Chapter 5 : Chapter 5
Chapter 5: An Adorable Contrast
“Mr. Adrien, do zombies only die if you cut off their heads?”
“Yes. Cut off the head, and they die.”
“What about skeleton soldiers?”
“More or less the same.”
“And necromancers? Do they die that way too?”
“No. A necromancer has to have its soul fire extinguished before it can be killed.”
“What about vampires? And werewolves?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen them, and I’ve never killed them, so how would I know?”
Cyril responded with a growing headache to Caroline’s endless stream of questions. The cold, aloof figure from his memories—the one who had once heralded the coming of death—had completely shattered apart, replaced instead by a little girl bundled up in layer after layer of thick clothing, chattering away in the freezing wind.
He had never imagined that Caroline would turn out to be such a lively girl, overflowing with curiosity. One moment, she had been so frightened by the zombies that her legs had gone weak. The next, she was squatting beside Cyril, watching him scoop zombie brain matter into bottles, and had even dared to poke at the sticky yellow lump with her finger.
“Then I think vampires and werewolves would need to have their heads cut off twice before they die.”
Caroline tilted her head back obediently and let Cyril wrap a scarf around her neck, all while continuing to mutter to herself.
“Their regenerative abilities are very strong. You can’t kill them without enchanted weapons,” Cyril answered reflexively, only to realize at once that the girl’s eyes had lit up. Her amber pupils fixed themselves straight on him.
“But you just said you didn’t know.”
“Put your coat on,” Cyril said irritably, tossing a thick wool coat over Caroline before handing his broken sword to her. “Take this for self-defense.”
Leaving Tarp was an urgent matter. After hastily dealing with the zombie corpses and collecting the brain matter that could be used as alchemical material, Cyril had chosen to burn the bodies outright so as not to leave any clues behind for the necromancers who would later take up residence in Tarp.
It was admittedly wasteful. For a Rogue, it was the sort of loss that hurt to the core.
But he had no choice.
For the current Cyril, those materials that could be used to brew enchanted potions were of limited value. What he truly needed—
Cyril looked at the open character panel before him, and the joy welling up inside him made the corners of his mouth rise despite himself.
Cyril Adrien, Half-Elf, Male
Health: 40% (Weakened) (Slow Recovery)
Level: 1 (10/10) +
Class: Apprentice Knight Squire (0/3) [Assignable Levels: 1]
Skills: Reconnaissance (Beginner). Basic Swordsmanship [Silverblade Knight] (Intermediate). Basic Archery (Beginner).
Where it had previously shown Level: 1 (2/10), it now read (10/10). That blinking blue plus sign represented the fact that he could advance by one level. The impact of seeing it was no less than the first time he had stood amid the breathtakingly realistic world of Road of Radiance itself, and the joy it brought him was even greater than the first time he had opened a precious treasure chest alone in some ancient ruin.
He shook his head, forcibly casting aside all those fantasies of obtaining some overpowered divine artifact ahead of schedule and racing straight to max level to become invincible. He focused his attention on the panel once more.
He had been worried before that the game interface might be nothing more than decoration, but now it had proven that he had already firmly grasped his greatest advantage.
The boy finally managed to calm his excitement. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the plus sign. As his experience reset to zero, his status became Level 2: (0/15), and his assignable levels increased to 2. There was no convenient full recovery effect from leveling up, but the weakness in his body did lessen somewhat.
That was the result of stat growth from leveling up.
Even if he could not see those stats, they still existed.
But Cyril did not assign that level to the class corresponding to knighthood.
The higher a class rose, the more character levels it consumed. That was also why, although Road of Radiance placed no hard restrictions on classes and allowed players to pursue multiple professions, no one had ever become a true master of every class.
What was more, classes also conflicted with one another. Once you took one class, it would place restrictions on others.
If not for his connection to the Silverblade Knights, then the class on Cyril’s template right now should have been Militiaman—the most worthless class in the game and the least deserving of resources.
The infuriating part of the game was that players had to reach a major city before they could formally take a class. Until then, unless they stumbled into some extraordinary chance encounter, they had to keep investing resources into Militiaman just to level themselves high enough to reach the city.
There had even been dedicated power-leveling groups because of it, groups that took paying clients and rushed them to the level required to reach a major city. Cyril had done that sort of work himself in the past and had made quite a bit of money from it.
It could be said that starting with a class like Apprentice Knight Squire was already an extraordinarily favorable beginning.
But Cyril’s former profession had been Rogue, and he had followed the path of shadow specialization. His way of doing things had never matched the upright and open manner of a knight, and he was not at all familiar with a knight’s growth path.
To rashly pour his levels into a field he did not understand in a world where there was no deleting your account and starting over was clearly unwise.
Cyril hesitated for a moment, then decided in the end to hold onto those levels for the time being.
He closed the status panel, only then noticing that Caroline was crouched in front of him, her beautiful catlike eyes fixed on him as though she wanted to see through whatever he was thinking.
“Have you packed everything?” Realizing that Caroline had witnessed every little shift in expression brought on by his inner turmoil just now, Cyril could not help lowering his head slightly.
A Rogue who walked in the shadows did not like exposing his emotions.
Of course, in Caroline’s eyes, Cyril had nothing whatsoever to do with Rogues. He was a knight, bathed in glory—
Even if he was only an apprentice knight squire, still countless ranks away from becoming a true knight, the girl from a northern frontier town had no understanding of such distinctions.
“I’ve packed everything already.” Caroline pointed at a large bundle on the ground. “Food and clothes are all inside. But Mr. Adrien, where are we going?”
“We can’t stay in the northern frontier.” Cyril answered simply. He reached down, lifted the bundle, and weighed it in his hand. It was not especially heavy. “We go south. I’ll take you to find your father. Stay with me, and I’ll keep you safe.”
Caroline’s father, the owner of this blacksmith shop, had already gone south three months ago, traveling into the heartland of La Rochelle. Supposedly the kingdom needed something forged, and the order recruiting blacksmiths had even been sent to the foot of the northern Maitland Mountains.
Without that reason, Cyril truly would not have been able to come up with any proper excuse to make Caroline obediently go with him.
Though from the looks of it now, Caroline trusted the Cyril who had saved her so completely that excuses seemed unnecessary.
“Will those skeletons come back?”
“More skeletons will come here,” Cyril said, shaking his head. “Not just skeletons. Necromancers too. Death Knights as well. In a few months, the entire northern frontier will be swallowed beneath the undead’s war fog.”
The blacksmith shop’s wooden door was pushed open once more with a long creak. Cyril stepped out first, then turned back—only to find Caroline standing motionless inside the shop with a small bundle in her hands.
“Come on,” he called out.
The girl bit her lip. She took two steps forward, then stopped in the doorway. Looking up, she asked in a quiet voice,
“Then... will we ever have a chance to come back?”
Cyril froze slightly.
In that instant, the lively, courageous girl from moments ago and the cold, distant woman from his memories both faded away.
What remained was only the somewhat haggard and fragile girl he had seen when he had first opened his eyes in this world—the girl who had still tried so hard to endure, standing there before him.
He drew in a deep breath, stepped forward, and could not help placing a hand on the girl’s white hair, rubbing it until it became even messier than before.
“We’ll come back.”
“We definitely will.”