Chapter 840

Chapter 840

“To what extent have they truly experienced combat?”
Esther had once been known as the Witch of Strife. Why did she carry such a title? Among practitioners of the mystic arts, she was a true outlier.
It was incredibly uncommon for a mage to gamble their existence just to evaluate their own limits. They were masters of exploitation and theft, yet they proved clumsy when faced with confrontations that put their lives on the line. At the first sign of genuine peril, they would typically vanish.
This was why the moniker “of Strife” was so unique, and why other sorcerers viewed Esther as a freak of nature.
“It has likely been decades since any of them fought a real battle,” she stated with total assurance. “They have rotted from within.”
Esther understood the fundamental heart of their species.
“Mutual trust is non-existent among them; they spend all their energy concealing their cards. Practice matches? Impossible. They never reveal their true capabilities, guarding their individual mysteries in isolation.”
Just as blossoms wither in the darkness and a stagnant pool turns foul, the downfall of the mages’ society was a certainty. They had constructed their own tombs without even realizing it.
“To build a community, one must be willing to distribute what they possess.”
Enkrid had elevated the status of the Border Guard’s permanent army by making his personal expertise public. He offered everything he had discovered to those who walked the path behind him. He was never stingy with his wisdom or his instruction.
But Astrail? They were miserly with both. Their only hunger was for conquest. They perceived reality through a suffocatingly narrow lens. Like frogs trapped at the bottom of a well, their entire universe was merely a tiny, circular patch of sky.
“Astrail lacks any understanding of knights. Specifically, they fail to grasp the caliber of the Border Guard Knights.”
Even with perfect preparation, Esther knew she couldn’t defeat the entire knightly order alone. Certainly, those fools currently salivating with avarice as they drew near couldn’t do it—they viewed knights as simple swordsmen. They remained ignorant of the fact that within the rank of “knight,” there are vast differences in quality.
Recalling Enkrid’s phrasing, Esther had smirked while saying, “A collection of mediocre mages and hags.”
Kraiss had given her a peculiar look when she suddenly beamed like that.
“They are nothing more than a group of mediocre mages and hags,” Esther repeated.
“If those mediocrities decide to take the populace hostage, it will be a problem.”
“They won’t do that.”
Esther was intimately familiar with the tendencies of sorcerers. The notion of mages acting to safeguard the lives of townspeople was something they wouldn’t even consider. They don’t recognize people as human beings; they are mere puppets consumed by the monster known as Knowledge.
Consequently, there would be no hostage situation. A stray individual might target the city for personal gain, but that would be the extent of it.

—

“They are approaching.”
As the mission commenced, Jaxon had activated the Geor Dagger intelligence web that permeated the city.
The report came from one of their own. These weren’t just professionals with keen senses; they were elite assassins who could detect impending doom through raw intuition.
“I appreciate it, brother. You’ve been sprinting hard enough to soak your boots in sweat.”
A colossal man spoke. Standing near him required one to crane their neck back just to lock eyes. The operative knew the giant’s reputation.
‘The Bear Beastman, Audin.’
He wasn’t actually of beast blood, but his sheer scale had earned him the name. In person, his presence was even more overwhelming. The operative, a man who had undergone rigorous training himself, could see the complex layers of muscle packed onto Audin’s skeleton.
The Bear Beastman pressed his palms together at his brow and whispered:
“Almighty, once more I deliver souls to Your presence.”
It was a terrifying prayer. When he raised his arms, his midsection became visible beneath his loose garment—a defined, segmented abdomen that served as natural plating.
‘Armor made of muscle.’
It was a physique that had demolished every human constraint and moved beyond. His flesh appeared as resilient as the hide of a dragon.
A holy warrior, the operative realized—and his entire concept of what a paladin should be shifted.
Audin concluded his brief devotion, lowered his hands, and looked down at the man. Nominally, this was just a messenger from the spy guild, but his movement patterns betrayed him.
‘Feet that have mastered the art of silence.’
Audin recognized his true nature immediately. Regardless, he maintained his usual, unperturbed grin—as immovable and serene as a mountain or a great bear.
Beside him, Teresa finished her own prayer and spoke.
“It is time to move.”
They were positioned inside the sentry station guarding the entrance to Lockfried Fortress. The city was susceptible to a siege—and Lockfried even more so. Fighting within the walls would be a nightmare. Therefore, the heart of Kraiss’s strategy was proactive interception.
However, they couldn’t track the specific paths of every sorcerer moving independently.
“Our priority is defending the city. We will take our stands before the gates and along the ramparts, following Esther’s blueprints.”
Kraiss paused for a beat, organizing his thoughts. After a moment, he remarked:
“A man fueled by vanity never bothers to hide his arrival.”
Audin concurred. And indeed, that observation was being validated.
He had deployed the Geor Dagger as a precaution, but the mages were acting with total arrogance.
“What is that?”
A sentry at the station squinted.
“What’s happening?”
Two guards leaned out to look. In the distance, the sound of screaming erupted—people were fleeing. Traders were ditching their wagons and running for their lives.
“Well, here we go.”
Audin and Teresa walked out. Some of the people retreating were members of the regular army. They weren’t just running; they were fanning out to the flanks, drawing their steel, and resetting their lines.
Audin had drilled with these men. He noticed something unusual in their coordination.
“That tactical setup isn’t designed to stop a small group of elites,” Teresa observed, and Audin nodded in agreement.
The regular soldiers reorganized as they fell back, their gazes shifting toward the two figures coming from the rear. Even without speaking, their eyes radiated a sense of relief.
“Retreat to the wall formation!”
Audin’s voice boomed across the area; purely in terms of sheer volume, it was staggering. Several squads offered a quick salute and began to pull back.
“Knights are on site. Maintain the line and withdraw. Mercenaries, move back as well!”
A soldier shouted to the hired swords mixed in the crowd—wanderers from the south who had been guarding the merchant caravans.
“We’re just going to leave those two there?” one mercenary yelled back.
“Did you come all this way without hearing the tales of the Mad Order of Knights?” the soldier replied, moving with practiced ease.
“But still…”
The world was vast. Many who heard the legends found them impossible to credit without witnessing them firsthand. Yet, what other path was there? Staying to fight would simply result in a meaningless death.
They pulled away. One mercenary remained deeply troubled. He was a native of Zaltenburg, within the Duchy of Octo, and had spent his career as a sellsword on the southern borders. He had heard whispers of the Mad Order but never truly grasped what they meant. Their reality was too distant from his own life of small border clashes and hunting wild predators.
‘Is this really going to work?’
Then, the horror the mercenary had anticipated crawled into view.
A stampeding wave of the walking dead. A multitude of draugr—monsters stitched back together from the grave—surged forward. It felt as though massive boulders of rotting meat and bone were tumbling toward them.
Decaying skin split open, spilling foul fluids onto the earth; the air grew thick with the stench of putrefaction. These restless corpses had risen to wage war. Among them were clattering skeleton warriors held together by bleached bone, and skeletal knights dressed in mail forged from spoiled flesh. They carried shields made of human skulls and swung blades fashioned from sharpened bone.
Lumbering in their midst were dozens of flesh golems.
Draugr—a collective term for the unliving. The plains were saturated with necromantic horrors. At the center of the swarm, a figure sat upon a throne of bone, peering down at the world. The seat itself was carried on the backs of four skeletal thralls.
“There is no need for a long dialogue. Deliver the Child of the Star to me. If you do, nothing will happen. Or at least, nothing truly terrible. I assume I don’t need to describe who that is, do I?”
The sorcerer atop the bone throne called out.
Audin stared at the sea of corpses.
Why was it that no matter how many he pulverized, no matter how many spirits he ushered toward the Almighty, they simply kept coming? Would these abominations only cease to exist if he cracked the skull of the ‘Father of All the Dead’ who was rumored to reside in the Demon Realm?
“I can hear the melody of the departed,” Teresa whispered.
Audin could hear it too—the groans of those who yearned for the end, the bodies pleading for eternal rest.
“Then we shall provide that rest,” Audin declared.
Today, the tally of sacrifices he had to offer the Lord would grow once more. Necromancers were the souls the Lord craved most; it was best to send them on their way without delay.
“Almighty, for Your renown, I lift my fists.”
Teresa began her chant. A soft, white radiance pulsed outward from her, moving slowly and broadly.
Witnessing this, the mage let out a derisive laugh.
“So you choose to taste agony. I am the sovereign of necromancy, commander of a hundred spirits.”
Kraiss had anticipated that at least one member of Astrail would strike at the city. Esther had warned that their obsession with animating corpses for war had likely never faded. Thus, based on her intelligence, Kraiss had positioned the knights.
This conflict was occurring right in front of the city gates. This meant that thousands of eyes were watching.
The retreating infantry and mercenaries, the panicked merchants, the people waiting at the gates, the vendors outside the walls—everyone saw it.
And before all of them, five flesh golems lunged simultaneously.
With thunderous impacts, they sprinted toward the giant man.
The mercenary’s eyes grew wide. He couldn’t even track the golems’ speed—one second they were stationary, the next they were a blur of motion. The world seemed to stutter in his vision. One leapt through the air, one charged head-on, and two lunged from the flanks.
He forgot to breathe. He couldn’t even swallow. He just watched.
‘They are dead.’
These five flesh golems were no common monsters. They had been crafted specifically to kill knights—horrors refined through countless iterations.
Then, the mercenary watched as his logic was blown apart.
*BWHOOOM!*
The air itself seemed to implode. The actual strike was too fast to see. All he witnessed was flesh being launched upward, stripped away in a vortex of shimmering white light.
*Thup-thup-thup.*
A downpour of putrid meat rained onto the grass.
“…What just happened?” the mercenary stammered.
A soldier standing near him provided the answer.
“What do you think? That is the Knight of the Whole Body.”
The Knight of the Whole Body, Audin—a fanatic of the Mad Order. He was already a legendary figure among the regular troops.
Beside him, the towering woman drew her blade and shield and stepped forward. Despite her massive frame, she moved like a ghost, leaving trails of light as she swung. In her path, the draugr were pulverized and shattered, falling like wheat before a scythe.
“Not even a sovereign of ten thousand spirits… this is nowhere near enough,” Audin whispered, his mind flashing back to the bloodbath in Naurillia.
The mage who claimed to be the master of a hundred spirits began to shake.
‘How is this possible?’
His five elite golems had been liquidated in an instant. Simultaneously, scores of his lesser thralls were being erased. He had called himself a one-man army—and rightly so, given his command over a hundred wraiths. Even practitioners of different magical schools respected that title. Yet, the foundations of his power were being crushed.
Just as Esther had predicted—they had arrived without measuring the true strength of the knights. And the consequence, from the perspective of a mage, was a catastrophe.

—

“I am called Warhob. I bear no personal ill will toward you, but you possess such exquisite physical potential that I simply cannot help myself.”
Rophod, Pell, and Dunbakel were operating as a unit. The three were confronting a sorcerer on the flank opposite Enkrid, to the south of the peaks that shielded Greenperl.
The man who had emerged from the high summer grass brought two Death Knights with him—one armored in midnight black, the other in bone white.
Warhob didn’t deploy a swarm of ghosts; he relied solely on those two harbingers of demise. One could view him as a spiritual heir to the necromancer Audin had once battled alongside Balrog.
In fact, Warhob had hunted down the artifacts that mage had left behind in the dust of history, reconstructed his incantations, and perfected them. He had even used sorcery to alter his own biology—a combat-focused mage who believed he possessed the prowess of a knight.
“It seems we didn’t actually need all three of us here.”
“Sir Kraiss tends to overthink things,” Pell and Rophod remarked.
Dunbakel chipped in, “The guy in the center smells the weakest. I can catch the scent of it.”
Warhob didn’t just want the Child of the Star; he wanted the Mad Order for his collection. Within Astrail, he was the only one who held their martial skill in high regard—which made sense for a man who specialized in commanding fallen knights.
‘Not the entire group, but just three of them…’
Warhob moistened his lips.
If Astrail hadn’t initiated this move, he wouldn’t have traveled this far—but since he was here, he intended to claim some new trophies.
“I suspect I could handle the two of you on my own.”
“No need to push yourself.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that thing doesn’t even have a concept of honor.”
While the three knights exchanged quips, Warhob concealed his left hand behind his back and pulled a cord on a pouch at his wrist.
Fine dust spilled out, caught by the breeze. Simultaneously, he cast a spell to manipulate the wind.
This was his method for covertly distributing toxins. On the surface, he acted as if he were preparing for a duel, but his true talent lay in spreading invisible poisons.
The three standing before him were chatting carelessly—the perfect opening to let the gas drift toward them.
Then, without warning, all three went silent, snapping their gazes toward him simultaneously. Their eyes burned with a sharp intensity.
“There’s a foul stench,” the beastwoman growled. The two men stepped back with quiet precision.
These three had survived the endless physical trials imposed by Rem, lived through Jaxon’s grueling training, and were forged in the fires of sparring matches with Enkrid. Their survival instincts operated on a plane far beyond the norm. Knights are individuals who surpass mortal boundaries through relentless discipline—it was only logical.
The reality was that Warhob had never stood before a true knight in his life. The two death knights he controlled were merely shadows of the past he had excavated from ancient tombs.