?

The top is really weird. He's hard to categorize.

The premise is that the players are pulled into the game, and if they die in the game, they die in real life. Like inception or Sword art online.

But I think the Duke may have remembered his past iterations where the Player (King) failed him?

Either way, the king ran away from his empire soon after he was pulled into the game world and the Duke is at the very least salty about it. Because if the King dies, the empire dies by default.

So like, we do see that the Duke likes him. And he gets jealous on occasion, but not over every little thing.

It's a lot of love hate, but the top has an emotionless face and barely talks.

they also skipped a ton of intro chapters and narrative info from the novel. which, after reading it, makes sense otherwise it'd be hard to draw... but i think ml has a good reason for being weird

good to know. Like I understood the duke's reasoning enough from the chapters here, but I still just not a fan of him because I don't know what's going on behind that blank face.