Ghost Knight King's Dungeon Project

Chapter 18 [The Failed Infiltrator and the Crimson Sword]

The cold double moon and the stars hung high in the sky.

The rusty bronze moon seemed exceptionally large today, obscuring half of the pale white moon. The two halves of the moon overlapped, their outlines merging to form a single entity, as if the bronze moon had swallowed half of the white moon.

The tower wizards of the human Lunos Academy call this double-moon phase "Soul Eater Moon," while the elven stargazers call it "Rildevan-Eva"—a complex and beautiful Elven term that literally translates to "lover's eyes," but usually refers specifically to "the unintentional exchange of glances between lovers when they part," or "the lingering gaze of couples who are reluctant to separate."

As for the dwarves... they are a pragmatic race, living year-round in tall fortresses and mountains carved into cities. The shape and form of the moon mean little to them; at most, they might mutter a rough and indistinct phrase like, "Copper stuck to white stone."

During the copper-white double moon phase, the light from the copper moon is very weak, with the moonlight primarily emanating from the white moon. Therefore, after the copper moon obscures half of the white moon, the brightness of the moonlight is significantly reduced.

"The lunar phase during the [Soul-Eating Moon] will cause the moonlight to be exceptionally dim," Elliott explained to his teammates behind him, holding a telescope. "It's a great opportunity, perfect for infiltration and assassination."

“…Troublesome,” Talia muttered.

“It’s almost dawn, and most of the torches in the camp have gone out. We’re getting ready to set off.” Rondar stretched his body and arranged his hunting bow, quiver, and long and short blades. “Through binoculars, we can see that the bandit camp has three entrances. Two of the entrances have three bandits, all of whom are awake. The other entrance only has two bandits, and one of them is dozing off.”

“We’ll infiltrate through the weakest third entrance—but to prevent being flanked from behind, we must leave someone behind to guard the rear.” He looked up and surveyed the members of the team.

“These two monks are the strongest among us, the sharpest blades, and the last line of defense for everyone’s safety. Brother Samo seems to be better at fighting in confined spaces and indoors than Brother Taran, so—Brother Samo, you, me, and Elliott will infiltrate ahead. Gerard, you keep watch in the middle. If the bandits get close, immediately go ahead and warn us to prevent being unwittingly surrounded. Ruby and Serena, who are weak in close combat but skilled in long-range attacks, you stay with Brother Taran to guard the rear and provide long-range spells and potion throws when the opportunity arises.”

"You've put me, your strongest fighter... at the very back?" Talia swung her hammer and spear like a stick, the hammerhead making a heavy whooshing sound as it cut through the air.

"Uh...where did you get the idea that I'm good at fighting in confined spaces?" Samael asked instinctively.

How come I didn't know I was good at fighting in confined spaces?

"Your knight's sword is designed for foot combat; its length has been reduced. Uncle Robin said it was modified to prevent it from hitting walls or other obstacles in confined spaces," Rondar said, recalling what Guardian Number One had said.

“Oh, is that it…” Samael came to his senses. “He could even tell that. That… that guard has a really sharp eye.”

In his previous life, Xia Mo'an was a veteran player of the game Dark Souls 1. The terrain in the game was always narrow and dangerous, and there was also a special parrying mechanism: if a weapon hits a wall or rock, it will trigger a parrying stagger, causing the character to waste stamina and be attacked by enemies who can get close and hack away.

Experienced Dark Souls 1 players often choose weapons with special attack patterns like vertical slashes or thrusts to avoid hitting walls while swinging. However, these weapons are relatively rare and difficult to obtain. Most powerful weapons that can be quickly acquired in the early game are still primarily based on slashing.

Samael had just emerged from the underground wormhole before forging the Netherbronze sword and shield. The narrow, cramped space evoked fond memories of a blissful time in his past life when he was nearly driven to despair by the infamous Dark Souls boss, "A Chance Encounter with Two Dogs and a Sheep in an Alley." Because of this, he subconsciously shortened the length of the knight's sword when forging the blade to avoid any hindrance to his swings caused by an excessively long blade.

Even a mere guard possesses such keen observation skills. Adventurers who make their living through exploration must be even stronger… Samael pondered. Disguising oneself as an adventurer is likely far more difficult than imagined—much more difficult.

They're not idiots, nor are they clueless NPCs in a game. They probably can't keep this up for long. What will they do then?
“Brother Taran, it’s not that we don’t want you to participate in the front-line battle, it’s just that the bandits will quickly flank us from the rear once they detect the intrusion,” Elliott explained. “I’ve dealt with bandits before; they’re adept at raiding caravans, using division and encirclement to overwhelm the carriage escorts. Like wolf packs, they’re used to quickly surrounding and dividing the enemy. The bandits will start trying to flank us from the rear the moment they encounter the enemy, which is why we hope you can protect our important support units and ranged damage dealers.”

“Furthermore, Brother Taran, your weapon is a hammer and spear, which may be more suitable for open-field group combat than infiltration operations in confined spaces. Dealing with bandits surrounding you from the rear should suit your combat style better,” Rondar added. “Thanks to your addition, we no longer need to assign extra men to assist Ruby and Serena, so we can focus on infiltration operations.”

"We split the team into groups in this way to avoid being crammed together between the narrow walls of the ancient imperial beacon tower ruins, which would prevent everyone from making the most of their abilities or even accidentally injure their teammates."

"Fine." Talia snorted, standing beside Ruby and Serena with her hammer and spear in hand.

“We’ll try our best to stealthily deal with the bandits in the camp and reduce their total number. After hearing one whistle, it means our location has been exposed. Glad will retreat and rejoin the rearguard, and Ruby will fire a flare. After hearing three whistles, Ruby and Serena will begin ranged attacks, and everyone will advance towards the entrance of the bandit camp’s beacon tower ruins.” Rondar pointed to a bone whistle around his neck.

"Okay." Everyone went to their respective posts.

“I… well, Rondar brothers, I’m actually not very good at killing… I’ve never killed anyone before.” Samael muttered under his breath as he hurriedly stuffed rags into the gaps in his armor to prevent the metal from clanging, following behind Rondar and Elliott. “I’m not used to it… how about I knock them out, and you guys… finish them off?”

Elliott frowned. He covered the lower half of his face with a dark red scarf, revealing only a pair of slightly confused eyes.

No, this person is clearly not a demon hunter warrior, nor is he some… strange demonized wizard, not even a villain. This is fucking absurd. Elliot thought. He really is a monk from a secluded monastery, seemingly untouched by bandits, as innocent as a noble student from Lunos Academy, who may have never left the magnificent capital of Florence in his entire life.

I guess I'm overthinking things... It must be because I've been spending too much time with that brat Rondar. Elliott rubbed his temples. Ugh! It's made me so paranoid!
Rhondalton paused, showing neither surprise nor disdain. He simply sighed softly.

"The Samoth monks... they probably haven't been away from the monastery for very long, have they? I haven't witnessed any of their evil deeds," Rondar asked. "Not to mention in the wastelands, even within the empire, large numbers of bandits and robbers still roam freely."

"Imperial laws cannot perfectly cover every place. The desolate roads are always full of murder, robbery, theft and rape, and many crimes are related to them."

“I admire your kindness and morality, Brother Samos, but there’s no need for mercy on these people. They’re no different from beasts.” Elliott added, saying he admired them, but inwardly cursing the idiot monk for being so fussy and indecisive. He was just like the Holy Light Priests he’d encountered before, a true example of a clergyman with boundless love.

“Alright… then.” Samael hesitated, raising his kite-shaped shield and knight’s sword.

The three quickly reached their hiding place. Fortunately, Samaelti had stuffed a bunch of rags into the joints of his armor, so at least it didn't make too much noise.

The barricades made of sharpened firewood formed a large circle of bandit camp, with tents, broken cart frames, old wooden barrels, grain sacks and other miscellaneous items scattered around.

At a gap in the barricade, two bandits stood guard, carrying broadswords and daggers. One had secretly drunk some wine and was lost in thought, while the other was already nodding off.

The moon is a filthy bitch, always changing its mind. The absent-minded bandit stared blankly at the gloomy sky, yawning, his thoughts hazy. This wasteland is no place for humans; they scavenge for food in the dust like wild beasts, wondering when they'll be able to return to the habitable zone—even if it means risking being hunted by bounty hunters.

The warrant will expire in a few years, right? Then I can go back to the habitable zone, change my name, and start a new life somewhere else. He counted on his fingers, thinking.

I must admit, I've been numbly wallowing in dice, cards, cheap liquor, knives, and thugs for far too long, to the point that I've forgotten how many years have passed in this way. The wasteland turns people into beasts, whether noble or base.

It started as a game of cards, gradually escalated into a gambling debt, grew larger and larger, and ultimately led to a murder. What happened after that is somewhat hazy. In short, he's still playing cards, and he's still committing murder.

How things turned out this way is no longer important. When he was a fourteen-year-old boy, he saw others profiting from wrongdoing without being punished, so he followed suit and did wrong as well, and gradually became indifferent to it. Evil became his most efficient way of survival, and eventually, his only way of survival.

Like a murderous blade piercing a victim's chest, the blood flows on and on. Eventually, even stopping the bleeding is futile.

The next moment, he felt a slight chill.

He lowered his head, staring at the tip of the serpentine sword that had pierced his chest, stained with blood and glowing with a faint blue venomous light.

Numbness spread rapidly throughout his body, followed by darkness. The curved sword slowly shrank back from his chest. And he slowly collapsed, his soul gradually swallowed by the thick, cold darkness.

His final thought was that the arrest warrant would expire in three years.

Elliott gently placed the body down and nodded to the other two.

Randall shook the blood off his sword, laid the dozing bandit's corpse on the ground, and beckoned Samael to follow.

Samael held up his shield, kept a low profile, and carefully guarded the flank.

The three men sneaked into the camp and made their way along the narrow, tangled paths toward the largest tent—their goal was to reduce the enemy's available manpower as much as possible before alerting them.

The campsite was a chaotic mess, littered with bricks from the ancient city wall, scattered loot, bones of a Crackclawed Bird, what appeared to be a severed human finger, and bloodstains. Tents were mixed with caravans, creating a complex and disorderly landscape.

*Thud.* Accompanied by a strange, soft sound, a figure suddenly sprang up from the ground!
A drunken bandit was lying on the ground! Randall accidentally stepped on his shin!
The next second after he stood up, Samael reacted swiftly, his hand like an iron clamp, gripping the drunk bandit's neck tightly with one hand, while his other arm used a WWE wrestling-style chokehold to constrict the bandit's body into his cold, bronze arm.

The strength of the Dark Bronze Armor was immense; for Samael now, grabbing a burly man with one hand was like pinching a chick.

Randall breathed a sigh of relief. *Clang!* A soft sound. The drunken bandit drew a short dagger from his belt and stabbed Samael in the abdomen.

The murder weapon struck the hard bronze and broke in two.

"Ugh... Ugh..." A faint, dying animal-like gasp escaped his throat as cold iron clamps gripped his neck tightly, fingers brimming with terrifying power nearly crushing his trachea.

His body was embraced by the arms and breastplate of the Nether Bronze, a terrible coldness chilling his muscles and making him feel numb. The chilling sensation of rigor mortis seeped into his joints, and the judgment of the necromantic halo descended upon him under the moon phase of the Soul-Eating Moon.

"You... well, have you ever killed an innocent person?" Samael asked in a low voice. "If you have, it will make me feel better."

Is this a trial? The bandit pondered with difficulty in the darkness of impending death. He had never believed in gods, but at this moment he wavered. Even if he had fled thousands of miles to this desolate land, he could not escape the judgment of fate from the angel of death.

“Please, monk, stop torturing him and me, just give him a quick death.” Elliott growled in a low voice, “All clergy are so long-winded! That’s why I hate teaming up with fanatics from the Holy Light Kingdom, even knights and priests! And you, Rondar, if you’re clumsy, don’t come up with any stupid infiltration plans—I’m the only one in the whole team with proper infiltration skills!”

Randall bowed his head and admitted his mistake.

Samael remained silent for a moment.

With a soft crack, the sound of bones breaking. He laid the corpse, whose neck had been twisted 180 degrees, flat on the ground.

"It feels really strange," he said softly. "It's colder than I expected."

"Stop dawdling, hurry up!" Elliott growled in a low voice. "I should have known! This whole infiltration plan is utterly rotten! You idiot Rondar, you and Brother Samos have practically no stealth skills, yet you insisted on coming up with this crap and coming in with me to assassinate someone! You'll ruin us—"

The next second, he caught his breath and turned deathly pale.

A blood-red blade pierced his chest, passing right through it. The crimson, alien-shaped tip with hook-like barbs on both sides smiled as it peered out, then slowly retracted into Elliott's body, emerging from behind him.

"Elliott!" At Rondar's panicked cry, Elliott's figure slowly fell to the ground, revealing a burly man behind him holding a scarlet longsword.

The man chuckled softly, shivering slightly with comfort. The bloodstains on the longsword were absorbed into its scarlet blade, the faint, shimmering dark red light seeming to be drunk by the beast within.

"The Alliance is really underestimating us. What kind of adventurers are you to be here to suppress bandits?" The burly man, wearing a fur-trimmed robe of wild beast skin, held a magnificent scarlet sword hilt and slowly tapped the wooden barrel next to him with his longsword.

Thump thump.

With the clinking of sword tips, countless torches suddenly lit up, like the glowing eyes of a wolf pack in the darkness. The bandits laughed and surrounded them.

The vast majority of the bandits didn't sleep at all!
"What level assassin is this? Level three or four? Has anyone told you that I used to be a level five adventurer?" The burly man raised his boot and kicked the unconscious Elliot on the ground. "Oh, I almost forgot. The Alliance doesn't care about the life or death of adventurers at all. It doesn't matter if a level five adventurer goes missing or becomes an outlaw. It's also common for important information to be missing from high-level mission requests."

The surrounding bandits burst into loud laughter.

"Rest so close to our camp, upwind? Do you think we're deaf, blind, and have no sense of smell? Who didn't fight their way up in the wasteland?" The burly man chuckled. "You're incredibly stupid—coveting loot, huh? As a level five veteran, let me tell you, kid, survive first, then talk about loot—of course, you don't need this advice anymore."

He casually picked up the scarlet longsword and thrust it at Rondar with ghostly speed.

Boom!

The sword blade was firmly blocked in mid-air by the horizontally extended rusty bronze kite-shaped shield.

The scarlet blade clashed with the dark green rusted bronze shield, sparks flying and leaving a bluish scratch on the shield's surface.

The bandit leader was startled!
This is a demonized weapon obtained through a trade with that lord; ordinary armor is utterly destroyed before its blade! It was thanks to this sword that they were able to easily slaughter the grain transport convoy. How could such a weapon possibly be stopped by a rusty bronze shield?
The next second, a chilling, eerie green sword wind swept over, as sharp as falling stars.

With the combat experience of a level five swordsman, the bandit leader took a step back and retreated swiftly, barely dodging the cold blade! The sword tip slammed into the ground, forcefully shattering the stone bricks of the ancient empire's beacon tower.

An ordinary knight's sword was swung with the force of a heavy sword and halberd.

Cold liquid streamed down his face. The bandit leader touched his face, feeling a slight pain on the side of his cheek. His hands were covered in cold blood; he'd been grazed by the sword's wind—what kind of monstrous strength was that?!
“You killed innocent people…” the fussy, armored monster said softly, “Then… what I have to do next will be much easier. Rondar, blow the whistle, go and treat Elliott first.”

Before he could speak, Randall blew the bone whistle, rushed in front of Elliott, and grabbed the potion bag to give him emergency treatment.

A piercing whistle echoed through the night sky as a potion bottle was hurled into the air, shattering and bursting into a blinding flash. A ball of light hovered above the bandit camp, illuminating the area below as if it were daytime.

Samael stepped forward, shield in one hand and sword in the other, striding into the light. His hood covered his helmet, and the shadow beneath the helmet's eye slits revealed a hollow space.

"A shield?" the bandit leader sneered. "Do you think adventurers are here to fight? Or are you a dedicated guardian...?"

The rusty bronze shield suddenly turned sideways, and a flash of eerie green bronze shadow appeared.

Before he could finish speaking, the bandit leader flew straight backward, crashing into half of the tent.

Samael held his shield horizontally and slapped the bandit leader away with a backhand!

"Come here." He looked around and invited gently.

The two bandits suddenly leaped up. One jumped onto Samael's back from behind, stepped on his shoulder, and plunged his dagger into the gap in the neck of his armor. The other flashed his broadsword and stabbed it into Samael's waist.

The bandit grinned maliciously, reaching out to pull out the blade to bleed the victim, only to find that the blade was firmly stuck in the gap of the armor.

[Foreign object detected in joint; powerful suction activated.]

With a clang and a shower of sparks, Samael's full suit of armor snapped shut, the rag he had stuffed into the gaps to sneak in was ejected, and his blade was cleanly snapped off by the hard edges of the bronze armor plates, the break resembling the marks left by an industrial rolling mill when it cuts through inferior steel.

Samael neither dodged nor evaded, but instead raised his shield and swept it overhead, breaking the ribs of the dagger-wielding bandit amidst a scream. The moment the bandit fell to the ground, the shield, like the heavy, blunt blade of a guillotine, pressed its edge straight down towards the bandit's neck!

The bandit howled, desperately gripping the blunted edge of the shield, trying to push aside the terrifying, guillotine-like shield, but it was to no avail. The immense force of the ancient undead had already crushed down. Although the edge of the bronze shield had no sharp blades, being as thick and flat as a chopping board, its terrifying power, with an abrupt halt to the screams, crushed the bandit's neck, spine, and flesh all at once!
Clang, clang! The metallic clanging of armor echoed relentlessly throughout the camp, like the roar of war chariots!

He turned around and with a swift upward thrust, he sent the bewildered short-sworded bandit flying, slicing him in two at the waist!

The screams of agony echoed as the upper half of his head struggled in the pool of blood, managing to crawl half a meter before being impaled in the skull by the Dark Bronze Knight's sword.

“Come.” Samael drew his blood-stained knight’s sword and repeated. Blood trickled down his body, his sword, and his shield. The Nether Bronze automatically repelled the blood, flushing it to the ground, where it dripped and froze into a thin layer of blood ice at his feet.

The bandits trembled and retreated in unison.

"Back off...back off! Fools! Back off, that's not something you can handle! Don't waste my manpower!" The bandit leader, who had been slapped away by the shield, struggled in the ruins of the collapsed tent, coughing up blood. Half of his face bore the pattern of the shield, his cheekbone was broken, and he cursed incoherently.

He pulled a healing potion from the chain at his waist and poured it into his mouth, while raising his scarlet longsword in the other hand. "You all go and deal with those unsuspecting idiots outside the camp. I'll handle this heavily armored weirdo!"

　The author is a college student, and September 1st was a busy day with travel and classes, so time was a bit tight. Before posting at midnight, while checking for typos and organizing plot foreshadowing, the author accidentally fell asleep while looking at the posting page. The author apologizes to the readers who stayed up late to wait for the update. The author is considering whether to change the posting time to the morning or afternoon.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)