Chapter 7
Chapter 7
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 7
Chapter Title: Arrival at the Silver Dawn Knights
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A few days after escaping the prison, we arrived at the gates of a certain city. It was the city where Iris's knight order was based.
For now, its outward appearance wasn't much different from what I remembered. The size and shape of the gates were roughly the same, and there even seemed to be guards posted in front.
The difference was that there was no long line of carriages waiting to enter or people in all sorts of colorful clothes forming a queue.
The horse, which showed no signs of fatigue even after galloping nonstop for three days with both Iris and me aboard, proudly passed the line of people and carriages and approached the guards.
"You've arrived, Captain Iris!"
The guards snapped to attention the moment they saw Iris and spoke in crisp, disciplined voices.
"Yes. Inform the lord that the second captain of the Silver Dawn Knights has returned. Also tell him I'll delay my report for a bit. I have business to attend to first, so I'll head back to the castle ahead of you."
"Understood!"
'Looks like that lord asshole hasn't changed.'
I thought that after seeing Iris hesitate for a long moment before attaching the honorific to "lord." In the game, this city's lord was a villain the player could kill without a shred of guilt.
If I pushed forward the lord extermination quest a little quicker, Iris might like that. In the extreme, I could take down one more boss and then immediately deal with that guy.
"But... who's the one riding behind you...?"
Suspicious eyes turned toward me in the back.
Iris had gotten me some clothes, so I was no longer in the state of having just a loincloth to cover my privates, but from the guards' perspective, it was suspicious to see a stranger riding the same horse as their city's knight captain.
"Don't concern yourselves with him. I vouch for his identity."
"Understood. If that's the case..."
He trailed off, but when Iris said she vouched for my identity, he obediently stepped aside. Iris didn't spare the guard a single glance as she urged the horse into the city.
As I compared the street scenery in my head to the Brutal 4 city interior map,
a strange feeling washed over me anew.
'It's fascinating in all sorts of ways.'
Some parts faithfully reflected details omitted in the game, while others followed real-world laws identically.
For example, we still starved to death if we didn't eat. But on the flip side, there was no need to use the bathroom. No matter how much we ate or drank, nothing ever came out.
It seemed like the very concept of excretion didn't exist in Iris's mind to begin with.
In fact, I hadn't gone to the bathroom once since arriving here, yet my body showed no issues whatsoever. It was bizarre.
Even though Brutal 4 hadn't implemented either hunger or excretion gauges, one followed reality while the other adhered to game logic.
And one more thing.
'How should I put it... My eyes are feasting, I guess.'
Whether due to the mod's influence, the difference in appearance between men and women walking the streets was stark.
The men looked ordinary. Some even resembled NPCs straight out of the game, and even if not, most were just your everyday average Joes.
The women, on the other hand, had flawless skin without a single blemish, and their beauty was so outstanding that you could slap the word "pretty" on almost any of them and no one would argue.
Iris, who in reality would make a hundred out of a hundred passersby do a double-take, wasn't a standout here but merely a bit prettier than the abundance of ordinary women around.
'Though "a bit" still means drop-dead gorgeous.'
It wasn't just appearances that differed by gender. Clothing followed the same extreme divide.
The men wore appropriately medieval fabrics suited to the game's world, but every woman was in fairly revealing modern attire.
Short jeans with tank tops, crop tops exposing navels, miniskirts with high heels, or in extremes, just a single shirt over nothing at all.
And the men treated women dressing like that as completely normal.
Even if a woman strutted down the main street in nothing but a shirt, or stood there in a crop top and leggings with her underwear fully visible, no one leered.
The women showed no qualms about wandering around practically naked either. It was like the whole society had its common sense rewritten.
'Well, nothing bad about that for me.'
With beautiful women everywhere you looked, modern-style clothes, and all of them super revealing—what harm could that do me?
It just felt a huge disconnect from the original Brutal 4, a world crumbling without hope or dreams.
"Here we are."
How far into the city had we gone when Iris stopped the horse in front of a massive castle? Towering walls encircled it, and where a gate should have been, there was just a huge, gaping hole.
"It's a castle?"
In the game, it was just an ordinary knight order building with a training ground.
"It's an old castle. It used to be where that guy... ahem, the lord lived, but he dumped it on us and built his own mansion to live in instead. That's how our knight order ended up here."
Her speech hadn't changed much, but Iris treated me far more casually now than when we first met. Same for me.
There was no reason for either of us to harbor ill feelings toward the other, so it was natural.
Iris was an NPC famous among players as a meme for trusting the protagonist way too easily, and I had no desire to antagonize her and turn this into self-imposed hardcore mode.
As a result, our distance naturally shortened over the three days traveling from the prison back to the city. That was why I spoke to her casually too.
She was the captain, sure, but given the knight order's situation, there was no need for formalities.
"Dumped it? What does that mean?"
"I'll show you directly once you're in the knight order. It'll be much better than explaining it here."
This was genuinely something I didn't know. In the original game, the Silver Dawn Knights' quarters were a plain training ground, and while the lord had a mansion, it didn't feel like he'd abandoned the castle.
'I hope it's not that the story itself has changed.'
That was the worst-case scenario I could imagine.
After circling halfway around the inner walls, Iris stopped the horse. Right beside us was a wooden door ajar. From inside came the sound of horses whinnying. This seemed to be the stable.
"Wait here. I'll be right back."
"You?"
"Gonna tie up the horse. Won't take long."
I said I understood and jumped down to the ground. Iris rode through the gap in the open wooden door and vanished inside the building. Once I confirmed she was fully gone, I let out a sigh of relief.
'I never want to go through that again. Seriously.'
Riding the horse itself wasn't tiring. Just like in the game where the character never complained no matter how long you rode, I felt no fatigue at all. My body seemed immune to it.
The problem was the position.
Iris wouldn't have brought two horses just to come to the prison alone, so naturally, the only way for us to return together was for me to ride behind her.
Yeah, behind a woman wearing just a white sleeveless top and short dolphin pants.
With nowhere proper to hold on, she even told me to grab her waist or shoulders. She said clinging awkwardly to the horse could lead to falling off mid-gallop, which might kill me.
She wasn't wrong, so I obediently wrapped my arms around her soft, plush-feeling waist. Thanks to that, I spent the entire ride desperately trying to calm my lower half.
Even if the mod had warped common sense to see that absurd outfit as normal, she had to know what it meant when a rock-hard rod kept poking her ass.
And damn, it was huge too, so I leaned my upper body way back to keep it from touching her butt, sitting in this awkward half-crouch the whole time. It was exhausting in every sense.
At least once we entered the city, we were just walking slowly, so I didn't have to hold on. Thank goodness.
Really.
"What're you thinking so hard about?"
A woman's voice I hadn't heard before came out of nowhere from the side, startling me into looking up.
"Hi!"
A woman with blue hair, wearing a white sleeveless top and blue dolphin pants, was waving right next to me.