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Actually, it hasn't been a surprise.
Betrayed so many times before, it was just a matter of time.

The day had been long and full of battles, they just survived the fierce defense of a hydra, a giant and finally, of a Dark Knight, who killed three of their companions.
When the Dark Knight fell, it was he who took off his ring and put it on his own finger to prevent it from getting lost. All that fights and deaths just for that little thing.
"Tell again, what does that ring do?" Scarlet asked.
"Creates Dark Knights, I just don't know how, but that makes it very dangerous... and obscenely valuable." Was his answer.
And it was the truth. As adventurers, all their questing, the fighting and the lives lost, had been for the only end of getting and selling the ring. With the gold they'd buy new and better lives for themselves and their loved ones. Scarlet, for example, had planned to buy two or three ships to transport merchandises and a home for her old mother and sick sister.

They went to sleep. He, bearing the ring, had uneasy dreams full of death, but he expected that since the ring was, after all, a cursed thing. A cursed object that would make all their lives better.

The death was fast; he didn't even felt the knife cutting his neck. He and all his companions but two were slain, the two survivors being the traitors who had killed them all to take the ring.
He opened his eyes and gasped, but it was late.

In death, he felt the ring getting hot in his hand, the heat then crawled through all of his body and then warm passed to cold and he heard a voice in his head, a whisper in a dead tongue followed by unnatural laugher.
Then the traitors took the ring out of his finger and escaped leaving behind all the corpses for the carrion eaters to enjoy.

*********

So this was how the Dark Knights were made.
They had to die bearing the ring. Maybe treason, a knife, or maybe the lives of other victims were also necessary. Or possibly even the vengeance urge of the one to be given the unholy knighthood. Whatever the case, he had risen knowing he had been betrayed and murdered and also feeling his body full of an incredible and terrible power.

He saw all his death mates. Good fellows full of courage, all holding their dreams, all trusting each other, like brothers, like sisters.
His fists clinched in anger and then he felt the armor covering his body, made of a dark metal born from his hate.

Fifteen warriors were necessary to defeat an overconfident, taken by surprise, Dark Knight. The traitors where just two. Easy math.

A new Dark Knight was born, and as soon as he buried all of his dead companions, his quest begun.