A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 409

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 409: Inside the Black Wave

= = =

People usually said one knight could stand in for a thousand soldiers.

Then what did you do if the enemy numbered ten thousand?

The count decided to treat his opponent as a knight and kill him. That was why he made the Ten Thousand Specters.

“Die.”

Become fertilizer.

Become nourishment.

Become feed.

Become part of me.

The count’s magic circle had one effect. It manifested his spell world in reality.

That gave the specters physical substance, turning them into Specter Soldiers.

A wave advanced, made of bodies shaped from black soot.

Even when knocked down, the specters that had become a black wave rose again, got shoved aside, and kept pressing forward.

Gwoooaar.

They were writhing lumps that let out horrific shrieks between charges.

There was no formation at all. They just clumped together at random and ran.

That was why they could not be fast.

This was not an orderly army advance, it was like a chaotic mass rolling in.

Watching it, Enkrid thought it looked like an ant swarm.

Of course, each one of those ants was human-sized, so anyone swallowed up in it would die.

Would only he die?

The soldier behind him, scratching his forearm raw, would die too.

“Mother! Mother! Where are you going!”

The soldier shouting at empty air, seeing things, would die too.

“Magenda, I will go to your side too.”

The soldier miming strangling his own neck in sudden despair would die too.

It was a complete disaster. Whatever dirty trick Count Molsen used, magic or sorcery, it was landing.

Not all of them had snapped. Some soldiers were still fine.

“Hey. Where are you going, you idiot? Magenda is my sister. She never did anything with you, and she’s alive and well.”

One sane soldier smacked the back of the strangling soldier’s hand and said it.

“What is this? What is this supposed to be?”

One soldier looked around in disbelief as he spoke. Panic showed in his posture.

He was likely wondering why everyone else was like that when he was fine.

Enkrid did not know the exact nature of the spell the count had used, but he understood the rough flow of the situation.

The spell might have covered the entire battlefield, yet once someone left a certain area, they would probably escape the soot’s influence.

The longer they held out here, the more they would be affected.

With influence and scale like this, would it disappear if they cut down the one controlling it?

It was an instinctive realization.

If they did not break through this and kill the controller, no other solution came to mind.

So they had to move forward.

Rem saw the specter horde and told them to form up after hearing Enkrid’s order.

“I refuse.”

Ragna answered first. He even stumbled for a moment as he said it.

Ragna’s condition was not normal either. Overusing Will naturally put strain on mind and body.

“Brother-nim, has something inauspicious entered your head? Shall I pull it out?”

Audin showed concern.

It seemed to him that Rem had fallen for the mage’s trick up ahead, so he offered kindness personally.

Audin also had plenty of wounds from setting his finger bones back in place.

His opponent had been no easy target.

Would Jaxon be fine either?

He had paid the price for failing to assassinate the count earlier.

There was a small hole in his abdomen. He had hurriedly applied medicine and sealed the wound with specially made bandages, but he was not in condition for a long fight.

The wound location was bad. More than that, a cold energy kept rising from his belly.

Rem was the same. He was nauseous from the price of borrowing another person’s sorcery.

Enkrid was the worst among them.

He had no blowback from Will, but he had pushed his body itself far too hard.

That result was only natural.

Rierbart had grafted on Demon Creature muscle to force himself into becoming a knight.

To endure that, Enkrid had squeezed out strength to his own limit.

Luck had been on his side too, or so Enkrid thought.

If he had failed to realize the Will-based art he named Eye That Sees One Inch Ahead, by now he would have been greeting the morning sun and repeating today all over again.

Even while they spoke, the black wave crept forward.

It looked like seawater made of black oil turning to high tide and closing in. Just looking at it made disgust surge.

Some Specter Soldiers that were part of the wave had already collapsed to the ground, yet they still scratched forward with their fingers.

Kill. I will kill. They were souls that showed only bloodlust.

Above that, there were tangled masses of specters with limbs knotted together. It was a sight beyond disgust, enough to make anyone retch.

Everyone said no, but this was not a situation where no worked.

“Let’s take the shortcut.”

So Enkrid added nothing else, and Rem continued in a calm tone.

“The captain first, me second, the slacker third. The alley cat and the religion freak fall back, follow us, and hold the rear.”

His tone was businesslike. Rem’s explanation was not kind, but Enkrid understood.

The days he had learned from him had not been wasted.

“Three-Wave Formation?”

When Enkrid asked, Rem nodded.

It was the name of a tactical formation they had been hit with once before.

The centaur colony and horse Demon Creatures had used it together.

The first wave drew attention, the second wave dealt the blow, and the third wave shattered the target.

Each wave got stronger. What Rem wanted now was to repeat the Three-Wave Formation with the three of them rotating positions.

“Let’s go.”

Enkrid did not hesitate. Even if they explained and understood it a hundred times here, they had no time to practice anyway.

More importantly, the specter horde was already right in front of them.

Guuooaar!

It sounded like a ghoul howling from the bottom of a deep well.

“Real combat is the best training.”

Enkrid recalled Rem’s old words and brought Silver down. Pivoting on his left foot, it was a Heavy Sword Style top-down split.

Whoosh.

The blade claimed the space and dropped.

“Relax your strength!”

Rem shouted from behind, but Enkrid had already swung.

Thud! The first charging specter took the blade in its head and split in half.

It had limbs, but no eyes, nose, or mouth, just a black mass-monster.

When Enkrid’s sword cut through its head, black mist burst out from inside.

It was dead. He felt it.

Then a specter behind it pounced again. They did not stop. Why would they care whether the one in front died or not?

“Left!”

Rem shouted. In front of Enkrid, one specter was shaping something like a sword and swinging it.

It was not an angle he could dodge just by slipping sideways.

Even so, he moved sideways. No one could do that without serious trust, but Enkrid stepped boldly.

The next instant, a mass like a ray dropped from his right.

Boom! Crunch!

It was the sound of Rem’s hammer crushing the specter’s skull.

Right after, Rem drew the axe in his right hand at a steady speed, horizontal to the ground.

Brrrrk! Rumble.

He did not put force into one hard chop, he pushed and dragged it through. Every specter caught on the blade split apart.

A single glance was enough to know this was no ordinary skill.

Using balance and arm strength, he distributed weight through his core, then even used the force of his feet driving off the ground.

That was how the axe blade kept advancing without stopping.

After two attacks like that, Rem also moved right.

A different wave of Specter Soldiers filled the space he left.

Geeeeaar!

Over that shriek soaked in bloodlust, a chipped blade dropped.

Naturally, it was Ragna’s sword.

Whoosh.

The blade split space vertically and cut through three specters knotted into one mass.

One of them reached out and struggled to grab Ragna’s collar. Its hand never touched him, and Ragna withdrew after swinging.

“Again!”

Before Rem even shouted, Enkrid had already recognized and grasped the flow.

How many times had they sparred together by now?

Well over several hundred.

So he stepped in and filled the empty space to block the front.

When Rem said to relax his strength, he meant receive and redirect only.

In other words, withdrawing was more important than striking.

Because he saw the core of it, Enkrid moved that way. He loosened his sword grip, took a Soft and Flowing Sword form, then cut, knocked aside, and shoved away specter heads.

One specter jumped upward, but a long pole flew in from somewhere.

Whoong, thud!

The flying pole pierced the specter, then hurled it far back.

It looked like someone had thrown a javelin. It was literally a spear picked up from the ground and thrown.

“Advance, Brother-nim.”

It was Audin’s skill.

From left-rear, Jaxon’s hand moved nonstop.

With one longsword in hand, he stabbed and cut the specters closing in from every direction one by one.

The roles were clear.

Enkrid and Rem held the front, and Ragna in the center cut them down.

Audin was the foundation supporting all of that. Jaxon moved into any opening and filled it.

With Audin and Jaxon securing the rear, the three only needed to drive into the front.

The specter horde encircled Enkrid and his group and crashed in.

The world turned black. The sky vanished, only darkness remained, but their sharpened senses still let them pinpoint each other’s positions.

Enkrid relied on those senses.

The other four did the same. At this level, they would not cut an ally’s back.

Unless they did it on purpose.

A specter’s claws dropped. It even stuck out a long tongue between those overgrown nails. The tongue tip was spear-sharp. It was an unusual type of specter.

Rem’s axe cut it apart.

The axe blade flew diagonally and split its head at a slant.

Seeing the severed head, Enkrid drew Gladius and struck away another specter’s hand.

Thud!

It felt like hitting heavy mud, not iron.

The hand caught by Gladius was gouged out in a chunk.

No need for a follow-up. As he turned sideways, Ragna’s sword moved.

Enkrid stopped overthinking.

He simply moved forward.

The five became one and tore through the specter wave.

Among them, Rem and Audin were the most exhausted.

One served as the foundation, and the other maintained balance in the middle.

The five had fought like mad for a long time because they did not get along. They had also physically fought each other more than a few times.

Those clashes became sparring and real fights, but that much conflict made it easier to learn each other’s habits.

If you did not read each other’s rhythm, you lost, so had they not all done their best for exactly that?

For the five of them, moving in sync came naturally.

It was their first time, yet they looked no different from a knightly order that had trained together for over a decade.

* * *

Crang saw it, and Marcus saw it.

Pel and Eisia were also seized by a bad premonition.

Anyone would feel ominous seeing black specters, soot, and dark clouds covering the sky.

Even more so after seeing that specter wave swallow Enkrid and his group.

Enkrid and the Lunatic Company would die.

On the surface, that was exactly how it looked.

“It is a spell. It will not last long!”

Eisia shouted, forcing calm into her voice. She was also saying it to herself.

She was a junior knight of the knight order.

She did not use spells herself, but she had faced mages many times.

She deliberately steadied her mind and kept thinking.

How long could a large-scale spell like this be sustained?

Not for long.

That was true. Still, if it lasted only as long as one candle burned, both armies would take near-annihilating damage, and soldiers possessed by specters would likely become something no longer human.

Eisia could not know that far.

“We need to break a path and get out.”

She said it.

Even then, Crang was staring at the spot where Enkrid had disappeared.

Was he really dead?

“Damn it, Your Highness!”

Marcus shouted. The battlefield had gone insane.

The count had clearly been possessed by something. Even for a mage, was this really possible?

Should they have called the knight order?

Pel tightened his grip on Idolslayer.

“Should I go in?”

That thought came while he looked into the specter wave. It even seemed possible.

No. For now, enduring was the answer.

The specter horde still had plenty left after swallowing Enkrid’s group.

Pel had already cut one or two. The charging specters were immune to Idolslayer. That meant the answer was to cut and repel them one by one.

Eisia also pulled the squires under her command into a tight circle. Then she stepped forward herself.

She slashed left, spun once, then thrust right. Two sword strikes killed two specters.

Before she had time to look at the one spewing mist, Eisia flipped backward through the air.

It was not a stunt one expected in plate armor, but she wore partial armor centered on a cuirass, so she could perform a near-acrobatic flip.

After that dodge.

Boom!

A specter leaped up and crashed down where Eisia had been.

Without even time to catch her breath, Eisia drove her elbow to the side at a Specter Soldier that had already closed in.

Smack!

It felt like striking stone. Even the specter’s body was not soft.

Then she used that force and stabbed her sword down in the opposite direction. A power-loaded vertical cut split another specter.

Eisia felt dizzy.

“How long can I keep this up?”

If this was a battle of time, was enduring really the answer?

If they could somehow hold around Crang.

The regular soldiers could not.

“Help me!”

“Aaaagh!”

Specter Soldiers with physical substance rushed sane soldiers.

In terms of raw skill, they were not that impressive, but the problem was numbers.

They never stopped. They kept charging. Specter Soldiers did not know fear.

Crisis breeds opportunity.

Across the battlefield, people worthy of being called heroes appeared.

They were the ones showing their ability in disaster.

An old but experienced commander did it.

A young but brave soldier did it too.

They gathered nearby comrades and endured.

But for how long did they need to endure?

How long did they need to endure to survive?

A curtain of despair descended. The dark clouds blocking the sunlight seemed to speak of their tomorrow.

They would be seized by specters and die, or torn and stabbed to death by Specter Soldiers.

* * *

In the darkness, Enkrid forgot himself, forgot the situation, and kept swinging his sword again and again.

“This is hard.”

It was grueling enough for those words to come out on their own.

Still, it was not unbearable. As he kept going, he picked up tricks. Instead of batting them away with force, he saved strength and twisted attacks off-line.

What he lacked, Rem covered.

If that was still not enough, Ragna filled it.

They sometimes got pushed back two or three steps while fighting, but in the final count they advanced.

If they stepped back two, they walked three forward.

If they stepped back three, they walked four forward.

Rem’s mid-fight formation control was the biggest contribution.

Enkrid did not dodge the falling specter hand, he received it on the flat of his blade and let it slide away.

He redirected and cut. Specters by nature were not things ordinary metal could cut, but gaining physical substance gave them a weakness too.

Even normal swords could kill them now.

Enkrid repeated stabs and cuts, endured and endured again.

Around him there was only pitch-black something.

Black soot, a wave of Specter Soldiers, plain darkness, black masses filling all directions, hands full of killing intent.