Eternally Regressing Knight Novel - Chapter 924
Chapter 924: Chapter 922 – Let’s Have a Bout
Chapter 922 – Let’s Have a Bout
“Just don’t try to seduce her.”
Enkrid stared silently into Cypress’s eyes.
These were the eyes of a man he had once idolized, a man he had once wished just to meet.
“Are you serious?”
He couldn’t help but ask.
“I am serious. There is a significant age difference between you two.”
Cypress looked solemn.
It was fitting, perhaps, for a man who had deceived the Great Emperor while standing on one leg.
Judging by his expression alone, it was impossible to tell if he was joking.
“No, I meant about taking her with us.”
Somehow, the quality of his jokes was on par with Shinar’s.
Does everyone become like this when they age?
‘Come to think of it, isn’t he much younger than Shinar?’
Even if he didn’t know the exact number, he had a rough idea of the age of the Fairy who stayed by his side.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
She was standing right there.
Enkrid had instinctively glanced at her, prompting the question.
Shinar continued without a change in expression.
“Were you about to claim a preference for young, pretty human women? Request denied. I won’t even entertain that notion.”
“…Suit yourself.”
“Good. That is the correct attitude.”
Shinar nodded in satisfaction.
Cypress, having watched the brief skit, spoke again.
“I heard a Witch is also staying with you in the city. Aurelia… I cannot have my granddaughter be your third option.”
“Then wouldn’t it be better to keep her here with you?”
“I’ve seen how much Aurelia’s skills have changed. Take her and polish her skills for a few more years.”
Cypress’s tone shifted.
He sounded less like a Knight Commander and more like a grandfather.
Enkrid had no reason to refuse, and teaching Aurelia wasn’t a bad proposition.
Learning through teaching was a wisdom Enkrid had recently embraced.
He had felt it with Fel and Ropord; guiding Aurelia on her path would likely help him grow as well.
“Let’s do that.”
As he nodded in agreement, Cypress’s face grew twice as serious.
“If you make her your first wife, I might reconsider it.”
At those words, Shinar placed her hand on the hilt of Naidyr.
“Is that a challenge for a duel? Young human?”
It was simply awkward to hear the title ‘young human’ directed at Cypress.
“I don’t think that will happen,” Enkrid said.
He had overheard a few conversations between Ingis and Aurelia.
There seemed to be no room for him to intervene between those two.
Perhaps Cypress knew that, too, as his eyes danced with mischief.
The comment had definitely been a joke.
“I want to tag along too, but I’ll hold back. There is a mountain of work to do here. Though he doesn’t look it, our Master gets lonely easily. If his granddaughter and his best friend leave at the same time, he might cry into his wine bottle every night.”
Lien giggled from the side as he interjected.
The remark was rude, bordering on excessive, but Cypress simply nodded.
He didn’t deny it.
These two were truly friends.
Exchanging such insults was just their daily routine.
“Then go.”
Cypress gestured.
His body couldn’t move as freely as before, but his resolve remained unbroken.
He was still the Guardian Deity of the South.
Enkrid grasped Cypress’s hand.
“It was an honor, Sir.”
“I felt the same.”
Enkrid finished the short farewell and turned away.
It was time to leave.
The war had ended with fewer casualties than expected.
Usually, when this many people die near the Demonic Realm, wraiths are born and ghouls rise, but nothing of the sort happened.
It was thanks to the hard work of the priesthood dispatched from Legion.
They had brought holy relics to block the miasma of the Demonic Realm, planting and burying them across the land.
“Legion sent several precious items.”
Seeing the relics, Audin expressed his admiration.
Such cooperation would have been unimaginable with the Legion of the past.
A holy relic was an artifact born of divinity—belonging to a martyr or a clergyman who had lived a pious life until their natural end.
It wasn’t something that could be mass-produced like coins.
Enkrid passed by one such relic.
It was a metal ornament shaped like a cluster of grapes, symbolizing abundance.
He was finally leaving the land where the war had ended.
Hiing.
Weird Eyes folded his wings obediently and stuck to Enkrid’s side.
“Right. You lingered next to the tent too, didn’t you?”
While Enkrid was dying and coming back to life, Weird Eyes hadn’t left the tent either.
As Enkrid raised a hand to stroke its mane, the horse nudged his hand away with its forehead.
Thump.
It felt like the horse was telling him to stop doing useless things and focus on recovering.
He had no intention of riding Weird Eyes.
His body would heal better by walking.
Riding a mount consumed mental and physical strength, and the journey back wasn’t urgent.
He heard that one of Lihin-Stetten’s detached forces had run into Rem’s assault unit and been crushed, but the rest had reportedly returned to Lihin-Stetten obediently.
The Great Emperor’s son had apparently granted them amnesty and ordered their return.
The attitude the South adopted after the Embankment Treaty was clear: they intended to strengthen their internal stability and focus on blocking the Demonic Realm.
‘Is it as Krang wished?’
He walked together with the entire Knight Order.
Although his body hadn’t recovered perfectly, it was manageable.
“To the Hero of National Salvation! The Hero of the End of War!”
Ahead of them, a unit of soldiers had formed up, blocking the path.
No, they weren’t blocking it—they had lined up on either side, creating a corridor for them to walk through.
Krang stood at the center.
His voice rang out louder than ever before.
“Salute!”
As soon as the command fell, the soldiers filling the left and right flanks pressed their left hands to their waists and bowed their heads.
Snap!
A sharp, unified sound rang out as the entire unit moved in perfect synchronization.
It was a military salute filled with respect and honor.
“At ease.”
At Krang’s words, everyone raised their heads.
“I speak as the King of this nation. Because you fought, the present exists. Because you stepped forward, you protected those standing behind you. I express my gratitude for all of it.”
Enkrid felt the weight of every word Krang spoke.
A vision flickered before him.
The background behind Krang seemed to shift into a city, and people emerged from it, bowing their heads and shedding tears of gratitude.
‘Jules, Lita, Merrid.’
Countless names surfaced in his mind.
Some he couldn’t protect, and they had died.
Others, he had saved.
A child who dreamed of being an herbalist had died, but a child living in the Border Guard had lived.
The vision blurred like morning fog and vanished.
In the meantime, Krang approached and thumped his fist against Enkrid’s chest.
“It’s not over yet.”
“I know.”
Five demons remained, and the Demonic Realm was still intact.
“Still, suppressing Lihin-Stetten like this makes me happy beyond measure.”
Krang laughed.
Enkrid smiled, too.
“My insides must be the most refreshed, Your Majesty.”
Cypress squeezed in between the two.
The unit offering the salute stood firm behind them.
Humans cannot live alone, and they cannot fight alone.
It was a truth realized anew.
“For the Madman!”
The cheer erupting from the back was proof of that.
“For those standing behind us!”
Other cheers touched his heart as well.
That was what happened when Aurelia joined them and they left the Southern Front.
Another significant event that couldn’t be ignored was a dream he had on the way back.
Naturally, it was a dream featuring the Ferryman.
“How many ‘todays’ do you think passed before you woke up?”
Even after leaving the front lines, his body hadn’t recovered, so Enkrid put aside training and focused solely on recuperation.
Since walking aided recovery more than sitting still, they continued a slow march.
On the first night, as soon as he lay down and fell asleep, the Ferryman popped out and asked the question.
Enkrid fell into thought.
He didn’t know exactly how many ‘todays’ had passed.
He simply estimated that if he counted every time he woke up, at least hundreds of days must have passed.
It was simple logic.
He assumed he died every time he closed his eyes and opened them again.
“Is the number important?”
A soft green light flickered inside the hood.
Today, the Ferryman had turned his head obliquely to the side, hiding his face within the robe.
“You seem not to know,” the Ferryman replied.
He even set his lantern down on the boat’s deck—a sight Enkrid was seeing for the first time.
Looking at the lantern, Enkrid asked:
“Do I need to know?”
“It would be good if you knew.”
The Ferryman explained readily.
It was a simple and brief story.
“You fainted countless times and woke up again. Just on the fifth day, you hovered between life and death sixteen times. Every time you reached the brink, you barely held onto your breath.”
Who kept me breathing?
Rem, Audin, Shinar, Krang, Theresa, Dunbakel, Fel, Ropord, Luagarne, Temarress.
They all did.
It was a repetition of everything he had seen, even back when he first became a knight.
“Don’t die. If you go like this, it’ll be a shame.”
Rem had used several secret arts to seal the wound.
The rest did similar things.
Shinar, in particular, had poured her essence into him unsparingly.
“It was an impressive scene,” the Ferryman said.
Coming from his mouth, it was a truly awkward remark.
Wasn’t he an existence that acted as if he knew everything?
‘What methods exist to postpone death?’
The Ferryman recalled asking himself that.
If those people hadn’t been around Enkrid, his ‘today’ would have been much shorter.
That day might have been too short to accomplish anything.
He might have been consumed by the loop entirely.
What did his life—the time he had lived through—prove?
The past speaks to the present.
That phrase came to mind.
Forgotten words released from his subconscious drew out emotions.
The Ferryman tried to shake off that emotion quickly, but not everything went as he intended.
‘Leave it. It’s been a while. Let him enjoy it.’
Another aspect of the Ferryman blocked the thought and surfaced completely.
That was who faced Enkrid in the dream now.
‘Death postponed by the help of those around you.’
It was a new form of ‘today,’ one he had never experienced until now.
Enkrid had struggled in that gap, but he was never alone.
“One person inside the whole cannot change anything, but if that one gathers and becomes many, the world changes. Because change starts with me, but it doesn’t end with me.”
Those were Enkrid’s words.
The Ferryman had heard them, too.
The declaration he shouted at the Great Emperor had been proven true.
The change he caused had reached even the curse the Ferryman cast.
‘Acknowledgement.’
As the Ferryman thought, a moment Enkrid hadn’t perceived until now surfaced in his mind.
‘Wait, that bastard Rem asked again if it was good to be alive.’
Audin had laughed gratifyingly at that, and Dunbakel had nodded.
Everyone had reacted with one heart to what Rem said.
It was awkward beyond measure, but he had let it be because there was no time to question it.
Temarress saying it was a “mystery” how he was even alive was for a similar reason.
It wasn’t that surviving was fascinating—he had clearly been dying, and dragon blood had no effect.
‘He said what happened was a mystery because he saw that no one gave up until the very end.’
The Dragonkin was still short of words and lacked the talent to convey his meaning.
If Enkrid had intentionally questioned the meaning, he would have known, but he realized it only now.
“This time, your ‘today’ looped only eleven times.”
There was a massive gap between his perception and reality.
Enkrid now understood the reason.
Though he wouldn’t bring that up.
The Ferryman took off the hood.
It was the face of a woman, a full head taller than Enkrid.
Green eyes shone against white skin.
“See you again.”
The woman, clearly a part of the Ferryman, spoke.
Enkrid woke from the dream.
“Why is there no normal person here?”
Anne, the healer who called herself ‘Elixir,’ complained.
She had been examining the returnees for days.
“Sir Jaxen also returned half-dead.”
While she grumbled, she understood just how rough and violent their fight had been.
Anne examined the scar on Enkrid’s abdomen and spoke accurately once more.
“Thanks to that, many people must have survived.”
She spoke with her head bowed.
The meaning contained in those words was clear: gratitude and praise.
Enkrid didn’t answer.
About fifteen days passed, and his condition recovered enough to train.
Enkrid checked what he had realized and mastered with his body.
Another ten days passed, and his physical condition returned to perfection.
In the meantime, rumors circulated outside.
Titles like Beelrog Slayer and Demon Slayer spread like wildfire, and bards composed new songs endlessly, seizing the opportunity.
***
Enkrid hummed a song titled Knight of the Apocalypse or Knight of the End of War.
It was now a month since his return to the city.
“Are you back to full strength?”
It was a winter dawn, before the sun had even risen.
A day when the cold wind seeped deep into the bones.
Rem was the type who usually enjoyed rolling around wrapped in heated leather furs on such days, no matter what anyone said.
Yet, today he came out at dawn for training and warmed up alongside Enkrid.
He put away the heated furs and worked up a sweat with his own body heat.
He lifted and lowered heavy iron weights, finishing by stretching his muscles as if unraveling every single strand.
His muscles, expanding and contracting, revealed a form smoother than any artwork.
Even when fighting Lihin-Stetten’s Knight Order, he hadn’t prepared this intensely.
Now, he concentrated without a single joke.
The sky was pitch black before the dawn.
Apart from the cold, stars twinkled overhead.
With that starlight as a backdrop, Rem asked the question.
“Perfectly,” Enkrid answered.
Rem nodded and walked to one side of the training ground.
His pace was neither fast nor slow.
Standing there, Rem drew his axes and lowered his stance obliquely.
In his right hand, the Descended Axe; in his left, the axe made by pestering the Dwarf craftsman—a crystallization of the Dwarf’s secret art, forged from three metals: True Iron, True Silver, and Black Gold.
Rem crossed the two axes in front of his face, bent his waist forward, and spoke.
“Let’s Have a Bout.”
***
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***
If you enjoy the series and want to get more chapters early, head over to https://payhip.com/Samowek
Next 100 chapters – 25e [Be sure to message me on discord for any information]
[SHOP BEST BUY] – 50e – Every chapter translated – Latest WN-1070 + daily chapters from monday to friday for a month.
-KNIGHT – Cost 20e – Chapters 1000-1070 + daily chapters from Monday to Friday for a month
I welcome you to join our discord https://discord.gg/RY7BbJpeAZ
**ANY INFO ONLY APPLIES TO THE LATEST CHAPTER HERE ON WEBNOVEL**