Falsely Accused, I Started Plundering Monster Traits

Lin Yan tossed the bent sword aside as Marcus came back with his gear.

The six strangers were still across the intersection. Five men in full plate, all of them clearly knights, with the older one standing slightly ahead of the rest. His armor was the best of the group, worn but well maintained, with a silver cross fixed over the breastplate. The other four stayed close to the pale-haired girl between them. She looked fourteen or fifteen, small beneath a dark traveling cloak and conspicuously cleaner than everyone else.

Marcus handed the rifles and chest rig back. "Boss, you looked cool as hell back there. When we get out, you have to teach me."

"That kind of thing takes talent."

"Then I’ll practice more. I should be able to learn something."

"Suit yourself."

Lin Yan put his gear back on. The knights watched the guns more closely than they watched him, and none of them had relaxed since the fighting ended.

The older knight said something.

Completely incomprehensible.

He repeated it more slowly, apparently under the impression that speed was the problem.

Lin Yan opened the traits he’d just collected from the rotters and started going through them. Most were ordinary white traits he had no reason to equip right now—endurance, balance, grip strength, several weapon aptitudes. There was even a Sword Aptitude I buried among them. Interesting, but not useful enough to give up a slot for.

A little farther down, he found what he actually needed.

[White Trait — Valerian Common]

There you are.

He equipped it, and the next sentence out of the knight’s mouth suddenly made sense.

"...identify yourselves."

"Lin Yan. Marcus."

Marcus stared at him.

The older knight started to ask something else, but Lin Yan had no interest in holding a diplomatic conference in the middle of an intersection full of corpses.

"There’s a store nearby. We can talk there."

That suggestion did not go over particularly well. The four younger knights were already positioned around the girl, and what little space had existed between them disappeared. Nobody drew a weapon, but nobody needed to.

The girl broke the silence.

"We should go."

"My lady—"

"This place isn’t safe."

The older knight clearly disliked the idea. He disliked Lin Yan even more, judging by the way his attention kept returning to the rifles. But the fog around the intersection was getting thicker, and there were still distant sounds coming from somewhere beyond it.

Eventually he agreed.

They headed back to the convenience store.

Once inside, Lin Yan gave them water and whatever packaged food was easiest to eat. The knights were suspicious of nearly everything, which was understandable considering half the things in the store probably looked more alien to them than their armor looked to Marcus.

Lin Yan handed the girl a can of soda along with the food.

She studied the can until Lin Yan realized she had no idea how to open it. He popped the tab for her and went back to talking with the older knight.

A little while later, her quiet voice came from beside him.

"My tongue hurts a little."

"Tastes bad?"

"No."

She took another sip.

That was about the extent of her contribution while the adults sorted out the basics.

The older man was a senior knight of the Church, and the other four served under him. The girl was one of the Church’s Saintesses. All six came from the Valerian Empire, a place Lin Yan had never heard of, and none of them recognized Earth, Fairmont, the Federation, or anything else he named.

He gave them the short version in return. Cars, firearms, asphalt roads and glass towers belonged to Earth. The castles, stone streets and armored corpses showing up between them did not.

The knight was willing to explain that much, but became noticeably less helpful whenever the conversation approached where they had been going or why five fully armored knights were escorting one teenage girl in secret.

Lin Yan left it alone.

Their destination wasn’t important yet.

"Before you ended up here, what happened?"

"We were still on the road. It was close to sunset when one of my men noticed something along the horizon. We took it for fog at first, but it kept spreading. Too quickly. Within minutes, whole stretches of the road and countryside had disappeared behind it."

"You tried to get away?"

"Of course. We changed direction twice. It made no difference—the thing was spreading faster than we could ride. Then we saw something moving in the sky."

"The Black Dragon," the Saintess said.

The older knight nodded. "It had been hunting us for several days. Most of our men had already gone another way to draw it off while we continued with my lady. We believed we had lost it, but shortly before the mist reached us, it appeared again."

Lin Yan caught the part that mattered. "Coming toward you?"

"Straight toward us. It was still some distance away, but closing quickly. Then the mist overtook the road. We could see almost nothing until it passed, and when it did..." The knight gestured vaguely at the store around them. "This was what remained. Your towers among our buildings. Your roads crossing ours. Pieces of both worlds thrown together."

"And the dragon?"

"It was here."

So the thing had already been racing toward them before the Convergence happened.

Lin Yan brought up the task again.

[Task 1: Destroy the Convergence Anchor.]

[Reward: 100,000 Points.]

System. Define Convergence Anchor.

[A Convergence Anchor is the native entity carrying the highest concentration of world-origin within an active convergence zone.]

World-origin?

[The weight and value of an entity within its native world.]

That description could mean almost anything, but the obvious candidate was hard to ignore. Lin Yan had already seen the Black Dragon above Fairmont—something large enough to dwarf the streets beneath it, with scales that ordinary gunfire barely scratched—and according to these people, it had been bearing down on them at the exact moment the two worlds collided.

"If the dragon finds you again, can you kill it?"

The older knight answered without hesitation.

"We run."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!