Chapter 941 - Need a Hand?
Occasionally, creeping tree roots would lunge for his throat, and he would sever those as well.
He ran and swung his sword for two full days.
There was nothing but things to cut down in every direction.
Thus, nothing remained in the world but his enemies and himself, his sword and himself.
Enkrid concentrated on the slaughter so intensely that he barely registered the hallucinations anymore.
Intermittently, the Ferryman's phantom would appear and mutter something, but it went in one ear and out the other.
That was how thoroughly he had abandoned everything else to immerse himself in the battle.
"If you stumble here, you will be bound to the Demonic Realm for the rest of your life."
The Ferryman spoke.
Enkrid ignored it.
Night Stroll severed the hamstrings of a ghoul three times his size before splitting its skull.
The blade flowed as smoothly as a river, then abruptly accelerated and gained crushing weight.
It was a swordsmanship that seamlessly chained three distinct nature transformations.
He blended Oara's technique into the mix.
'Connecting Sword.'
Enkrid refined his techniques even as he fought.
There was no end to learning, and that made it exhilarating.
Death constantly licked at his neck, yet Enkrid focused entirely on the moment.
He didn't forget the joy of it.
A faint smile graced his lips as Night Stroll tore across the battlefield.
He pushed off the ground and moved his body.
The sword became the arrowhead; his body became the shaft.
Together, they formed a single arrow that pierced straight through a dragon's torso.
Boom!
The beast, its torso blown open, swung its massive foot in retaliation.
Enkrid swung his blade behind his back, as if bracing himself, catching the strike and pushing it away.
At some point, the monsters had stopped using the Draconic Tongue or even exuding oppressive auras.
Instead, even when their bodies were mangled, they swung their feet and threw their fists.
If asked why, the answer was simply that they had no other choice.
Resorting to pure physical violence was more effective than trying to crush him with presence or voice.
'They don't die.'
The first dragon he faced had died when its neck was severed, but the ones that followed were different.
Their bodies had to be reduced to mincemeat before they truly died.
Did they lack vital organs?
Was that why he couldn't kill them in a single strike?
'If I shred their bodies completely, they die.'
He found a method, so he executed it.
Night Stroll became a falcon snatching its prey.
Taking full advantage of the Connecting Sword, he carved massive trajectories across the earth, unleashing a flurry of high-speed slashes to chop the dragon's body into pieces again and again.
The entire sequence happened in a flash.
As Enkrid dashed past a dragon, black slime mixed with chunks of flesh sprayed across the ground.
Uske, the bottomless well, sustained him.
Induless, the ceaselessly shifting Will, heated his body.
His tempered flesh erupted with the Will housed within.
Night Stroll's blade raced across the earth once more, mincing a Cyclops that dared block his path.
Taking brief pauses to regulate his breathing, he looked ahead.
The number of monsters simply refused to dwindle.
"You've got to be kidding me."
It was Dunbakel's voice.
She had smelled the monsters long before they even appeared.
A deep, rich stench of rot—if one had to describe it, a brewed stench of rot—was the first thing to assault her nose.
It was an astonishing olfactory feat, but that only made it all the more absurd.
She had a premonition that this situation wouldn't end anytime soon.
Both her beastkin instincts and her knight's intuition screamed the same truth.
'This is the law and the rule here.'
Dunbakel thought to herself.
In the world of a Demonic Realm, this was everyday life.
Waves crashed endlessly.
Before they could even finish slaughtering the first wave, a second wave rose up, and behind the second, a third.
Over the course of two days, their numbers had only multiplied.
Excluding a small perimeter around Enkrid, Rem, and Dunbakel, the entire area was choked with monsters sporting writhing tentacles where their eyes should be.
"These bastards are completely giving up on thinking, aren't they?" Rem remarked.
Enkrid entirely agreed.
'They're throwing their bodies at us like weapons.'
They didn't breathe fire like he initially suspected.
There was no bizarre magic either.
They just hurled their massive bodies at them with reckless abandon.
The problem was, there was no end to it.
"I got played," Rem muttered.
It was a realization that hit him simultaneously.
The hallucinations shown at the border were designed to prey on his impatience.
Consequently, they had walked right into the maw of the beast known as Silence.
"I'll carve out a path. You two get out of here," Rem ordered.
Objectively speaking, it was an admission that this was the end of the line, but it wasn't a surrender.
Silence harbored many secrets.
They had managed to unravel a few of them.
If they prepared properly, they could fight a better battle next time.
These bastards feared fighting outside, not inside.
The solution wasn't to resolve this from within, but to crush it from the outside.
Rem's mind was already focused on the conclusion waiting beyond tomorrow.
To reach that point, they couldn't all afford to die here.
"You finish this for me, Captain."
"It'll be lonely going alone, won't it?"
Dunbakel stepped up beside Rem.
The beastkin had made her peace with it.
They were fighting enemies that required destroying more than half their bodies to kill, and their own stamina was bound to hit a wall eventually.
"Go, Captain. I really coveted that face of yours. I should have pinned you down at least once."
Dunbakel bid her farewell in a manner entirely fitting of her.
Naturally, Enkrid had zero intention of turning his back.
His mind raced.
'The black slime felt like tree sap.'
To kill these hulking bodies, striking vital points was useless; they had to grind away more than half their mass.
They didn't breathe fire, but they swarmed endlessly.
As if they formed a single colony, despite their different outward appearances, their behaviors were all identical.
Even the ones that looked like ghouls solely relied on stomping with their feet and crushing with their hands.
Whether it was a dragon, a ghoul, or a Cyclops, regardless of their exterior, their actions were uniform.
The only slightly unique trait was how they occasionally utilized blind spots to launch a limb.
'It doesn't feel like multiple individuals, but rather a single entity wearing different masks.'
Was it like a swarm of bees protecting a queen?
"If the exterior is hard, it means there is something to protect on the inside."
Those were Shinar's words.
Enkrid recalled the memory and muttered it aloud.
It wasn't a profound deduction, but a reflexive response.
Shinar's words had simply popped out of his memory.
Coupled with the hallucinations, it created the eerie illusion that the Fairy was standing right next to him, whispering in his ear.
"Creatures that form a swarm abide by a set of rules."
This wasn't Shinar speaking; it was the process of drawing upon his accumulated experiences from his subconscious and examining them.
Enkrid didn't stop thinking.
"If your thoughts stop, you die."
It was something Krais often said.
Enkrid fully agreed.
'What happens if all three of us pull out right now?'
The Western cities would be ambushed.
Rem didn't want that.
That was why he was staying behind.
And Dunbakel was respecting his decision.
His thoughts accelerated, debating and calculating dozens of possibilities.
Even for Enkrid—who had marched into the Southern Demonic Realm, shattered the Thorbriar Fortress, and experienced all sorts of horrors—this was an unprecedented situation.
"Quit screwing around. This isn't going to end," Rem snapped, reading Enkrid's intent before he even spoke.
He knew this man wouldn't just leave because he was told to.
But if Rem died here today, someone still needed to be there tomorrow to protect.
He finally understood the meaning of his wife's dream.
Ayul had dreamed of the entire city being destroyed.
She had substituted herself for everyone, watching herself die over and over.
In other words, the one dying in her dream wasn't Ayul, but every single person living in the city.
Because Ayul cared for all of them, she had replaced their deaths with her own in the vision.
A dream might just be a dream, but right now, it carried entirely too much weight.
If they failed to stop Silence here, all of that felt like a guaranteed future.
He couldn't let that happen.
Rem resolved to put the Demonic Realm to sleep, even if it meant throwing his own life away.
That was why he planned to accept the proposal Silence had been whispering to him, disguised as an auditory hallucination.
'Become one with me. Then I will halt by your will.'
'Alright, let's play.'
The moment Rem spoke and made his inward resolve, Enkrid also heard a voice.
It was so vivid and overflowing with life that it was hard to dismiss as a mere hallucination.
"Hey, need a hand?"
The voice was somewhat familiar.
It sounded like one of the Ferryman's voices.
Specifically, the voice of the tall, blonde woman wielding a spear, with her hair braided down her back.
"If you managed to notice that much, I see potential in you. You and I need to have a little chat."
With those overlapping words, the world went black.
Thud—
Enkrid dropped his sword.
His posture collapsed, and he crumpled to the ground.
He lost consciousness.
One knee hit the dirt, his arms went limp, and his head lolled to the side.
"...You're passing out here?"
Dunbakel muttered as she caught his falling body.
Rem, who had been right on the verge of letting go of himself, froze.
"What the hell is this?"
Whatever his plan was, it was put on hold.
Dunbakel also scrapped her plan to abandon reason, transform, and fight to the death.
The thick white fur that had just begun sprouting furiously over her legs halted its growth.
She scooped Enkrid up in her arms and immediately bounded backward.
She couldn't afford to grab Night Stroll, so she left it behind.
Rem batted away a dragon's tail that came whipping toward them.
Smash!
The dragon's scales shattered, and black, viscous blood sprayed everywhere.
Rem fell back without even taking the time to wipe the gore from his face.
Finding a brief opening, Dunbakel slapped Enkrid's cheek.
Smack!
The sound was sharp, but Enkrid remained limp and unresponsive.
Next, she brought her elbow down hard on his head.
Thump!
It was a loud, heavy blow.
Yet, Enkrid didn't wake.
She was absolutely not taking revenge for what he had done to her earlier.
"Rem!"
"Hold the line!"
Dunbakel's shout carried an implicit question, what do we do now?
Rem couldn't make a decision easily.
If he gave up now, Enkrid would die.
'That damn bastard Captain.'
He ground his teeth.
Whatever he decided, he needed time to think.
'Do we retreat here?'
Would these bastards let them go that easily?
As if to block their escape route, they had been packing the rear tightly for a while now.
From a bird's-eye view, the monster horde would look like a massive ring entirely encircling the three of them.
Rem grasped their formation without even needing to look.
Given their sheer numbers, any other formation would be impossible anyway.
This insane horde of monsters marching on the city was a massive problem, but escaping right now was equally difficult.
He didn't feel like they were going to die right here, but if they just kept holding out like this, it felt like there would be no other outcome but death.
'The hallucinations...'
The thin fog filling the area relentlessly forced hallucinations upon them.
It scrambled their senses to compromise their judgment.
'Disgusting bastards.'
It certainly lived up to the name Silence.
The bastards had become a soundless prison, suffocating them from all sides.
Rem steadied his breathing and gripped his axes.
Whatever the long-term plan, their immediate priority was surviving the crashing wave.
You have to be alive to think.
More importantly, he still had some power left in reserve.
He couldn't say he had plenty of leeway, but he had enough to buy them some time and put everything on hold.
"Come at me."
Rem growled, invoking a Descent.
It was the turn of the Walking Turtle, Aramudeng.
Even when all are swept away by the crashing waves, he alone treads the ocean floor to forge a path.
On the day the Great Flood came, he walked alone upon the drowned earth, weaving a chain to connect the two walls.
It was the Divine General who held both ends of the chain he had forged, enduring for over thirty days to block the surging waters.
He drew out his breath, long and thin, adopting the respiration of the deep sea.
A gray light rippled through Rem's eyes like waves.
***
The moment his eyes closed, Enkrid plunged into a hallucination.
It hadn't actually happened, but it was an entirely plausible outcome.
Even though he recognized it as a hallucination, a piece of a dream, it was a moment of 'what could have been' that was difficult to ignore.
"Shit!"
Rem exploded in a fit of rage, and Dunbakel fought after discarding all reason.
The two pushed past their limits.
He did the same.
He triggered the five nature transformations in rapid succession, blending them flawlessly into Oara's Connecting Sword.
Holding his breath, he danced a blade dance amidst the colossal monsters.
He didn't spare his Will.
He became intoxicated by the sensation of omnipotence.
They held out like that for ten days, until they were finally surrounded by a horde of ogres, and a gray vine ensnared his ankle.
If Uske was a bottomless well, Silence was an entire ocean.
Enkrid's limits were reached first.
He hadn't lost in terms of willpower, but the difference in sheer endurance was undeniable.
He was struck by an ogre's massive fist, his ribcage caving in.
A shattered rib pierced his heart, bursting it.
It was a death that would have sent Luagarne into hysteria.
Naturally, because it was only a 'what could have been', it was a death that hadn't actually occurred.
The scene warped, and he saw himself standing on the deck of a ship.
He was still inside the hallucination.
An unwritten future was currently playing out.
This time, he was merely an observer, looking down at his dream-self standing on the boat.
"Tsk."
The Ferryman standing opposite him clicked their tongue.
They seemed deeply displeased about something.
In that instant, Enkrid was violently pulled from the hallucination.
The surroundings scrambled, crumbling and scattering like a sandcastle washed away by a wave.
When the world reformed, Enkrid found himself standing in the center of a clearing in the woods.
"Hey."
A voice called out to him from a few steps ahead.
Blonde hair braided down her back, piercing green eyes.
She stood more than a head taller than him, with large hands and large feet.
The smile on her face pulled the corners of her mouth up so high that one could easily call her expression jovial.
"Is there ever a right answer to a choice? Hard to tell, isn't it?"
The woman spoke again.
No, she asked.
Enkrid didn't answer; he just stared at her silently.
He didn't ask who she was.
Some things are understood without needing to be spoken.
'The Ferryman.'
More accurately, a piece of the Ferryman.
One of the Ferrymen.
***
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