A Knight Who Eternally Regresses Novel - Chapter 752

Chapter 752

Closing the gap in an instant, Rem delivered a sharp blow to Roman’s jaw. The hand that had been holding his axe moved with such velocity it left a lingering trail in the air before retracting. It was a strike aimed perfectly at a vulnerable point. A hit that precise should have rattled Roman’s skull and sent him into a heap on the ground—yet he stood his ground. He acted as though the physical trauma simply didn’t exist.

Roman didn’t stop at just taking the hit; he pivoted his frame halfway and threw a heavy elbow strike with the arm holding his greatsword.

*Thud.*

Rem remained composed. There was no cause for alarm. He effortlessly brought his arm up to intercept the strike, then swept Roman’s legs out from under him. The possessed man stumbled to the side and hit the dirt.

“He’s a stubborn one. You sure I shouldn’t just take a limb?” Rem questioned once more.

“If you’ve got the skills to stitch it back on later, be my guest,” Enkrid answered with resolve.

Inside, however, Enkrid was puzzled. Why was Roman here in the first place? And why was he operating without any backup? Had something gone wrong in the city of Oara? That seemed unlikely; he received consistent updates from that location. If Oara had been struggling to contain the lingering threats of the Gray Forest—the demon zone—Enkrid would have stepped in personally. He had tasked Kraiss with monitoring that region so thoroughly that the man had started to grumble.

“I’m only one person, you know,” Kraiss would say.

In truth, Oara had evolved beyond its past. While it wasn’t a central hub guarded by the main imperial roads, it had grown far beyond a typical border outpost. It was the inheritance of Knight Oara, and Crang personally ensured its stability. So what had brought Roman here? Enkrid had his suspicions, but since the man was right in front of him, there was no point in guessing.

“He won’t even lose consciousness,” Rem observed in a flat tone.

Enkrid wasn’t an expert on this specific type of parasitic creature, but the evidence was plain to see. That brownish mass clinging to the top of Roman’s head had to be the core organism. Roman’s eyes were vacant and glassy—he was clearly a puppet being manipulated while his own mind was submerged.

“Do you think he’ll wake up if we rip that thing off?” Enkrid asked.

Rophod offered his perspective on the matter. “I’d give it a fifty-fifty chance.”

Had Enkrid simply been told Roman was dead, would he have just moved on? Or would he have felt the sting of loss? One thing was certain: Enkrid wouldn’t let his resolve falter over this. If there was a chance at salvation, he would take it. You do the very best you can. That was the philosophy he had forged through the brutal cycles the Ferryman had forced him to endure.

The Ferryman had always pushed him into agonizing scenarios, demanding he stay anchored in the “now” rather than drowning in a future of ruin. The man had been like a conductor of trauma, composing a symphony that began with loss, moved through bitterness, and peaked in total despair.

“Will you only feel the weight of regret when everyone you care for is a corpse? Will you scream to go back to the past then?”

During those trials, the Ferryman had been more relentless than ever. And in response, Enkrid had poured himself into his blade. He trained with such intensity, even within his subconscious, that he never broke. If anything, the Ferryman’s torments only served to forge him into something stronger. To an observer, it might have looked like the Ferryman was testing him. Enkrid felt that possibility too, but he didn’t care to debate it or change his behavior because of it. Through all that training, he reached a simple conclusion: Do the best you can.

He had a gut feeling that he had actually learned this unwavering mindset from the Ferryman, as if the man had nudged him toward this realization. He kept that thought to himself, though.

Snapping back to the present, Enkrid called out, “Jaxon, Audin.”

The pinnacle of Enkrid’s revived orthodox swordsmanship—derived from Lua Gharne’s tactical style—was about taking the most effective path in the moment. This situation required the same focus. They needed to extract the parasite. Jaxon was capable of making incisions as precise as peeling fruit, and Audin was the sole member of the group possessing divine energy.

“Rem, pin him down.”

Rem, who had just been trying to shatter Roman’s bones with wild axe swings, immediately adjusted his rhythm. Instead of a killing blow, he moved his axe like a lariat, hooking Roman’s greatsword and slamming it into the dirt.

*Thunk.*

He used his foot to anchor the massive blade to the ground. From there, the process was seamless. Jaxon moved in with surgical speed and sliced the parasite away.

“The Lord’s gaze is upon us,” Audin intoned.

He pressed his hand against Roman’s scalp. Blood had started to spray from the numerous punctures the parasite had left behind, but a flash of white light forced the wounds to close instantly. The struggle ended there. Roman went limp, falling like a marionette whose strings had been severed. Audin caught him by the neck. It looked like he was helping him up, but the grip was firm enough to break his neck if the situation changed.

“You saved his life just so you could hold him like you’re about to end it?” Rem remarked.

Audin gave a small laugh. “It’s a specialized technique that offers both restraint and care.”

“Right. Specialized technique, my foot,” Rem snorted.

Nearby, Ragna let out a massive yawn that made his jaw pop. He didn’t seem worried at all.

“What’s the plan for those things?” Pell asked, gesturing toward the treeline.

Organisms identical to the one that had taken Roman were crawling out from the brown woods. The trees themselves turned out to be part of the creatures’ bodies. These brown masses began to slink forward, moving like a tide of living sludge.

“What do you think we’re going to do?” Rophod snapped at Pell. The mission was to purge the area, wasn’t it?

“Those are my fiancé. This is making me nauseous,” Shinar said with a playful whimper, hiding behind Enkrid. Rem looked ready to snap at her, but he held his tongue. Enkrid noticed the restraint.

“You’ve matured, Rem,” he said with a nod of approval.

Rem shot him a look of pure annoyance. “Ugh, would you just shut your mouth for a second? Do you ever stop talking?”

Rem wasn’t one to lecture others on talking too much, but as the leader, Enkrid just gave him a knowing look. *Look who’s talking.* Rem chose to ignore it.

As they watched the swarm of parasites approach, Rophod and Pell stepped up side-by-side. If you let your guard down for even a second, you’d end up as a meat-suit for one of these things. They were lethal.

“Should we just cut through them?”
“Want to burn it down?”
“Let’s go with fire.”

They weren’t intimidated.

“Watch where you put those flames,” Shinar warned. Mental trauma isn’t easily discarded, and fire was still a source of fear for her. However, she wasn’t just a typical fairy; she was slowly moving past her history. “Just use it with care,” she added.

As the parasites, now looking more like piles of mud, lunged forward, Pell and Rophod began systematically dismantling them. Soon after, they set the forest that spawned them ablaze. It was a small grove, and once the fire took hold, the rest of the structure crumbled like a pile of rot. At one point, the heart of the colony—a massive worm—slithered out. Pell unleashed a strike that echoed the fluid arc of Enkrid’s Vortex. A single, devastating hit was Pell’s trademark as well, even if it lacked Enkrid’s ultimate refinement.

The worm continued to twitch even after its head was split open. In the end, only the flames finished it.

“Allow me,” Lua Gharne said, stepping up to strike it with a whip of fire.

They had neutralized a demon zone in less than half a day. Part of that was due to the zone’s limited size, but mostly it was because their collective strength was far beyond the norm. Once the area was clear, Audin hoisted Roman onto his back, and the group set off for their next target: another demon zone.

Toward the southern reaches, these “minor demon zones” were numerous. Destroying them one by one was essentially a loud challenge to Balrog. They eventually set up a makeshift camp, and it was there that Roman finally came to. He blinked against the light and looked at Enkrid.

“Did you end up dead too?” he croaked.

There was a moment of silence as the reality of the situation was explained.

“Ah.”

Roman sighed and began to recount his own recklessness. It was a classic story of defiance—a desperate bid to force his way onto the path of a knight.

“My growth had hit a ceiling. Years were slipping by while I stayed exactly where I was. I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore.”

He had made a radical choice. After clearing out most of the threats in the Gray Forest, Roman felt like he was rotting. To break through that wall, he needed a change. He had struck out alone, and that was how he discovered that people were still surviving in the “no-man’s-lands” between nations. He had reached that place mostly through sheer luck; even Enkrid had nearly died fighting a Cyclops in similar territory.

So, had he been fighting for the sake of those people?

“No, it was pure ego. I had this delusional hope that if I just kept throwing myself into demon zones, I’d find the spark I needed.”

His successes in the Gray Forest had given him a false sense of security. But if you march in the wrong direction without looking down, you eventually step off a cliff. The road to knighthood isn’t some paved highway. The silver lining was that after Roman fell, someone had been there to catch him. It was a foolish move, but everyone in the group could sympathize with that drive. Enkrid, especially, understood that desperation perfectly. He couldn’t bring himself to lecture the man.

Very few people in the group were inclined to be gentle, however.

“That was moronic,” Rem stated.
“Completely,” Ragna chimed in.

Jaxon didn’t even look up; he was busy sorting through pebbles and tucking them into his gear.

“Do you have no faith? If you walked with the Lord, He would have illuminated the way for you,” Audin added.

Roman’s errors were laid bare, not by Enkrid, but by the rest of the crew.

“Sounds like you were lazy with your drills,” Pell said, displaying his typical fixation.
“Bravery is fine, but there’s no logical reason to tackle a demon zone without a squad,” Rophod noted.

Roman looked around at the diverse group. “Who are you people supposed to be?”

“The Order of Knights,” Enkrid replied.

Roman began to recognize some of the faces. It clicked. The Mad Order of Knights. He knew he’d been an idiot, and he knew they were the ones who had pulled him back from the brink. He tried to stay quiet, but the banter continued around him.

“My fiancé… if I ever got stuck in a demon zone, you’d come for me, right?”
“Why would you ever go in alone?”
“To feel alive again, obviously. When that monster grabbed me, I kept imagining you coming to save me.”
“Didn’t I tell you to turn around the second you got there?”
“You have to learn to interpret a woman’s words correctly. Also, I’m kidding. Do I look like a potato that can’t even sprout?”

A “potato that can’t even sprout” was a fairy idiom. In the common tongue, it was basically calling someone a complete dunce. Roman didn’t catch the nuance, but Rophod was happy to explain the insult.

“That’s more information than I needed,” Roman grumbled.
“Is it now?”

Then Rem joined the fray, followed by the others. Hearing them tear into him like that made a strange heat rise in Roman’s chest.

“The parasite only took hold because your spirit was soft.”
“Weak mind, weak body.”
“You’re too big to have such sloppy fundamentals.”
“An idiot is just an idiot.”

The gray-haired Rem, the blond warrior, the giant priest preaching about the Lord, the guy obsessed with rocks—they all had something to say. Then Teresa, the half-giantess, walked over.

“Did you at least have a strategy?” she asked, seemingly out of genuine curiosity.

“You absolute bastards…” Roman finally boiled over.

He knew he’d been reckless—but could they really not see the frustration that drove him to it? Did they have any idea how suffocating it was to feel stuck? Even if the people out there were barely clinging to their humanity, they were still people. Why wasn’t anyone acknowledging that? But he was in no condition to start a fight. He just let out a long, weary breath.

“How could a bunch of people born with every talent in the world ever understand what it feels like to be me?”

As he looked up, his gaze met Enkrid’s. Here was a man who had treated natural talent like garbage and climbed to the top through pure, agonizing willpower. He was a knight now; Roman had heard the stories. But Enkrid was something more than just a titled warrior.

Looking at Roman’s outburst, Enkrid realized that this frustration was also a step on the path to becoming a knight. Being an imperial knight didn’t mean you could automatically mentor someone. It usually required the right mix of personality and circumstances. But Enkrid was an outlier. He could guide even someone like Roman. He could see the route through the fog. It wouldn’t be an instant transformation, but he could provide the landmarks and clear the obstacles.

It was possible.

That was what set Enkrid apart. The journey he had taken was unlike any other. He had carved stairs into sheer rock faces where no path existed. Roman, noticing the strange intensity in Enkrid’s eyes, suddenly felt self-conscious and blurted out, “People actually live inside those demon zones. I bet that’s news to you.”