While I was on the ground, holding my head down and covering my ears from the sound, the bat thing dropped down from the ceiling, flipping its body around and landing on its feet, no longer upside down. Then it started crawling towards me at a leisurely pace. At the time, I had recovered from the sound other than a ringing in my ears. Did it think that I was vulnerable and an easy kill?

I grabbed my sword when it was only a few steps away and slashed upwards. It barely had any time to react to this I managed to complete my attack without too much resistance. For a moment there, I thought I had only grazed it or even missed it. Then, its head fell from its body. I had been lucky enough to decapitate it with my random swing. Its body fell to the ground and violently thrashed about until it finally came to a standstill.

Faking weakness, or actually being weakened but recovering before the enemy expected me to was a good strategy. One I hoped to apply elsewhere if other methods didn’t work first. With the enemies like this, I might be able to reach the sixth floor before being forced to leave or doing something like a grind or fish. However, I decided on leaving this dungeon.

Who cares if I could defeat the enemies when I’d go deaf in the process? My ears were ringing and I could barely hear myself groan from a headache. So much for proving I was actually tough but just down on my luck to the other adventurers. Once again, I was leaving the dungeon only a few seconds after entering it. Or maybe by this time they would get off their asses and go into the dungeon themselves.

Once I was back outside, I found that they were basically all still there. Thankfully, I was still half deaf and couldn’t hear their gossip. Jerry was still there as well, but not the others. He walked up to me and started trying to talk to me but I couldn’t understand a word he was trying to say. After two failures in the dungeon, all I felt like was doing was finding a nice spot to sit down and drink, but he was blocking my way.

Even more annoying is that my hearing was starting to come back in bits and pieces. Sometimes I’d be able to hear what Jerry was trying to say normally but then my hearing would become sensitive and I’d overhear an odd comment from the adventurers behind me. It got to the point where I wanted to shout at all of them to be quiet. Instead, I simply walked away into the forest a bit where I’d have some privacy or would have some if not for Jerry following me. He kept talking on and on, mostly about my arm.

I didn’t care enough to pay attention as I shoved my finger into each of my ear holes and rubbed around as my hearing slowly cleared up. And when it did, I wiped my hand on Jerry’s shirt. That thankfully got him to stop talking as he looked down at his shirt baffled by what I had just down.

“Alright, now that I can actually hear and you stopped talking, let me be clear about something. I know what you did with your friends when it came to my ale. Just come clean about it already,” I said.

“Ale? What are you talking about? And what do you mean by actually hearing me?” asked Jerry.

“Some sort of monster using sound attacks. I was recovering from it still, that’s why I came here to be alone. Didn’t work out too well. As for the ale, it’s the ale I recovered from the dungeon. Your friends and Tom were the only ones who knew about it and I came back from the dungeon with my arm chopped off and half my ale drunk in the room I rented. Three mugs were lying on the ground outside my room and you guys saw exactly when I left the bar. Who else am I supposed to suspect other than you guys?” I asked.

“I’m serious. I have no idea what you’re talking about. While I knew you were pissed off about something, I thought it was due to losing your arm and pushing the blame onto us for not giving you enough advice. Even now, I was going to talk to you about letting you retire without paying us back the rest we owed you so you wouldn’t have to enter the dungeon in your current state,” he said back to me. If not for the fact that my arm was coming back, I’d appreciate the sentiment of him cutting his losses on the debt for me.

However, I still felt like he was lying or twisting the truth. After all, stealing from a one-handed man was far worse than stealing from an able man and he didn't want to get that kind of rep. So, he was still claiming ignorance. Then again, I had an idea that would make him tell all no matter how much he wished the bury this incident.

“I know that you wish to join a knight order. What if I told you that the goddess I follow wants a knight order to be formed from scratch? Not just that, but I possess more than one of her divine items so the groundwork for at least one more member of the knight order is there,” I said.

This was something he couldn’t refuse since it was his dream to form or join a knight order, which is why he operated in a group. I didn’t actually want to make him a member with the time he tried to rob me and how he betrayed me, but I wanted to hear him admit it and then crush his dream right in front of his face. Besides, I needed to hold onto this necklace and shield until my arm rehealed. It wasn’t something I could give away.

“What sort of effects does your goddess grant?” asked Jerry while looking off deeper into the woods. He didn’t want to face me as it’d show on his face how he lied before. This was basically admitting the crime and he wanted to make sure the payoff for coming out was worth it. That was everything I needed but I decided to play along to see how far things could go.

“Endurance and healing. The necklace is double healing while the shield is one of both blessings,” I said while showing off the necklace and shield so he could confirm that they were both divine items with the same symbol, the same divine.

“Those aren’t too useful for adventurers or knights. It’s more of something for common people as it can’t help you kill stronger monsters. I would rather have something like being able to shoot lightning out of my hand or increasing my strength,” said Jerry.

“Trust me, the hand lightning doesn’t work out too well. Then again, healing won’t help much either when you’re being attacked by a hundred enemies at once,” I said while thinking of the young man that died during the convergence dungeon.

“What?” asked Jerry, having no idea what I was talking about.

“Nevermind. Just think about it this way, as someone who’s been using these buffs I’ve been able to avoid having hangovers, think clearly while drunk, and even heal from some pretty nasty wounds. Everything from bruises to cuts to back pain washes away within hours,” I said.

“With all that healing power, you still can’t bring back your arm. They’re purely support effects that can help keep you going in the dungeon with less downtime, but become useless as you get more used to the dungeon and have more of an issue with having enough power to kill dangerous monsters and survive encounters with elemental enemies,” said Jerry. Elemental enemies? Probably those beasts I fought for this sword and the dagger. Turns out they knew about them after all.

“Now that’s the best part, Jerry. I just got this necklace now after a particularly dangerous dungeon dive and with its power stacked with my shield, I’m regrowing my damn arm right now. Which means if you join up you’ll have to wait until it finishes healing my arm back. In exchange I’d let you borrow the shield if you lose a limb later on,” I said while waving my stub in his face and pointing at how the skin was getting reddish at the end of it.

Not sure why it was doing that, but I’m thinking it was part of the healing process. Before I had imagined stuff like the bone healing first and having a skeleton hand then the muscles and skin and stuff growing over it. However, it seemed to be rebuilding stuff from the inside and stretching out the skin on the outside. Would the skin grow more as well or break as my bones regrow and need more space? Heck, giving it a little cut on the stub might help with the healing process, but my spearhead still had traces of monster blood on it and my other weapons were magic enchanted and would hurt me.

“If what you’re saying is true, then I do see it becoming useful as insurance if I get hurt badly in the dungeon and the endurance might help in day to day life. Alright, I admit it. Chris, Matt, and the new guy, Stephen went off and drank from your ale. They brought it up with me how you were holding out on some ale you brought from the dungeon and felt like we deserved it with how we loaned you weapons and gave you advice. I refused to take part myself and tried convincing them that you’d probably share it later just like you did with the liquor. At the same time, I’m just as guilty as I didn’t stop them as they went off nor did I tell you about it,” said Jerry telling me everything about their theft.

He still insisted that he had no part in it yet admitted guilt. Even if he was still lying it was close enough that he came out about it. As for making him join my knight order, I had until my arm healed to make a decision on that. For sure, with his knowledge of the dungeon, he’d be useful. There were some issues with trust but he’d be locked into only being able to be a part of my goddess’s knight order if he joined, which guaranteed loyalty.

Maybe Jerry joining the knight order wasn’t such a bad thing. It seems like every day I change my mind about him. I definitely needed more people to help me and those people already having skills in the dungeon was preferable. However, was it really the best idea to hire Jerry? Literally, this situation was a life or death situation for me. Mistakes were not something I could afford too many of and it seemed like trusting him in the first place was already one mistake.

“Right, so until your arm reheals I can be an honorary member of your knight order, sir. We’ll, of course, have Chris, Matt, and Stephen join as well. We’ll have to work hard to get divine armaments for them so they can be official members. As for the incident with your ale, I’ll talk to them about it,” said Jerry. He called me “sir.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Jerry walked with me as we went back to the dungeon entrance and waited for each of their members to pop out. None of them had found good grind or fish targets so we didn’t have to wait long. Maybe ten minutes it was rather than the hour or so it would have taken if one of them found a good target. Each of them looked at me with a strange expression. Not sure if they were weirded out by my missing arm, imagining something similar possibly happening to them one day, or if they knew the gig was up and I knew they were the ones who drank my ale.

Nonetheless, they all gathered up under Jerry’s instruction and we walked back towards the outskirts of town. We weren’t heading back to the bar as it would be packed even now and was no place for a good long conversation. At least, not one about something as serious as this. I would take a long talk over alcohol any other day. Not that the day was up yet.

The place we ended up at was what I could only describe as a barn. It was a large one-room building with a large door which felt like it was designed with livestock rather than people in mind. We entered the building and it even looked like a stable with a variety of side rooms with only a door and walls up to my stomach separating it from the rest of the place. In the back, there was a long wooden table with a bunch of chairs. The table was covered in various items from ores to weapons messily piled up.

“What did I say about leaving the place like this guys? We’re just asking to be robbed like this, go put it away,” said Jerry as the others rushed over to dump the ores into a nearby chest and the weapons were placed on holders on the wall. His words hit close to home with what happened to me. Was I really asking to be robbed when I simply left the curtains open and the keg on the table despite it being the second floor?

“So what’s going on Jerry? Why’d you drag us away from the dungeon so abruptly? Does it have anything to do with one arm over there?” asked Stephen, the new guy. I disliked him already and started to believe he might’ve been the one swiping my ale instead of Jerry.

“He’s one of us, before unofficially and now officially. We’re now one group and need to establish a few things. From now on, call me the Vice-captain or sir rather than Jerry. We’re going to establish a knight order from scratch by the order of a divine that wishes to have a knight order to its name and we even have two divine items belonging to that divine,” said Jerry, or should I call him the vice-captain now? He was really getting into this knight order thing.

“Uhh Jerry, I mean vice-captain, are you being serious right now? Are we really making a knight order ourselves? I mean I know we said we’d join one together if we had the capabilities, but making one from scratch ourselves sounds absolutely crazy,” said Matt, understandably a bit overwhelmed at this announcement.

“If you’re the vice-captain, who’s the captain of the knight order?” asked Chris. He probably wouldn’t like the answer to that question.

“More importantly, what effects does this divine grant upon their items? If it’s something bad, I’ll continue working with you guys, but I’m not going to join the knight order fully and commit to that,” said Stephen. Not very loyal to the group but very practical it seemed.

“Simple. The one who owns the divine items and got the quest from the goddess is the captain here. I’m totally serious about this matter as it’s something we can actually do. As for the effects from this divine, it’s healing and endurance. Which sounds a bit disappoint at first but get this, the captain’s arm is regrowing currently. Once it regrows, I’ll get one of the divine items and we’ll all work towards improving our headquarters here and getting more items blessed by this divine. With this divine, we won’t have to worry about injuries and can focus more on fighting aggressively,” said Jerry.

The three of them looked at each other, gauging reactions and overall being unsure about the whole thing. After all, this was a major decision, yet not one they had to commit to yet as we only had two items. But once that second item was passed to Jerry, their friend they would rather stick with, it’d be like them committing to it as well unless they decided to abandon their friend in favor of keeping their options open or going to greener fields elsewhere.

“This feels like some sort of joke suddenly making him the boss of all this. It’s cool that his arm will come back but I doubt I’d warm up to this whole healing and endurance thing until I get my own arm lobbed off. And I have no intention of letting that happen,” said Stephan, as if I had a choice in my arm being lobbed off.

“Whatever you say Vice Captain, I’ll stick by your decision,” said Chris.

“I guess we can work with this. After all, we don’t have to decide on this until his arm regrows. And those effects aren’t really the ones I want but they would be awfully convenient. I have my doubts but I’ll stay with you guys for now,” said Matt.

“As I said before, I dislike this but I’m staying as it still benefits me. Maybe this whole knight thing will work out but even if it does I doubt I’d stay unless as an honorary member. So yeah, I’ll play along as we pretend to be knights,” said Stephen.

“Now that everyone is in agreement, I now declare us to be the knight order of,” Jerry started to say before looking at me. Oh right, I had never told him about the goddess’s name.

“The Knight Order of the Goddess Sanae Patil,” I said, revealing the divine’s name and making this a formal, or closest thing to a formal, formation of the knight order. I had no doubt that this was nowhere near enough to heal my liver but was good progress towards that goal.