Chapter 940 - Can you drain the ocean dry?
Rem tucked his axe into his belt and raised both hands above his head.
'Descent, Bodremoe.'
Rem didn't dodge. Watching the dragon's foot plummet toward him, he spread his hands, caught it, and pushed.
If the Sky-Flinger was legendary for striking down a flying deity with a single stone, and Sapsal possessed the power to tear through evil, then Bodremoe was the Divine General capable of gently sweeping aside a mountain.
Though he was born of the Bear's bloodline, he had lived his entire life flowing like a river.
A deafening shockwave erupted, but Rem neither coughed up blood nor was he flattened into the dirt.
He simply deflected the kinetic force to the side.
The dragon's gray foot slammed into the earth right next to him, missing his body by a mere handspan.
'Even a flowing river is terrifying when it rages.'
Without missing a beat, Rem drove the fingers of his left hand straight into the dragon's scales.
Crunch.
The scales were as hard as boulders. No, if anything, they were harder; they certainly weren't yielding. He grabbed his axe with his right hand.
Bodremoe had descended upon his body, and now, another Divine General descended upon his weapon.
'Wrathful Bird, Wrathful Bird.'
A second Divine General.
Rem held back nothing—neither strength nor technique.
If it was time to kill, he used everything at his disposal.
What was the point of holding back?
This was the culmination of ruminating on, refining, and tempering the realizations Enkrid had helped him unlock.
A descent upon his body, and a descent upon his weapon.
Two Divine Generals residing within him simultaneously.
It was a dangerous, makeshift loophole he had agonized over to create.
Rem had forcefully split his shamanic power into two separate streams.
While he couldn't house both spirits within his physical body at the same time, this division allowed him to wield the power of two Divine Generals at once.
It felt like trying to divide a single meal perfectly equally among quintuplets.
'No stray thoughts.'
He severed his idle thoughts and focused.
If Bodremoe granted him the fluidity to deflect the dragon's leg and the monstrous grip strength in his fingers, the Wrathful Bird was a spirit forever consumed by rage, soaring at maximum velocity at all times.
'Even as my feathers are sheared by the wind to become blades, I pray my body remains faster than anything else until the moment I die.'
The two shamanic spells tangled together violently, making him feel as if his internal organs were being wrung dry.
He couldn't hope to sustain this for long.
Enduring the lethal strain on his body, Rem swung his axe.
The blade, possessed by the Wrathful Bird, cleaved through the dragon's ankle.
It was a strike executed in a world of silence.
The sound followed a beat late, completely drowned out by the thunderous crash of the dragon's foot striking the ground.
It was a sound only Rem could hear.
Snip.
Immediately after, the dragon's ankle was cleanly severed.
The Wrathful Bird residing within the axe blade neatly amputated the joint and vanished.
'Release the Bird.'
He released Bodremoe as well and threw himself backward.
What Enkrid had wanted from him was to draw the dragon's attention from the front.
This much was enough.
Was it a stroke of luck?
Because he had come with the other two, he had a brief window to catch his breath.
If he had been alone, he would have had to force his screaming muscles to scale the beast's severed stump and aim for its head.
As long as he had the leeway to breathe, he could safely dissipate the lethal recoil of wielding two Divine Generals.
'Fall back and recover.'
Rem retreated.
This all happened in the frantic fraction of a second after he severed the ankle.
The other two, who had scattered to the flanks, simultaneously launched their counterattack.
***
Enkrid ignored the hallucination of a little girl in a white dress waving at him as she vanished between a gray tree and a boulder that looked like spilled intestines.
'A fake.'
The Demonic Realm known as Silence was fundamentally different from those in the South.
'Does it continuously generate hallucinations?'
If the Southern Demonic Realms exacted a toll from intruders through sensory dulling and oppressive physical gravity, this place used sudden, vivid hallucinations as its calling card the moment one's senses became too sharp.
Visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory—illusions assaulted every sense.
You saw things you never expected to see and heard sounds that weren't really there.
If you wanted to endure in Silence, this was the tax you had to pay.
'Over here.'
How many times had he heard a shout like that?
Among them were several desperate, agonizing cries calling out to him specifically.
He saw a bleeding child, then caught a glimpse of a shadow fleeing frantically through the trees.
All of it was fake.
To top it off, he started smelling fresh blood, and a sickly sweetness coated the inside of his mouth.
'Feels like I just chewed on a handful of hallucinogenic mushrooms.'
Enkrid calmly categorized every sensation.
Accelerating his thought process, he ruthlessly separated the real from the fake.
While doing so, he did what needed to be done.
He raised his gaze, locking onto the entity radiating actual killing intent.
It was the bastard that shook the earth with a single stomp.
Was it going to breathe fire from its maw?
Probably not.
Even with his five senses heightened to their absolute limit and endless hallucinations battering at his sanity, the Will ceaselessly swirling within him kept the blade of his intuition razor-sharp.
That intuition told him the draconic monstrosity glaring down at him would fight using only its physical body.
'Is it a false conviction?'
No.
Distinguishing the real from the fake wasn't difficult.
It was an absolute certainty felt within the realm of his sixth sense.
'It doesn't breathe fire.'
Its fighting style, its method of attack, the scent it exuded—these formed the undeniable basis of his judgment.
-How dare you!
Exaggerating slightly, the dragon spewed the exact same phrase for the forty-sixth time.
A pressure similar to when Themares used the Draconic Tongue bore down on Enkrid's shoulders.
'No, it's weaker than Themares.'
Enkrid made his assessment.
It was easier to shake off than his first encounter with the Draconic Tongue.
His Will of Rejection activated automatically, erecting an invisible, impenetrable barrier.
The dragon's words held absolutely no meaning for Enkrid.
He watched Rem take the hit head-on and cleanly sever the ankle.
Then, Enkrid drew Night Stroll.
'Sharp and piercing.'
Those traits were the very reason for this sword's existence.
Aetri had forged something dangerously close to a Demonic Sword.
'Aetri, I'll put your gift to good use.'
He muttered inwardly and kicked off the ground.
As his body launched forward, he entered a world of soundless pressure.
Simultaneously, he felt a heavy, wind-displacing force closing in on his flank.
A massive gray mass, identical to the foot that had tried to crush Rem, came hurtling toward him.
'It swung two feet.'
The dragon had swung both feet at the exact same time.
Enkrid couldn't see it, but the dragon's two eyes had split, tracking left and right independently.
One eye watched Rem, and the other watched Enkrid.
In that moment, the beast clearly recognized the two most threatening presences on the battlefield.
So, it stomped on Rem with one foot, and smoothly swept the other foot from behind.
The beast was the size of a citadel.
Swinging a single foot sideways turned it into a devastating iron mace hurtling from the enemy's blind spot.
The dragon utilized that perfectly.
That was why it had swung a front paw specifically targeting Enkrid's left flank.
Enkrid couldn't possibly know all of this consciously.
A specific technique simply surfaced naturally in his mind.
'A wrapping kick?'
It reminded him of Audin's kicks—twisting the pelvis to strike from the opponent's blind spot.
It was a move one might expect from a bipedal martial artist, not a colossal dragon.
'Did it learn how to fight?'
Does this bastard actually know martial arts?
These thoughts followed in rapid succession.
Striking Rem head-on while simultaneously utilizing Enkrid's hallucination-riddled senses to smoothly swing a foot at him like riding the wind.
He couldn't help but admire it.
Enkrid twisted his body to the side.
Maintaining his momentum to ascend and aim for the neck, he spun his body a half-turn and brought his sword down.
He mixed his Will into the rotational force.
Every movement was as natural and obvious as breathing.
'Vortex.'
Straight, Heavy, Illusory, Fast, Flowing.
He drew upon the property of 'Heaviness' and infused it with rotation.
Using his left foot as an axis, he generated a vortex and drove the sword down.
In that explosive instant of impact, he shifted his entire body weight.
'Add the Drop.'
The 'Drop' was the anti-giant swordsmanship he had learned in his previous dream from the blonde woman he presumed to be the Ferryman.
The core principle was loading maximum kinetic weight into the movement.
It was a movement that could be called acrobatic, a sword strike that others might revere as a divine technique.
Enkrid executed that divine technique right where he stood.
The swinging sword clashed with the dragon's incoming foot.
Boom!
The air compressed and exploded.
The foot caught in the sword strike split wide open.
Amidst the rupturing flesh of the dragon, Enkrid leaped upward the moment his sword finished its arc.
His target was the neck.
His intent, fueled by vivid killing intent, remained absolute.
'Kill it. Sever the neck.'
The overwhelming pressure formed the shape of a blade, entirely monopolizing the dragon's attention.
At that exact same moment, Rem, having caught his breath, gripped his slings.
Vrrrrrrrrrm!
The sound of the whirling slings was deafening.
It was loud enough to drown out the roar of the battlefield.
The dragon, having lost two feet, let out a scream.
Or rather, it opened its maw as if to scream, but no sound emerged.
There was no sound, but just witnessing the devastation was enough to make one's own ankles ache.
Of course, Enkrid and Rem were entirely unfazed.
As the dragon reacted to the vivid killing intent radiating from Enkrid and Rem, its eyes went wide.
At that moment, a white shadow rose behind it.
The owner of the shadow was the beastkin who had erased her presence and sprinted up the dragon's back.
Her name was Dunbakel.
Her scimitar struck the dragon's head vertically.
Clang! Riiiiiip!
The sound of the blade crushing and splitting the scales as it dug in was horrific.
The noise of the blade dragging all the way down to the base of the neck was exceptionally loud.
Dunbakel wrenched her sword out midway down the dragon's neck.
The beast's blood spattered as a black, viscous slime.
Dunbakel ran down the dragon's back with rapid, tapping footsteps, flipping once in the air before landing gracefully.
Standing up, she wiped her cheek.
The black slime on her cheek smeared, staining her face dark.
Thump, Crack, Crunch.
The dragon's massive body toppled sideways, crushing dozens of gray trees beneath its weight.
While Rem absorbed the force from the front and Enkrid drew its attention, Dunbakel delivered the execution.
They hadn't explicitly discussed it, but it was a perfectly coordinated maneuver right from the start.
"Well, at least the training I put you through paid off, Smelly," Rem said.
"Who trained who?"
"I trained you."
Standing where the dragon had fallen, the two exchanged trivial banter.
Enkrid intended to examine the dragon's scales and anatomy, but as if its role was complete, the creature's body—starting from its eyeballs and spreading to its entire mass—melted into a black sludge, seeping into the ground and vanishing entirely.
"The stench of rot is nauseating," Dunbakel said.
She and Rem also verified that the massive corpse had disappeared.
"So it wasn't a hallucination."
If Enkrid could distinguish hallucinations, so could Rem.
Rem swung his axe like a pendulum as he spoke, casting his gaze deeper into the Demonic Realm.
The fog thickened.
The muddy ground showed not a single speck of dust, even after a citadel-sized mass had collapsed and trees had been crushed.
The earth was soggy, as if someone had poured an ocean of water over rotting soil, and the air was suffocatingly damp.
'You could say it feels like being half-submerged in a lake.'
However, this lake was filled not with water, but with a fog brimming with malice.
The threat felt like a chilling blade pressed against his skin, and the warning signals blaring from every direction rang alarm bells in his mind.
In the midst of this, Enkrid opened his mouth.
"How did you do that earlier?"
He was asking Rem.
His gaze was fixed on him.
Pushing away the dragon's foot while simultaneously severing it.
It was a simple movement, yet it wasn't simple at all.
The shamanic arts woven into it made it incredibly complex.
It was soft yet strong, strong yet soft.
You could call it a technique of the absolute highest caliber.
"You saw that, too?"
The corner of Rem's lip twisted upward.
Asking about a martial technique in the middle of a Demonic Realm was certainly not normal, but for the Madmen Knights, it was just another day.
"You were doing something interesting."
Enkrid's outward demeanor was calm, but his eyes sparkled.
That alone made reading his thoughts effortless.
He was excited.
Rem had fought while simultaneously maintaining two contradictory properties.
It was impossible for Enkrid not to be intrigued.
"Let's try it out after we finish everything here. I've got even more fun stuff up my sleeve," Rem replied with a wicked chuckle.
Even if it wasn't a true, living dragon, they had still just killed a dragon.
Yet, before they had taken even ten steps from where it fell, monsters swarmed them from all directions.
"That's quite a few," Dunbakel muttered.
Enkrid watched the massive shapes poking their heads out through the fog.
One monster identical to the dragon they had just fought; two Cyclopes, smaller than the dragon but still three times Dunbakel's size; three ogres of similar bulk; behind them, five Trolls, eight Manticores, thirteen Minotaurs, twenty-one Owlbears, thirty-four Lycanthropes, and fifty-five Scalers.
Every single one of them was massive.
It was as if they had walked into the dead center of a breeding ground for colossal monsters.
For Enkrid, Rem, and Dunbakel, counting them was child's play.
As he habitually categorized the monsters, he noticed black masses squirming and rising from the ground behind the horde.
"Ghouls this time?" Rem muttered.
Their numbers already neared ninety.
The squirming black masses multiplied, and behind them, a horde easily numbering over a hundred rose up.
This time, they were bloated lizard beasts.
More accurately, they were demonic beasts resembling drakes.
-How dare you!
The monsters roared in unison.
Riiiing—
The air vibrated violently, and the condensed fog pressed down heavily on the shoulders of the three.
Enkrid quietly raised his head amidst the fog.
If they fought like this, they would be annihilated.
Even as knights, they couldn't spend their entire lives endlessly slaughtering an infinitely regenerating horde of monsters.
So, should they stop here?
If they stopped moving simply because death was approaching and there was no escape, that would be the end.
But Enkrid didn't know how to live like that.
"Hold the line."
He commanded, pointing his sword forward.
Night Stroll pushed back the encroaching fog.
A blue mist seeped from Enkrid's lips.
It was the physical manifestation of the Will swirling violently within him.
Rem simultaneously gathered a harsh gray light and aimed it at Silence.
"Let's get to work."
Dunbakel desperately wanted to turn tail and run, but she held her ground.
"We're going to figure something out, right?"
The two who had been waiting beyond the bridge in the fog were now standing right beside him.
In his eyes, that meant they had already cleared the first hurdle.
"We just have to kill them all."
Enkrid answered, and then he fought.
For two full days, they faced an endless, surging tide of monsters.
They forgot the time; they forgot the situation.
All that remained in the world was his sword and himself, himself and his sword.
Then, the enemy and himself, himself and the enemy.
They fought those remaining elements until they thought they would die.
But whenever they killed one, another monster was born behind it.
Can you drain the ocean dry?
You cannot.
That was what Silence was telling them.
***
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