"Fwooo."
Rem exhaled, his eyes half-lidded. The half-open gaze looked unfocused, like it had lost its point.
The nature of Haramut is steadiness.
'Breath of the Deep Sea.'
Long, thin breaths that don't tire easily.
'Turtle's Endurance.'
A body and mind that don't shake over most things. Good for enduring. Only for enduring.
'It's not efficient.'
It was interesting. The thought process of the Ferryman woman in Enkrid's memories and Rem's thought process flowed in similar directions.
Efficiency—something you can only gain by losing less of your own while making the enemy lose more.
His thinking accelerated and dragged out a conclusion.
'I don't need to endure. I need to break them.'
Haramut is as strong as Bodreme. The difference is that his senses for perceiving the opponent dull.
In exchange, the skin, bones, and organs all over his body harden to a degree comparable to Audin's holy light armor, but what's lacking is lacking.
'Combination.'
Not just using both Descents at once—crossing their traits. A step forward born of a moment's idea.
Inspiration struck his mind and showed him the road ahead. Confidence that he could do it overflowed and turned into omnipotence.
Right or wrong didn't matter. If he had to do it, he would.
'Don't die. Save everyone.'
He would keep what his wife had said. He would not let her wish be crushed.
'Even if I become one with Silence, as long as I endure it and come back, that's all that matters.'
Before that, though, he had to do an axe dance for the boss.
He mixed Fire Bird's keenness into Haramut's steadiness.
Fire Bird is furious because it's more sensitive than anyone else.
Not long after Enkrid lost consciousness, Rem went beyond his limit.
By keeping his eyes half-open, he let go of half his vision and sharpened his other senses.
Upper left, lower right, overhead, underfoot.
He perceived every attack in sequence and swung the axes in both hands. Every line he drew sent chunks of monster flesh flying, and the dark gray tendrils that tried to hook his ankles were cut, burst, and shattered.
Black fluid sprayed everywhere. The sticky liquid hit the ground and seeped in. It looked like the earth was drinking it, and it felt like it was telling them the fight would never end.
When the fluid soaked into the ground and vanished, a new monster was born somewhere far away. A repeating law.
That was the conclusion he'd reached—enduring with Haramut while watching with Fire Bird's keenness.
'Faintly.'
He could see something beyond, but he failed to observe it.
"Bastards not even dogs would bite."
The reason Dunbakel complained from behind and the reason Rem failed to observe were the same.
'There are too many of them.'
The number of monsters packed in front of them had increased if anything—it didn't decrease.
One, one, two, three, five, eight.
Under a fixed rule, the numbers increased. The types stayed the same and the pattern didn't change much, but it never stopped.
'Endless crashing waves.'
That was the enemy's weapon.
"So what?"
Rem swung his axe, mimicking Enkrid's tone as he spoke. He slipped past the forearm of a troll that had just thrown a punch at his face, then swung the axe in his left hand and cut through above the elbow.
Then he spun and drew the axe in his right hand down in a vertical line. Its side split open and the muscles of its entire body convulsed. An axe blow carrying the strength of two Descents.
Boom!
The troll that took the blow to the head didn't just split—it burst. Hard flesh scattered in all directions.
Rem didn't stop. He kept spinning, shaping a storm with the twin axes in his hands.
He charged straight into the enemy horde. He fought, and fought again.
If anyone had seen him fight now, they would have written a song. They would have understood clearly why knights were called calamities, and how legends were born.
That was how Rem performed. With two axes, he chopped huge monsters into dozens of pieces, splitting and carving them apart.
He did it by holding Haramut in his body and wrapping Fire Bird around both axes.
Did Dunbakel slack off behind him?
She, too, held out and endured with Enkrid at her back.
It wasn't a long time, but some moments—short as they are—feel long. And then Enkrid woke up. Just as Dunbakel was about to wake him even if she had to bite him, he opened his eyes.
***
Enkrid looked over the traces Rem and Dunbakel had left behind. The ground was black and sticky, like old oil had congealed.
Was it always like this? No. It was the result of killing so many—black ichor-blood sprayed by monsters that lived inside the Demon-lands Silence, monsters different even from ordinary monsters.
It happened because they were killing faster than the ground could absorb.
"How long was I out?"
It was closer to passing out than sleeping, but Enkrid asked as he tightened his gauntlets.
"Long enough to finish a bottle."
Dunbakel answered. About enough time for the shade to stretch by a palm's width.
The monsters surrounding them were still there, but they'd bought a little breathing room. Rem must have gone on a real rampage.
The hand Rem had used for jokes trembled faintly. Had he overdone it by detonating his Sorcery in a short time? He probably had.
The goal was to guard their back.
He'd fought to protect the city, and to protect Enkrid, who'd passed out.
'Root—no, Silence. What is it?'
Now he knew its origin.
The shapes of the monsters he'd seen in memory and the ones here were similar yet different, but—
'The core is the same.'
A flower that gives birth to colossi. A massive plant.
Silence is an aggregate formed by a single monster using its own body. It is many and an individual, an individual and many. Its manifested form looked like a garden made of the Demon-lands' trees and flowers.
'A Demon-lands garden.'
It suited Silence as another name.
"Dunbakel, find one smell."
"What?"
"Assume whatever smell this is giving off is meant to hide something, and find what's hidden."
It was vague, but what could he do.
Even the Ferryman in his memory hadn't found Silence's core.
She'd lost all her comrades, and only at the very end awakened the technique to catch the hands and feet that monster—both swarm and individual—had scattered.
She chose, moved forward, took responsibility, but she was a little late.
Enkrid felt a piece of what the Ferryman carried inside. Should he call it resentment, a long-held desire—
Or was it regret, or lingering attachment?
Whatever it was, she wished to erase the monster called Root—or Silence.
'I'll do it for you.'
Whether it was regret or a wish, whatever it was.
Enkrid empathized with the Ferryman's sorrow, with what she'd felt.
He empathized with every moment of flailing to avoid losing more, because what you lose doesn't come back.
At Enkrid's words, Dunbakel's nose twitched. Her sense of smell far surpassed a normal beastfolk's. When it came to detecting something, she was the best in the order.
Of course, in this situation, even her nose was useless.
"The stink of rot is vibrating so hard I can't smell anything."
Dunbakel said.
"Yeah, so we go where it doesn't stink. Carry Rem."
Enkrid replied blandly. If it didn't work, you tried it until it did. Put another way, if it was hard to tell smells apart, you moved to a place where you could.
It was a truly crude logic, but because it was stubborn, it reached a conclusion in the end. The basics of the Mad Order of Knights, maybe.
"What?"
Dunbakel cocked her head. She was used to the Mad Order of Knights' way of thinking.
But the meaning in Enkrid's words was clear enough that she had to ask back.
Rem had rampaged on his own, and even if Enkrid fought better than him, the number of monsters stretched ahead didn't decrease.
Yet it was a tone that said he'd decided to fight alone.
They said a knight could cut down a thousand, but that only worked when the situation supported it.
And besides, were the monsters in front of them even human?
If even one of them got out, it would be enough to become a horrific nightmare.
If a dragon-shaped monster swung its tail once, dozens of ordinary people would turn into lumps of flesh made of blood in an instant.
She'd blocked it several times with a scimitar and even cut it like lopping off a lizard's tail, but they weren't easy prey. There were too many.
As time passed, their bodies grew harder, too. For a while now, it had felt like pounding on a shell made of iron.
Not just the dragons—giant ghouls, too.
"Rem, catch your breath and help Dunbakel."
Enkrid didn't care about her state of mind at all. He was already fully in a battle stance. The moment he finished speaking, he made his words real—leaping forward and throwing a punch.
Thud!
Dunbakel blinked. The first clash wasn't much different from before he passed out. Enkrid smashed and broke the dragon's tail with his fist, then rolled aside.
With his cloak wrapped around him, he accelerated like he'd trained rolling sideways, then grabbed an ogre's leg and twisted it backward, snapping and crushing it.
Crack, squelch.
The sound was loud, but there was no scream. Even if they were as hard as shells forged of iron, a knight who used Will possessed monstrous strength that could warp iron barehanded.
As long as something had a clear structure like a joint, breaking it was easier than tearing iron apart with your hands.
Enkrid's fighting was an efficient set of motions for facing a single individual.
Meaning, in this situation, it was an inefficient fighting style.
It stayed the same after that. He rolled on the ground and rose again. The cloak that had guarded his body while hanging loose shrank, and as he sprayed ichor off his body, he met a ghoul's fist with his own and shattered it. He swept its ankle and broke it.
Even so, his feet never stopped. Enkrid's movements left afterimages.
If Audin fought in earnest, would he fight like that?
He was darting through the monsters at a speed that couldn't be seen. But monsters didn't stop at that level, and Dunbakel knew it.
'You have to crush more than half the body.'
Only then would they stop moving. She'd learned it by fighting them countless times. Dunbakel judged they weren't undead.
'Even though the smell is like rotten corpses mixed into leaf mold.'
One thing was certain—they weren't dead beings.
Which made them even more of a headache, if anything.
Enkrid kept repeating the same way of fighting until he was knocked back.
A cyclops swung a gray club, and he hadn't managed to dodge it.
Enkrid rolled backward a few times, got up, and cracked his neck left and right.
"Boss?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. Carry Rem and follow me. I'll open a path."
Dunbakel looked at Rem. Rem said with an indifferent face.
"Carry me, stinker."
Dunbakel did as he said and hoisted Rem onto her back. From her back, Rem said:
"Focus. He told you to find something, so let's find it."
She didn't know what the boss had seen after passing out and waking up.
It was reasonable to suspect he'd been mind-controlled by hallucinations, but neither of them thought that, not even a little.
If he were the kind of human who'd crumble to hallucinations like this, he'd have died ages ago.
Dunbakel stepped forward, chasing after Enkrid.
At first, Enkrid had been smashing joints and throwing fists and kicks, but at some point he rolled low and came up with a sword in his hand.
It was his sword. Night spilled blue light. Had he been rolling around to find his sword this whole time?
She didn't know.
After that, the fight was… what should she call it.
She couldn't believe it even as she watched.
"Ah."
Dunbakel let out an exclamation. Rem was surprised too, but instead of opening his mouth, he focused on breathing.
He'd used Descents and Sorcery recklessly, so he focused on recovering. Since doing two things at once wasn't awkward for him, he was surprised even while recovering.
Enkrid swung his sword. A simple motion. A diagonal slash. It cut the monster. It left a shallow wound. Compared to its bulk, it was about the level of a cut on a forearm that bled a little.
About as much as a blade grazing an ogre's instep.
Of course, if it were a person, even that kind of wound would require pressing the cut and wrapping it in bandages, but the opponent was a monster.
Black ichor flowed a little, then stopped on its own. The ichor congealed like old oil and sealed the wound shut.
If it wasn't a clean, hearty sword cut or an axe chop, that was what it had looked like all along.
Normally, it would end there. The monster would still come at him.
But the one that had been cut trembled in tiny shakes, then collapsed.
Cracks spread from the wound, and its body broke apart and scattered. The ichor that had looked like hardened oil fell to the ground in clattering chunks like stone.
Maybe he'd found the feel with the first slash—Enkrid sprinted forward without hesitation.
He cut, and he burst them.
A wave—the technique the Ferryman had taught him—saw the light.
Dunbakel couldn't know that just by watching. Her unconscious instinctively interpreted Enkrid's fight and what he was doing.
Was the destructive power inside the swing itself overwhelming?
'No.'
Dunbakel had eyes. She traced backward from the results of what Enkrid did and grasped the process.
'A natural enemy?'
From her back, Rem snickered and said:
"Where'd he pick up something like that now."
A human who sometimes—no, often—showed them something strange.
Rem muttered. Dunbakel agreed.
He'd closed his eyes and woken up, and now he was suddenly acting like the natural enemy of monsters he'd never seen before.