Chapter 17 – Nochtentoria Castle

The villagers had been complicit with my abuse, yet they shifted all the blame to my parents and the chief as if they didn’t have a single fault.
Pretending to be spotless, uninvolved… What a joke.
Putting aside my resentment towards my father, stepmother, and the village chief, the others were equally disgusting.
I could still hear it, clear as day, how they had yelled that I would be the ruin of the village.
They were malicious to the point where the indiscriminate hostility that came from beyond the dungeon gates was more welcoming in comparison. 

I repressed a sudden bout of nausea and forced myself to say, “I’d be troubled if I received this province inhabited by them.
You may as well bestow me something better down the line, please.”

“Then I shall do that,” Mayer replied and returned with his steed to the front of the march.

 Behind us, the village chief visibly sighed in relief, no doubt glad that he could keep his status.
However, the villagers were all glaring at him sharply.
I bet they felt like a good chance had just slipped out of their hands, akin with the possibility of getting a guild and whatnot.
I could roughly picture what would happen in the village after my departure: nothing much would be different from what it currently was, but at minimum, my parents and the village chief wouldn’t be able to walk around with their heads held high as they used to.

The value of the name ‘Dark Knights’ was truly high, considering how Fabian’s corps had been ignored like it was nothing when I joined him during the first playthrough.
Before Fabian began to accumulate fame, Jun’s parents had labeled him as a fraud because he wanted a support mage like me to join his team.
And yet, when Fabian’s expedition corps began to be renowned as the Champion’s force, the duo weaseled their way into the base to cause some trouble.
The pains I went through to pry them away back then…

But I was sure that they wouldn’t have the balls to come to the Dark Knights’ base, and this certainty left my heart at peace.
Thanks to that, I was able to leave the village feeling more refreshed than when I had done the same during the first playthrough.
And boy, how that made me feel good inside!

* * *

When I found some time to take a breather, I opened the party member status window that I hadn’t had time to take a good before, not with everything that had been going on. 

The game customization of this world granted me a special ability—I could call up game interfaces, such as status windows.
Through them, I could check on my level, the stats of my party members, and even see the amount of experience someone needed to level up.
It also enabled me to monitor spell casting delays, received support spell type as well as the duration of each.
I had access to information unknown to others, and that was—to sum it up—overpowered.

First, I checked my status: level 23.
I started at level 20, but it seemed I had leeches quite a lot of experience from the Dark Knights.
To be fair, that dungeon had been level 35 and I had almost died back there.
As the memory rose to the forefront of my mind, I felt a chill ripple through my body and I couldn’t help but rub the back of my neck to try and alleviate the sensation.
Although I had joined the Dark Knights mid-raid, I had clearly gained more experience this time thanks to the corps members eradicating every single fellspawn in the dungeon.

Back in the first playthrough, I had been level 21 when I left with Fabian.
The level 35 dungeon had been difficult for Fabian to progress through, so he had focused on killing only the core fellspawn and clearing the dungeon.
He had deeply regretted not being able to obtain more experience from the remaining monsters.
It couldn’t be helped, though; there was a limit to the number of people that could enter a dungeon.
Because I had already been inside when they entered, Fabian Corps had had to exclude one of its core members from entering the dungeon.

It was admirable how they had managed to clear the dungeon with a cumbersome level 20 support mage who couldn’t even cast a proper spell because she was still in the first iteration of this world… And that came back to bite me many times after the incident.
It was why the members of Fabian Corps had begun to look at me unfavorably.
Perhaps from that very moment onward we were on a bad start already.

This made Mayer appointing a level 20 support mage as his vice-captain even more shocking.
At first, I had thought Mayer offered me the position of vice-captain because he didn’t know my level, which was something usually hard to tell whether it was yours or another’s; imagine my surprise when I found out you could only discover someone’s level by using a levelometer!

Since I thought he didn’t know my level, I had discreetly asked Mayer about it, as level 20 and 40 might have been all the same in his eyes.
To my surprise, he hadn’t seemed the least bit concerned.
He had said, “Levels can be raised.
I do not neglect the talented because of such things.”

 “But with me in the corps, the average level of the Dark Knight elites will drastically fall!”

 “It will still be higher than the current Fabian Corps,” he had said, reassuring me.

I still felt incredulous whenever I recalled that episode; however, his words weren’t wrong.
Mayer Knox was level 80—the average level of the corps was still 50 even if we just combined mine and Mayer’s levels.
The maximum level attainable in the game was 99, but getting there was no easy feat.
As a game, sure, but when the game turned into reality? It was like trying to reach God’s domain.