Reborn as the Black-Knight - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

Sir Knight

Location: The City

He’s never killed people before.

He’s also never been a disembodied spirit, thrown into another world before either, so there are lots of things that are different today, actually. However, despite whatever has happened to him, he can feel something changing and writhing inside of himself. Maybe its the atmosphere, maybe its this pretend game that they’re playing or maybe it’s the armor — they say you should always dress for the job you want and not the one you have, after all — but whatever has initiated this change in his perceptions of the world doesn’t even make him feel that bad about the death — his own as well as that all around him in this moment.

Even more surprisingly, he quite apparently knows how to fight, even if he, in that old life of his, had never been much of a fighter. The enemy soldiers seem to be rattled, of course. By all accounts, he should be too. However, he simply isn’t.

Following his base instinct rather than any skillful training that has been mastered over years, if not decades, of dedication, the heavy knight swings his blade, the star-hewn sword cutting through the metal that it meets, lifted in fear to block its strike. The enemy’s weapon, much like the faltering man behind it, both fall to the ground, very much not in the shape that they were in before.

It’s not shocking for him. It’s not grotesque or frightening, it doesn’t scar his mind or soul, as would the digging nails of a person fighting for life in the grasp of a predator scar the body. He wasn’t a hard man in his last life, he’s pretty sure. But this almost feels… mundane. It’s no different than when he left his house to buy groceries. It just feels like it’s his daily routine. It’s…

—  Well, he hates to say it, but fighting and killing these people in what should be the greatest rush of his existence is just kind of empty.

He plunges the massive starlight sword down into the next man’s chest, who had been knocked onto the ground on his back from the exploding ice. The pierced man grasps the edge of the blade that presses through his broken ribs and down to the stones beneath him, screaming as his arms flail. The sword that is plunged through him and into the world below reaches from just below his neck, down to his navel.

The knight twists the sword and the man falls silent, his arms landing limply on the ground.

He doesn’t know how long it has been, actually, since he was the man who went to buy food in that other world. He had done so and died on the way back home, encountering the cosmic entity who he can only refer to as ‘Zero’, though he will not do so, as thinking the number would perhaps anger it again. But after his dismissal by the creature, the god, the demon, whatever it was, he had simply ceased to be for a time for as far as he is able to tell.

He was truly nothing in its deepest sense.

A sword plunges itself through his chest from behind.

The knight turns his head, looking at the shaking man standing behind him, with his hands still on the hilt of his weapon. Sir Knight places his armored palm flatly onto the tip of the blade and simply slides it back out of himself, pushing it out through his back from his front as he stares at the soldier.

The sword slides free out of his back without a drop of blood on it and falls to the ground at his feet, between the two of them. The soldier steps back and then screams, running off, vanishing into the chaos.

— At least that sense of him being lost was the case until he heard the girl’s whisper, reaching and calling out into the eternal void, a word connected to someone’s soul. He had grasped hold of that spiritual string of fate as if it were a lifeline, pulling himself along this metaphysical cord until he had yanked himself all the way down out of nothingness and into her soul, which exists in a body that exists in the very physical, real, material world.

And so, he himself, by using her as a vessel, had become a physical, material thing once again.

In a manner of speaking.

— But there may be a catch. After all, he’s tethered to her now. He has become physical and real, but only because she is so. They’re tied together.

He can tell as much because of the sensation in his chest, his torso nudging to the side as if someone were pulling on him. Sir Knight turns his gaze, looking at the two enemy soldiers who scoop up her majesty, who has fallen over incapacitated from her illness, and are in the process of carrying her away.

The man arcs his arm back and hurtles his massive sword off towards them, the blade spinning in the air, connected to his arm by a black string made out of pure lightlessness. He yanks the cord back as the blade slices through both of their necks. The flying sword launches back towards himself as both of the men fall over together with their load, now a little lighter than they were before.

His metal gauntlet lets out a heavy rattle as the hilt of the ethereal weapon lands back in it, its force pushing him back a step, as the night falls quiet apart from one last sound.

— Ice crackles all around him, the air hissing in excitement as it grows heavy and cold. He lifts his gaze, looking up to the sky that is filled with hovering icicles, glistening in the night as if the heavenly stars had fallen down low. Instinctively, he lifts his cloak, throwing it over his shoulder and letting it billow through the air as he jumps and looms over the girl, shielding her and himself from a barrage of sharp, razor icicles crashing down all around them. Hundreds of them shatter the stones at his feet, shards of rock and frozen-wet flying all around the air, but hundreds more simply vanish into the cloak as if they were being plunged into a body of water, never to return.

The spell ends and everything turns quiet.

He lowers he cloak.

Sir Knight, as is apparently his new name, turns to look over the chaos that remains. Houses are on fire and corpses lay all around him. People watch from the nearby windows and soldiers, who he can only assume are from this nation, stand in a circle around them, having watched the one man that he is fight against these dozens of, apparently, elite enemy troops without having felt the desire or need to intervene. He isn’t sure which.

He only recognizes as much because he was in the girl’s, Acacia’s, thoughts before, having been connected to her soul during his escape from the void. That connection has imprinted a lot of memories and knowledge of this world onto him. Not everything, but enough to grasp the situation. This is another world, separate from the one he had come from, just as he himself is an entity, separate from the creature he once was.

Brave Sir Knight lifts his shining sword and he wipes it off on his billowing cloak, then returning it to its scabbard. The ethereal blade, made out of of otherworldly blankness, compresses as he stores it away.

One or two of the enemy had escaped during the ice-caster’s spell, but that’s fine. The fight appears to have come to an end. Vague stragglers might still be scouring around the city as they organize their retreat, but they’ll dissipate soon enough.

Given the distance of this place from the front line, it’s like that this was a special operation, meant specifiably to kidnap her majesty. They don’t have the forces here for a sustained onslaught now that the element of surprise has faded.

Sir Knight rises to his feet, rubbing his helmet as he tries to understand how he knows so much about the world and its happenings. It’s a real twist for his thoughts and, even if he’s pretty much on board with the strange happenings of fate that had brought him here, it’s still all kind of a lot and very sudden. He really could use a minute to catch up.

As the fires crackle around him, the last shards of glass falling from the broken windows as if they were flakes of snow, he looks down at the dirty, bruised creature down at his feet. There are marks of ash and blood all over her, her wrists and arms smeared with grime and a welt growing on her forehead where something hard had struck her earlier in the day, the smell of alcohol still lingering.

— He looks around the area.

Dozens of curious faces, belonging to guardsmen who had not bothered to interfere in his fight and to the people of the city, staring out of homes and alleyways, look to meet him and he realizes now that the sound he hears isn’t the crackling of fire and screams.

It’s cheers and claps.

He’s really not used to hearing that.

Sir Knight bends down, lifting Acacia off of the ground as the people of the city move in, running towards him with feverish glows in their eyes.

A hand claps his shoulder. “That was amazing!”

“What level are you?!” asks an excited woman, tugging on his wrist and shaking Acacia’s head by doing so.

A young man steps in before him, looking in awe. “What’s your name?!” he asks, blocking the way. Sir Knight walks forward and the man moves before he’s crushed.

“Hey. We could use you in the guard,” says an older guardsman, holding out a small advertising slip.

“Forget that! Hey, you want to join my party?” asks an elven woman. “We’ll give you double-rates!”

Somewhat confused, Sir Knight looks around at all of them as he walks. They’re like tiny birds, chirping up at him for something and he can’t quite understand what they want. Nobody ever approached him like this before in his old life, so why would they do so now?

In a way he knows that it’s because he’s strong now and that his presence is imposing. But the newness of this sort of attention… He looks around at them and he can’t help but wonder if anyone would bother to look at him if this wasn’t the case, if he was just a nobody.

— Of course, he knows the answer to that.

Their attention, their affection and desires, they’re contingent on his uniqueness and strength. Him being useful, physically, socially, for them is a firm requirement for them to pay him any kindness or mind.

He lifts her majesty higher up, so that they don’t touch her in their efforts to prod him.

All of them, even if they don’t know it, beyond the glimmer in their eyes that yearns for survival and thriving, there is just nothing.

They’re empty.

And in a way that is so deeply ironic at this point, he finds that disgusting. Of all the places to be empty, behind one’s eyes is the worst.

Sir Knight does his best to escape from them all, vanishing into the night. His cloak flows over the bodies of the dead enemy soldiers as he walks over them, the dark, all-absorbing fabric laps over them as would a burial shroud in the wind and, by the time he passes, the dead are stripped of their armor and weapons, the equipment and their possessions having been absorbed into his inventory.

(Sir Knight) has looted:

• [Leichtfuss Light Cuirass] x 11
• [Leichtfuss Light Wolfshelm] x 07
• [Leichtfuss Shortsword] x 11
• [Leichtfuss Standard Issue Clothing] x 09
• [Leichtfuss Standard Issue Robe] x 02
• [Leichtfuss Standard Issue Rucksack] x 05
• [Standard Health Potion] x 03
• [Standard Soul Potion] x 01
• [Miscellaneous Trinkets] x 04
• [Obols] x 218

— Payment for services rendered.

________________________________________

Acacia Odofredus Krone

Human, Female, Initiate

Level 05

Location: The City, Home

Blurriness is the first thing that she takes note of as she wakes up, her eyes slowly opening and breaking the tight seal that they had formed around her consciousness as she stares blankly.

Her body is sore and her head is throbbing, which isn’t actually too unusual of a state for her to be waking up in these days.

The girl runs her tongue over her dry lips and mouth.

She’s in bed.

Acacia blankly stares for a time.

— She blinks, sitting upright in a jolt and looking around herself.

‘She’s in bed’?! The thought repeats itself in her mind.

Wincing from her movements, she holds her throbbing head and then slides her legs over the side of the bed, kicking away some empty bottles that roll off a few feet to the tiny wall of the basement room.

Confused, dazed, she looks around herself.

This is her room.

What was… what was all that?

Was it some weird fever dream, brought on by the slow progression of the sickness?

Acacia coughs, clearing her throat out of habit, as she looks around the room in a daze.

No.

No, that wasn’t a dream. She was trying to find work and then…

— Her eyes go wide and she jumps up, kicking more glass away as she runs to the door to the tiny cellar room and opens it, stepping outside into the city back-alley and then looking around.

It’s day time. Back here, everything looks fine.

She runs a few steps down the alley on the side of the adventurers’ guild and looks at the plaza.

It’s destroyed.

People are running around, cleaning up the rubble. Sorcerers and wizards of the less destructive schools of magic are using their spells to move away debris, as are the particularly strong physical types. Facades are already being repaired by teams of craftsmen of many trades and patrolmen march the streets in groups of three, keeping a sharp eye on everything.

Rubbing her eyes, she looks around herself and then heads back past the garbage bins in the alleyway and down the small staircase, into the cellar room, closing the door behind herself.

The attack was real, then. If that was all real, if the attack on the city was real and all of that mayhem and death was real, if her attempted kidnapping was real, then so was her rescuer… right?

Acacia leans back against the door, one arm hanging loose and her other fiddling with the fabric of her robe on her chest.

But what the hell was that?

Was it some feverish delusion? The impossibility of the situation is of course, clear to her. But it felt so real, right? 

“…Sir Knight,” she mutters beneath her breath, trying to recall exactly what had happened last night.

“Your Majesty,” says a voice from nowhere.

Acacia jolts upright, looking around the tiny room. “Show yourself!” she orders, not quite sure how the impossibly large giant could be in here. She opens the door again, looking back outside as if he were standing on the other side of the door, but he’s not there.

The girl holds her mouth, as she smells the smell of air, shortly before a lightning strike, as she tastes the taste of copper on her tongue. Black smoke wafts out between the gaps of her fingers.

As before, the entity releases itself from her body in a truly uncomfortable manner, leaving Acacia gasping for air after it is finally free. She lifts her head, looking at the shadow that forms together in to a hulking creature that can barely stand in this tiny room, his head budging down because the ceiling is too low.

“It was all real?” asks Acacia. Although, she’s not really asking him as so much as she is asking herself and the universe. He nods. “You’re real?” she asks, lifting a hand and moving it towards him to touch the foggy body that is only starting to come together now into something solid and coherent. The spot that her finger reaches ripples outward as if she had touched the surface of water, but then it comes to an abrupt stop as his body hardens and becomes manifest. “What is this?” she asks.

The shadow looming down over her, shrugs. “Good question,” he replies. “What do you want it to be?” asks Sir Knight, she stares at him. The man lowers himself down onto one knee, perhaps as a sign of fealty, or perhaps simply just so that he isn’t butting against the roof.

It’s quiet for a moment as the question lingers in the room. What does she want this, all of this, to be?

“…Real,” replies Acacia, knowing the answer. “I want it to be real.” She clenches her fists, her mind racing. It really happened. Everything that happened last night, everything that was said, she wants it to be real more than anything else in the entire world. She wants to be something, to be anything more than an absolute z-

Sir Knight lifts a hand, stopping her.

- An absolute nothing.

“…I don’t like that you’re reading my thoughts,” says the girl, lifting an eyebrow. “Are you a demon? What are you?”

Sir Knight shakes his head. “Fair. But we’re connected,” he replies. “For as long as I reside in you, I am essentially just a thought of yours.”

Acacia looks at him, crossing her arms. “I don’t like that you’re literally inside of me either,” she notes.

“Fair,” replies Sir Knight. “It is a little awkward.”

Acacia stares at him and he stares at her through the slits of his heavy helmet, behind of which only the glint of a glowing eye can be seen and nothing more. The room is silent for a moment. Her gaze drifts wayward, wandering over to an empty glass bottle down on the floor and then back towards him.

“I would prefer not to live in a bottle,” says Sir Knight, reading her thoughts.

Acacia looks at him. “Sir Knight,” she says, holding her hands together. “I, Acacia Odofredus Krone, youngest princess of this nation, sincerely thank you for your efforts to save me last night.”

He gives her a thumbs-up. “We’re good.”

She points at the bottle. “But from now on, please stay in this bottle instead of me.”

“As you wish,” says Sir Knight. He rises to his feet. “There is a lot for us to do,” he explains.

Acacia blinks, looking at him. “Do?” she asks, not sure what he means.

Sir Knight nods and stands upright, lifting his cloak to pull out a sack of coins that he had taken from the enemy the night before and tosses it to her. Acacia looks at it, not understanding. She opens the bag and looks inside, yelping in surprise and dropping it as she sees all of the money. A paltry sum that wouldn’t have even been worth her holding in her old life. But now…

— The coins all fall out and scatter, rolling around the room and she screams, dropping down after them to the floor to collect them all back together.

This is more than enough for another dose of her medicine.

“Do,” repeats Sir Knight, as she lifts her gaze to look up at him from the floor, now on her knees instead, as they have seemingly switched places with one another. “To return you to your rightful throne, your Majesty.”

— A coin strikes against the wall, rattling noisily as it slowly comes to a stop.