Knight Guards

"So that's decent armor now checked off the list as well. Next, I'll need to have a way to earn myself some steady income..."

At that moment, Sol suddenly heard a wail echoing through the trees of the forest.

He raised an eyebrow as he noticed some birds flying toward him from the south, scared off by the cry.

"That way? It sounds like a grown man..." He thought to himself.

"H-help! Someone help me from these bandits!"

Sol began to walk toward the screams, but he nearly tripped over the overgrown roots of the forest below him.

After stumbling a little bit, he looked down at the roots and gritted his teeth in slight irritation.

"Damn this small body!" He exclaimed, knowing full well that his small stature wasn't at fault.

At that moment, Sol noticed that the overgrown roots that were everywhere around this part of Jetai looked odd.

They had streaks of light purple flowing through them, which wasn't normal for common trees.

He squinted his eyes slightly at the look of the roots, but the wailing of the man continued.

"Please! Ahhh!" He screamed like a sissy.

Sol rolled his eyes, "Let me take a look at this annoying pest first." He said as he turned and began dashing to the area where the sound was coming from.

After running through the forest for about a minute, he came across a more open grassland.

Here, he spotted a giant peach-colored ball made of a seemingly squishy substance. It was also clad in leather armor that was clearly undersized.

"A slime?" He thought out loud, emerging from the bushes behind the ball.

"What?" The ball turned around. As it did, a round human face stared back at Sol.

"Did you just call me a slime!?" Turns out, it was just a morbidly obese guy in his early twenties.

Sol was quite bewildered by this sight, "Jeez... I didn't even see a creature as fat as him in the Origin Realm."

He peered down at the man's stubby little feet, "I guess he does have some legs... he must actually be a human then." He surmised.

"Wha--I can hear you ya' know!? I'm standing ten feet away!" The gargantuan man yelled, clearly offended.

Sol ignored the man's words. All he was thinking was, 'Is this guy a Mercenary? He's clearly dressed up as one. How the hell did he even fit into the vat of poison when he took the test?'

"That's enough of you blabbering your fat ass off!" A man riding a horse shouted from the other side of the open plot of land about 200 feet away.

As he neared with his horse, this familiar-looking man squinted his eyes and looked at Sol.

A smile appeared on his face, showing his rotten yellow teeth.

"Perfect... just who I was looking for." His eyes widened as his heart began to beat with exhilaration.

This man was the fat guard from before. Sol immediately noticed who he was, but didn't think much of it.

"I expected him to find me a bit later on..." Sol thought out loud. "But I'll just beat his ass again, so it doesn't really matter."

The human ball turned back with a shocked expression, "You've met this bandit before!? He's been terrorizing me for an entire hour, chasing me around!"

Sol wasn't concerned with anything the ball said apart from the last part.

"C-chasing you?" He stammered slightly, a rare sight for the Cursed Magus.

"How did you even run?"

The ball raised a finger into the air next to his face, "Oh... about that... I actually stumbled and fell down a hill and happened to end up here. I got knocked out in the process so I don't really know how I ended up here."

Sol scoffed slightly in disbelief, 'This guy... rolled down a hill for an hour straight? He truly is a ball...'

"Don't know how you got here? My horse couldn't even beat you in a race from you rolling like a ball down the hill. I'm surprised you're still alive." The guard exclaimed in slight anger.

"Ah... so that's how I ended up here... hehe." The ball laughed slightly.

Sol noticed another man coming out of the bushes behind the guard just then.

"The other guard?" He questioned to himself, remembering there was another guard with the fat one back at the walls of Hllscani.

"Ah... you're here, Captain Heimdall?" The fat guard turned back and inquired at that moment, answering Sol's question.

The man appearing out of the bushes rode on a brilliant white horse that had a spiraling horn attached to its forehead.

The horse exuded an ethereal aura and the man atop of the horse was almost no different.

"That's definitely not the other guard..." Sol said to himself, staring at a young man who didn't look to be a day over 23 years of age.

His complexion was a pale white, causing his skin to almost glow in the sunlight.

As he took his helmet off, his deep azure eyes revealed themselves. He was clad in shining white armor like some hero in a fantasy play.

His eyes looked cold and his face both emotionless and speckless. If one wasn't looking closely, they could have even classified him as a woman from his feminine facial structure.

"Nect, did you find the one whom you said attempted to murder you?" Heimdall spoke in an elegant tone.

"Yes... he's right there." The fact guard pointed at Sol with a malicious smirk once again donning his face.

Heimdall moved his horse closer, standing it next to Nect's.

He squinted his long eyelashed eyes.

"Surely, you aren't talking about the round young man?" He calmly spoke, poised.

"No, he's talking about me." Sol walked around the ball and showed himself.

Heimdall's expression remained indifferent, his eyes looking down at Sol coldly.

"Attempted murder?" The ball seemed to shake as he rhetorically asked this question.

He turned toward the men whom he had thought to be bandits all this time.

"Are they not..." He stopped, noticing the badges on their chest.

"A Unicorn Emblem..." His eyes expanded, "The knight guards of Hllscani!"