A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 611

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 611: Time for Punishment

= = =

From the Grey Holy Army's perspective, some bastards had suddenly punched straight through the middle of their formation.

On top of that, they had watched those same bastards stroll into the monastery without a care, and four holy warriors had died in the process. It was a solid hit to the face.

That hit became the signal for battle to begin.

They refused to wait quietly for divine judgment and decided to strike first?

Muel looked them over, wondering what kind of lunatics had shown up, and spotted them poking around inside the monastery.

The monastery sat in a basin you had to climb a slope to reach, so its gate stood on the high side of the incline. Looking up from below, you could see into the interior. Palisades had been erected there, with thornbushes packed in front, but none of it blocked the full line of sight.

Step forward and you could see clearly enough.

The reverse was true as well. From inside the monastery, you could see outward.

Muel fixed his gaze on the figure standing at the center of the opposing side. No helmet, black hair.

The man showed no interest in concealing himself and no intention of doing so. That alone prodded something in Muel.

Put plainly, the sight of that figure standing there like that was deeply irritating.

The distance was too great to make out his eyes, but somehow his posture read as utterly indifferent, which only added to the irritation.

Forcing a show of ease? Pathetic.

Muel registered that four holy warriors had died and that the enemy had broken through his formation, but he did not consider it a crisis for even a moment.

He acknowledged that whoever had killed those four holy warriors had real ability. He simply did not believe that changed the situation itself.

Besides, they must have spent everything they had just to kill those four.

It was the kind of delusion that comes from believing the tide has already turned in your favor.

"Finish it."

Muel declared. One word was all a fight like this required.

What power did that monastery have? Enough to hold back an army?

The opening move belonged to the divine Priests. They were primarily combat-spell users. They drew up their divine power. Gray light gathered and took shape into spells.

"The hour of punishment is upon you."

Muel tossed out one more line for show. When you were aiming to be Pope, the image you projected mattered.

That was what he believed. It was exactly the kind of thing a worldly-minded Priest would believe.

* * *

"Gray Explosion Spell!"

Four pairs of elongated wings spread from the sides of gray masses, and they were a breath away from snapping forward through the air.

The unnamed holy warrior saw the spells coming and flinched, but everyone around him was calm.

"Everyone, get clear!"

He shouted it, and again nobody reacted.

Instead, he turned to look beside him and found a stranger standing at his shoulder who had not been there a moment before.

'Wait, when did she get here?'

She had black hair and the kind of face you could never forget after seeing it once.

He was still waving both arms and yelling for people to dodge, still thrown by the beauty who had appeared out of nowhere, when she spread both hands wide. Her fingers moved through the air as though pressing keys on a keyboard. Standing upright, she played some invisible organ, and the air around her shuddered.

Then.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

The gray dragonflies, which would normally have sought out living bodies before detonating, all exploded against the top of the courtyard wall instead. Watching that, the woman spoke. No trace of a smile on her face or in her voice.

"Crude."

Esther had shifted to human form, opened her World of Spells, and awakened the eye that perceived spiritual energy, fixing her gaze directly on the enemy's spells.

The intuition granted to the naturally gifted told her exactly what the opposing side had done.

'They blended sorcery and divine spells.'

What they called divine power, more precisely, a divine spell of the Gray God poured through with corrupted divinity, was dismantled in an instant.

Intuition produced the answer, and knowing the answer produced the solution.

She fed vitality into a formless force-spell and detonated the explosion spell back on itself. Simple enough.

Then gray masses the enemy soldiers called Light Bullets came flying from where their troops were massed.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

If it had been someone else's problem to deal with, it would have been quite a spectacle. Each gray mass cutting through the air was larger than a human head.

"Hmph."

Dmyuler's Wind Cliff.

Esther murmured. A borrowed spell. A fistful of magical power condensed inside her World of Spells poured out, following her gesture, and a wind barrier rose and blocked their front.

Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud!

The unnamed holy warrior heard what sounded like iron balls hammering a wall somewhere ahead of him.

It was the noise of the invisible barrier clashing against the Light Bullets.

With that sound, every last Light Bullet was crushed, detonated, and scattered.

After that, the ones calling themselves Priests of the Gray God began chanting spells in earnest.

"O Lord, strike down your enemy with lightning!"

"Become a hammer and smash them to pieces!"

"Burn and sear, let them know the weight of their sins!"

Gray lightning transformed and came screaming in.

A gray hammer-shaped sacred light as large as an average human body came flying as well.

The holy warrior judged that spells at this level were not the work of low-ranking Priests but of Priests who had made some kind of name for themselves somewhere.

Mixed in among them, a roiling round gray mass trailing flame came in too, and his assessment was the same.

It was clearly dangerous, so he shouted again.

"Get out of the way..."

He never finished.

From the outside it might have looked threatening, but to Esther's eyes the spells were riddled with openings.

Before the unnamed holy warrior could finish speaking, Esther recited, manifested, and voiced her incantation.

"Dmyuler's Scythe. Del Grecher's sneeze. Bonehead, go wild."

Several divine spells were incoming, but three answered them. The magical power condensed inside her World of Spells poured out, and the wind coiled into scythe shapes that slashed through the lightning.

Crack! Boom!

Spell met spell, a whirlwind erupted between them, and they canceled each other out. The lightning discharged harmlessly into the air and scattered, leaving behind only something that sounded faintly like a bird's chirp.

Next, a small blizzard erupted in the air. A mass of cold gathered from it, snuffed out the incoming flame, then seized the hammer and broke it apart.

That was not the end either.

Bonehead, the flesh-doll who had been summoned while no one was watching, was out in front of the Grey Holy Knight Order, both arms swinging.

Thwack! Thud! Clang!

He carried no particular weapon, but Esther had spent a long time watching Enkrid train and drill and spar.

Martial knowledge had accumulated.

And if knowledge accumulated, putting it to use was the duty of a mage and a witch, was it not.

She had done exactly that, and so Bonehead moved in ways that bore no comparison to before.

Ordinarily, a Flesh Golem was most commonly used by enlarging it and planting it as a meat shield. That was standard.

But the Bonehead Esther had summoned now served an entirely different purpose.

He snatched a spear from a soldier and fought with it, pulling it back while kicking out, driving his foot into a soldier's gut, then sweeping the spear sideways and cracking the shaft across another soldier's shield.

The force and speed of his strikes were solid, and his technique was not bad either.

On top of that, he felt no pain and would not die from most things, which made him a serious problem for anyone trying to engage him.

And there was more.

"Return the dead to the dead!"

Even Turn Undead, the divine-exclusive spell, did nothing.

Ordinarily that family of spells was called an exorcism technique, but it was one not granted to those who had taken on gray sacred light.

So a Priest who could use white sacred light instead of gray tried the spell, and still it did nothing.

The dead should return to the dead, yes, but what moved Bonehead was magical power as its primary force.

Cut the continuous supply of magical power and he would stop. A single exorcism spell could not stop him.

"Block it!"

"How dare you..."

"Crush it!"

When spells failed, physical means were the right answer, and the enemy acted accordingly.

They stabbed, slashed, and beat at Bonehead, trying to put the flesh golem down.

Even after that, more gray sacred light and lightning came in, but the methods were neither exceptional nor inventive. It was just repetitive labor.

Esther stood alone and blocked every spell that several dozen enemy divine Priests could throw at her.

"...She's stopping all of it?"

The holy warrior muttered. He was deeply astonished, but this was only the beginning.

While Esther held off the spells and Bonehead drew attention, someone who had been standing quietly beside Enkrid slipped away, unnoticed by anyone.

Even in broad daylight, he found shadows and crossed over walls, and could ensure no one knew he had done it.

He confirmed the positions of the Priests casting divine spells, then went to each one in turn and started cutting.

Fwip. Thwick.

The enemy did not realize something was wrong until Noma, the student Muel prized above all others, was dead.

Noma was the finest user of divine spells in this place, second only to Muel himself.

"Noma has been killed!"

Someone shouted it.

"What?"

"How?"

The holy warrior escorts were thrown into confusion. The one who had announced Noma's death was Jaxon. He had altered his voice to shout that Noma was dead, drawing all eyes toward himself.

When you had done your work and could not hide the result, the right move was to shout it yourself, louder, and gather attention at the moment of your choosing.

It was a technique for creating deliberate chaos and carving out a window to move through.

With everyone's eyes pulled to where Noma the Priest had died, Jaxon moved without hurry and killed another Priest.

Approach from behind the target, draw the blade across beneath the voicebox, and the sound rising from the lungs never makes it out.

Only a hissing rush of escaping air.

Even that was cut short almost immediately by blood gurgling out in a flood.

The next target was stabbed through the lung from behind. Lungs that could not pressurize with enough air could not scream, naturally.

No scream, not even a death rattle, and two were dead. Then a silence knife found the throat of a Priest who had just received transferred divine power from nearby colleagues and was about to chant a high-level spell.

Fwip.

The divinity that had gathered in that Priest's body scattered in every direction like a cloud of dust disturbed.

"Ugh."

Several Priests who had been channeling their divine power choked on the backlash and coughed up blood. Only then did one of the holy warriors fix on Jaxon's position.

"There!"

Even among those who had been suffering without answers, a few were genuinely skilled. Some of them lit up and charged.

The trouble was, that only worked on someone it could work on.

The holy warrior had raised a finger to point at where Jaxon was just before calling out "there," but Jaxon had already vacated the spot.

So the finger pointed at nothing, an empty place where he had been.

Jaxon fell in among the soldiers, acting startled alongside them, asking what on earth was happening, and slipped smoothly out of the battle zone.

A soldier with thin eyebrows standing right next to him watched Jaxon break from the line and asked blankly:

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Answering nature's call."

The soldier sputtered, confused, then seemed to accept it.

Oh? Sure, I guess you have to go.

Before he could find words, Jaxon was already tapping the ground in longer strides, picking up speed.

Absurd as it was, that was how the bulk of the Priests, the backbone of the enemy force, died one after another.

Noma's death, followed by several more Priests who had been casting divine spells, sent a strange ripple through the Grey Holy Army.

What is this? Why are they dying? Who is doing this? We didn't even see anyone?

People have always feared the unseen more than the seen.

That was also exactly what Jaxon had been aiming for.

Either way, when a small group was trying to hold an army, you needed this kind of pressure.

He had done it enough times that the work was familiar, but the enemy's response came fast.

"Evil Spirits did this!"

Muel's voice. He had learned his student was dead, turned it over briefly in his head, and put it to use by branding the enemy as servants of demons.

It was effective to a degree.

"Of course, children of demons!"

Those who had followed along without knowing much were taken in.

Even those who had come knowing full well that Noma's monastery had nothing to do with demons nodded along.

And those who had at least a twinge of conscience, however thin, found it a convenient way to justify themselves.

The logic went: just suppose there really are Evil Spirits over there, because hasn't enough happened to make that seem plausible?

And even if it turned out not to be true, it was the kind of situation you could point to later when someone questioned you and say, at the time, I could only think of it that way.

Enkrid, through all of this, had been standing there doing nothing but watching.

* * *

"Lot of interesting ones in the bunch."

Among those who served the Gray God were some who had particular confidence in their own ability.

They had not yet received the rank of Holy Knight, but their skill matched it.

In some cases it surpassed the current Holy Knights outright.

These were the strength the Holy State had kept hidden.

You could not exactly call the last several decades a time of peace, but it had been a period when every armed faction on the continent kept some portion of its power concealed.

If Azpen had done it, so could anywhere else.

Naturally, the Holy State had kept some of its power hidden as well.

Viewed from a continental scale, the hidden strength that various factions had been sitting on was being drawn out piece by piece, pried loose by the madmen from the Border Guard and their Madman Knights.

"My spear."

One of them lifted his weapon: a halberd. A cold chill drifted around the blade. It was a magic weapon carrying a frost spell, and it was also his Inscribed Weapon.

His name was unknown, but he had mastered divine power well enough to reach the rank of a knight.

"Mmm. Good, good."

At his side, the Holy Knight called Azratic wound a long cord around his wrist and murmured.

Even so, neither of them moved forward yet.

The army went first. Like a wave beginning to swell, soldiers stepped forward one by one, two by two. They were advancing.

* * *

As that wave of an army began to move, ripple by ripple, a voice came from within the monastery.

"Almost arrived too late."

Another ally had joined them inside.

"Brother Commander."

It was Audin Pumray, built like a bear, a member of the Madman Knights.

"Oh? You made it?"