A Knight Who Eternally Regresses

Rem tucked his axes at his waist and raised both hands.

‘Invocation, Bodreme.’

Rem did not dodge. Watching the dragon’s foot fall, he spread both hands, received it, and pushed.

If the Sky-Dropper possessed the strength to bring down a flying divine general from the sky,

and Sapsali the power to bite apart the impure,

then Bodreme is the divine general who gently pushes mountains.

He inherited the bloodline of the bear, yet lived his whole life like a flowing river.

A thunderous crash burst out, yet Rem neither coughed blood nor was flattened. Just like that, he pushed the foot aside, and the dragon’s gray foot struck the ground right beside him—barely a palm’s width away.

‘Even a flowing river is fearsome when angered.’

Rem drove his left fingers straight into the dragon’s scales.

Thok.

The scales were about as hard as a mass of rock. No—if anything they were harder, certainly not softer.

Just like that, he took an axe in his right hand. Bodreme’s invocation dwelled in his body, and into the axe—his descending weapon—another divine general descended.

‘Angry bird, angry bird.’

The second divine general.

Rem spared neither strength nor technique. If he judged it was time to use it, then he used it—what was the point of hoarding it?

It was the result of recalling, refining, and training what he had awakened thanks to Enkrid.

Invocation in the body, descent in the weapon—two divine generals residing at once. A workaround he had devised after much thought.

Rem split the form of his sorcery power into two and apportioned it. He couldn’t make both dwell in his body simultaneously, but this way he could use two divine generals.

It felt like dividing food equally while raising quintuplets.

‘Idle thoughts.’

He cut off the stray thought and focused. If Bodreme gave the softness to push away the dragon’s leg and monstrous grip to his fingers, the angry bird was always filled with rage, forever sprinting at top speed.

Even if its feathers were ground by the wind into blades, until the moment of death it wished its body to be faster than anything.

The two sorceries tangled, squeezing his insides. It was hard to expect long duration. Enduring the load on his body, Rem swung the axe.

The axe edge, with the angry bird descended into it, split the dragon’s ankle. It was an axe swung in a world without sound. The noise followed late, buried beneath the sound the dragon made striking the ground.

A sound barely audible only to Rem. Pik.

Then the dragon’s ankle was cleanly severed. The angry bird dwelling on the axe blade neatly cut the ankle and vanished.

‘Release the angry bird.’

Release Bodreme as well, and withdraw the body. What Enkrid wanted was to draw the dragon’s gaze from the front.

This was enough. Fortunate, you could say.

Because he had come with the other two, a breathing space opened. If he’d been alone, he would have had to overextend—stamp onto the instep, climb up, and aim for the dragon’s head.

If there was enough room to breathe, he could bleed off the remaining strain from using two divine generals.

‘Pull back and recover.’

Rem stepped back and caught his breath. He was just finishing the moment of severing the ankle with his axe and disengaging. The two who had split left and right also began their moves.

***

Enkrid ignored the child in white fluttering clothes who vanished between gray trees and rock shaped like entrails.

‘Fake.’

The Demon-lands Silence differed from the south.

‘Hallucinations keep forming?’

If the southern Demon-lands taxed everyone who entered with dulled senses and suppressive pressure, this side instead issued sudden phantasms as invitations when your senses grew sharper.

Visual hallucination, auditory hallucination, phantom smell, phantom taste.

You see what you never expected; you hear sounds different from reality. If you meant to endure in the Demon-lands Silence, this was the tax you paid.

‘Here.’

How many times had he heard cries like that already?

Among them were several voices desperately calling for him.

A bleeding child appeared, then a shadow glimpsed fleeing urgently between the trees.

All hallucinations and auditory illusions. Then the smell of fresh blood began, and sweetness coated his tongue.

‘Like chewing a whole clump of hallucinogenic mushrooms.’

Enkrid calmly sorted everything. Accelerating thought, he separated real from fake.

At the same time, he did what needed doing. He raised his gaze and sensed the individual radiating killing intent—the one whose single kick shook the ground.

Does it breathe fire? It wouldn’t. His five senses were sharpened to extremes, endless hallucinations probing his mind, yet the Will ceaselessly whirling inside him honed the blade of instinct.

That instinct told him the dragon-like monster above would fight using only its body.

‘False certainty?’

No. Distinguishing real from fake wasn’t hard. A sea felt within the realm of sixth sense.

‘It doesn’t breathe fire.’

Fighting style, attack form, the smell it gave off—these were the basis of his judgment.

“Dare!”

The dragon babbled what was, exaggerating a little, the same word for the forty-sixth time. Pressure similar to when Temares used word-command crushed his shoulders.

‘No. Worse than Temares.’

That was Enkrid’s judgment. Easier to shake off than the first time he’d experienced a dragonkin’s word-command. Will of refusal activated on its own, raising an intangible barrier.

The dragon’s words held no meaning for Enkrid.

He had already watched Rem receive the foot from the front and sever the ankle.

Enkrid drew Night Walk.

‘Sharp and keen.’

That nature was the reason this sword existed. Aitri had forged something close to a demon blade.

‘Aitri, I’ll use your gift well.’

He recited inwardly and kicked off the ground. As his body advanced, he entered the soundless world of pressure.

At the same moment, from the side he felt a heavy pressure shoving the air. A gray mass identical to the rock that had struck Rem flew in.

‘Two feet swung.’

The dragon had swung both feet at once. Enkrid couldn’t see it, but the dragon’s two eyes had split left and right.

One watched Rem; one watched Enkrid. In this moment it keenly sensed the two presences most threatening to it.

So with one foot it struck Rem, and with the other it swung softly from behind. With a body the size of a decent fortress, if it turned one foot sideways and swung, it became a mace flying from a blind angle the enemy couldn’t see.

The dragon exploited that. Thus it swung one forefoot aiming at Enkrid’s left.

Enkrid could not know all that process. Only that one technique surfaced in his mind.

‘Roundhouse?’

It called to mind Audin’s kick that twists the hips and targets the blind spot.

If the opponent hadn’t been in a dragon form but a two-legged being, it was something it might do.

‘It learned striking?’

A creature that knows how to fight?

Thoughts followed in succession. Striking Rem head-on while, from the side, exploiting his senses thrown into disarray by hallucinations to swing a foot smoothly on the wind toward him.

Admiration rose naturally. Enkrid turned his body sideways. Leaving intact the intent to go up and aim for the neck, he rotated half a turn and brought the sword down.

He mixed Will into the rotational force. Every motion was as natural and obvious as breathing.

‘Vortex.’

From the five properties of straightness, heaviness, and swiftness, he took heaviness and added rotation. Pivoting on his left foot, he generated a vortex and drove the sword down. Here, together with Point Explosion, he shifted the center of mass of his whole body.

‘Mix in drop.’

Drop was anti-giant swordsmanship learned in a previous dream from the blond man presumed to be the Ferryman. The core was loading weight equal to motion.

A movement you could call a stunt; a slash someone might call a divine technique.

Enkrid executed that divine—or stunt—slash in place. The sword he swung met the dragon’s foot.

Bang!

Air compressed and burst. The foot caught by the slash split as well. Standing between the riven dragon flesh, Enkrid leapt upward the instant he finished the cut.

The target was the neck. The will based on vivid killing intent remained unchanged.

‘Kill it. Sever the neck.’

Oppression took blade-like form and seized all of the dragon’s gaze. At that same instant, Rem too, after severing the foot and catching his breath, gripped his slings.

Wiiiiiiiiing!

The whirling sound of the slings was loud—enough to bury almost any other noise.

The dragon, having lost both feet, screamed. No—its jaws opened as if to scream, but no sound came.

There was no sound, yet the sight alone made one’s own ankles throb. Of course, Enkrid and Rem were unmoved.

As the dragon reacted to the clear killing intent pouring from Enkrid and Rem and glared, a white shadow sprang up behind it. The owner of the shadow was the beastwoman who had killed her presence and flown up the dragon’s back.

Her name was Dunbakel. Her scimitar struck the dragon’s head vertically.

Tong! Krududduk!

The blade broke and split scales, driving in with a loud sound. As it drew straight down toward the neck, that sound too was unusually loud.

Dunbakel pulled the blade free at the middle of the dragon’s neck. Its blood splattered as black slime. She ran down the dragon’s back with sharp footfalls, then spun once in midair and landed.

Standing, she wiped her cheek. The black slime smeared on her face spread, darkening her cheek.

Thud, wajijik, kwadduk.

Then the dragon’s body toppled sideways, crushing a dozen gray trees.

While Rem received the force from the front and Enkrid drew the gaze, Dunbakel finished it.

They hadn’t spelled it out, but it was movement planned from the start.

“Worth teaching you all this time, stink-breath.”

Rem said.

“Who taught who?”

“I taught you.”

From where the dragon had fallen, the two traded trivial words. Enkrid tried to examine the dragon’s scales and form, but its body, as if its work were done, began from the eyes and melted black, the whole mass dissolving into the ground and vanishing.

“The stench of rot is thick.”

Dunbakel said. She and Rem confirmed the vanished mass.

“Not a hallucination.”

Enkrid said. If Enkrid distinguished hallucination, Rem did too. Rem swung the axe in his hand like a pendulum as he spoke, then cast his gaze deeper into the Demon-lands.

The fog thickened. The soggy ground raised no dust even as a fortress-sized mass collapsed and trees fell.

As if someone had poured water over rotten soil, the ground was viscous and the air damp.

‘Like having half your body sunk in a lake.’

Only, what filled this lake was not water but fog packed with malice. The threat was like a blade carrying dread, and danger signals felt here and there rang alarm bells in the mind.

In such a situation, Enkrid spoke.

“How did you do that earlier?”

He asked Rem, eyes flicking toward him.

Pushing away the dragon’s foot and severing it. A simple motion, yet not simple. The sorcery contained within was not.

Soft yet strong, strong yet soft. A considerable technique.

“You saw that too?”

Rem’s lips twisted upward. Asking this in the middle of this was certainly not normal, but for the Mad Order of Knights it was ordinary.

“You were doing something interesting.”

Enkrid’s demeanor looked calm, but his eyes shone. It wasn’t hard to read his thoughts from that alone. He was excited.

Rem had fought containing two properties at once. How could that not spark interest?

“After we finish things here, let’s try it. There’s something even more interesting.”

Rem answered with a snicker.

Even if it wasn’t the real thing, they had killed a dragon. And not even ten steps after killing it, monsters surged in from all sides.

“Quite a lot.”

Dunbakel muttered. Enkrid saw masses pushing their heads through the fog.

One of the same type as the dragon they’d just fought, two cyclops monsters—smaller than that but three times Dunbakel’s size—three ogres of similar bulk, five trolls behind them, eight manticores, thirteen minotaurs, twenty-one owlbears, thirty-four lycanthropes, fifty-five scalers.

All large. It was as if they had stepped into the middle of land where giant monsters roamed.

For Enkrid, Rem, and Dunbakel, counting numbers was nothing. As if by habit they classified the monsters, and from the ground behind them black masses writhed up further.

“This time ghouls?”

Rem muttered. The number neared ninety. The writhing black masses increased, and behind them rose a number easily over a hundred. This time, bloated-bellied lizard beasts.

More precisely, beasts similar in form to dragons.

“Dare!”

All the monsters gathered strength and shouted. A high ring vibrated the air as the fog clumped and pressed on the three’s shoulders.

Enkrid quietly raised his head within the fog.

If they fought like this, it would be annihilation. However much they were knights, they could not live forever cutting down endlessly increasing monsters.

So would they stop here? If death approached and there was no path to avoid it, and you stopped hands and feet, it ended there.

Enkrid didn’t know how to live that way.

“Hold.”

He said, and leveled his sword forward. Night Walk pushed away the surrounding fog. Blue vapor flowed from Enkrid’s mouth.

It was the influence of the Will swirling inside his body. Rem too, at the same time, took on gray and aimed into Silence.

“Let’s do it.”

Dunbakel wanted desperately to run from here, but endured.

“You’ll manage somehow, right?”

The two who had been beyond the fog bridge were now beside him. With that, he had thought the first hurdle was cleared.

“If we kill them all, that’ll do.”

Enkrid answered and fought. For two days straight, he met the endlessly surging monsters. He forgot time, forgot circumstance.

What remained in the world was only sword and me, me and sword. Then again enemy and me, me and enemy remained.

With what remained, he fought until death. When he killed, monsters were born again behind.

If you scoop out the sea, can you make it dry?

You cannot.

It was what Silence was saying.