A Knight Who Eternally Regresses Novel - Chapter 768

Chapter 768

“What in the world…”
One of the blue-complexioned fairies—a corrupted magic spirit—parted her lips. Her gaze was fixed on the sight unfolding in the distance.
Her reaction wasn’t one of pure shock; she was well-acquainted with the presence of the divine.
However, deploying such a vast field of holiness to obstruct an advance was a tactic she found remarkably peculiar.
Naturally, the Master of Thorn Fortress did not dwell within its walls in solitude. He was surrounded by a retinue.
Beside the horde of beasts commanded by the Lord, there were aides to facilitate his dark inquiries and a pair of sorcerers well-versed in the arts of alchemy. Additionally, there were numerous mindless abominations that possessed the martial prowess of seasoned warriors.
Among this host, three magic spirits stood watch atop the battlements. Their purpose was to observe, report, and torment any who dared approach.
Specifically, they were meant to grind down intruders through constant harassment, eventually delivering the spent husks of those individuals to the Lord for his use.
That was their function.
These creatures were remarkably expressive for their kind, likely due to having steeped themselves in the miasma of the Demon Realm until their original fairy essence was all but gone.
They conversed amongst themselves while eyeing the barrier of radiant white light from their high vantage point.
“A desperate struggle.”
“The thrashing of a mortal. It should prove entertaining.”
“They truly believe the battle is won simply because they halted the plague ghouls.”
“Divine power, is it?”
All three spirits had traded their natural purity for the heavy influence of the Demon Realm—the energy known as demonic power. Because of this transformation, one among them could enslave the minds of lesser monsters, while the other two were proficient with the bow.
They were capable of lacing their projectiles with malice-soaked energy.
Granted, they were far less capable than the marksman who had initially ambushed Enkrid’s companions.
That inferiority was precisely why they had been relegated to sentry duty.
Still, their fall from grace had not robbed them of their inherent fairy grace; they remained exceptionally nimble.
“That girl wielding the holy light… we should flay her and study its source. I wonder if the skin of a half-giant is particularly dense. If so, it might serve well in the creation of chimeras.”
A true giant’s hide was as tough as stone. If her constitution was comparable, she would be a magnificent resource.
These entities harbored a malice that was alien to true fairies. Whether this was a result of the Demon Realm’s corruption, the sheer passage of time in this place, or a combination of both remained a mystery.
In their own minds, they believed that by abandoning the legacy of groves and blossoms to become the foster children of the abyss, they had achieved superior power. To any human observer, they certainly appeared as something entirely different from a fairy.
Sluggish.
When compared to Shinar or the fairies residing in the city of the Border Guard, the gap was immense.
A true fairy would not so much as bruise a blade of grass without cause. They were protectors. They understood that their high sensitivity could easily turn into self-destruction, so they practiced rigorous emotional discipline.
But the creatures here were devoid of such restraint.
They wore their foulest emotions on their sleeves and committed atrocities of biological experimentation without a second thought. They lacked the fragile refinement of their kin.
Jaxon wasn’t privy to these philosophical distinctions. He simply perceived that their reactions were duller than they ought to be.
And that was all the information he required.
The moment he cut down a pair of plague ghouls, Jaxon surged forward against the current—heading straight for the point where the monster tide originated.
Even Enkrid would have found it impossible to slip unnoticed through a crowd of monsters who had stitched their own mouths shut and were primed to detonate.
But Jaxon was different.
The atmosphere of the Demon Realm follows its own rules.
Once you grasped those rules, the act of adaptation was trivial.
Assimilation—a high-level knightly art known as “Blur” within the ranks of the Dagger of Geor. It rendered the practitioner’s form faint and ghostly, earning its title.
But what was a name?
Categorizations held no weight.
He had understood that truth a long time ago.
He was capable of masking his presence and navigating the ghoul swarm in reverse—and so he did. Keeping his center of gravity low and his footwork rapid, he skirted the edge of the teeming mass.
Then, catching the glow of the spectral orifice upon the thorn-covered rampart, he launched himself upward.
A few lingering spirits made a half-hearted attempt to intercept him, but their efforts were futile. Jaxon used their reaching limbs as simple stepping stones to scale the masonry.
A handful of wraiths shrieked, their torsos emerging from the stone as they reached out, but Jaxon methodically drew a blade coated in holiness and carved through them.
Kiiaak!
The spirits wailed in torment, yet their cries were swallowed by the mournful anthem echoing from the Thorn Fortress.
Only the most perceptive of the inhabitants noticed any disturbance.
In this manner, Jaxon even bypassed the intuition of the spirits. For him, this was routine. These were the methods he had perfected through a lifetime of work.
Had his opponents been as sharp as uncorrupted fairies, he might have been detected. But a series of favorable circumstances worked in his favor.
The guards were dim-witted, and the Thorn Fortress—this stronghold of the Demon Realm—had never suffered a breach before.
A few knights had encountered or heard tales of this place over the years, but they had deemed it an impossible target.
To strike alone was a death sentence. To strike in force… there were never enough men to spare.
Furthermore, these dwellers never posed an immediate threat to the world outside. On the surface, they appeared to remain sequestered within their dark domain.
All these factors led to this precise moment.
Guided by instinct, Jaxon exploited every available flaw in their defense.
He crested the wall.
Once he had the three sentries in his sights, he materialized behind them and, with a stiletto in each hand, drove the blades into the napes of two guards.
To the survivors, it was a scene of pure nightmare.
“…!”
The third spirit couldn’t even manage a cry of alarm. His eyes widened in terror as he spun around.
To his vision, it looked as though a shadow had manifested from the ether to butcher his comrades.
He swung his heavy bow like a club in a frantic defense. But Jaxon moved with the fluidity of water. As he pulled back, the two bodies that should have collapsed instead jerked to a halt mid-fall with a sickening sound.
Jaxon stole a glance at them. That wasn’t the way a body should react to a fatal puncture. But he didn’t let surprise take root.
This was the Demon Realm. One had to expect the impossible.
The two who had been struck froze, their spines arching in a grotesque fashion, before their heads slowly rotated upward. The sound of bone grinding on bone echoed as their necks twisted. Their gaze lost all semblance of focus. The whites of their eyes dominated as their pupils retreated into their skulls.
Then, from the punctures Jaxon had made—the holes at the base of their skulls—no dark ichor flowed. Instead, with a wet, pulsing sound, their tissue expanded and new, horrific anatomy took shape.
A long, fleshy mass slid out like a massive serpent, trailing onto the stone.
What could such a thing be called, growing from a neck? A limb? A tail?
There was no word for it.
A neck-appendage? A neck-coil? Regardless of the name, the twisted new growth of the magic spirit stretched across the floor, its muscular fibers coiling and snapping before the tip suddenly hardened into a point—and whipped toward Jaxon.
It moved with the velocity of a fired arrow. Jaxon’s eyes tracked the new threat with precision.
Underneath the dark, navy skin, black vessels throbbed visibly. It resembled a bloated, writhing parasite.
Jaxon pivoted and struck with his stiletto.
Swish.
Even this mutated, unnatural limb possessed joints—or at least weak points that functioned as such—and he carved through one of those gaps. It was a display of blade mastery that turned the enemy’s own force against them.
One might describe it as the absolute peak of reactive swordsmanship.
However, to an onlooker, it appeared as though he had foreseen the entire exchange, striking with a chilling calm.
If Enkrid had been watching, he would have voiced his admiration for such sharp perception and the way Jaxon redirected the opponent’s momentum.
Black ichor sprayed from the wound, but the mutated organ didn’t falter. Like a viper changing its strike path, it coiled and lunged for the back of Jaxon’s head.
“You wretch.”
Meanwhile, the final magic spirit, still relatively whole, managed to draw an arrow to its bowstring—but the second it did, a blade buried itself in its brow.
Thunk!
The sharp crack of steel meeting bone. It was the Silence Dagger Jaxon had released while evading the other two.
As Jaxon danced between the two lunging flesh-worms, the one hit in the head shuddered, its eyes rolling back as the spark of life faded. Its entire frame began to vibrate.
Jaxon watched closely once more.
A curse? Or does death trigger the transformation?
It appeared that some kind of mechanism had been woven into them to ensure this outcome.
The light grew dim, obscuring the battlefield—but Jaxon was a creature of the shadows.
He had no difficulty navigating in total darkness. Where his eyes failed, his other senses provided a complete picture of his environment.
As he continued to observe through sound and feel, the Silence Dagger wedged in the fairy’s skull was forced out by internal pressure.
Rrrk—thunk.
The weapon clattered to the floor. And from the hole in the forehead, flesh began to bloom—forming another organ identical to the ones currently hunting him.
Even then, Jaxon remained a silent observer, soaking in the sensory data. In doing so, he spotted a discrepancy.
What he had initially taken for bulging veins beneath the surface of the flesh-worms was something far more sinister.
The thick, dark lines tore through the skin and then… they flowered.
A black blossom opened its petals.
A cursed seed had been sown within them.
So, what was the force animating them now?
Will. A singular Will was driving them. But Jaxon’s own Will, unlike that of his fellow knights, functioned on a different plane. Sharpened by his hyper-awareness, his Will didn’t just see—it pierced through, analyzed, and integrated the information.
For a corpse to maintain motion after the soul has fled…
It must be a thrall of the undead—or a vessel for a spirit.
Having witnessed the plague ghouls below, he could piece together the enemy’s tactics.
They housed spirits of decay within the ghouls.
And in these spirits, they had cultivated a specific flora native to the Demon Realm.
A sufficiently refined sense can mimic the effects of sorcery. To Jaxon, the truth was plain, even if it would baffle others.
Deep within the three warped beings, Jaxon perceived a rhythmic, black oval pulse beating in the center.
From the dark flowers erupting from the necks of the magic spirits, a fine black dust began to settle.
It was a toxin potent enough to daze even a knight—and would prove fatal to a commoner upon mere contact with the skin. But Jaxon had been forged through the ingestion of countless poisons since his youth.
That didn’t mean he was reckless enough to breathe it in.
He produced a small mask and covered his face. It was a specialized item sourced from a fairy city—engineered to filter the air entering the lungs.
During his tenure with the Mad Platoon, he had established connections across the land. He had acquired what he needed even from the hidden fairy enclaves.
No one, Enkrid included, was aware of this.
With the filter protecting his breath, the poison touching his skin was of no concern.
The lashing, flailing flesh-worms striking the floor and filling the air with dust were no more a threat to him than the wild swings of a frenzied tribal warrior. His talent for direct engagement had flourished during his time among the Madmen.
He was loath to admit it—and would never confess it to another soul—but those lunatics had indeed sharpened his edge.
Jaxon wove through the gaps in their chaotic movements and drove his blades into the seeds lodged within their forms.
Controlling the flow of information was the essence of war. He found himself in complete agreement with Lua Gharne on that principle.
That was the reason he had scouted ahead—to ensure that the events at the gates were kept from those deeper within the fortress for as long as possible. He was satisfied with his progress.
This wasn’t his first time using his prowess for something other than gold. But to say he wasn’t finding some enjoyment in the task would be a falsehood.
He was providing aid to a man—and that man was marching toward a grand purpose.
In his mind, he could almost hear his mentor’s voice, hauntingly familiar:
“There you go, you brat. You’re looking like something now. Stop wasting that talent. Use it for something you actually believe in. Haven’t I told you that enough? Are your ears not ringing yet?”
His master had always maintained an irritatingly jovial tone. Jaxon realized now that it was likely because he had been such a morose student.
I understand.
The lessons he had heard until his ears felt like they would bleed were finally carved into his soul.
When had this shift started?
Jaxon had discovered a sense of what was right by observing Enkrid. Therefore, anyone who stood in Enkrid’s way was the enemy.
And at this very moment, that sense of right—and the man who embodied it—was drawing near the fortress.

—

The detonation of the plague ghouls had left the atmosphere heavy and stagnant. Under normal circumstances, simply drawing this close would have been fatal—but Teresa’s holy song was carving a path of purity for them.
Enkrid cast his gaze upward. Several distorted silhouettes were tumbling from the heights, one after the other.
It appeared as though they were suffering from sudden, violent fits—but no one needed to be told that the cause of those fits was Jaxon.
What in the world is happening up there?
The fallen foes began to shift and warp. A skirmish broke out. Only then did Jaxon’s silhouette become discernible.
Should he intervene? The thought crossed his mind but didn’t linger. He stayed his ground.
There was no necessity.
A short time later, the three mutated abominations slumped to the stone like hollowed-out husks.
Quite why a creature of human shape would suddenly sprout serpentine limbs was a question for another time.