It's Dangerous Outside the Dungeon, Master

“Yes, Master.”

When Evangeline, dyed in darkness, revealed herself again with a cheerful voice, she was in the form of a black knight wearing a deep hood.

To put it simply, the appearance of a ‘Death Knight’ wrapped in black armor from head to toe.

I could notice one oddity in her appearance.

‘The eyes…’

The color of the glowing eyes inside the hood was red, not blue.

In the crimson eyes, white light pupils flickered ominously like flames.

‘Could it be.’

For a moment, all sorts of feelings crossed my mind.

Wondering, ‘Did something go wrong?’

Well, the concept of turning evil appears often in all kinds of media.

Isn’t the reversal of eye color a symbol of that?

I was worried that Evangeline might have become like that while establishing her individuality as a Death Knight.

And I was afraid that my relationship with her might change as well.

“I will gladly do so.”

However, my worry was unfounded.

As she removed her hood and smiled, Evangeline’s appearance gradually became bathed in light.

The black armor turned to silver and blue.

The ink-colored and red cape flowing behind her back turned to white and water-color.

The dull platinum hair flowing from under the hood turned golden.

Finally, the red glow in her eyes that seemed to emit resentment turned into clear blue eyes.

“My lord. My master. My one and only ruler.”

The one prostrating there was no longer a Death Knight, but had taken on the appearance of a female knight who seemed to have jumped out of a fairy tale or game.

The appearance of an incredibly beautiful hero.

“Eve…”

‘You’re incredibly beautiful.’

In that overwhelming moment, I naturally reached out to her and opened my mouth.

『Congratulations on achieving a great feat! Demon King Candidate ‘Libertas’! You have successfully placed a hero under your command for the first time!!』

I confirmed that the screen had appeared at my fingertips.

It’s been a while since I’ve encountered something like this, but it’s not welcome at all.

“How tactless.”

“Master?”

As I irritably swept away the message that popped up in front of me, Evangeline, who had tried to grasp the hand that had come up to her eyes but missed it, was looking up at me with bewildered eyes.

I reached out to her again and received a kiss on the back of my hand, but by then, my mind to say what I had intended to say earlier had already flown away.

“No. I was just surprised by how beautifully you’ve changed.”

…I completely lost the mood.

I know without being told that Evangeline is no ordinary being.

“I thought you might think so, but I thought you’d like it. I believed it was a good performance.”

“So you did it to tease me.”

“Ah, it wasn’t exactly to tease you. It was just my sincere desire to take in one more beautiful aspect of you, Master.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Is it?”

Evangeline’s smile had changed from the refreshing one earlier to a somewhat sly one.

It resembled that of Elias when he was male before, but it was much more refreshing, confident, and bold than that.

However, it wasn’t as if the polite and diligent image she had shown before had completely disappeared.

While she was saying words that seemed to tease me, she was still holding my hand without moving from that spot. As if she would endure like that for ten thousand years if my order didn’t come.

“Stand up. I want to see your whole body.”

“Gladly, my Master.”

I slowly circled around her as she stood up, examining her newly revealed appearance.

Her hair is brilliant golden, as if the sunlight itself had been spun into threads and planted.

If Serica’s hair captured the color of the first sunset, hers should be seen as having the midday sun embedded in it.

The armor was clean silver, but there were traces all over it that couldn’t be hidden.

As if proving her life full of trials and tribulations.

The cape and skirt are blue. They held a refreshing light, filled with her magic power.

Although she doesn’t turn her body to follow me, her two eyes, which keep following me as if not wanting to lose sight of me, are also filled with a blue water-like color.

The magical glow of her eyes leaves a trail that lingers briefly and disperses with each movement.

“I want to see your other form again.”

“As you wish.”

Evangeline pulled up the hood attached to her cape.

It didn’t seem to have any magic cast on it, but rather looked like a conscious trigger for using her ability.

Her appearance was instantly dyed in darkness, as if her previous refreshing appearance had been a lie.

The blue light that had been showing refreshment changed to a red light wrapped in resentment and curse.

The armor all turned black, the lining of the cape was dyed in the same crimson color as her eyes.

The hair that had seemed like midday sun was discolored again to a dull platinum color mixed with an ominous, foggy ash.

It was such a big change that it made my heart sink for a moment, even though I knew her true form.

“Come back.”

The black knight, who still had that refreshing smile under the black hood, but even that appearance was ominous, returned to being a golden-haired noble knight.

This is really…

‘A Death Knight and a Princess Knight.’

Isn’t this an appearance that captures both romanticized images people have of knights?

“Are you pleased?”

As I returned to my original position after circling her twice, she smiled and asked like that.

It was still a refreshing smile, and also…

‘I didn’t know she could make such eyes.’

Reverence, adoration, respect, esteem, loyalty, devotion, worship, veneration, admiration, affection, single-mindedness, and so on. Expressions that seemed to contain all the emotions of love towards a superior person were all contained in those eyes.

And she was sending out those emotions much more intensely through the still connected path.

It was a wave of emotions that seemed to overwhelm my fear of growing distant from her.

There was only one thing I could say.

“I like it very much. More than I expected.”

“If that’s the case, I’m glad too. My Master.”

I reached out to her again, and she took my hand and led me down from the altar.

After she guided me to the chair, I sat down and watched Evangeline talking with the others for a moment.

“You’ve taken a step ahead… Evangeline.”

“Xue. As I said earlier, it was an interesting match.”

“I was going all out, you damn…”

“Who said I didn’t use my full strength? I said it was fun.”

The appearance she showed with Xue was exactly the same as the image of old friends I had seen before.

A feeling like slightly ill-tempered friends or rivals.

You could say it’s an appearance that suggests the years they’ve built up together.

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen that… form. Evangeline.”

“I feel like I’ve woken up from sleep too, Ran.”

“…Don’t let your guard down just because you’re in the lead.”

“Come after me if you can.”

Her relationship with Ran seems to have a stronger malicious feeling, but it feels solid in a way that will never cross the absolute line.

Another thing I could tell was that the two of them weren’t friends yet.

Was Ran a more solitary type than I thought, or was their relationship just distant?

“Lady Evangeline… is that right? Is this your true form?”

“Rather than my true form, this is the form given to me by the Master. Lady Sonia. As Ran said, if you’re the Master’s disciple, you’re someone I should serve too, so please speak comfortably.”

“T-that, I’ll get used to it slowly…”

“Please do so.”

Unlike with the other two, she took a thoroughly respectful attitude towards Sonia.

She doesn’t ask for a kiss on the back of the hand as she habitually did with me, and while she doesn’t make contact first and keeps her distance, it feels like she’s giving proper treatment.

Even so, I didn’t get the feeling that she was trying to distance herself.

『Congratulations on achieving a great feat! Demon King Candidate ‘Libertas’! You have successfully placed a hero under your command for the first time!!』

『Congratulations on achieving a great feat! Demon King Candidate ‘Libertas’! You have evolved a summoned beast into a hero!!』

While listening to their conversation, I held the tea in my hand and called up the message window I had pushed away earlier.

The message window, which somehow seemed more crooked than before, still conveyed its message to me without forgetting:

『As a reward for achieving a great feat, the Dungeon Lord will receive certain attributes, and the dungeon will receive a certain amount of materials!』

『Attributes – Health 43 Technique 54(◀ 52) Durability 46 Magic Power 63(◀ 61) Resistance 55(◀ 53)』

”Great feat’, huh. One attribute for each achievement.’

It seemed that the attributes gained this time only increased the Dungeon Lord’s own specs, without affecting the dungeon.

It’s a good enough reward just for the Dungeon Lord to become stronger, though.

This was a concept that didn’t exist when playing the game.

It seems they’ve detailed what was just lumped together as achievements in MilDun 1.

Since getting achievements was a given, I had just been ignoring the message windows that popped up until now.

But this didn’t seem like something I could ignore.

『Those fallen human heroes, who will become heroes of the demon realm, will be the stairs for you to ascend to the throne of the Demon King.

I hope you continue to gather them and keep them by your side! The more of them there are, the deeper your darkness will become, and the higher that throne will rise!』

Fallen heroes, corrupted heroes, or heroes who chose evil, and so on.

The system calls them by various names, but the users of MilDun 1 just called them ‘heroes’ or ‘braves’.

It’s too long to call them by all those names, and human-side heroes or braves were just enough to be ‘boss mobs’.

‘Subjectively, I think it’s ridiculous to judge heroes by good and evil.’

These could be obtained through two routes while playing the game.

One is, of course, ‘Hero Summoning’ using heroes, braves, or those with the potential to walk such a path as sacrifices. Either corrupting them directly or summoning heroes corrupted by other demons in the past.

‘Thinking about that time gives me a headache.’

As you can tell just by hearing it, it’s a gacha with such a setting.

You can ignore the oddity of sacrificing an archer and getting a mage or something like that.

And I didn’t have very good gacha luck.

‘Everyone else got the complete 5-star except me. In the gacha.’

A ‘complete 5-star’ refers to a 5-star hero that can be immediately deployed in the dungeon without needing any additional material input or growth.

To put it simply, it’s buying time by putting in money.

It’s not that I didn’t spend as much as others.

I just had very bad drawing luck.

…Pessimistically speaking, if you consider family as a single-draw gacha too, maybe I’ve had bad luck all my life.

This was also one of the reasons why I became obsessed with the growth and evolution of my first summoned beast.

If it wasn’t going to be gacha in the first place, I thought I’d bet on the more likely option.

‘Somehow, I didn’t feel attached to summoned beasts or mercenaries that came from draws.’

This is another reason.

Perhaps because they were ‘those touched by others’ from the setting, I didn’t get attached to other heroes or braves that came from gacha.

Even if I was happy when a 5-star came out, it was just for that moment, and somehow I ended up using the unit I had been using before again.

So I focused on evolving my first summoned beasts.

‘And that was the right answer.’

The heroes I directly raised and created were better in performance and had higher growth limits than those created through draws.

While heroes raised by other users were also generally higher compared to heroes drawn from gacha, two of the heroes within the world’s top five were always the ones I raised.

It felt as if it was saying ‘This is your path’.

Although it wasn’t a game that prepared diverse appearances or settings for heroes, I think that sense of superiority was one of the driving forces that made me keep playing that game.

Wouldn’t it naturally feel good if the ones I directly raised were stronger?

『Name – Evangeline』

『Individual Name – Weapon Professor』

『Alias, Title – Hero, ‘One Who Tips the Scales’』

And before my eyes, finally, the first hero in this world appeared.

Created by raising my first summon.

『One Who Tips the Scales – The hero ‘Judge of Absolute Good’ willingly abandoned the absolute nature of her scales. Now all she wants is a scale that tilts in the direction I desire of its own accord.』

Her title was different from those of the heroes I had seen in MilDun 1 so far.

That would be natural, of course.

If times have changed, heroes should change too, and if they had ideas, they would have prepared more diverse heroes when making a new game.

And this is reality.

The heroes I’ve seen… they might be dead, but if they’re around, they would be in old countries or at the center of demon realms.

They would be over 200 years old.

‘Come to think of it. ‘Scales’, huh.’

I’ve seen heroes with aliases related to judgment or verdict a few times before.

Most of them are titles received by clergy, but Evangeline’s appearance, while radiant, doesn’t look like a holy knight at all, which made me wonder.

However, that doubt was washed away as I looked at her characteristics.

『Characteristics – Golden Rule Scales, Heroic Commander, Stacked Strong Strike, Hero’s Mask (Half), Member of Necropolis』

『Golden Rule Scales – Do not do unto others what you do not want done unto yourself.

■ Hero’s Martial Arts (Sword)

■ Heaven-bestowed Martial Talent

■ Tipping the Scales

■ Adding Weight

A complex characteristic combining the above four characteristics.』

Her main characteristic, “Selfish Scales,” was a combination of “Specialization: Swordsmanship” and “Specialization: Martial Arts” with “Martial Talent,” an upgraded version of “Finesse,” plus two other characteristics added.

‘My goodness.’

Now that she has become elite rank, it was a fully activated mythical-grade characteristic.

“Sonia.”

“Yes, Master.”

Looking at that, it became even harder to hold back.

It felt like questions I had been trying to put off to focus on immediate matters were now swirling in my head.

“You can rest for today. The lesson was tomorrow, right?”

“Ah… Yes. That’s right. I understand.”

She seemed momentarily confused, her eyes widening, but soon nodded as if she had realized something and slowly retreated.

She did turn back once at the door, but when our eyes met, she bowed politely once more before disappearing.

“My lady. You were in a hurry.”

“Is that how it looked to you too?”

“It’s visible to all our eyes.”

I guess it was too blunt a dismissal.

Thinking that I should mention it to Sonia separately later and apologize or spend some time with her, I raised my gaze to look at the three.

“Let’s go to the private room.”

Yuran, who acts like a gentle wife despite being black inside.

Lin Xue, who is expressionless and quiet, but always doesn’t hide her beastly nature.

Evangeline, who has a refreshing smile on her lips, but still has much unsaid.

The time has come to ask them for the truth.

Author’s note.

Below are the main characteristics of Evangeline that appeared this time!

『Golden Rule Scales – Do not do unto others what you do not want done unto yourself.』

『■ Hero’s Martial Arts (Sword) – Gains bonuses when using any weapon. Among them, receives powerful bonuses for all actions using swords.』

『■ Heaven-bestowed Martial Talent – Gains bonuses for all acts of force and their growth. All attributes increase by 5, or 5%, whichever is greater.』

『■ Tipping the Scales – The magic power imbued in weapons changes to have an advantage over the opponent’s attributes, and has a powerful advantage against those who use holy and demonic powers.』

『■ Adding Weight – Those who receive effective damage from her attacks have either their health or magic power temporarily decreased, and this can stack up to 50%.』

『Heroic Commander – When commanding fifty or more soldiers, the commander’s own and the soldiers’ main stats greatly increase. This is proportional to the number of soldiers.』

『Stacked Strong Strike – During battle, can add an attack of +50% health and magic power to necessary attacks. Can increase up to 200%, but the limit of additional stacking is up to 10%.』

『Hero’s Mask (Half) – Heroes have many enemies, so it hides his true face.』