Chapter 838 - Astrail
Ten days had passed since the fight with the Salamander and Themares's natural integration into the group.
Was it that Dragonkin were highly adaptable?
He lived among them with a surprising casualness.
He wasn't picky about his food, nor about where he slept.
He ate as much as the knights ate and slept as much as they slept.
No, to be precise, he slept for as long as Enkrid slept and ate when he ate.
He never left Enkrid's side, and it was incredibly natural.
"Is the Dragonkin after my position?"
It had reached a point where Shinar would throw out such jokes, but no one paid it much mind.
To borrow Rem's words:
"He'll figure it out. What's it to me?"
That's probably what he would have said.
In other words, everyone had returned to their daily lives.
The only slight difference from usual was that they didn't push their bodies too excessively, whether in sparring or training.
It was noon, with the sun beating down.
Perhaps due to the Salamander's influence, the ambient temperature had been as hot as before for a while.
It had rained a few times, and the humid air raised the level of discomfort.
Of course, it was a humidity that Luagarne would have found quite satisfactory.
She, too, had shown a brief interest in the Dragonkin, but she didn't make an excessive fuss.
As always, the Frog's attention was focused on Enkrid.
The direction of her curiosity had not changed.
It was a time when that Frog had also briefly left to immerse herself in her own training.
On the tenth day, during one of their endlessly repeated spars, Enkrid cut Themares's neck.
Red blood spurted where Dawnforged had passed.
Themares, with his neck half-cut, stabbed Enkrid's heart with his own sword.
Even with a severed neck, the speed and power of his thrusting blade did not diminish in the slightest.
With a puk, the pure white blade pierced through the Will protected by the ironclad technique, cut through the muscle, and split the heart.
Normally, one side should have been protected by Dragon Scales and the other by Beelrog's hide, but that was not the case.
It was because they were competing purely with wits, without scales or armor.
A win or a loss?
That couldn't be determined.
They were doing it for enjoyment, after all.
Naturally, the cutting of necks and stabbing of hearts were virtual.
They were fake.
If it had been real, both would have died.
Just because you're a knight doesn't mean you can live with your heart pierced, and just because you're a Dragonkin doesn't mean you can live with your neck cut.
They had fought in their minds, repeatedly revealing and concealing their intentions through hand and foot gestures, gazes, and sword-gripping stances that were no more than a flinch.
A virtual spar, perhaps.
To fight in more detail, they mixed in hand and foot gestures in the air and showed movements that shifted their center of gravity enough for the other to perceive.
Sweat trickled down Enkrid's back.
At first, he had been manageable, but now he could no longer be called an easy opponent.
Could I win if we fought for real?
Could I kill him?
He would have to try to find out.
In half a month, the Dragonkin had closed the gap in their skills.
And Enkrid had learned just as much.
"It is strange," Themares said, blinking.
The favor held in his vertically slit eyes, called Dragon Eyes, was still there.
"I was thinking the same thing. You're peculiar. Is your insight extraordinary? A racial trait? That last technique, you imbued your entire body with will and thrust as if on auto-reflex, right?"
Was the Dragonkin's insight amazing?
Yes.
And Enkrid was amazing too.
He had seen the technique the Dragonkin had shown in his mind and had grasped its core.
It went beyond not being stingy with teaching; he was not stingy with learning either.
He always saw and accepted everything with an open mind.
Hadn't this very trait blossomed and allowed him to become a knight?
His insight was comparable to a Dragonkin's.
And yet, the Dragonkin's insight was still surprising.
When one becomes a knight, they gain an insight called an eye that sees one step ahead.
A Dragonkin is born with it.
That is why lies do not work on them.
By reading will, they possess a skill close to mind-reading.
Needless to say how useful this was in a fight.
'Orthodox swordsmanship doesn't work.'
That's because Themares's eyes see through deception.
Conversely, the orthodox swordsmanship Enkrid had created was a deceptive art based on solid fundamentals.
'A method of digging into a weak point and thrusting, based on the flowing sword.'
His fundamentals of swordsmanship were solid, but he had pioneered his own style from the beginning.
His insight, an inborn eye, was excellent at identifying his opponent's weaknesses.
Their spar was half swordplay, half conversation.
In that time, Enkrid had also heard why the Dragonkin had remained here.
"My intuition is very sharp. That intuition tells me that if I stay by your side, I can meet it."
A Dragonkin possessed insight.
A being capable of vague precognition.
They held such a mystery.
It couldn't be for nothing that they could change their gender at will and become hermaphroditic beings.
"Meet who?" Enkrid asked.
"The being that interfered with my duty."
There was no chill in the Dragonkin's answer.
No resolve was revealed either.
It was the tone of a scholar listing facts, speaking of something that must be protected.
So, should it be called chilling instead?
He spoke of a set fact as if it were nothing, but if you looked at the other side of it, it made you feel a chill.
Of course, Enkrid was unfazed.
He was a man who wanted to eliminate the entire demon realm.
An armistice ends a war, and an apocalypse means the end of the demon realm.
That is what he wished for.
A man like that could take the Dragonkin's words about meeting and crushing a single demon as nothing special.
"Your intuition is sharp," Enkrid nodded.
Considering the minions of the demon that had come for him, they would come again.
If not, he would find them.
"We do not forget a being that has interfered with our duty," the Dragonkin added.
To them, duty was the reason for living.
It was surprising that he felt interest and fun in a human, but Themares still needed a duty.
He needed a room to find a new duty.
Just as he had always done.
But before that, a Dragonkin collects the price from the one who interfered with his duty.
This, more than anything else, was the priority.
Besides that reason, Themares had remained here because his heart had been moved.
That in itself was nothing short of amazing, even to the Dragonkin himself.
Of course, no one here thought of it as anything special.
"What did you expect from his demonic charm?"
"He is a man who can even charm the goddess of fortune."
To borrow the words of Rem and Audin, Enkrid was this kind of man.
In the afternoon, Krais, who had been watching the spar, asked, "You're not planning to gather all the races, are you?"
A knight order with a half-giant, a Frog, a beastkin, a Dragonkin, an elf, and humans.
Of course, the Dragonkin was not an official member of the knight order, but in Krais's eyes, he seemed to be seeping into the knight order like rain on dry ground.
'It would be nice if he seeped into the salon, too.'
Well, if not, then not.
"Shouldn't we change the name to the Inter-species Knight Order?"
It was a joke.
"And I heard from Esther…"
Krais is busy.
He had no reason to visit so often without a purpose.
"Spit it out."
Esther had discussed a crisis.
Moreover, she had even predicted the timing of the visitor's visit with considerable accuracy.
Because of that, Krais had lost sleep for about three days.
This anxiety, no matter how much he suppressed it, constantly raised its head.
The anxiety he had suppressed while awake came out in his dreams.
It was a dream where the city was burning and several magicians in black robes were capturing citizens and locking them in an underground laboratory.
The content was so specific that it was even more unsettling.
In his dream, Krais had also learned the reason for the experiment and had seen the future fifty years from now.
The Border Guard had become the second womb of the devil, and a new devil was born here.
'The Demonic Devil of Charm.'
It was an evolved version of a succubus, a dream demon that bewitches people with just a look.
It was a shitty dream.
That was why.
Krais, engulfed in anxiety, had taken various measures.
The words he was now relaying to Enkrid were also about that.
"I've informed everyone of their positions and what to do. Esther spoke with conviction, but if things go south, you'll have to respond on your own."
Krais had done his job while beating his anxious heart—he had actually been hitting his chest and had been caught and lectured by Luagarne.
***
And so, another three days passed.
A black shadow once again cast itself over the Border Guard.
Naturally, most of the citizens and regular soldiers didn't even know what was happening, but a shadow had come to the city.
In a way, it was an opponent more troublesome than the Salamander.
After returning to the city, Enkrid had not devoted himself to training at full strength.
His spars with the Dragonkin, while they crossed the line in his mind, were restrained in person.
It was the same for the others.
Of course, to an ordinary person, it would seem like a crazy thing to say, but by Enkrid's standards, it was so.
He was scratching his cheek where a scab had formed from a scrape by Baek-a—the Dragonkin's sword's name—when a member of Esther's magic unit came to him.
"They've come," he said.
The tone was not urgent, but the meaning contained in the words with the missing subject was clear.
"Jaxen?"
"Sir Jaxen has already moved."
"Let's go."
Enkrid threw on another hooded cloak over his own and headed out of the city.
He passed the training ground, left the inner castle, and walked without rest through the well-paved road to the outer castle gate.
He hid his face as he went, and those he knew, he passed with only a look.
"All clear on duty, and you, this way."
Only a very few personnel knew that Enkrid was leaving.
The one guarding the gate today was the chief of security.
Vengeance nodded to Enkrid.
He was one of the few who knew Enkrid was leaving.
His mission was to come out on the pretext of checking on the duty posture, deliberately call Enkrid out, and let him leave.
"Is the kid growing well?"
Enkrid asked as he passed.
"Very much."
A smile naturally formed on the speaking Vengeance's face.
Enkrid had seen Vengeance's child in passing.
What would that child become when he grew up?
Protecting that child and people like him, those who stood behind him.
Enkrid knew his job well.
With the short conversation with Vengeance at an end, he stepped outside the city walls.
The Dragonkin followed behind him.
"You look like your blood is boiling, Enki," said Themares, who had come to call him by a nickname in just a few days.
"I've told you several times, you don't need to say everything you see, Themares."
The Dragonkin's social adaptability was not that great.
He said everything he saw.
"That beastkin doesn't wash because she dislikes revealing the scent of fear."
For example, he would dig into Dunbakel's wound so casually.
"This salamander bastard?"
Of course, Dunbakel had fought back.
"That elf has lived for a very long time. If we were to count the years…"
"Have you ever seen such a rotten potato sprout of a Dragonkin?"
There had been such incidents.
"That witch, too, though she is human, the days she has lived…"
He had also spoken easily to Esther and had shown the feat of cutting through D'Mulle's Blizzard with Baek-a.
Esther had stopped the Dragonkin's mouth with her actions, not her words.
Well, he was gradually getting used to this kind of thing.
At the place where Enkrid was heading, the older Esther was waiting.
A witch who was not as old as Shinar, but clearly older than himself.
As soon as Esther saw Enkrid, she said, "Your eyes look strange."
Enkrid vaporized his thoughts and asked back, feigning ignorance, "Mine?"
Rem, who had joined with almost no time difference, said, "I told you, the commander's eyes go strange sometimes."
Enkrid ignored Esther's strange gaze and asked Rem, "Are the others in their positions?"
Rem nodded and replied, "In their positions."
Krais believed that in a fight or a battle, the one who is properly prepared before it begins, wins.
Esther also agreed with that.
Originally, magicians and witches were those who prepared.
A prepared magic is several times more dangerous than one that is simply cast.
Through Esther, all of the Madmen Knight Order knew that fact well.
Krais had said to Enkrid with hollow eyes, "If you can pierce beyond such an opponent's expectations, the blade you draw in that moment will be a sharper dagger than any other."
Preparation is in the realm of prediction and speculation.
A magician's inspiration can receive all of that as something close to a premonition, but…
"Esther is more outstanding than the ones coming now, right? That's the premise."
Krais is a genius.
Esther, in her own way, agreed with that statement.
He had devised a strategy with Esther's abilities also in the realm of his calculations.
"Coming out to greet us?"
It was a wide land, having left the Border Guard and the main road.
A land close to a wasteland, so dust occasionally rose.
In front of it, an old man in a gorgeous white robe embroidered with gold thread spoke.
About a dozen people in gray robes followed behind him.
Esther had predicted the movements of the magician who was targeting her.
Krais, worried about the demon's machinations and retaliation, had heard about the mad spellcasters targeting Esther and had prepared.
"What can they do?"
Krais had asked, and Esther had told him what she knew.
Because she had rich experience dealing with them in the past, Esther knew a lot.
More than what Krais wanted.
"Commander."
Krais had immediately called Enkrid and then even Abnaier and had held a strategy meeting.
He had also asked Esther again.
"What is a magician's weakness?"
Astrail.
A gathering with the meaning of a group that chases the stars.
Esther had said it.
Magicians are originally beings who do not know how to get along.
"They are arrogant," she had said.
They were beings who would not think that they would be struck down by a mere blade.
Esther had said they would think that way, and Krais's eyes, hearing those words, had sunk like something precipitated in a cup of water.
The light in his eyes had dimmed, and he had repeated his thoughts in his head.
The genius, engulfed in anxiety, had recognized the magician's weakness.
After that, the first person he had sought out was Jaxen.
***
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