbed both of my cheeks and pulled me close.

Lizé’s face was right in front of mine.

Even when I tried to create some distance, I couldn’t budge an inch as if I was firmly grasped by her palms.

“Well, I have a lot to say. Right, newbie?”

“I was joking. Sorry. So, can you let go of this now?”

Lizé stared at me for a while longer, keeping her face almost touching mine, before releasing her grip.

I plopped down on the ground.

Blue pupils 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.”

It was a question I had been contemplating the answer to the whole time I was sitting here.

Lizé 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 I was worried the aggro of the Rock Centipede might not focus on one person and instead bounce around if we all attacked together at once, but I couldn’t bluntly say that.

There was a chance the knight commanders might misinterpret it as me saying their actions would interfere with me.

It might be an exaggerated thought, but I didn’t even want to give them room to think that way.

That was absolutely not the case, and I had no intention of implying that.

Rather than being a hindrance, I hoped they would be a help.

If it wasn’t a boss that I had to defeat personally, I planned to entrust the subjugation to the knight commanders as much as possible.

Of course, in the early stages, the experience gained from defeating bosses was quite significant, but from the mid-game onwards when the experience of all mobs increased, it was a gap that could be sufficiently overcome through grinding.

Moreover, for builds that were viable in the Darkest Light Mod, as long as you invested appropriately in Divine Power and Magic Power, the level ups after that up to a certain point didn’t have much meaning.

If you had the control to overcome the difference in level and stats, you didn’t need to feel too attached to the experience from defeating early-game bosses.

“Can’t you just accept that I had my reasons and move on?”

“Do you think I will?”

Before I knew it, Iris and Erica had also approached and were looking at me with eyes similar to Lizé’s.

Having one such gaze was already burdensome, but now there were two more, so the pressure I felt was immense.

However, just like Lizé, neither Iris nor Erica seemed to be truly angry at me.

If Lizé was whining about why I hadn’t told them beforehand, for Iris and Erica, it was closer to a slight reprimand mixed in with the whining.

“So, your answer is?”

I blurted out the second reason, which was also the most obvious answer.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“……?”

For a moment, Lizé’s eyes widened.

It was an expression that seemed to say, what did I just hear?

Iris and Erica behind her had similarly unsurprised faces.

“Wait a second. 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 guys.”

Blue pupils rolled around.

It seemed she couldn’t understand what I was saying.

“Newbie, don’t tell me you were worried about us just now?”

“Even if it’s you guys, falling from that height would have meant instant death. I think it’s strange not to be worried.”

“How high is that height for it to be considered high?”

Lizé’s face crumpled.

It seemed like she was trying to pretend to be angry, but she was quite pleased that I was worried about them, so the corners of her mouth kept twitching on their own.

As a result, her overall appearance was very peculiar.

“In my perception, we fell for nearly 20 seconds. Don’t you have a rough idea of how high that is?”

All NPCs, except for a few special ones, 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.

Since the maximum health proportional damage kept getting added for every certain height during the fall, at the height of this cave, it was guaranteed death.

That’s why you had to eat the fall damage with a Falling Attack.

“Are you saying you were able to survive unscathed, newbie?”

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

“And you’re not going to teach us how you did it.”

“It’s not that I won’t teach you, it’s that I can’t. I do it by instinct, not knowledge, so…”

I still wasn’t certain whether Iris, Lizé, or Erica could perform Falling Attacks.

They couldn’t even deflect enemy attacks, and although I somehow got them to roll, there was no invincibility during the roll, and they couldn’t activate the special abilities of weapons other than their own.

It really felt like they only knew what the NPCs knew, purely and simply.

It would be even stranger to think they could do Falling Attacks when they couldn’t deflect or roll.

Before coming here, I had asked them if they knew how to land safely without getting hurt by using enemies as stepping stones when falling from a high place, just in case, but all four of them only displayed question marks above their heads.

I could do it just by trying, so I wasn’t in a position to teach them anything.

How would I know the reason why invincibility time was only applied to my roll?

“Even so, that’s excessive worry, Mr. Newbie. There’s no need for you to worry about usㅡ”

“Why is there no need to worry about you?”

“……Huh?”

Erica, at a loss for words due to my response, blinked her eyes.

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

I had planned to explain to them what patterns the Rock Centipede had when facing it.

Because you never know what might happen.

I’ll continue to explain every time I entrust the subjugation to them in the future.

Right now, their stun resistance is a mess, so if they get hit once by a gigantic boss, they’ll be stuck in an infinite stun loop, groaning until they die.

The Darkest Light Mod has much shorter intervals between attacks compared to vanilla, making it even more dangerous.

And most importantly, if the knight commanders had stayed up there with me instead of avoiding it first, they would have fallen and died from fall damage.

They can’t eat fall damage, you know.

Of course I have to worry.

“We are knights, newbie. If we must die, we are always prepared for that, and we must be.”

“You are human before you are knights. You may die someday, but that day shouldn’t be today. The same goes for the future. As long as I’m here, I won’t let that happen.”

There are so many demons you have to subjugate on my behalf in the future, I absolutely cannot allow you to die a futile death from falling or being killed by something like the Rock Centipede.

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

“I’m sorry for not telling you in advance. But in that situation, it was the best option. I didn’t want to involve you in something I could handle on my own.”

“Newbie……”

When I finished speaking, Lizé’s eyes were sparkling for some reason, and Iris and Erica were also looking at me with clearly different eyes.

‘Did it work?’

I wasn’t sure where I had succeeded, but it seemed to have passed smoothly for now.

I inwardly let out a sigh of relief.

I was glad it ended better than I thought.

“So, about what comes nextㅡ Hey, are you listening?”

I tried to explain what patterns the Rock Centipede had, but for some reason, everyone seemed to be lost in their own thoughts, not listening to me.

I could understand Lizé always being like this, but why were Iris and Erica acting this way?

‘A peculiar fellow.’

It was a thought that simultaneously came to mind for Iris and Erica.

They could only describe him as a peculiar fellow, literally.

Despite being a newbie who had just joined the knighthood, he not only single-handedly subjugated a demon that even the knight commanders had failed to defeat, but he also went on to sweep away nearly a hundred additional demons over the course of a few days.

Despite being a newbie who had just joined the knighthood, he not only acted without any hesitation, but he always produced the best results.

Despite being a newbie who had just joined the knighthood, he not only matched them, who had undergone rigorous training as knights since childhood, but he even went so far as to worry about them in return.

Originally, it should have been impossible.

Who was worrying about whom?

Moreover, he himself was in a situation where he couldn’t even fully demonstrate his inherent abilities due to a curse.

He wasn’t in a position to worry about others.

‘It’s a strange feeling.’

But oddly enough, being worried about by the newbie made a corner of their hearts feel ticklish.

They had always lived lives far removed from such things.

Standing at the forefront and fighting as knights was something that was considered only natural, and death was always by their side.

The Empress was the same.

She herself was known as the strongest existence in the empire, so there was no way she would care about mere knights.

Many members had also been sacrificed to demons.

But while they mourned the deaths and feared death, no one worried about dying.

Fear of death was natural, but dying was also natural.

There was no reason to worry or be worried about.

If you died, it simply meant your life had reached its end.

That was the only thought they had until now.

‘Human before knight, huh……’

But this man was different.

He was saying that what was considered natural was not natural.

All of this was a first for them.

Moreover, it wasn’t even a hypocritical act where he was hiding his true intentions.

Sincerity was evident in his eyes.

He was genuinely worried about the knight commanders, who were far stronger than himself.

They could have found it absurd, wondering who was worrying about whom.

They could have scolded him, telling him to say such things after growing a bit more himself.

They could have thought of it as a light joke and laughed it off.

But no one did that.

They didn’t want to.

Because, somehow, it didn’t feel too bad.

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