Chapter 943 - Natural Enemy
"Hooooo."
Rem exhaled a long breath, his eyes falling half-shut.
Through slitted eyelids, his gaze seemed to lose focus.
The nature of the Divine General Aramudeng was stoic and impassive.
'Respiration of the Deep Sea.'
Drawing breaths long and thin, conserving stamina to stave off exhaustion.
'Patience of the Turtle.'
Forging a body and mind that remained unshaken by almost anything.
It was perfect for enduring.
But only for enduring.
'The efficiency is garbage.'
It was a fascinating parallel.
The thought process of the female Ferryman in Enkrid's memory and Rem's current thought process were flowing in the exact same direction.
Efficiency.
The art of fighting an enemy while minimizing your own losses and maximizing theirs.
His thoughts accelerated, drawing a grim conclusion.
'I can't just endure; I have to crush them.'
Aramudeng possessed as much raw strength as Bodremoe.
However, it severely dulled his combat perception.
In exchange, it fortified his skin, bones, and internal organs to a level comparable to Audin's Holy Light Armor, but a flaw was still a flaw.
'Combine them.'
He went beyond merely housing two Divine Generals simultaneously; he began cross-weaving their distinct traits.
It was a leap forward born from a split-second inspiration.
The epiphany struck his brain, showing him the path forward.
Overwhelming confidence surged, morphing into a sense of absolute omnipotence.
Right or wrong didn't matter.
If it had to be done, he would do it.
'Don't die; save everyone.'
He would keep the promise he made to his wife.
He would not let her desperate wish crumble.
'Even if I assimilate with Silence, I just have to win and go back.'
Though, before that, he owed the Captain a proper axe dance.
He wove the hyper-sensitivity of the Wrathful Bird into the stoic endurance of Aramudeng.
The Wrathful Bird was consumed by rage precisely because it was more sensitive to everything than any other spirit.
Not long after Enkrid lost consciousness, Rem pushed past his limits.
By half-closing his eyes, he deliberately surrendered half his vision, hyper-amplifying his remaining senses.
Top left.
Bottom right.
Overhead.
Underfoot.
He perceived every incoming attack in perfect sequence and swung the axes in his hands.
With every line he carved through the air, chunks of monster flesh were cleanly amputated and sent flying.
Pitch-black vines that slithered out to snatch his ankles were severed, detonated, and pulverized.
Black slime sprayed in every direction.
The viscous liquid splattered against the earth and immediately seeped in.
The ground seemed to actively drink the black sludge, a grim visual metaphor confirming that this battle had no end in sight.
Whenever the slime seeped into the earth and vanished, a new monster was birthed in the distance.
It was an unbreakable rule of this realm.
This was the conclusion he reached while enduring with Aramudeng and observing with the sensitivity of the Wrathful Bird.
'Faintly...'
He could sense something lurking far in the distance, but he failed to accurately pinpoint it.
"These bastards aren't even fit for dog food."
The reason Dunbakel cursed from behind him was the exact same reason Rem failed to observe the entity.
'There are just too damn many of them.'
The sheer number of monsters packing the area in front of them only multiplied; it never decreased.
One, two, three, five, eight.
They multiplied following a specific pattern.
The species remained consistent, and their attack patterns barely changed, but the wave simply never broke.
'An endlessly crashing tide.'
That was the enemy's greatest weapon.
"So what?"
Rem mimicked Enkrid's tone as he swung his axe.
He ducked under the forearm of a Troll that had just launched a punch at his face, sweeping his left axe up to cleanly sever the beast's arm just above the elbow.
Using the momentum, he spun his body and brought his right axe down in a devastating vertical chop.
His flank opened up, his entire musculature contracting violently.
It was an axe strike imbued with the combined might of two Divine Generals.
Boom!
The Troll, taking the hit straight to the crown, didn't just split—it detonated.
Hardened chunks of flesh blasted outward like shrapnel.
Rem didn't stop.
He spun like a top, manifesting a literal storm of steel with his twin axes.
He hurled himself straight into the heart of the enemy horde.
He fought, and fought, and fought.
Had any bard witnessed his battle right now, they would have composed a song on the spot.
They would have understood exactly why knights were called walking calamities, and witnessed firsthand how legends were born.
That was how spectacularly Rem fought.
Wielding his two axes, he chopped, cleaved, and shredded massive monsters into dozens of pieces.
He achieved this by housing Aramudeng in his core and wrapping the Wrathful Bird around his arms.
Was Dunbakel just sitting idle behind him?
Absolutely not.
With Enkrid unconscious at her back, she held the line and endured the onslaught.
It wasn't a long time chronologically, but in battle, even a few seconds can feel like an eternity.
Then, Enkrid finally woke up.
Just as Dunbakel was seriously considering biting him to force him awake, his eyes snapped open.
Enkrid surveyed the carnage Rem and Dunbakel had wrought.
The ground was coated in a black, viscous sludge, like coagulated, centuries-old grease.
Was the earth here always like this?
No.
Because they had slaughtered so relentlessly, the ground was saturated with the black slime—the 'blood' of the monsters unique to the Demonic Realm of Silence.
It was the result of their kill rate vastly outpacing the earth's ability to absorb the gore.
"How long was I out?"
It hadn't been sleep so much as a dead faint, but Enkrid asked as he tightened his gauntlets.
"Long enough to finish a whole bottle of booze," Dunbakel replied.
The monsters surrounding them were still ever-present, but they had managed to carve out a slight breathing room.
Rem must have gone absolutely berserk.
The hand of the man casually tossing out jokes was trembling faintly.
Had he overtaxed his body by detonating his shamanic power in such a short burst?
Almost certainly.
His sole purpose had been to protect their backs.
To protect the city, and to protect his unconscious Captain, he had fought like a demon.
'The Root. No, what is Silence, exactly?'
He finally understood its true origin.
The monsters he saw in the memory and the ones swarming them now were similar, yet different.
'But the core is identical.'
The flower that birthed the Behemoths.
The colossal plant.
Silence was a collective formed by a single monster manipulating its own mass.
It was the many, yet it was an individual; it was an individual, yet it was the many.
The physical manifestation he had seen earlier looked like a twisted garden forged from the Demonic Realm's trees and flowers.
'The Demonic Garden.'
It was a rather fitting alternate name for Silence.
"Dunbakel, find a specific scent."
"What kind?"
"Assume the stench of rot right now is an intentional smokescreen to hide something. Find what's being hidden."
It was a vague order, but what else could he do?
Even the Ferryman in the memory had failed to locate the core of Silence.
She had lost every last one of her comrades, and only at the very end did she realize the technique to destroy the 'hands and feet' spawned by the collective-individual monster.
She made her choice, pushed forward, and took responsibility, but she was a little too late.
Enkrid felt a fragment of the Ferryman's true inner thoughts.
Was it a grudge, or a long-cherished desire?
Or perhaps it was regret, or lingering attachment?
Whatever it was, she desperately wished to obliterate the monster known as the Root, or Silence.
'I will grant that wish for you.'
Whether it was regret or a dying wish, it didn't matter.
Enkrid empathized with the Ferryman's sorrow, with the agonizing emotions she had endured.
He empathized with every frantic moment of struggling to hold onto what she loved, knowing that once lost, it could never return.
At Enkrid's command, Dunbakel flared her nostrils.
Her sense of smell vastly outclassed that of an average beastkin.
When it came to detecting anything, she was the undisputed best in the Knight Order.
Of course, in the current situation, even her nose was functionally useless.
"The stench of rot is so overwhelming I can't smell a damn thing," Dunbakel grumbled.
"Right. That means we move to a place where it doesn't smell. Put Rem on your back," Enkrid replied matter-of-factly.
If something doesn't work, you keep trying until it does.
To rephrase his order: if it's too hard to distinguish scents here, they just needed to move to a spot where she could.
It was an incredibly ignorant, yet brutally straightforward mindset that would eventually force a result.
You could call it the foundational philosophy of the Madmen Knights.
"What?"
Dunbakel tilted her head.
She was perfectly accustomed to the Madmen Knights' brand of logic.
However, she asked for clarification because the implication behind Enkrid's words was starkly obvious.
Even if Rem had gone on a solo rampage, and even if Enkrid fought better than him, the sheer wall of monsters blocking their path hadn't thinned in the slightest.
Yet, his tone implied he had decided to fight them all by himself.
They say a true knight can slaughter a thousand, but that's only possible when the situation allows for it.
Furthermore, were the monsters in front of them human?
Every single one of them was a nightmare capable of devastating the outside world.
If that dragon swung its tail just once, dozens of ordinary people would be instantly reduced to bloody pulp.
Dunbakel had blocked its strikes a few times with her scimitar and even managed to slice it like a lizard's tail, but they were by no means easy prey.
And there were simply too many of them.
To make matters worse, as time dragged on, the monsters' bodies seemed to be hardening.
For a while now, hitting them felt like striking an armored shell made of solid iron.
That applied not just to the dragons, but even to the oversized ghouls.
"Rem, catch your breath and assist Dunbakel."
Enkrid paid absolutely no mind to her internal panic.
He had already shifted completely into a combat stance.
The moment the words left his mouth, he executed his plan.
He sprinted forward, throwing a punch.
Thud!
Dunbakel blinked.
The initial clash didn't look much different from before he passed out. Enkrid smashed a dragon's tail aside with his fist and rolled smoothly to the side.
His cape wrapped tightly around his body.
As if he had rigorously trained specifically for rolling sideways, he built fierce momentum, grabbed the leg of an ogre, violently wrenched it in the opposite direction, and shattered the joint.
Crack, Crunch.
The sound of bone and cartilage snapping was horrific, yet there was no scream.
Even if their exterior was as hard as an iron shell, a knight wielding Will possessed the monstrous strength to crumple solid steel with their bare hands.
As long as the target possessed a clearly defined structure like a joint, breaking it was inherently easier than tearing through raw iron.
Enkrid's combat style was highly efficient for dismantling single targets.
Which meant, in the current situation, it was a highly inefficient method of fighting.
His subsequent actions followed the same pattern.
He rolled across the ground and sprang up.
The cape that had trailed to protect his body retracted.
Spraying the black slime coating his armor in all directions, he met a ghoul's incoming punch with his own fist, shattering the monster's hand.
He then delivered a brutal kick to its ankle, snapping it clean in half.
Throughout all of this, his feet never stopped moving.
Enkrid's movements blurred into afterimages.
If Audin fought with intent to kill, would it look like this?
He was weaving through the monster horde at a speed invisible to the naked eye.
However, fighting like that wouldn't be enough to stop this tide.
Dunbakel knew this.
'You have to grind away more than half their body mass.'
Only then did they stop moving.
She had learned this the hard way after fighting them endlessly.
Dunbakel had concluded they weren't undead.
'The smell is like a rotting corpse mixed into compost, but...'
One thing was certain: they weren't dead beings.
Which made them all the more infuriating to deal with.
Enkrid continued fighting in that same manner until he was suddenly violently repelled backward.
A Cyclops had swung a massive gray club, and he hadn't been able to dodge it in time.
Enkrid rolled backward several times, pushed himself up, and cracked his neck left and right.
"Captain?"
"Ah, I'm fine. Put Rem on your back and follow me. I'm opening a path."
Dunbakel looked at Rem.
Rem spoke with a deadpan expression.
"Piggyback ride, Smelly."
Dunbakel sighed and hoisted Rem onto her back.
From her back, Rem spoke again.
"Focus. He said to find something, so let's find it."
He had no idea what his Captain had seen or experienced while unconscious.
One might normally suspect he had succumbed to a hallucination and been mind-controlled, but neither of them harbored even a sliver of that thought.
If Enkrid was the kind of man to crumble under a hallucination of this level, he would have died a long time ago.
Dunbakel kicked off the ground and chased after Enkrid.
At first, Enkrid had been breaking joints and throwing punches and kicks.
But at some point, he rolled low to the ground and rose with a sword in his hand.
It was his sword.
Night Stroll bled a harsh blue light.
Had he been rolling across the ground specifically to find his dropped weapon this whole time?
She didn't know.
What followed, however...
Even watching it with her own eyes, it was hard to believe.
"Ah."
A gasp escaped Dunbakel's lips.
Rem was equally shocked, but instead of letting his jaw drop, he focused entirely on his breathing.
Because he had recklessly drained his Divine Generals, he was desperately focusing on recovery.
Doing two things at once wasn't unnatural for him, so he managed to be shocked while simultaneously recovering his strength.
Enkrid swung his sword.
It was a brutally simple movement.
A diagonal slash.
It cut into a monster.
It left a shallow wound.
Compared to the beast's massive size, it was equivalent to a minor cut on a human forearm that barely bled.
It looked like a grazing strike across an ogre's foot.
Of course, if a human suffered a wound that size, they would need to apply pressure and bandage it to stop the bleeding.
But these were monsters.
A tiny amount of black slime oozed out before stopping on its own.
The slime coagulated like old grease, sealing the wound instantly.
Unless it was a devastating, full-power sword or axe strike, that was exactly what happened.
Normally, the exchange would end there.
The monster would simply continue its assault.
However, the monster that received that shallow cut suddenly began to vibrate violently, then simply collapsed.
Starting from the wound, a network of deep fissures rapidly spider-webbed across its entire body, and the monster shattered into pieces.
The slime, which had looked like hardened grease, rained down onto the ground like pulverized stone.
Having seemingly grasped the feeling with that first strike, Enkrid sprinted forward without a shred of hesitation.
He cut, and they detonated.
Wave.
The technique the Ferryman had passed down finally saw the light of day.
Of course, Dunbakel couldn't comprehend the mechanics just by watching.
Her subconscious merely interpreted Enkrid's combat and the results of his actions instinctively.
Was the raw destructive power imbued in the sword strike itself that incredible?
'No.'
Dunbakel had eyes.
She looked at the result of Enkrid's actions and reverse-engineered the process to understand it.
'A natural enemy?'
Rem chuckled from her back and spoke.
"Where the hell did he pick up something like that this time?"
"He really is a man who constantly shows us the impossible", Rem muttered.
Dunbakel entirely agreed.
He closed his eyes, woke up, and suddenly started acting as if he were the apex predator of monsters he was seeing for the very first time.
***
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