Chapter 965 - Silent Cast
The angle and speed of the incoming thrust were vicious.
Of course, it wasn't quite at the level of Rem, Ragna, or Audin, but...
'A Knight.'
She had reached the stage of instinctively channeling Will.
According to the foundational theories Enkrid had awakened to and Luagarne had systematically organized, this was a strike typical of someone who had just crossed the threshold into true Knighthood.
Enkrid didn't pull back the sword in his left hand.
Instead, relying entirely on the insights he had gained within his mental landscape, he moved his hands and feet purely on instinct and intuition.
He flawlessly shifted his center of gravity and used his gauntlet to catch and deflect the incoming blade.
If you only looked at the raw movement, it was identical to swinging his left hand to swat the sword away.
Claaang!
'That was a bit clumsy.'
It was a critique aimed entirely at himself.
To be precise, his Formatting of Will had been slightly delayed, leaving a stinging impact on the back of his hand.
The blonde swordsman in his mental landscape had executed that exact maneuver as easily as breathing.
'A few more times...'
And he would get the hang of it quickly.
Despite the sudden ambush, Enkrid was overflowing with relaxed confidence.
He was actually leisurely enough to test out a new technique mid-fight.
However, his opponent was not.
The moment her blade was deflected, her foot shot out, aiming directly between his legs.
Her response was blindingly fast and entirely devoid of hesitation.
Enkrid simply raised his own foot to block the kick.
'Three times.'
Exactly after the third strike, the opponent's momentum visibly plummeted.
Because he could physically feel and react to the flow of Will, he knew exactly what was happening.
Holding Today, Enkrid stared at his attacker.
Despite it being the dead of night, he had a pretty good guess as to the color of her hair.
It was likely orange.
"As expected," the attacker muttered, her voice laced with resignation.
"Aishia," Enkrid acknowledged her.
"I figured it was you."
Aishia took a few ragged breaths to steady herself and nodded.
Watching from the sidelines, Rem muttered out loud.
"Man, you really like playing dangerous games, don't you?"
It was a comment aimed directly at what Enkrid had just done.
Trying to catch a lethal, ambush strike barehanded.
Sure, he had managed to Format his Will at the absolute last microsecond to protect himself, but it certainly wasn't a stunt anyone in their right mind would casually attempt, yet he pulled it off flawlessly.
Enkrid stared at Aishia.
Having crossed swords with her, he now knew that Aishia hadn't officially reached the realm of a true Knight just yet.
'She can only infuse Will into three strikes.'
She was still technically a semi-knight, but through grueling training and conditioning, she had forged a fighting style that allowed her to temporarily tap into the power of a Knight.
How?
She must have agonized over it relentlessly.
Desperately struggling to consolidate every single strength she possessed into one focal point to wield whatever Will she had.
That desperate struggle had brought her to her current level.
'Impressive.'
Enkrid casually tossed aside his cumbersome hood.
Naturally, Aishia wasn't the only one present.
Standing off to the side, Andrew's eyes were practically bulging out of his head as he shouted.
"Did you deceive me?!"
Andrew wasn't an idiot.
Naturally, he knew the Madmen Knights had arrived in the capital, so there had always been a lingering suspicion in the back of his mind that they might be involved in this chaos somehow.
But he had personally crossed swords with the 'Noble Slaughterer'.
At the time, he was absolutely certain it couldn't be them.
Because he genuinely believed that if they fought seriously, he stood a decent chance against that assassin.
"Didn't you say the demonic minions were pulling some kind of trick?!"
Hadn't Duke Marcus even secretly sent him a letter claiming exactly that?
"Yeah," Enkrid replied nonchalantly.
Strangely enough, Andrew didn't feel angry.
A few final puzzle pieces simply clicked into place inside his mind, and he completely understood exactly why they had orchestrated this entire charade.
'I was the fool.'
While he was desperately drawing all the attention, they had fabricated this bizarre serial killer known as the 'Noble Slaughterer' to systematically eliminate the minions before they could organize or hatch any other schemes.
Because he, the Commander of the City Guard, was the one every single minion was keeping their eyes on.
'Did they really need to go this far?'
Of course, they could have executed the operation in a much looser, less extreme manner, but this was Krais's doing.
And Krais was a man whose absolute specialty was violently preempting every single potential variable before it even had a chance to manifest.
What if the demonic minions banded together and decided to completely vanish or flee the capital?
He was the kind of man who could only sleep soundly after brutally castrating even the slightest possibility of that happening.
'So thanks to me, you managed to drag out every single bastard hiding behind the minions?'
Andrew currently had three of his personally trained elite guards standing behind him.
While they exchanged a few brief words, the torches held by two of the elite guards flickered violently in the wind.
Because the thick clouds were obscuring the moonlight, the violently flickering torches were the only source of light, causing the shadows around them to writhe and dance.
And then, one of those violently writhing shadows abruptly stood up.
This was hardly the time to be catching up or having a leisurely chat, but absolutely no one had expected something like this to happen so suddenly.
In the hand of the shadow that had stood up was a blade that was twice as pitch-black as the shadow itself.
That blade thrust straight toward Andrew's back before abruptly freezing in mid-air.
"Crumble."
It was Esther.
She raised her left hand, muttered a rapid incantation, and the shadow instantly collapsed back into the ground, completely losing its form.
"Child of the Stars?" a voice questioned from the opposing side.
They were standing directly in front of the city wall.
With Enkrid at the center, Esther stood one step behind him, Rem stood to his front right, Aishia had just leaped out from the bushes on the left, and Andrew and his three elite guards were positioned behind them.
And roughly twenty paces ahead, barely visible in the oppressive darkness caused by the obscuring clouds, several figures stood waiting.
Even with the enhanced vision of a Knight, they could only make out their vague silhouettes.
However, their voices carried perfectly.
The hyper-sensitive hearing of a Knight clearly caught the enemy muttering the words 'Child of the Stars'.
"These bastards really don't know how to wait, do they?"
Rem sneered, flicking his left wrist.
He had brought his full arsenal tonight.
The throwing axe, meticulously crafted by the dwarven master Argan, transformed into a blur of spinning steel and launched forward.
His hand speed was so blindingly fast that anyone below the level of a Knight wouldn't have even registered the motion.
The axe was in the air before the enemy's sentence had even finished.
BANG!
With an explosive shockwave that literally ruptured the air, the axe Rem had thrown violently ricocheted backward.
Seeing that, Esther narrowed her eyes.
Enkrid also registered the exact sensation snagging on his sharpened senses.
An invisible, intangible barrier had materialized into a wall of solid steel to deflect the axe.
While that invisible barrier was undeniably cracked and damaged, the sheer fact that it had managed to completely stop the axe was astonishing.
"It shattered," the enemy—the Mage standing twenty paces away—stated calmly.
He was a man draped in long, loose-fitting white robes, adorned with several hanging ornaments.
The thick clouds obscuring the two moons slowly drifted apart, allowing the moonlight to spill down and reveal his figure.
Fwoosh, poof.
The torches held by Andrew's men were instantly extinguished.
"Andrew. Take your three men and fall back," Enkrid ordered, taking a single step forward.
His five senses roared to life, and goosebumps erupted across his entire body.
Accompanied by a suffocating wave of tension, the Heart of the Beast activated, forcibly regulating his heartbeat.
A chilling sensation brushed the back of his neck.
"He is one of the Masters of Astrael," Esther warned, instantly recognizing the opponent.
They were individuals who had reached the absolute pinnacle of spellcraft, earning the title of Master.
Objectively speaking, Esther could not completely overwhelm a Master in a straight fight.
It would be an incredibly grueling battle.
She would have to throw several massive gambles just to stand a chance against an entity of that caliber.
She knew her own limits perfectly.
"He didn't come alone," Rem pointed out, clicking his tongue.
Just as he said, the Master had brought his entire entourage.
It was one of the absolute worst-case scenarios Krais had imagined.
Though, to be completely accurate, Krais had specifically orchestrated this entire operation to force this exact worst-case scenario out into the open if it existed.
The Master of Astrael had rallied every single minion he had hidden within Naurill and brought them here.
While none of them were quite on his level, every single one of them was an elite subordinate meticulously cultivated by a Lord of the Demonic Realms.
A dark-skinned fairy, a dwarf wearing a helmet adorned with two massive horns, the bastard called a Master, and standing behind them were five spellcasters draped in heavy robes.
They all stepped forward together.
The scribe who had deliberately lured Enkrid's group here twisted his lips into a sneer.
"Every single one of you is a dead man."
Enkrid couldn't help but think it was an incredibly cliché villain line.
The man who called himself Master of Astrael approached and opened his mouth, yet despite only speaking once, three entirely different sentences overlapped and echoed simultaneously.
"I see you prefer to greet people by throwing things."
"Since you are Knights, I assume you can hear me perfectly from this distance."
"My name is Eudokia."
It was a profoundly bizarre, almost mystical parlor trick.
He closed the distance to within ten paces and stopped.
Rem placed a hand on his axe.
"Don't do anything stupid, Warrior of the West. If you stand on our side, we will ensure you become a Grand Warrior of the demons, so just quietly obey," the dwarf ordered, addressing Rem as if he had been waiting for this exact moment.
Bathed in the moonlight, the dwarf's eyes were a chilling, cross-slit silver.
Just looking at him, it was obvious he was far from ordinary.
"I am already a Grand Warrior belonging to the Goddess, born and raised in the West. You half-pint piece of shit," Rem retorted without missing a beat.
Enkrid tore his gaze away from the Mage and stared blankly at Rem.
"What are you looking at?"
"Ayul?"
Did he just say 'Goddess'? Didn't he mean Ayul?
"Ah, yeah, whatever."
"I was just wondering if you could say that with a straight face while standing in front of your wife."
If Ayul had heard that, she probably would have been deeply moved.
"Stop talking shit and focus on the front," Rem grumbled.
Although Rem's cheeks didn't turn red, Enkrid was absolutely certain he was embarrassed.
"The Romantic Axe."
Because of that, the words just naturally slipped out of Enkrid's mouth.
"What?" Rem snapped.
"It's your new nickname."
"Are you completely out of your god damned mind?!"
Listening to their absurd banter, Esther let out a flat, utterly defeated scoff, while Aishia nodded sagely, marveling at the fact that these crazy bastards were still just as glorious as ever.
"You guys do realize we are currently in an incredibly, overwhelmingly dangerous situation right now... right?"
Andrew firmly believed in the Madmen Knights, but standing face-to-face with the absolute root cause of every single problem that had plagued the capital recently was making his palms sweat profusely.
Master Eudokia wasn't angry.
He wasn't flustered either.
He was certainly dumbfounded by their complete lack of tension, but they would all be dead soon anyway.
'If I turn him into my own Grand Warrior, he will be quite useful.'
With that thought, he forcibly tore open his own Domain of Spells.
"Greeting."
With that single, heavily abbreviated word, an unfathomable amount of mana surged, violently dragging the power of an entirely different dimension into reality.
Hearing that single word, 'Greeting', Esther instantly glimpsed the hyper-dimensional spell structure woven into it.
Originally, that spell was the 'Greeting of Agraba'.
He had compressed the entire incantation into that single word.
And 'Agraba' referred to an entity possessing an invisible, intangible body armed with catastrophic physical strength.
And so, with that single 'Greeting', an invisible boulder plummeted directly toward the heads of Andrew and his three private guards.
It was completely invisible, but its crushing weight and physical mass were undeniably real.
Andrew didn't even have time to scream before desperately raising his sword above his head.
But could a mere sword catch a falling boulder?
Absolutely not.
He had never trained to defend against something like this, nor had he ever experienced a situation even remotely similar.
However, somewhere in this world, there was a man who genuinely enjoyed subjecting himself to exactly this kind of deranged, suicidal training every single day.
Granted, that man happened to be standing right next to him.
Enkrid violently kicked off the ground, caught the invisible boulder plummeting toward them on the flat of his blade using pure instinct and spatial awareness, and brutally shoved it to the side.
BOOOM!
The invisible mass violently slammed into the ground just beyond the bushes, kicking up a massive cloud of dust and debris.
"Guaaagh!"
In a stroke of horrific luck, the scribe they had been chasing happened to be standing exactly where it landed, instantly flattened into a bloody paste by the invisible boulder.
It was a deeply bizarre, horrifying spectacle.
You could clearly see he had been crushed flat by something massive, but because the object itself was entirely invisible, only the mangled, bloody corpse was visible to the naked eye.
"Come forth, Legion of Steel Puppets."
Master Eudokia casually chanted his next spell.
He couldn't care less that one of his own minions had just been brutally crushed to death.
Before he even finished speaking, a massive, vertical tear violently ripped open in the empty air, and a giant hand forged entirely of solid steel clawed its way out.
The steel hand ruthlessly tore the spatial rift wider, exactly like ripping open a tightly stretched canvas, and violently dragged its massive body out into reality.
As the first one emerged, dozens of new tears ripped open in the air beside it, and in the blink of an eye, the number of steel golems pouring out easily surpassed twenty.
When one reached the level of a Master of Astrael, it was only natural to look down on mere Knights.
'Have I remained secluded for far too long?'
They should be prostrating themselves on the ground, desperately begging for their lives just from looking at him, yet they actually dared to bare their fangs.
It was definitely because his seclusion had lasted too long.
The Masters of Astrael were individuals who lived their entire lives utterly consumed by their research and their Spell Worlds.
It was incredibly rare for them to step out into the world and actively exert their influence.
That was exactly what the lower-ranking grunts were for.
'If I must step forward, I will permanently engrave the terror of my existence into their souls.'
It was one of the very few unspoken rules the handful of Masters strictly adhered to.
Eudokia was simply fulfilling that obligation.
With a single wave of his hand, the Legion of Steel Puppets charged forward.
Their immediate targets were the pathetic, useless humans cowering in the back.
Thump!
Thump!
The deafening footsteps of the golems shook the earth and the very air itself.
To Andrew and his subordinates, it looked exactly as if towering nightmares were violently bursting out from the rising dust clouds.
"Haa, do these bastards just not see me or something?" Aishia spat venomously, adjusting her grip on her sword.
Triple Fang.
The moniker 'Three Fangs' was earned precisely because she could only swing her sword with the true, devastating power of a Knight exactly three times.
After executing those three strikes, her muscles would scream as if they were tearing apart, but if she backed down here, every single day she had spent agonizingly training to reach this point would be completely wasted.
The exact moment she stepped forward and Andrew desperately raised his sword...
Eudokia chanted yet another spell.
"Mirror Room of Vanna."
Before the activation word had even finished leaving his lips, a massive, shimmering circular portal manifested directly in front of him.
The horn-flute dagger Enkrid had just hurled vanished directly into that portal.
BWOOOOM!
The deafening, air-shattering blast of the horn-flute echoing from the void was the only thing left behind.
Enkrid had deliberately packed his full arsenal tonight.
If asked why, it was entirely because of Krais's warning.
That large-eyed bastard had explicitly predicted that the enemy would launch their full-scale counterattack tonight at the earliest, or tomorrow at the latest.
Looking at it now, that large-eyed friend of his had casually pulled off a feat worthy of a true prophet.
"Prophecy? No, it's just prediction. It's about comprehensively calculating the opponent's intentions, the current situation, and what they ultimately desire. How do I do it? Well, I don't want to die, and I don't want to be in pain, so I furiously rack my brain to figure it out. If I'm wrong, I prepare contingencies for being wrong. I prepare for absolutely every single variable, and then I desperately pray to the Gods that those contingencies actually work."
As a fleeting thought crossed his mind, Enkrid was abruptly pulled back to the conversation he had with Krais yesterday afternoon.
'Did I die?'
Has 'today' repeated itself?
It was only natural for that exact suspicion to instantly cross his mind.
After all, hadn't he experienced this exact phenomenon countless times before?
Of course, the very moment that thought surfaced, he also instantly realized that this was not reality.
His five senses, his sixth sense, and the hyper-tuned perception forged from unraveling spells were violently screaming at him.
He finally understood exactly why his entire body had broken out in goosebumps the very second he laid eyes on that bastard calling himself a Master.
The moment he saw them, the bastard had already cast an illusion spell, and now, it had fully taken effect.
'Silent Cast.'
What exactly had Esther called this specific stage?
Tacitus, was it?
That bastard had been continuously chanting completely different spells out loud, while secretly preparing this exact illusion the entire time.
Ultimately, a fragment of the terrifying World of Spells that Eudokia had polished and refined over a long, brutal lifetime of survival had completely swallowed Enkrid, welcoming him into a flawless, inescapable illusion.
***
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