Chapter 2 : Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Cyril, Apprentice Knight Squire
Cyril leaned against the flimsy wooden door. In his hand was a broken standard-issue longsword. He had found it by the doorway, lying across the ground. It was most likely the weapon the original owner had dropped earlier.
He had not wasted time in that room wondering why he had transmigrated, or why he had transmigrated into a minor villain boss. Even if this was no longer a game—or rather, even if he truly had arrived inside the game itself—the habits drilled into him over years of living as a Rogue still shaped the way he thought.
Time is life. He treated that as a creed. If what Caroline had said was true, and this really was the Year of the Dragon’s Roar, 1440, then this was precisely the early stage of the undead invasion in the north.
While on the second floor, Cyril had already gone to the window to confirm it. Though he could not see the whole town clearly, there was the massive breach in the northern town wall directly opposite him, and the trail of devastation running all the way from that breach to the street before his door—
The snow on the street was mixed with dirty red. Half of a broken battle standard was stuck in the snow. The torn banner was too damaged to make out which unit it belonged to. And jutting out from the snow was half of a severed arm.
All of it made one thing clear: the town called Tarp, lying at the foot of the Maitland Mountains, had endured the first wave of the undead’s surprise assault and had been thoroughly massacred.
For Cyril, the only fortunate part was that the undead had adopted blitzkrieg tactics in the beginning. Once they broke a town and slaughtered its people, they immediately moved on to the next one, striving to devour all the border settlements of La Rochelle pressed against the Maitland Mountains as quickly as possible. The undead liches responsible for transforming those settlements into undead strongholds would not reach the front lines so early.
That meant that, for at least a few days, Tarp was safe.
Safe, that is, aside from the walking corpses wandering the street outside.
“Caroline.” He drew in a deep breath, then turned back to the girl sitting on the stairs a short distance behind him. “How many people did you wake up in total?”
“Me?” Caroline looked dazed for a moment. Hugging her knees tightly, her slender body trembled, whether from the cold or from fear. “Including you, Mr. Adrien, four in total. The others were Mr. Rien, the apprentice from the shop, Aunt Annie from across the street, and Uncle Chris...”
Cyril nodded. The number matched what he had seen from the window.
Although Caroline was still just the ordinary daughter of a blacksmith at the moment, almost unrecognizable compared to the tall necromancer in his memory except for her hair color and the shape of her face, she was still so young and tender she seemed like a fawn just learning to walk. Yet her outstanding aptitude for necromancy had already revealed itself in the walking corpses she had awakened.
It was simply that she still lacked the ability to control those corpses. Even Cyril, before he had transmigrated into this body, had only protected Caroline and blocked a few zombie bites for her because of this body’s peculiar instinctive will.
Yes. Just as Cyril had expected, the original owner of this body had already died in the earlier defense of Tarp.
Cyril found the fatal wound on his body easily enough. It was on his abdomen. It was a slash left by the standard hand-and-a-half sword commonly wielded by skeleton soldiers, a wound that had torn through the thin leather armor he wore along with the shirt beneath it, leaving a deep gash that had ultimately caused him to bleed to death.
And yet, the place that should have been a grisly, mangled mess was now covered in newly grown pale skin. The cold wind slipping through the crack in the door sent chills across it, and together with the waves of weakness pulsing through his body, it proved one thing:
The current Cyril Adrien was not a walking corpse.
He was a living being.
That might have been a good thing, since it meant Cyril would not have to become an undead knight like the Cyril from the game. But for the present him, it brought no benefit at all—
Because he was far too weak.
Being brought back from death did not restore the blood he had lost before. On top of that, this body had clearly been lean to begin with and had never held any advantage in strength. The damaged leather armor on him also suggested that his former class had been a scout, not a professional swordsman.
Cyril already had some ideas about what he should do next. At the very least, with Caroline now in his hands, there was no way he would let the future Twilight Shadow fall into the hands of the undead and once again grow into the Keltir Alliance’s trump card.
He had considered killing Caroline outright while she was still just an ordinary blacksmith’s daughter. But since “Cyril” had been one of the zombies awakened by Caroline, and had now seemingly returned from the dead, who knew whether some strange soul contract might exist between them, binding his life to hers—
After all, while he had ample experience chopping off undead heads, he knew very little about necromancy itself. In the game, such things could be explained away with a few simple values, but in reality, they would surely be entirely different.
Yet taking this trump card away would not be easy either. As Caroline had said, she had awakened more than just Cyril, and those dead who lacked consciousness and would not obey her were the greatest obstacle at the moment.
If only he were not so weak—
Cyril lowered his head and looked helplessly at his body. It was so thin that he felt as though he had crawled out of the slums. Compared with his character in the game, it was a world apart. Most of all, floating over his abdomen was the character status display, with the two red words Heavy Injury. Even if he had enough combat power, he would only be able to bring out twenty percent of it at most.
Wait.
Cyril suddenly froze. He blinked rapidly, only to realize it was not an illusion—those red words truly were floating over that patch of newly grown skin.
A rush of excitement instantly ran through him. If he could see numerical data, then did that mean the game system tied to those values also existed, even if only in part?
At once, Cyril raised a trembling hand and drew the symbol he knew so well it was practically carved into his DNA—
A downward stroke, then an upward flick, then a stroke down to the lower left, and finally a horizontal pull, forming a five-pointed star missing one line.
His hand moved swiftly and steadily. The moment the symbol was completed, a faint glow lit up in his field of vision. Then a translucent light screen, complete with a character model, appeared before his eyes.
Cyril Adrien, Half-Elf, Male
Health: 15% (Heavily Injured) (Slow Recovery)
Level: 1 (2/10)
Class: Apprentice Knight Squire (0/3) [Assignable Levels: 1]
Skills: Reconnaissance (Beginner). Basic Swordsmanship [Silverblade Knight] (Intermediate). Basic Archery (Beginner).
The panel left Cyril rather stunned. It did indeed look just like the character panel he knew from Road of Radiance, but much of the data normally found in an online game—Strength, Constitution, and the like—was missing. What remained was more of a simplified status summary.
Still, Cyril quickly came back to himself. No matter what, at least he had not been cast all alone into the game world. At the very least, he still had a familiar system with him—
Even if it was incomplete.
The more familiar things he had around him, the more he could control, and the higher the chance his plans would succeed—
He had always believed that.
There was only one point still bothering him greatly.
Why was he wearing leather armor, while the class shown on his status panel was Apprentice Knight Squire?