The angle and speed of the thrusting blade were fierce. That said, it was not on Rem's, Ragna's, or Audin's level.
'Knight.'
It was at least at the stage of using Will unconsciously. Going by the theory Enkrid had grasped and Luagarne had organized, it was swordsmanship one might expect from someone standing at the threshold of knighthood.
Enkrid did not pull back Today in his left hand. Instead, based on what he had seen and experienced in that mental image, he moved foot and hand in the realm of instinct and intuition.
Shifting the center of balance in his feet like that, he used his gauntlet to receive the thrusting blade and flick it away. Looking only at the motion, it was the same as swinging his left hand and batting the sword aside.
Claaang!
'That was a little clumsy.'
That was directed at himself, no one else.
To be exact, the shaping of his Will had been a little late, so the impact remained on the back of his hand.
The blond swordsman in that mental image had done it as if it were nothing.
'A few more times.'
This too would become familiar in no time. Even with a blade suddenly flying at him, Enkrid was utterly at ease. He was relaxed enough to test a technique at leisure. But his opponent was not.
Instead of the blade that had been knocked away, a foot shot for the space between his legs. The response was fast and without hesitation.
Enkrid raised his own foot and knocked that aside too, but—
'Three times.'
After exactly three attacks, his opponent's momentum dropped off noticeably. Because he was at a level where he could feel and react to Will, he knew it.
Holding Today, Enkrid looked at his opponent.
Even in the middle of the night, he felt like he knew what color that hair was. Orange, probably.
"As expected."
The one who had attacked out of nowhere muttered as if speaking to herself.
"Aisia."
Enkrid let on that he knew too.
"I thought it'd be you."
Aisia caught her breath a few times and nodded.
Watching, Rem muttered,
"That was a vicious thing to do."
He was talking about what Enkrid had just done. Trying to catch a blade flying in from an ambush with his bare hand.
Of course, the shaping of Will happened in an instant, so it was fine, but it was not the sort of thing anyone could attempt lightly, and yet he had done it.
Enkrid looked at Aisia. Now that they had crossed blades, he knew Aisia was not yet a knight.
'She only puts Will into three attacks.'
A junior knight, but one who had trained and tempered herself in a form that briefly reached up toward the rank of a knight.
How? She must have thought and agonized and racked her brains. She must have gathered every trait she had into one and struggled to use the Will she possessed. That was how she had arrived where she stood now.
'That's admirable.'
Enkrid threw off the cumbersome hood.
Naturally, Aisia was not the only one here.
From one side, Andrew spoke almost like a shout, eyes wide.
"You deceived me?"
Andrew was not a fool. Of course he had known the Mad Order of Knights had arrived, so in every situation he had suspected that maybe they were moving behind the scenes.
But he had already faced the Noble Killer. At the time, he had been certain it was absolutely not them.
He had even thought it was an opponent he might be able to handle if it came to a fight.
'Wasn't it supposed to be a trick by the servants of demons?'
Hadn't Duke Marcus even sent a secret letter?
"Yeah."
Enkrid answered as if it were nothing. Strangely enough, Andrew was not angry. A few puzzle pieces simply clicked together in his head, and he understood why they had carried things out like this.
'I was the clown.'
While everyone's attention was fixed on him, they had created a bizarre figure called the Noble Killer and used that to deal with things, so the servants would not gather among themselves or start entertaining other thoughts.
All the servants had been focused on him.
'Did they really have to go this far?'
Of course, it would have been possible to handle this in a sloppier way than this, but it was Kraiss's work.
Kraiss was the sort of man whose specialty was preventing every possible accident before it could happen.
What if the servants of demons conspired among themselves and all hid or fled? Unless even that possibility was cut off, he would never be able to stretch out his legs and close his eyes.
'And thanks to that, they dragged out all the ones hiding behind the servant group too?'
Andrew had three elite soldiers he had trained personally standing behind him.
In the middle of those few exchanged words, the torches held by two of the elite soldiers flared and wavered in the wind. With the clouds blocking the moonlight, the torches had become the only source of light, and the shadows shook to match their flickering. One of those writhing shadows suddenly stood up.
This was neither the time to catch up nor the time to talk at leisure, but even so, no one had expected something to happen so suddenly like this.
In the hand of the risen shadow was a pitch-black blade, twice as dark as the color of the shadow itself.
That blade stabbed toward Andrew's back and then stopped.
"Collapse."
It was Esther. She raised her left hand, muttered something, then spoke, and the shadow crumpled straight down to the ground.
"Child of the Star?"
A question came from the other side. They were right in front of the city wall. Esther stood one step behind Enkrid at the center, Rem to the front right, Aisia had sprung out from the bushes on the left, and farther behind her stood Andrew and his three elite soldiers.
And about twenty paces ahead, in the darkness where the clouds made it hard to make out shapes, several people could be seen.
Even with a knight's eyesight, only their outlines were visible.
Still, the sound carried clearly. A knight's hearing caught the opponent's muttered words, Child of the Star.
"Impatient bastards."
Rem said, shaking out his left hand. Tonight he too had brought all his gear. A throwing axe painstakingly made by the dwarf craftsman Argan turned into a spinning disk and flew.
If you were not a knight, his hand movement was so fast you would not even recognize it as a spinning disk. The axe had flown before his words had even finished beginning and ending.
Boom!
With the sound of the air bursting, the axe Rem had thrown bounced back. Esther narrowed her eyes at the sight.
Enkrid too felt something catch in his senses. A shapeless curtain had become a solid wall of iron and blocked the axe. That shapeless curtain was not completely unharmed either, but the fact that it had blocked it at all was startling enough.
"So it broke."
The enemy—meaning the mage twenty paces ahead—spoke. He was a man in long, loose white robes, wearing several ornaments.
The clouds covering the two moons slid aside a little, and his form was revealed in the moonlight. Fwoosh, pop.
The torches carried by Andrew's group all went out at once.
"Andrew. Take the three and get out."
Enkrid stepped forward as he spoke. His five senses sharpened, and goosebumps rose all over his body. Along with the tension, the Heart of Might activated and adjusted his heartbeat. A cold sensation brushed the back of his neck.
"It's an Astrail master."
Esther recognized the opponent and said. Those called masters were the ones who had mastered spells.
Looked at objectively, Esther could not overwhelm a master. She was not something that could beat one easily. To face one, even she would have to throw out several gambits. She knew herself well.
"He's not alone."
Rem said, lips twisting. Just as he said, the master had brought his whole group out.
It was one of the worst endings Kraiss had imagined.
More precisely, if such a worst case existed, they had arranged things so it would come out.
The Astrail master had gathered every servant hidden in Naurill and dragged them out. None of them was equal to him, but each one had been a subordinate painstakingly raised by a lord of the Demon lands personally.
A dark-skinned fairy, a dwarf wearing a helmet with horns on both sides, that master himself, and behind them five robe-covered spellcasters.
They had all come.
The secretary who had lured this group here twisted his lips into a smile.
"Your lives are as good as over now."
Enkrid thought it was an awfully cliché thing to say. The one called the Astrail master approached and opened his mouth, and even though he opened it only once, three separate lines were heard at the same time.
"So you throw things as a greeting."
"You're knights, so you should be able to hear me from here, right?"
"My name is Eudokia."
It was a marvelous trick.
He came straight on until he was within ten paces, then stopped. Rem put a hand on his axe.
"Don't be foolish, warrior of the West. Join our side, and I'll make you a great warrior of the demons, so come quietly."
As if he had been waiting, the dwarf spoke toward Rem. In the moonlight, the dwarf's eyes were silver, split crosswise. Just looking at him, he was clearly no ordinary creature.
"I'm already the great warrior of the goddess, born and raised in the West, you half-cut bastard."
Rem answered as if it were nothing. Enkrid took his eyes off the mage and looked at Rem.
"What're you looking at?"
"Ayul?"
The goddess, he said. So Ayul, then?
"Ah, well."
"I was just wondering whether you could say that in front of your wife too."
If Ayul heard it, it would be quite moving, wouldn't it?
"Quit your bullshit and look ahead."
Rem's cheeks did not redden, but Enkrid judged that he was embarrassed.
"Romantic Axe."
That was why the words came out on their own.
"What?"
Rem reacted.
"Your new nickname."
"Ah, are you seriously insane?"
Hearing the two of them bicker, Esther let out a short, deflated laugh, and Aisia nodded in admiration, thinking that these bastards were still properly insane.
"You do know this is an extremely dangerous situation, right?"
Andrew trusted the Mad Order of Knights, but with the source of every problem that had recently erupted in the capital standing right in front of him, sweat came to his hands on its own.
Master Eudokia was not angry. He was not flustered either. There was some absurdity left, but once they were dead, it would all be over anyway.
'They'd be useful if I turned them into my great warriors.'
With that thought, he opened his spell world.
"Greeting."
Mana dwelled in that one abbreviated word, and the power of another world was drawn in and manifested in reality.
At that single word, Greeting, Esther caught a glimpse of the high-dimensional spell world contained within it.
Originally, that spell was a greeting of regard from Agrava. He had compressed it into the single word Greeting.
And Agrava meant a being of monstrous strength with an invisible, shapeless body.
So with that one word, Greeting, an invisible rock fell above Andrew and his three private soldiers' heads.
It could not be seen, but its weight and physical substance unquestionably existed. That was the spell.
Andrew did not even have time to shout as he raised his sword overhead. But could a sword receive a rock?
It could not. He had not trained for something like this, nor had he ever faced a situation like it.
But somewhere in the world, there were always people who enjoyed exactly this kind of mad training.
Of course, rather than somewhere in the world, one of them happened to be very close by.
Enkrid kicked off the ground, received the rock that had caught in his sharpened senses with the flat of his sword, and threw it aside.
Boom!
The invisible mass dropped onto the ground beyond the bushes, kicking up a cloud of dust.
"Aaagh!"
Unluckily, the secretary they had been chasing was over there, and he was crushed flat beneath the invisible rock and died.
It was a strange sight. You could see the flattened state, but not the thing doing the crushing, so only the blood-smashed corpse sat there in plain view.
"Come forth, steel doll legion."
Master Eudokia casually cast another spell. He did not care in the least that one servant had died. Before his words had even finished, long vertical lines appeared in midair, and iron fingers thrust out, raking through them.
The iron hands tore through the lines in the air as if ripping through taut cloth and pulled out the rest of their bodies.
Once one emerged, several more lines were drawn beside it, and before long the number that came out had passed twenty.
Once you reached the level of an Astrail master, even knights were looked down on. And that was only natural.
'Have I been in seclusion too long?'
Instead of dropping flat before him and begging for their lives, they dared to come at him.
It was probably because his seclusion had been too long. These Astrail masters all lived buried only in research or in their own spell worlds. Rarely did they come out into the world and exert influence like this.
That sort of thing was for their underlings to do.
'If I step forward myself, I make sure to leave the mark clearly.'
It was one of the rules the few masters had to uphold. Eudokia was faithful to that rule.
With a single gesture, the steel doll legion that had appeared charged forward. Their target was the pathetic humans standing back there.
Thud, thud! The golems' footsteps shook the ground and the air. To Andrew and the soldiers under him, through the rising dust cloud, those things...