A Knight Who Eternally Regresses

Enkrid had received Crang’s letter, but there was still quite a bit of time left before he needed to go, and in the meantime Aitri had left a message.

“He asked you to wait ten days.”

Edin Molsen passed along Aitri’s message as well, then left. Enkrid had received the letter as soon as he arrived at the order’s quarters, and he still had not seen Kraiss yet.

Apparently he had gone out because he had business in a nearby city.

Enkrid had nothing in particular to do, so he had come out to the training ground to loosen up.

“Did these bastards know I was coming back? Where the hell are they all hiding?”

Trying to work himself up, Rem looked around for a sacrifice to test the technique he had newly realized this time. Then he ran into Ragna.

Standing in one corner of the training ground, Ragna ignored what Rem said. His gaze was fixed on the captain who had stirred him up. Then he opened his mouth.

“Take a day to rest?”

Where had he been before coming back? He had not been at the order’s quarters, so he had probably gone to see Anne.

It was not hard to guess the range of his movements.

And that mad genius, of course, would not have settled for where he was now.

Enkrid knew all of that, so he was not flustered by Ragna’s clear, unmistakable Will.

What was he saying? He wanted a match. The direction of that Will was obvious too. Enkrid. Toward him. It was more than welcome. It was a pleasant moment.

Just as Rem had gained something and awakened to something in the West, Ragna too had gone to Zaun, learned something, and returned.

While Enkrid silently watched, Rem opened his mouth. More exactly, he cut right through Ragna’s momentum.

“Someone like you’s easy enough to handle without resting.”

Ragna’s focus blurred strangely as his gaze shifted. His eyes turned to Rem.

The direction of his momentum shifted that way too. In the end, Rem and Ragna locked eyes. It did not matter who had started it. Before anyone knew it, Sunrise and an axe had been drawn, and their positions crossed.

Whoooom.

Their weapons did not meet. They only swept past empty air.

Because of that, a whirlwind rose between them. Dust and small stones spun in circles and lifted into the air.

“Seriously? You’re doing this the moment you get back?”

Just as Enkrid had expected, Ragna had also only just returned after spending time with Anne. The voice that rang out now belonged to Anne, who had come all the way to the order’s quarters with him and let out a deep sigh.

“If you stay close, you’ll get hurt.”

Rophod grabbed Anne by the shoulder from behind and pulled her back. While she obediently retreated, Rem and Ragna clashed in the center of the training ground.

“They turned into even more of monsters?”

Aurelia, who had settled off to one side at some point, clicked her tongue.

Even while Enkrid had been gone, she had tormented her own body, drenched in sweat. She had trained like she was flailing for her life, yet instead of closing the gap, those two had advanced even farther. It was shocking enough to make her mutter to herself.

Her eye really was exceptional. Hadn’t she recognized that the two of them had grown markedly stronger?

Of course, she had not seen everything. But through her five senses and her instinct, she could tell they were now moving on another line entirely.

Aurelia quietly steadied her breathing as she observed the two of them. If there was even one thing to snatch and make her own, she had to watch it all and learn it all. That was the teaching and the foundation of the Mad Order of Knights. Even the common soldiers here held to that attitude.

‘There’s no time to be surprised and despair.’

Just as Aurelia was sinking into her thoughts, a bear-like man approached Enkrid’s side.

“Brother, you’ve returned?”

It was Audin, who had arrived the day before. He too had come out to the training ground. On both hands he wore armaments he had not had before. Enkrid’s gaze ran over Audin from head to toe, checking his bearing, his momentum, and the changed armament.

‘He’s changed.’

It was not just his momentum that had changed.

“That?”

Enkrid asked with a glance toward the fist.

“My mace.”

Audin answered with a smile. He looked like a man dying to show it off. That was uncommon. Audin was a monastic warrior. Seeing him boast about equipment or anything else was strange.

With the backs of his hands facing the sky, Audin held both hands out.

It was a gesture telling Enkrid to take a closer look. He did as Audin wanted. He inspected the outstretched gauntlets one by one.

They were gauntlets that covered not only the fists but the forearms as well. The color was a dull white, matte and without shine. There were many marks like scratches on them. It was a weapon that had seen use.

‘Metal?’

At first glance they looked metallic, but to be exact, they were the scales of a monster. It would not be wrong to say the material was as hard as metal.

Of course, that was not all there was to it.

“Once, among the drakes, there appeared a monster with three heads. Several knights tried to kill it, but failed, and in the end the holy knights of Legion hunted it down and slew it.”

Audin suddenly began telling a story. Enkrid enjoyed listening to stories enough to hand krona to passing minstrels for them.

He quietly listened. It was the posture of full attention.

“One head held poison, and it used the other two like maces. After they killed that drake, they took scales full of {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} poison and changed them so they would hold holiness instead. It would be nice to say it was because of devout prayer, but in truth it was refined for over several decades by a person called a master of holy metallurgy.”

They had changed it so that instead of poison it would hold holiness and be used that way, then added metal to scales harder than any before, and after that lined the inside with the hide of the wilderness sheep said to be the toughest thing in the world.

Even Enkrid could not know the structure of a piece of equipment through observation alone.

Well, Aitri might have recognized it.

Just as there was the craftsman family called Lafratio in the fairy city, and just as Enkrid had Aitri, Legion too had a long tradition of metallurgy handed down through the generations.

As the Pope’s envoy and apostle in the flesh, Audin had received from them his mace, and his hammer.

The engraved weapon of a holy knight was called a holy weapon. That was only natural, since it was a weapon that contained holiness nearly on the level of a sacred relic.

“The left is the Lord’s Love. Love for short is fine. And the right is the Lord’s Mercy. Yes, you may call it Mercy.”

Just by looking, Enkrid had no trouble gauging the violence wrapped around the gauntlets encasing those fists.

Their names were Love and Mercy, but thinking of the way Audin usually viewed the world, the mercy he spoke of could not possibly be the form of mercy his enemies would want.

Sending them to the Lord was his mercy.

Making them realize things through suffering before sending them to the Lord would be love.

In other words, Love was beating them, and Mercy was killing them.

That was why the left hand was Love, and the right hand was Mercy.

Enkrid was clever enough to earn Kraiss’s admiration. In an instant, he understood the meaning in the names Audin had given them.

It was remarkable insight. His knack for reading things really was unusual.

“So you beat them with Love and send them off with Mercy?”

When Enkrid said it, having seen straight through him, Audin showed his usual polite smile, clasped both hands together, and nodded.

“Correct. Exactly right.”

Enkrid sensed the holiness surging madly inside Audin as he answered. The holiness that had already been intensely strong to a brute extent before now seemed strong enough to compare with Enkrid’s own Uske.

Was that all they had to say between them? No. They had not even spoken about Silence, and Audin still had things left to say about Teresa.

In other words, it would not have been strange if they had talked more, but Audin suddenly closed his mouth, and from his entire body holiness poured down like golden sand and took the shape of armor. Holy Radiance Armor.

“I’ll show you the Lord’s Love.”

With those words, Audin smashed the floor of the training ground.

Boom!

The dirt exploded and a hole opened up. Rem and Ragna had been fierce, but Audin was no less so.

This was the kind of thing he could only do because he knew Enkrid could take it just fine now.

The onlookers had already backed away long ago. That was thanks to Teresa’s guidance.

Enkrid’s pupils tightened to pinpricks as he perceived the object flying toward him and leaving an afterimage.

The left fist in the gauntlet came flying in quite literally like a mace.

His instincts told him not to focus on Audin’s body as he closed the distance, but on the mace instead. So that was what he did.

The moment Enkrid perceived it, he stepped into the gap in time. His thoughts accelerated as they searched for what had to be done. He raised Night Walk and held it vertically. He found the flow and set it against the gauntlet.

Tiririririrng!

The noise that burst out when the two crossed remained behind like an aftertone. Enkrid spun his body and looked at Audin’s left thigh.

Slash.

The blade cut cloth and reached the blood vessel. With a flowing sword he diverted the mace, and with a fast sword he cut.

That sounded simple, but considering the speed of Audin’s charge just now, it meant Enkrid had succeeded in a ridiculous feat one after another.

“You diverted it and cut.”

Audin remained calm. In truth, he had known and still been struck. A blade that cut through Holy Radiance Armor.

Wasn’t that interesting?

The blood flowing from the wound stopped almost immediately. A golden light wrapped around his thigh. Holiness several times denser than before enveloped Audin’s body.

“That’s nowhere near enough.”

Audin said it.

From that brief exchange just now, he knew Enkrid had advanced beyond where he had been before. But that was not surprising. That man was someone who kept living that way.

He chose danger instead of comfort and moved forward.

‘I protect his back.’

With the old name of knight, he rebuked the world.

So Audin merely had to do what he had to do.

To prove that he too had not spent this time idly, and to prove that this moment, showing what he had gained, was a joyful one.

Chrrrk.

The gauntlets on both his hands gave off a strange sound as they responded to holiness.

“Wave?”

Enkrid asked. Audin was delighted and surprised at once. Hadn’t Enkrid named the principle behind his technique even though Audin had not used it during their clash?

Just from looking? He was about to call even that remarkable.

To Enkrid, it was only natural. What he could see had changed, and until just before coming here, he had dug into and trained the Wave technique he had learned from the Ferryman.

Once he knew it was useful not only against Silence, but also in training, there was no reason not to do it. So he had tempered his Will on the foundation of Wave.

“Then let me show you more.”

Audin said it as the corner of his lips twisted upward. Fangs frightening enough to make anyone believe he was a bear showed.

Enkrid answered.

“Show me your tricks, bear beastman. The bear shows the tricks, and it’s Kraiss’s turn to earn the gold.”

Whether it was a spar or anything else, once they started clashing, his tongue moved on its own. It struck at Audin’s quiet heart.

Audin endured it with ease.

“Is that how you’re starting? With nonsense?”

The conversation was over. The two of them clashed again, leaving afterimages behind. One became golden light, and the other a blue line.

Whenever the crossing lines collided and broke apart, shockwaves burst out.

Each time the sound of air tearing apart boomed through the ground, the soldiers backed away farther.

“Damn it, keep control! Don’t let servants or attendants come near, and pull back any soldiers who aren’t up to it!”

It was Squire Clemen shouting. Normally he would have let it go, but getting swept into a spar like this was enough to kill someone.

Of course, there was no way those two were fighting without thinking, and he believed they would stop if anyone around them got caught up in it.

‘Then that means I have to keep that from happening.’

They were seriously measuring each other. So it was also the job of the order’s squires to let the captain and the rest do as they wished.

Clemen handled things, and naturally everyone obeyed his orders faithfully.

Pits were gouged out of the ground here and there, and savage force and momentum flew back and forth, but no one here was the sort to recoil in shock at seeing it.

More than that, quite a few people had their eyes peeled open, trying to learn even one more thing.

Rophod and Pell were like that, and so were Teresa and Dunbakel.

Aurelia and Clemen were like that too.

“There’s no way I can even think about catching up.”

Soldier Marco, now Platoon Leader Marco, shook his head. The spar, which had continued even after Clemen took control, finally ended.

“This is enjoyable.”

Audin smiled as he caught his breath after the fight, while Rem and Ragna glared at each other and stopped.

In terms of time, the spar had not lasted that long. They had measured each other’s skill and stopped there.

Though to the people watching, it likely looked different.

After that, it naturally turned into a time where everyone present showed what they had learned and what they had honed.

“You all improved too.”

Teresa said it, and Rophod and Pell clenched their molars hard.

They had been certain that this time, at last, they would be able to crush each other down, but it had not gone the way they wanted.

“Just wait a little longer. Rophod of the Red Cloak.”

“You idiot, does everything that falls out of your mouth count as words? I wear the dark green cloak of the Mad Order of Knights.”

The sharpness of their banter was improving by the day too.

Lua Gharne happily spoke with the returned Enkrid.

“So that Wave is the applied chapter of attribute change. Mm, a good direction. Your perspective really is unusual.”

She had already completed the entire system of training methods for becoming a knight.

“Take a look.”

It was true, what people said about Lua Gharne originally being a scholar rather than a warrior. Well, no one had doubted it anyway.

Enkrid took the booklet she tossed him, opened it, and looked through it. This was a system created by the Frokk scholar Lua Gharne.

‘How to awaken Will.’

After becoming a quasi-knight, how should one naturally make Will remain throughout the entire body?

‘Relying purely on talent?’

What they needed was a method by which anyone could reach it with enough time. If all they were going to talk about was talent, then what they were doing now had no meaning. Of course, talent still played a large role. That could not be ignored.

That was the kind of book it was.