Chapter 968 - I Wanted to Be Good at It Because I Loved It, and Now That I Am Good at It...
"Breath-Devouring Frost."
Eudokia's lips parted once more.
It was yet another Forbidden Spell.
If the Walking Fire was an entity operating as a bipedal manifestation of the fire element meant to incinerate its surroundings, this spell was a lethal fog deadly to anything that drew breath.
An invisible wave of absolute zero, condensed entirely through mana, rapidly expanded into the air.
Even without getting close, the sheer, biting chill instantly froze the fine hairs on one's skin.
Taking a single breath within the domain of this freezing fog would instantly freeze the victim's internal organs, leading to a horrific death.
Even mere physical contact with the skin would cause the frost to violently burrow inside.
It was a massive area-of-effect spell that could neither be dodged nor severed.
While the flow of mana continuously fueled it, severing that flow required physically stepping through the fog.
Furthermore, it wasn't the kind of spell that would instantly dissipate just because a single mana tether was cut.
'Will you try to sever this one too?'
The freezing fog had already materialized into reality; even if its mana supply were violently cut off right now, the fog itself wouldn't instantly vanish.
Therefore, this spell was impossible to physically sever.
Because its physical form was mist, it was naturally weak against something like the Wind Cliff of Dmule, but to a purely physical swordsman, it was a completely lethal, insurmountable spell.
'Or will you dodge it?'
If he dodged it, the spell would simply continue rolling forward toward the others behind him.
Eudokia mentally tossed out those two questions and immediately concluded the answer himself.
The humans he is desperately trying to protect in the back won't survive this.
Therefore, he cannot dodge.
The Breath-Devouring Frost would linger in this area for at least half a day.
'Freeze to death. Every single one of you.'
He wished for it, and he desired it.
Magic is the act of violently projecting one's desires into reality, and the specific method chosen to execute that projection is called a spell.
Standing before it, Enkrid watched the fog of absolute zero slowly coalescing into hazy, crystalline fractals.
While it wasn't perfectly visible to the naked eye, even someone without the ability to perceive spells could easily feel the bone-chilling air violently plummeting the temperature.
Then how exactly does one stop this?
His deliberation was incredibly brief.
His accelerated thought processes, his unique insight, and his hyper-tuned perception for detecting spells instantly synergized to drag the correct answer out of him.
Enkrid simply stood completely still and let his sword hang limply at his side.
Simultaneously, dozens of blurry afterimages bloomed around his relaxed arm and blade.
At first glance, it simply looked as if he were violently shivering in place, causing the blade to appear as if it had split into multiple overlapping copies due to the vibration.
'What is this bastard doing?'
Eudokia's eyes widened.
Knights are walking calamities; beings who casually execute feats that defy all logic and common sense.
And Enkrid was doing exactly that.
His blade violently slashed through the empty air countless times.
He was using the flat of his blade to forcibly shove the air itself away.
While the Breath-Devouring Frost wouldn't stop until its caster was annihilated, its physical manifestation was still bound by environmental factors.
Vwooooosh.
The sheer volume of slashes layered over and over until they violently compressed into a solid wall of wind.
Even while desperately fighting on the other side of the battlefield, it was impossible not to notice a spectacle of that caliber.
Watching Enkrid's swordsmanship, Esther couldn't help but marvel.
'He doesn't even need Dmule's spell.'
If someone were to ask exactly what Enkrid had just done, the simplest answer would be: He physically shoved the spell away using the sheer wind pressure generated by swinging his sword.
To explain it in excruciating detail, he had flawlessly blended the 'Formatting' stage of Will with the concept of 'Residue'.
Residue was a technique Rem fundamentally utilized whenever he threw his battleaxe—a combat application derived by sublimating the concept of 'Transfer'.
Enkrid had violently injected that exact concept directly into the wind he generated by treating his sword like a massive fan.
It was an absolutely brilliant idea.
And it was a technique purely born and refined through the countless, ridiculous bets he had made with the Madmen Knights during their sparring sessions over who could 'shoot' wind the furthest using their weapons.
The end result was Enkrid generating a massive gale of wind using purely his sword to violently push back the freezing fog.
While Eudokia maintained his stoic expression, that absolutely did not mean the situation was favorable for him.
If things continued exactly like this, the Forbidden Spell would violently turn back and engulf him instead.
Mages are fundamentally human; therefore, they also breathe.
If that absolute zero frost mixed into his breath, even if it didn't outright kill him, it would inflict catastrophic damage.
Eudokia instantly dispelled the frost magic.
With a deafening roar of rushing air, the massive gale Enkrid had generated violently slammed into the invisible barrier in front of Eudokia, harmlessly scattering to the left and right.
So, was it over?
Not even close.
Eudokia was not some incompetent amateur who would fluster and panic just because his calculations were slightly off.
He relentlessly unleashed the torrent of spells he had prepared.
'Sorrow is Poison.'
It was a spell he had personally developed.
It forcibly seeped extreme depression and sorrow directly into the target's mind.
It was a spell classified as an 'Emotional Toxin'.
Enkrid ruthlessly swung his sword directly toward the approaching current of that emotional toxin.
The invisible spell was cleanly severed.
Unlike the freezing fog, which manifested as a physical phenomenon in reality, this spell was strictly designed to target a single individual's mind.
While it lacked a visible physical form, it still had to extend outward like a fragile thread to reach its target.
And that thread was brutally severed before it even touched him.
"Incredible."
Those words finally slipped from Eudokia's lips.
Yet, even as he spoke, the spells he had prepared never stopped.
KABOOOM!
The Fruit of Guhinna.
It was a spell that literally ripped an otherworldly entity forged entirely of lightning from its dimension and violently dropped it onto the target.
Intangible spells ironically possess a far denser concentration of mana.
Therefore, unleashing an elemental spell that violently impacted physical reality was the optimal counter.
His judgment was instantaneous, and the speed at which he chanted was blinding.
If Enkrid was a Knight, this man was a Master capable of flawlessly completing dozens of spells in a single breath.
The violent clash between the thermal updraft of the Walking Fire and the absolute zero of the freezing fog caused the atmosphere to rapidly destabilize, rapidly forming a massive, pitch-black storm cloud overhead.
Raindrops began to plummet.
But before the very first drop even hit the ground, lightning revealed its presence first.
A blinding white bolt of lightning violently zigzagged down from the sky, locking directly onto Enkrid.
Enkrid simply raised his sword, caught the lightning bolt, and flawlessly parried it away.
'See everything as swordsmanship.'
For quite some time now, Enkrid had been perceiving every single spell precisely in that manner.
The advice the Ferryman had given him was completely accurate.
For example, the lightning bolt that had just struck him felt remarkably similar to one of Ragna's strikes, so he simply caught it and parried it away.
The lightning bolt he casually deflected shot off to the side and violently cratered the ground.
BANG!
Accompanying a deafening roar, a blinding white flash momentarily illuminated the entire area.
How exactly had he blocked that freezing fog earlier?
Because his pure instinct acted first, the conscious realization of the process only followed afterward.
'That freezing fog was exactly like hundreds of men simultaneously thrusting their swords at me.'
Therefore, he simply shoved the owners of those swords away before they could close the distance.
He utilized the concept of Residue—a property of Will—to achieve exactly that, and it had worked perfectly.
'If I fix their forms strictly within the bounds of swordsmanship...'
Spells are no longer intangible; they become tangible.
And if something possesses a tangible form, it can be parried.
And parrying was one of Enkrid's absolute favorite things to do.
Because he loved it, he desperately wanted to be good at it.
And now that he had genuinely become good at it, he was enjoying it more than anything else in the world.
"You can physically see spells, can't you?" Eudokia demanded.
He didn't just mean roughly sensing a spell's destructive output or its area of effect; he meant literally, physically seeing it.
That was exactly what his words implied.
He had suspected it earlier, but back then, he assumed the bastard simply possessed a highly mutated or specialized sixth sense for detecting mana.
He was completely wrong.
This bastard was perceiving the exact structural fabric of spells down to a microscopic level.
As Eudokia spoke, his hands blurred.
For the first time tonight, both of his hands moved frantically, rapidly weaving intricate hand signs.
Simultaneously with his hand movements, a massive, elongated vertical line materialized directly behind his back before violently tearing open with a sickening squelch.
"Devour him!"
Every living thing that moves is ultimately food for something else.
This was a Forbidden Spell he had personally engineered by forcefully amalgamating the Starving Stomach spell, the Death Warrior, and a golem creation spell.
A grotesque arm possessing only three massive fingers, covered entirely in pitch-black, jagged protrusions, violently shot out from the rift and lunged directly at Enkrid.
It was a crushing, devastating thrust, exactly like utilizing a massive siege ram as a spear.
Enkrid explicitly perceived it as a siege weapon and moved to counter it.
He raised his sword high above his head and viciously brought it down, executing a flawless vertical cleave.
CRACK!
The grotesque forearm Eudokia had summoned was significantly harder than solid steel, but Today was a blade that effortlessly cleaved through steel as if it were paper.
The forearm was cleanly bisected vertically.
The mangled chunks of flesh from the severed cross-section began grotesquely bubbling and writhing, desperately trying to reattach themselves.
Enkrid completely ignored it, using the arm he had just split open as a makeshift bridge to launch himself forward.
Sprinting straight toward the Mage.
Every single one of his movements far surpassed mere speed, leaving a trail of afterimages in his wake.
Eudokia relentlessly countered without a second's pause.
"The Embrace of Agraba!"
It was a spell infamously known by its moniker, the Crown of Thorns.
It unleashed a completely invisible, crushing wave of pressure from all directions, simultaneously materializing massive thorns meant to violently grind the target into a bloody pulp.
Enkrid didn't even attempt to dodge.
'See everything as swordsmanship.'
His perception rapidly hyper-segmented.
Moving beyond merely seeing, hearing, and feeling, he instantly locked onto the absolute core of the spell.
What should he do next?
All he had to do was cut it.
The blade, shimmering with an eerie azure light, rapidly darted out—front, back, left, and right—before returning to its starting position.
It merely looked as though he had casually poked at the empty air, but the absolute core of the movement was explicitly severing the very fabric of the spell.
With those relatively slow, deliberate strikes, yet another spell was violently annihilated.
Clap!
Instead of desperately trying to evade Enkrid's rapidly approaching blade, Eudokia sharply clapped his hands together.
Instantly, a massive, pitch-black void tore open in the empty air directly in Enkrid's path, and a horrifying maw lined with razor-sharp fangs—large enough to easily swallow an entire giant whole—violently lunged out.
'See everything as swordsmanship.'
At some point, Enkrid completely forgot about reality.
Even just a few moments ago, it hadn't been this extreme, but his entire perspective on the world, his tactile sensations, and every single one of his senses began rapidly simplifying.
Before he knew it, there were absolutely no humans left in the world surrounding Enkrid.
'See everything as swordsmanship.'
Every time he silently repeated those words, he sank deeper into the abyss.
The world was now constructed entirely of countless, endless swords.
Those countless swords began approaching him, one by one.
An entity reduced to nothing more than a blurry silhouette swung its sword, initiating a technique.
It was a Glance Strike.
A technique where you catch the opponent's blade, violently shove it outward to displace their center of gravity, firmly press down to lock their weapon, and then seamlessly use the back edge of your own blade to brutally slice open their shoulder.
In the exact split second their blades violently collided—the moment of pushing and pulling—Enkrid instantly shifted his grip into half-sword fighting.
With that single adjustment, he completely dismantled the opponent's technique.
He grabbed his own blade with his left hand, violently shoved the opponent's sword away, and perfectly used that exact momentum to press down and execute a brutal, drawing cut.
The entity holding the opposing sword was nothing more than a form constructed of blurry, distorted lines. The exact moment he severed its neck, its swordsmanship abruptly ended.
'Next.'
This time, a blade flew at him, perfectly aiming for the microscopic gap where a tempo is broken in half, and then broken again, exploiting the exact moment an opponent shifts their stance.
It was a highly sophisticated technique designed to artificially manipulate speed to violently steal the opponent's timing.
It was also the absolute perfect technique to use if you wanted to get instantly counterattacked by an opponent possessing terrifying insight.
And Enkrid did exactly that.
Rather than anticipating the strike and feigning a retreat, he violently accelerated his own tempo and struck first.
CLANG!
His blade cleanly severed another swordsman constructed entirely of lines.
'Next.'
This opponent explicitly waited for his sword.
The moment Enkrid brought his blade down on the waiting opponent, the opponent launched a perfectly timed thrust.
The two blades drove forward relentlessly through the empty air, aiming for their respective targets, until they violently clashed and slid against one another.
The intimately connected blades violently ground together.
There were no sparks, and there was no screeching sound of grinding steel, yet the two blades crossed while remaining perfectly flush against each other.
It was a technique that simultaneously parried and thrusted.
A lethal derivation of the deflection technique.
'An absolute mastery of the fundamentals.'
If he just stood there, he would inevitably sacrifice his neck, shoulder, or chest to the blade.
Enkrid violently twisted his torso and lunged forward.
Simultaneously, he violently seized the hand of the opponent gripping the sword.
By doing so, he completely halted the thrust and brutally headbutted the opponent right in the face.
In the exact split second the strength left the violently staggered opponent's body, he pressed the sword in his right hand against them and pulled.
His razor-sharp Engraved Weapon cleanly bisected the swordsman made of lines.
Swordsmanship did not strictly mean relying exclusively on sword strikes.
'Use absolutely everything.'
He wielded it honestly and directly.
He swung it with crushing, devastating weight.
Deception itself is merely another form of technique.
And there is nothing more brutally efficient than a blindingly fast, razor-sharp thrust and slash.
Softly deflecting a blade is simply the method of turning the opponent's own strength against them.
And integrating punches, kicks, and footwork... every single one of these elements seamlessly forged a complete system of swordsmanship.
This time, the opponent attempted a downward strike first.
Striking violently upward from a low stance, Enkrid cleanly severed the forearm of the line-forged bastard holding the sword a split second before the downward strike could connect.
While the one-armed bastard desperately scrambled backward, Enkrid instantly closed the distance and severed its neck.
The upward slash was executed with both hands, but as he closed the distance, he seamlessly transitioned to a one-handed grip with his left hand to execute a perfect horizontal cleave.
The flow was entirely uninterrupted; it looked exactly like a meticulously choreographed sequence of movements.
Everything he envisioned executed flawlessly—how could this not be absolute ecstasy?
Because he loved it, he desperately wanted to be good at it.
And because he had relentlessly agonizingly strived to be good at it, he could now enjoy it to its absolute limits.
'Never end.'
Utterly submerged in the sheer ecstasy of the moment, he swung his sword.
The pure, unadulterated joy crossed an absolute threshold, completely saturating his brain.
'Do not ever let this end.'
That desperate, burning desire violently surged, and his Will explosively responded to that desire.
Enkrid plunged endlessly into the 'now', into the exact moment, completely consumed by the time spent wielding his sword.
It was so intoxicatingly fun that even breathing felt like a secondary concern.
Perhaps because he had completely annihilated them so many times, several swords suddenly violently merged together.
They amalgamated into a towering behemoth possessing the raw physical strength to easily crush a giant into paste with a single finger.
Without a shred of hesitation, the behemoth violently swung its colossal greatsword.
Enkrid raised his sword horizontally above his head to perfectly catch the giant's greatsword.
Baaam.
He clearly heard the sound, but it wasn't a physical noise; it echoed entirely from within.
Because in this world, sound did not exist.
'It's heavy.'
You could call it the exact, perfect amount of crushing weight to make the clash utterly satisfying.
Enkrid flawlessly adjusted the strength in his wrist, perfectly altering the angle of his blade.
The greatsword that had crashed into his blade harmlessly slid off to the side.
Relying purely on brute strength, the behemoth violently halted the deflected momentum and immediately launched a horizontal slash.
Enkrid naturally shifted his descending blade into a perfect vertical guard, caught the incoming greatsword, and casually lifted his feet off the ground.
The absolute core of a soft sword technique is flawless strength control.
Enkrid's body was effortlessly pushed three steps sideways.
The greatsword merely violently cleaved through empty air.
In that microscopic opening, the sword Enkrid held transformed into a mere dot.
He violently dug his left foot into the ground and thrust the sword in his right hand.
After a flawless, soft deflection, he followed up with a thrust as blindingly fast as light.
Every single movement flowed as naturally as water.
And just like that, he perfectly pierced the neck of the behemoth forged of lines.
'This is just too damn fun.'
Could he just live in this place for the rest of his life?
Honestly, that wouldn't be a bad idea.
It was a space overflowing with sheer joy and absolute ecstasy.
What possible reason could he have to reject this?
— I thought you said you merely wished for peace.
Suddenly, piercing straight through his swirling thoughts, a voice echoed violently, utterly shaking the very core of Enkrid's heart.
***
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