Chapter 860

Chapter 860

“They are all destined for the grave regardless. Grant me entry before the end. That is all you must do. Turn your gaze from the suffering. Choose to be the predator that consumes, not the prey that is eaten.”

The infantryman recognized the words as the seductive hiss of a malevolent phantom—yet the sound was incredibly alluring. It was akin to a lover’s murmur brushing against his skin, nearly impossible to dismiss. No matter how fiercely a person gripped their sense of obligation, there were always those whose willpower fractured. Even with the knightly order advancing to execute the drowned and hunt the beasts terrorizing the outskirts, cracks in the defense were inevitable. From those fissures, the spectral limbs of dark entities reached out to seize the soldier’s windpipe. He was on the precipice of being overtaken.

“Taint.”

Crack!

The dark haze swirling above the head of the soldier—who had just fallen over from sheer fatigue—shattered and was torn apart. It was the result of a massive, bear-like man’s fist grazing the air above him. The soldier snapped awake, trembling.

“Wh—what is happening?”

Disoriented, his words failed him.

“Do not succumb to terror. If an evil spirit manages to swallow your soul, I will personally shatter your skull and deliver you to the Creator.”

The soldier was baffled. Was this giant promising salvation or execution? He blinked rapidly, his thoughts a fog. His drifting mind began to anchor itself back in reality—the lingering effect of the holy radiance that had swept over him.

“Hahahahaha!”

The individual who had thrown the glowing white punch let out a boisterous laugh and stood tall. Positioned directly in front of a torch fixed outside a tent, his massive silhouette completely engulfed the soldier’s frame.

“If your wits have returned, stand up.”

Suddenly, a familiar face peered out from behind that broad back.

“Lapild?”

The soldier recognized him instantly. Lapild spoke, his gaze sharper and more focused than it had ever been.

“We are setting out to mend the Holy Relic. Or rather, to establish a fresh one in its place.”

When the Apostle known as Audin had mentioned he was slightly delayed, it was because the clerics who had fallen ill required months of convalescence before their internal sanctity would be restored.

“Repairing the original Holy Relic will be a grueling task,” he had remarked after rescuing them. “It would be more effective to consecrate a new icon instead.”

“Whatever is required,” Lapild had replied, bowing in deep reverence before following.

Audin and Teresa moved through the heart of the military camp. Wherever a shadow of impurity lingered, they paused. If they sensed a soldier teetering on the edge of madness, they intervened before continuing toward the central relic.

The Holy Relic, etched with the emblem of the scales, still offered a flickering protection to the encampment. Without its presence, hundreds of the drowned would have likely burst from the earth in the very center of the camp. Because of its influence, the creatures drawn to the scent of living flesh remained clustered at the outskirts. This allowed Sir Cypress and a detachment of the Red Cloak Order to engage the hordes outside, hacking and crushing the drowned into pulp.

Snap.

Audin snapped the support beam. He set the sacred icon down gently into the mud soaked by the storm. The Holy Relic that had stood as a sentinel among the tents was gone. The cursed rain seemed to intensify, falling with greater malice. Some soldiers quickly joined their hands in desperate prayer, whispering pleas for mercy for what looked like an act of sacrilege.

“…What are you doing?”

A young guardsman stared, eyes wide with alarm. He spoke with hesitation, but the act felt forbidden—the relic’s presence was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay in this sector.

“Remain calm,” Lapild commanded, cutting him off. His expression was steady.

The rain continued its ominous descent, painting the camp in shades of ash. Dozens of pairs of eyes, clouded by skepticism and dread, watched the scene. Despite their bravery and their dedication to duty, these men were hitting their breaking point.

Audin recognized this as the ideal moment to deliver the message of his deity. Amidst men broken by sickness and devoid of hope, his voice thundered.

“Will you receive the message of the Lord who governs the field of slaughter?”

At those words, Teresa raised her voice in song. The sacred melody drifted through the air, sending waves of purity outward from the center of the camp. Audin also released his inner sanctity without holding back. The drowned that had begun to surface, their heads breaking the soil, found their skulls pulverized and their bodies driven back into the earth by the favor of the God of War. From the darkness between the tents, the wails of hidden spirits erupted.

Teresa’s hymn reached every soul present.

“When you traverse the gale and the tempest, when you attempt to walk a path of shadows without a glimmer of light, be certain of this—I shall never permit you to walk alone.”

The song was titled “Never Let You Walk Alone.”

As the music resonated, a sense of calm washed over the soldiers. Yet, it wasn’t merely peace that took hold. The doctrine of the God of War was far from passive.

“By elevating this Holy Symbol, every servant of the Lord shall find new faith and inherit His might!”

“O God of War!” Lapild bellowed, the veins in his throat straining with the intensity of his conviction.

The soldiers who had been aided along the path, those who had seen the wonders with their own eyes, joined his cry. Soon, a phalanx of men stood united by a surge of fanatical zeal.

“Now, are you prepared to smash the heads of the invaders and deliver them to the Lord’s presence?”

“War!”

“What is our objective?”

“To send them to the Lord’s side!”

“Who delivers the verdict?”

“The Lord!”

Watching from the periphery, Enkrid felt a momentary doubt regarding Audin. *Has he lost his following lately?* he wondered. Was that why Audin was capitalizing on this crisis to incite such fervor?

Teresa’s singing continued to anchor the scene. The combined power of the two holy figures saturated the entire camp in a heartbeat. *Regardless,* Enkrid thought, the suffocating demonic aura that had plagued the camp was gone. For this brief window, the ground had become territory under the direct gaze of the God of War. Even the heavy, cloying rain now felt as refreshing as a cool autumn mist.

—

“Listen, if you can’t keep the pace, I’m not coming back for you.”

“Do I look like some fool who gets lost in his own backyard? If you leave me, I’ll find my own way.”

“Fair point.”

Rem and Dunbakel exchanged words casually, as if they were merely wandering through a park. It was a level of relaxation that felt entirely wrong for the environment. Beyond the camp’s walls, it was a nightmare. To a standard soldier, it was the definition of perdition.

The landscape was crawling with abominations. Many were animals that had been mutated by consuming the blood of monsters. In the sky, a vulture glided by, a pair of human eyes gripped in its beak. Suddenly, a harpy dived, skewered the scavenger’s head, and began devouring it with wet, crunching sounds, its own rotted organs dangling from its talons as it flew.

“This brings back memories,” Rem remarked.

They had witnessed similar horrors once before, when the silence of the western Demon Realm had been broken—the day all eight generals moved to protect the West.

“The plan is just to butcher anything that moves, right?”

Dunbakel was equally accustomed to such chaos. The heart of the East was a perpetual cycle of this—a land where beasts and monsters tore each other apart in a never-ending bloodlust.

*Kyaaaak!*

Four shrieking phantoms suddenly lunged at Rem’s back. Dunbakel pivoted with a heavy step to get out of the way, while Rem let out a bored sigh and swung his massive axe. With a fluid, twisting motion, his blade caught all four targets simultaneously.

*Sssssshhhhk—*

The sound of the axe cutting through the atmosphere was bone-chilling. Rainwater that had pooled on the blade’s edge was flung away in a single arc. The wailing spirits, banshees, dissolved into nothingness. Their screams were capable of shattering a man’s mind, and the elder variants could summon legions of draugr, but these four were silenced instantly. The strike from the western warrior’s axe ended them so completely that no trace of them remained on the earth.

“There is a certain satisfaction in a cut like that,” Rem muttered, a smirk playing on his lips. As a user of spells, he could feel the resonance even when striking incorporeal spirits instead of solid flesh.

“Yes, yes, very satisfying. Then let’s keep cutting until we’ve had our fill.”

Rem wiped the back of his axe with his palm and adjusted his stance. Dunbakel wasn’t standing idle. She moved with grace, decapitating the drowned that crawled toward her one by one, her scimitar tapping through them as if they were made of glass.

Was this the true engagement? No. It was merely a warm-up.

“Hey, have you caught the trail yet?” Rem asked, maintaining a distance of about ten paces.

Beastfolk possessed incredible olfactory senses, and Dunbakel was gifted with a nose that was rare even among her kind.

“Yes,” the white-haired woman confirmed with a nod.

“Then why are we standing around? Do I need to kick you into gear?”

“I am moving.”

Both were experts in the behavior of monsters. Enkrid had specified that he needed Rem the hunter—not the officer, but the tracker. For now, leading the knights was a secondary concern.

*Monsters without a hive mind usually disperse,* Rem thought. When they gathered in such high concentrations, it was referred to as a colony. Even here, on the fringes of the Demon Realm in the South, that rule held true. The fact that they were all converging on this point meant there was a catalyst. Sir Cypress likely understood this as well.

*The captain must have realized it too—that’s why he deployed us.*

He had tasked Rem with locating and eliminating the colony’s core. Alone, tracking the primary creature would have been tedious, but he had a beastwoman who could track any scent in existence.

“That way.”

They kicked through the decayed heads of the drowned that rose from the mud to snag their boots, swatted away plague ghouls attempting to detonate and spread infection, and pressed onward. While the monsters varied in form, they all shared the mark of rot. Eventually, the pair discovered a small basin of stagnant, muddy water.

In its center stood a creature with a blanched, skeletal head. Its skin draped over its frame like a tattered cloak, and it held a gnarled staff encrusted with thorns.

“A lich,” Rem identified.

“A monster that uses sorcery? I’ve never encountered one,” Dunbakel noted.

“Neither have I. Only in stories.”

A product of the union between a ghoul and the drowned, it was a creature that commanded the dead. It was a being of local legend—a sorcerer born from the rains, undying, often called “the wretch who chases eternity.” It was a name given by terrified humans.

This entity was a primary source of grief in the South, specifically for the Red Cloak Order. Alongside the Thornwood Wall, it represented an enduring, unsolved crisis. However, today, its luck had run out.

The skeletal horror born of the storm lifted its arm, its joints clicking audibly. Rainwater coalesced into liquid javelins that shot toward them. Rem, resting his axe on his shoulder, swung once to shatter the projectiles head-on. Dunbakel carved through the remaining water spears with a horizontal sweep of her scimitar.

The water shattered into mist, then reformed into serpents that hissed toward their throats. Simultaneously, skeletal hands erupted from the soil to pin their ankles.

“Frustrating,” Dunbakel hissed, kicking through the grasping hands and dicing the water snakes into segments.

Meanwhile, Rem internally called upon the power of the guardian spirit he carried.

*Manifest—Sapsal.*

The name of the holy beast known for tearing apart everything unholy with its jaws.

As the liquid serpents coiled toward his neck and the glowing blue hands gripped his legs, Rem swung his axe, now pulsing with Sapsal’s essence. He struck at the snakes at his throat and then retracted; he moved the blade through the hands at his feet as if he were stirring a cauldron. The movements were deceptively light, but the impact was devastating.

*Gyaaaah—*

With a distorted shriek, the water serpents evaporated, and the draugr beneath him crumbled.

“What was that?” Dunbakel asked, eyes wide.

“Don’t talk to me. I’m focusing.”

Sapsal was a creature of irritation; it bit anything that got too close. It was a wild, feral thing that bared its teeth at everything, friend or foe.

“And stop staring at me. My axe is agitated by your presence right now. Hey, easy. No, not her! You can smell she’d taste terrible, can’t you?”

Dunbakel wasn’t the sharpest, but she knew he was insulting her.

“You’re mocking me, aren’t you?”

Rem laughed and advanced toward the lich, his axe ready. Did the dying horror feel a sense of doom in its final moments? Rem didn’t know or care. Of the eight generals of the West, the one known as Sapsal—the divine power currently occupying Rem’s weapon—cleaved the immortal dreamer in two. The lich tried to defend itself with a few frantic spells, but a physical barrier was required to stop a blow backed by Sapsal.

The axe fell without mercy, shattering the skull of the creature that dared to show its bones.

*Crash*—shards of bone and rainwater flew across the clearing. The vanguard of the Demon Realm, birthed from the storm, was no more.

*Ghhhhhhaaa—*

With a final howl, dark vapors rose into the sky. The haze that had been defying the rain tore apart and blew away. The eradication was complete. Immediately after, the self-appointed guardians of this territory made their appearance.

While Dunbakel had tracked the target by scent, these newcomers had found it through years of grueling experience.

“An impressive display of talent,” the man at the center of the group remarked. He was clad in light armor, and the blade he held was noticeably longer than a standard longsword.

“You’re a moment too late,” Rem retorted, looking them over.

They were draped in crimson mantles. Their identity was obvious.

At least, it was to Rem. Dunbakel, however, bared her fangs and gripped her scimitar, a low growl escaping her chest. She saw them only as powerful adversaries.

“Who are you people?”

She shifted into a combat stance. She didn’t fully grasp the politics of why she was here, nor did she have any affinity for the southern knights.

“They’re on our side, you moron,” Rem said, kicking her in the leg.

Usually, Rem was the one inciting conflict while Enkrid played peacemaker; the roles felt strangely flipped.

“The Mad Knight Order, I assume?” a voice from the other side asked.

“That’s us,” Rem confirmed.

“So you’re Enkrid? You look a bit more haggard than the reports suggested,” the middle-aged knight in the red cloak noted.

“Wow, starting with insults, are we?” Rem replied, his tone sharpening.

“Do you realize who you are addressing, to speak with such lack of respect?” another man stepped forward, his hand near his weapon.

Rem could tell just by looking that this man’s head would be easy to remove. The air grew thick with hostility—the kind of atmosphere that precedes a brawl.

“Yeah, keep sticking your chin out like that. I’ll take it and add it to my collection.”

A brutal tension crackled between the two parties. The few ghouls that had survived nearby remained frozen. They wanted to attack, but their instincts screamed at them to stay back. The sheer killing intent radiating from the warriors was enough to suppress the bloodlust of the monsters themselves.