A Knight Who Eternally Regresses Novel - Chapter 655

Chapter 655

“Were you not planning on encountering a spirit?”
Jaxon inquired. In moments of genuine astonishment, his manner of speaking frequently slipped into a casual roughness. Despite being perched on the roof, his words sliced through the atmosphere with precision. There was a palpable weight to his voice—a sensation akin to a freezing blaze.
Frigid, yet radiating intensity. It was a direct provocation.
His gaze was fiery, though his tone remained hushed and piercing.
“A monster stood in its place instead.”
Enkrid’s response remained flat, regardless of Jaxon’s intensity. Perhaps a hint of confusion colored his words, but nothing more.
“And?” Jaxon demanded.
“…I threw everything I had into the strike and ended its life.”
In a different setting, he might have chosen a different way to speak. Nowadays, he was capable of offering intricate details—the days of him sounding like a rambling lunatic were over. He had refined the way he processed the world.
However, such sophisticated dialogue didn’t feel right when standing before individuals whose internal energy was as jagged as a blade. Habit took over, and he fell back into the blunt patterns he once used with Ermen.
It wasn’t as if this group would take offense to such brevity.
“That sounds about right,” Ragna remarked, rising to his feet.
Moving forward with measured strides, Ragna unsheathed his weapon.
*Shiiing.*
The sound was crystalline and sharp, like the cracking of winter ice.
He cast the sheath aside with his left hand, locking both palms around the hilt.
“Step back, you pouting brat. It’s my turn now.”
During Enkrid’s absence, it appeared Ragna had come into possession of an exceptional blade. The metal gave off a pale cerulean glow, reminiscent of a clear morning sky.
The weapon was a composite of Valerian steel, Noir iron, and refined silver.
It was a massive, weighty thing—consistent with his previous heavy sword—perfectly suited to his physical power.
The world called him a divine prodigy, a true genius. Currently, the competitive spark in his eyes was naked and unashamed. He felt no need to mask his bloodlust.
Enkrid watched Ragna closely, and the latter spoke.
“If your defense fails here, you’re a dead man.”
In the world of high-stakes swordsmanship, the loss of a limb was a standard tuition fee. That was the philosophy Ragna lived by.
He spoke with a heavy seriousness, yet a faint grin tugged at the corner of his mouth—a cocktail of hunger, thrill, and the reckless joy of a youth who loved the fray.
Enkrid could decipher the older boy’s heart just by looking at his stance.
He had always possessed a certain intuition for such things, but his time among the fairies—masters of suppressing their inner selves—had only made his perception more acute.
Given the sheer enthusiasm Ragna was projecting, Enkrid asked a genuine question.
“I assume you aren’t planning on holding anything back?”
Ragna’s answer was delivered through the sword.
There was no telegraphing, no wind-up—just a sudden, violent lunge that seemed to puncture the very air.
*Clang!*
Enkrid snapped Penna into a vertical guard, catching the strike on the flat of his blade before leaping to the side.
*Boom!*
The atmosphere groaned as Ragna’s follow-up strike—a pre-planned execution—tore through the space Enkrid had occupied a millisecond prior.
The initial pierce was immediately followed by a heavy cleave.
None of these blows lacked weight. Yet, to an observer, Enkrid appeared to be dancing away with effortless grace.
He anticipates, then he acts.
Should a variable change, he adjusts his mental map instantly. If finesse fails, he meets power with raw strength. Even when the move looks strained, the end result feels like a natural part of his rhythm.
He was rewriting his strategy in the middle of the heartbeat.
It was as if he was calculating every floating leaf and gust of wind while remaining perfectly calm within the storm.
But how could a person manage that?
Standard logic says if you look at the stars, you can’t see the stones at your feet. Enkrid, however, seemed to be observing both simultaneously.
He turned accidental scrambles into what looked like destiny.
His perspective on the duel was macro-level, seeing the whole board at once.
In any other context, this would be an impossibility. But seeing it happen in real-time left no room for skepticism.
Rem had already seen the conclusion before the clash truly escalated.
Before Enkrid’s return, a fight between Rem and Ragna would end in a stalemate ten times out of ten. They were too evenly matched to find a gap. If Rem couldn’t find a way through, Ragna was unlikely to fare better.
The Wavebreaker Sword style was a wall; it didn’t permit a counter-attack. Every move was neutralized. Even Ragna’s raw power wouldn’t shatter it. The duel would simply devolve into a test of who collapsed from exhaustion first.
Stubborn and unmoving.
And when that exhaustion set in, the bottomless spirit of the defender would consume any fool who persisted.
When Rem had sparred with Enkrid, it felt like being sucked into a bog. A slow, inevitable sinking.
That was Enkrid’s vision of combat: seizing the opponent by the heel and dragging them into the depths until the very terrain favored him.
Rem had witnessed it. Now, Ragna was feeling it.
*I am going to be defeated.*
Ragna’s innate genius skipped the middle steps and went straight to the realization. If the momentum didn’t break, he would eventually fall.
The moment that realization struck, Ragna adjusted his center of gravity.
He had used this particular technique against Rem once before—a move that bordered on the unavoidable.
He coiled every muscle fiber and channeled his entire Will into a singular, downward execution.
On paper, it was a basic, fundamental greatsword strike. To the person standing in its path, however, it was something else entirely.
It was like a bolt of lightning flung by a deity.
The move was inspired by the way Enkrid focused his Will into a single point, but Ragna had reforged it into his own brutal language.
To Ragna, it was simply the ultimate swing.
He widened his base and hoisted his arms high. It happened in the blink of an eye. The telegraph was so minuscule that a defense was almost impossible to coordinate.
In a duel where a single breath determined life or death, even a veteran could usually only see the next immediate step.
This was why knights referred to their combat intuition as “foresight.”
But even with a knight’s perception, this moment defied prediction. And even if you saw it coming, your body wouldn’t be fast enough. To dodge was futile; the blade would simply track the movement.
Ragna’s speed on his feet was haunting. He was fast even by the standards of Rem, who had spent his life roaming the boundless western territories.
Backing away wouldn’t save you. When Rem had faced this, he had actually lunged forward at the last second to catch the blade high and halve its momentum.
It was a suicidal gamble. They had nearly killed one another that day, leading them to stop their practice duels. One of them would have ended up in a grave.
Now, Ragna was unleashing that same terrifying strike on Enkrid.
It was the kind of moment that screamed: *No escape.*
“…Damn it.”
Audin whispered under his breath.
Just as Ragna reached the peak of his momentum, Enkrid took a massive leap backward.
It was impossible to tell who moved first—did Ragna commit to the stance, or did Enkrid begin the retreat? The two actions were almost perfectly synced.
Ragna could have pursued and swung anyway. It was a variation he’d built using the foundations of Oara’s Continuous Sword style.
But the impact would be hollow. Enkrid had created exactly enough distance to bleed the move of its lethality.
A tactical withdrawal.
He had read the flow and predicted the geometry of the strike. It brought to mind Acker’s Spiderweb Swordsmanship, yet this was something far more polished.
Acker’s style focused on ensnaring the foe, but Enkrid’s approach was to render the opponent’s existence irrelevant, no matter what they attempted.
Was it just faster cognitive processing?
No. He was running two separate lines of thought at once.
Rem saw it. Jaxon saw it. Now Ragna and Audin saw it too.
Their eyes lit up with realization.
Ragna finally let the strike fly. Enkrid met it by sweeping his short blade in a horizontal arc.
Two weapons saturated with Will collided with a deafening roar.
*BOOM!*
It sounded as though the air itself had been pulverized.
It was as if a lightning bolt from the heavens had been intercepted by a volcanic blast from the earth.
Streaks of sky-blue and lines of pale moonlight crashed together and veered off.
Neither combatant was interested in absorbing the full shock, so the contact was a glancing blow.
It was, after all, a practice match. Both men rebounded a step.
As they crossed paths—one moving left, the other right—a brief silence opened up between them.
That signaled the end of the exchange.
Ragna had burned through nearly his entire reserve of Will. He needed time to breathe. Enkrid, however, looked as though he could go all day.
“Do you wish to proceed?”
Enkrid asked, holding Penna vertically before his eyes.
Ragna stared into Enkrid’s blue gaze for a beat, then lowered his weapon and walked over to stand by Rem.
The sight of Rem and Ragna standing together was almost funny—particularly to anyone who knew how much they had bickered while Enkrid was away.
“Alright, let the two moody brothers step aside,” Audin announced, walking into the center.
His eyes reflected that same primal hunger. A mixture of joy, thrill, and expectation burned in his look.
Had he always been this way? Or had Enkrid’s presence dragged it out of him?
It didn’t matter.
They were all vibrating with a competitive edge, itching to fight like maniacs.
A golden radiance began to shimmer around Audin’s form. It looked like glowing sand, cascading over his torso and flowing back up from his feet. These golden particles were the physical manifestation of his holy power.
“This represents the height of my ability,” he stated.
Audin lunged.
Light erupted from his clenched hand.
*Whoosh—!* The radiance compressed into a needle-thin point and darted toward Enkrid’s head.
It was a punch—launched with a pivot of the left foot and a sharp twist of the hips. Backed by divine energy and a reinforced physique, the strike resembled a lance made of pure brilliance.
*Crash!*
Enkrid parried this as well.
The spear of light wasn’t a single effort. It shattered into a barrage, raining down like a localized meteor shower.
Fists, boots, and grasping fingers sought to find a weakness in his guard.
Enkrid blocked and repositioned, repeating the cycle again and again.
To a casual observer, it looked like Audin was dominating the fight. He was the aggressor, while Enkrid held his ground without yielding an inch.
When Audin finally managed to close the gap for a grapple, Enkrid let go of Penna, seized Audin’s arm, wrenched it, and drove a knee toward his jaw.
*Crack!*
Audin intercepted the knee with his palm, but the momentum allowed Enkrid to leap back and catch Penna before it even hit the floor.
The transition was as smooth as flowing water.
From discarding the weapon to retrieving it—the entire sequence felt choreographed.
Real combat is usually a mess of luck and chance, but Enkrid made it seem like every variable was under his thumb. Even when a plan failed, the recovery looked like it was part of the original design.
He partitioned his mind, accelerated his perception, and fought by solving a thousand equations in a heartbeat.
*I can’t beat him,* Rem thought once more.
Audin was likely coming to the same conclusion.
Even with the most stable divine power of the group, there were fundamental caps on his performance.
From his vantage point, Rem watched. His heavy axe began to vibrate.
The sentient tool whispered to his mind.
*I see. But since you aren’t trying to end his life, I will stay out of it. This is merely a game, after all.*
The axe believed it had the power to kill—but Rem had no interest in that. The weapon mistook his fierce competitive drive for a murderous one.
They were two very different things.
If Rem tapped into the axe’s true, dark potential, he might find a path to victory.
But he didn’t want to go there.
Even in the face of this defeat, he didn’t feel any resentment. If anything, the experience was electric.
Audin seemed to share the sentiment.
“I am beaten,” Audin admitted—the only one among them to voice the loss clearly.
Then, wiped out and dripping with sweat, he asked:
“How does it feel to be back?”
Looking closely, Enkrid had been pushed too. He was drenched in perspiration.
Ragna and Rem were in the same state.
Audin’s question carried a heavy subtext.
In that moment, they all found themselves thinking back to the day Enkrid first appeared as their leader.