The Temple Knight Order 1
The day after Elise told us about the Temple joining the fight, our party sat gathered around a guild table, eyes sparkling with curiosity.
It went without saying that the Temple wasn't staffed by priests and nuns alone. As a power in its own right — an agent that moved according to the Goddess's oracles — it needed military force.
The moment you left the city for some remote mountain valley, you ran into wild beasts and wandering monsters. You could hardly send bare-handed clergy out into that. And yet the Temple could hardly go around signing exclusive contracts with secular mercenaries, either.
So the Temple raised monks and temple knights — to clear out monsters, escort priests and nuns on their pilgrimages of penance, and handle any number of other duties.
And they were people you almost never got to meet.
"Never thought I'd end up climbing the Tower with temple knights. Back in the north, I never even saw one of their faces."
"It feels like I've become the hero from those stories Dad used to read me as a kid."
Monks tempered their bodies endlessly under the banner of penance, subduing enemies with martial arts and holy techniques. Temple knights used Holy Power in place of mana, fighting in heavy plate and with massive shields. Situations that actually called for either of them were vanishingly rare.
Only when some clueless bandits attacked a penitent priest, or someone tried to scam the Temple and blaspheme the Goddess, did they step in. In a world where Holy Power itself proved the Goddess's existence, how many idiots thick enough to pull that kind of stunt could there really be?
On top of that, they had no reason to cooperate with mercenaries or adventurers. Priests and nuns already endured every kind of hardship under the name of penance — those who took to the field for a sacred mission had no cause to go begging help from freelancers.
"Roland. Have you ever met a monk or a temple knight?"
"I've seen them fight, but never worked alongside them."
Even after ten years grinding through a fantasy world, I could count the times on one hand. The only one that stuck was a monk I watched capture bandits while I was out on a job in some rural village. About as likely as a café barista happening to watch a scientist run experiments in a lab.
"Back when I was bouncing all over the kingdom on commissions… same way I helped out Grace's village. I headed into the southern mountains to deal with a large-type that had drifted into a remote corner of the kingdom, and I ran into them once. Monks who'd gone out to deal with bandits who'd been raiding food shipments bound for the Temple."
The party listened with glittering eyes. Even Irene, a candidate Saint, leaned in as if she'd never heard anything like it. So even growing up inside the Temple, she'd never actually met a monk or a temple knight?
In game terms, you could call the martial-arts monks PvP specialists and the heavily armored temple knights PvE specialists. Expecting monks who'd come to arrest bandits to take down a thick-skinned giant-type was close to impossible.
So I'd hunted the large-type blocking the road, and the monks had used the chaos to clear out the bandits — a loose, improvised joint operation.
"I don't know about temple knights, but the monks really could fight. Their opponents were bandits, not undead, but still… watching them kick off trees and dodge arrows as they charged in left quite an impression."
How to describe a monk's fighting style? "Acrobatic" felt about right. They weren't content just launching off the ground — they used trees and wooden palisades as stepping stones, soaring through the air like some martial-arts master out of a wuxia novel.
It finally made sense why those female monk characters, with their thighs flashing through the slits of their China-dress-style habits, had thief-tier HP and stats cranked to the absolute limit of evasion.
"Huh… so even Roland's never seen a temple knight?"
"Indeed. Even I, who grew up in a noble house, can count the times I've seen them on one hand. Aside from glimpsing them from a distance when Father visited the Temple, I've never watched them fight."
"If even a grand ducal family hasn't seen them, they really must be rare."
"For a noble house to witness temple knights in combat, they'd have to be mixed up in something thoroughly unsavory."
"Ah… so that's how it works?"
We were deep into our discussion of monks and temple knights around the table when the guild doors burst open. Every gaze in the room swung toward the entrance — not just the upper-grade adventurers holding tables, but the lower- and intermediate-grade ones who'd taken commissions and still stuck around for the rare spectacle.
What came striding through the doors, shouldering the full weight of every adventurer's stare and every viewer's attention through Han Se-ah's camera, was a massive knight in pure white armor.
The armor looked almost pathologically clean — pure white from helm to greaves to boots, without a single blemish. Aside from the Goddess's symbol engraved on the breastplate, there wasn't a single decoration or crest. Strip off the chest piece and you might have mistaken the whole thing for a marble statue.
"Wow, but if your armor's that white, cleaning it after a fight has got to be a nightmare. I already hesitate to wear a white T-shirt when I'm eating soup — who makes armor that color?"
Faced with the temple knight's fully sealed, imposing figure, adventurers and viewers alike started murmuring among themselves. Through modern eyes, that pure white armor was unique but mostly just raised worries about stains. Through medieval eyes, it looked like something as precious as treasure.
So while Han Se-ah and her chat fretted about laundry, the adventurers fell into a hush under a strange pressure. The temple knight paid them no mind either way. He planted himself at the door, unfurled a massive scroll with both arms, and began reading in a booming voice.
He was enormous, but completely hidden inside the armor — I'd half expected a "secretly a beautiful lady knight" twist. No such luck.
The temple knight's impressively deep voice rolled out over the scroll, which appeared to be a Temple proclamation. Strip away the religious flourishes and the core message was this: the Temple Knight Order would commit its full strength to entering the Tower.
The monsters inside multiplied endlessly no matter how many thousands of adventurers hunted them every day. So until the adventurers identified the root of this incident and the Magic Tower found a solution, the temple knights would take charge of the safe zones and provide unlimited support.
"Good heavens — is the Temple planning to establish a sacred domain inside the Tower?"
"Well, it is undead. Considering the Tower sits within the Temple's sphere of influence, they could hardly sit still."
The adventurers erupted into excited chatter. Even among adventurers — especially among adventurers who risked their lives climbing the Tower — there were plenty who clung to religion with something close to superstition.
The ones who paid huge tithes every month believing it would ward off death. The ones who believed that disrespecting a priest or nun would bring the Goddess's wrath. Mercenaries and adventurers believed all kinds of superstitions.
And that superstitious streak didn't change at upper-grade or highest-grade. Plenty of them credited surviving a large-type fight or a named-monster deathmatch to the Goddess's grace.
"Hmm, Roland? What should we do?"
"Do about what?"
Having finished the scroll without a moment's hesitation, the temple knight spun on his heel and left the guild. Just as the other adventurers began murmuring and debating among themselves, Han Se-ah tilted her head toward me with a question.
Her face was pointed my way, but her eyes slid quietly toward Irene. Apparently Irene's steely resolve after witnessing the undead firsthand was weighing on her.
Sitting at our table, having just heard the temple knight's announcement, Irene's eyes blazed with a passion that could only be described as fire. Even the gentle droop of her outer corners had sharpened upward, enough that her whole expression seemed changed.
"Miss Hanna… surely you aren't saying we won't go to the thirty-first floor…."
"Nooo, Unnie! Of course not. I was just wondering whether we should comb through the thirty-first floor slowly, or push hard all the way to the fortieth. Every time something weird happens in the Tower, it ends up being in ten-floor increments."
"Mmm, true… that is a fair point. Could the number ten be connected to the Demon King's vile black magic? In that case, we should try reaching the fortieth floor this time as well."
"I'd think it was hella weird too if I were them. At least the golems started from floor twenty-one, so no NPCs got too suspicious. The orcs piled up on floor twenty, but the golems were spread evenly from twenty-one to thirty. Still — if a boss keeps showing up every ten floors and I keep clearing them, aren't the NPCs gonna start getting ideas?"
Han Se-ah broke out in a cold sweat under Irene's perfectly reasonable suspicions. And so our party's course of action was decided by Irene — who was pushing her opinion far more forcefully than usual.