Eternally Regressing Knight Novel - Chapter 963
Chapter 963: Chapter 961 – The Noble Hunter
Chapter 961 – The Noble Hunter
“I’m unbinding it.”
Esther spoke as she formed a hand sign using only her right hand.
She pursed her lips and muttered an incantation in an unrecognizable language.
Even before Esther spoke, Enkrid had felt no desire to cross the wall.
To be precise, he had stopped of his own accord before she even held him back.
‘Why?’
He asked himself.
The answer came instantly.
He had sensed the spell.
If forced to explain it, he would just say it was a ‘feeling’, but he had actually perceived it through his sixth sense and pure instinct.
‘I feel a sense of revulsion.’
It was a sensation he had experienced countless times while rigorously training his Spell breaker techniques with Esther.
Enkrid hadn’t forgotten it.
His senses, honed even sharper than before, were screaming at him.
Was it because he was actively using Assimilation and consciously trying to move like Jaxen?
Or was it because mastering the Wave had taught him how to actively shift his Will in real-time?
Both likely played a part.
As Esther’s muttering ceased, the sense of revulsion vanished instantly.
The wall became just an ordinary wall.
‘Is it a noise-based spell?’
The kind designed to alert the estate if someone crossed the boundary.
Enkrid casually categorized the spell purely through his senses.
If Esther had known what he just did, she would have been appalled.
He certainly hadn’t been at this level back when they first trained together.
‘I could probably just evade it.’
Enkrid thought to himself.
Even if Esther hadn’t unbound it, it wouldn’t have been a problem.
Of course, he didn’t actually voice that arrogant thought out loud.
Enkrid wasn’t the kind of idiot who would say something like that to the witch standing right next to him, especially when she had just gone out of her way to handle it for his sake.
“Thanks.”
Instead, he simply said that.
“Felt kind of weird there for a second.”
Rem also tossed out a comment that roughly equated to ‘thanks’.
The three of them scaled the wall.
Enkrid and Rem possessed more than enough skill to silently vault over a wall just by hooking their fingertips on the edge, and when it came to pure physical capability, Esther was no slouch either.
The superhuman strength and feline agility she had gained by overcoming the curse of the leopard still resided within her body.
Had they mentioned the Duke’s estate was famous for its shrubbery and gardens?
The rumors were entirely accurate.
Stretching out before them were meticulously manicured square hedges and topiary shaped like rabbits and deer—the undeniable symbols of a gardener’s blood, sweat, and tears.
Thanks to that, moving while remaining hidden was incredibly easy.
Although they carried no light source, tonight the two moons shone exceptionally bright.
For various reasons, slipping into the mansion was a breeze.
Though they would have easily managed even if it had been difficult.
“It’s a bit chilly tonight.”
The conversation between two maids drifted into Enkrid’s ears.
It came from the direction of the dining hall.
The three of them pressed themselves flat against the outer wall of the hall, merely peeking their heads over the windowsill to peer inside.
“It’s warm during the day, but that’s exactly why you need to bring an extra layer when you go out at times like this. It’s not like you have anyone to take care of you if you get sick.”
“But I have you.”
The two maids giggled together. It was a wholesome conversation, pleasant to both see and hear.
Meanwhile, Esther abruptly stopped in her tracks.
“A minion has laid a trap here.”
The three of them crouched low beneath the window. Because Esther perfectly controlled the volume of her voice, her words only reached the two men.
“I will dispose of it and catch up.”
Esther declared, and Enkrid didn’t ask a single question.
Since she had offered to handle it, she would take care of it perfectly.
There was no reason to waste any more time here, so he left Esther behind and continued hugging the wall.
As he moved, he decided to test a new technique.
‘Was it something like this?’
He took the Will circulating throughout his body and expanded it outward across a specific radius.
“When the five senses are sharpened beyond their absolute limits, they evolve into a sixth sense, and as experience accumulates, that manifests as sheer intuition.”
Jaxen’s words echoed in his mind.
Had he described it as intentionally weaponizing what was originally just primal instinct or intuition?
If the foundation of sensory enhancement was sharpening and categorizing the five physical senses, the next step was using Will to hear the inaudible and see the invisible.
He loaded his Will into his five senses and awakened his sixth.
Everything within a specific radius was suddenly perceived so vividly it felt as if he could physically grab it.
There was no longer any need to click his tongue and use echolocation.
‘Three people beyond this wall.’
It was entirely thanks to applying what he had learned while hanging around Jaxen.
Enkrid loaded his Will into his senses.
Everything became unprecedentedly clear.
He felt as if he could even hear the moonlight filtering through the air.
‘No hostility, but they are three highly trained soldiers.’
They were the private guards raised by the Duke of the Fertile Lands.
Enkrid continued walking along the wall, searching for his target.
It didn’t take long.
“Don’t you think our roles are a bit reversed right now?” Rem grumbled.
He said it because he realized exactly what Enkrid was doing.
Enkrid ignored him and kept walking.
There was a lot of work to be done tonight.
Soon, their footsteps halted.
Because Will is essentially intent, reading hostility was even easier.
And reading the distinct, foul demonic energy harbored by demonic minions was easier still.
Tap.
Enkrid tapped his finger against the wall.
The meaning was clear: Right here.
Rem casually ran his palm along the wall, glanced up at the window directly above them, kicked a stray pebble up with his toe, caught it, and hurled it.
Crash!
The window shattered.
A deafening noise erupted from inside, and the exact moment the attention of everyone beyond the wall—and everyone else nearby—snapped upward…
Rem bolted along the wall, violently twisted the mansion’s doorknob until it shattered, and breached the interior.
He looked exactly like a feral beast going on a rampage.
But a beast that was incredibly cunning and possessed a very specific goal.
Enkrid sharpened his senses to a razor’s edge and followed right behind him.
Rem pulled up the mask resting under his chin, threw his hood over his head, and drew a shortsword—who knew where he had gotten it from.
His movements were so deadeningly quiet and concise that the sound of the blade being drawn couldn’t even be heard, yet his speed was blinding.
Just inside the hallway, directly beneath a wall-mounted candelabra.
A faint silhouette was visible in the shadows.
It was a woman wearing a thin, white dress.
She seemed to have stepped out of her room to investigate the commotion.
“Who’s there?!”
Her eyes widened in pure terror.
It was a fabricated emotion.
Enkrid saw right through it.
Having suffered endlessly at the hands of a fairy, he was a master at distinguishing genuine emotions from fake ones.
Naturally, Rem recognized it instantly as well.
Rem didn’t hesitate for a single second.
Pushing off the ground with a soft step, he lowered his posture halfway and launched himself forward in a dead sprint.
Simultaneously, he hurled the shortsword in his hand.
Perhaps entirely unexpecting him to actually throw his weapon, the minion failed to react in time.
Thwack!
The blade pierced straight through her throat.
It wasn’t just a regular blade; it was a blade heavily infused with shamanic arts.
Even after throwing the shortsword, Rem didn’t slow his sprint in the slightest.
He closed the remaining distance in a flash and violently ripped the sword free from the woman’s neck.
Sprinting, throwing, and retrieving—all executed within a single, fluid breath.
The woman clutched her throat, staggered, and collapsed to her knees.
Thick, pitch-black blood poured endlessly through the fingers desperately clutching her neck.
She slowly pulled her hand away.
The torn flesh on either side of the gaping hole tried to knit itself back together several times, but ultimately lost its strength and peeled apart.
The woman’s eyes rolled entirely white.
Was she trying to mount one final counterattack?
Enkrid watched coldly from behind.
The fingernails on the hand she lowered from her throat rapidly elongated into claws, but abruptly stopped.
True to her nature as a minion, she had harbored demonic energy and attempted a physical mutation, but it had completely failed.
“That’s one.”
While Rem was muttering to himself, footsteps echoed from further down the hallway.
Clack, clack, clack—
Someone was sprinting frantically.
Even though the window had shattered on the second floor, this person had immediately checked the first-floor hallway and was now charging toward them.
‘He has excellent situational awareness.’
Just as Enkrid was internally giving the approaching opponent a high score for their tactical response, the opponent spotted them.
“Who are you?!”
Schwing!
With that shout, he drew his sword.
But he didn’t stop there.
He maintained his full sprinting speed with his sword drawn and launched himself at them.
Shouting ‘Who are you?!’ while already mid-swing.
Whoever had trained him had done a phenomenal job.
It was a draw-and-strike rooted fundamentally in the swordsmanship of deception.
Rem raised his shortsword vertically to catch the diagonal slash crashing down on him, violently shoving the blade to the side.
It was an attempt to read the flow of power and deflect it.
The moment Rem tried to use technique to casually flow the blade away, the swordsman abruptly thrust his foot out, attempting to violently stomp on Rem’s lead foot.
‘He’s improved drastically.’
Enkrid awarded him another high score.
To pull off a maneuver like this meant he absolutely hadn’t been slacking on his daily training and conditioning.
Instead of getting his foot crushed, Rem barely shoved the sword away and leaped backward.
Enkrid had already faded back into the shadows long before.
“Guards!!”
The man who had astutely sprinted straight to the first floor despite the commotion happening on the second was Andrew Gardner.
A noble, a member of the Royalist faction currently serving as the Commander of the Capital City Guard, and a man who had trained relentlessly alongside the Madmen Knights, elevating his martial prowess to a level considered top-tier even within the capital.
You could easily call him the widely recognized, rising star of the capital.
Even as he shouted, he never once took his eyes off the two masked assassins standing before him.
It was the only natural response since this was hardly the time to be mourning over the corpse of a dead noble.
Well, even at a passing glance, it simply looked like a dead person.
If you looked incredibly closely, traces of demonic energy remained, but that was something only a Holy Priest could verify after a thorough examination.
In other words, from the outside, it simply looked like two assassins had just murdered a noble.
Screaming for the guards, Andrew gripped his sword and charged.
“Hmph.”
He gathered his strength in a single breath.
He had never stopped training.
He had learned a staggering amount while embedded with the Madmen Knights.
‘Never waste a single day.’
He had lived exactly by those words.
Boom!
His Will coalesced, packing explosive power into his sprint.
Enkrid felt a sudden wave of nostalgia.
A very long time ago, back when he led the Madmen Squad, hadn’t he seen a semi-knight charge exactly like this?
Now, Andrew was demonstrating that very same Will-infused sprint.
Though compared to back then, the current Enkrid possessed a level of skill that could effortlessly crush that sprint as if it were a joke.
‘Should I just knock him out and go?’
Rem asked with his eyes.
Enkrid judged that to be an overreaction.
Keeping his hand hidden from Andrew’s view, Enkrid clenched his fist in front of his chest, opened it, and wiggled his pinky finger.
It was the tactical hand signal for an immediate retreat.
Enkrid instantly spun around, sprinted down the back of the hallway, and vaulted out the same door they had breached.
Rem stuck right behind him.
“Guaaaaards!”
Andrew was about to detonate his Will to launch a catastrophic charge, but instead, he screamed one last time and the moment he burst out of the mansion, he desperately tracked their fleeing figures.
Since they were still faintly visible, he fully detonated his Will this time, violently kicking off the ground.
Sensing the sheer momentum rapidly closing the distance behind him, Enkrid sprinted straight toward the mansion’s main gate before abruptly cutting hard to the left.
It was a terrifying physical feat—cutting a perfect right angle without losing a single ounce of his forward momentum.
Following that, he locked eyes on the outer wall and leaped.
After effortlessly clearing the wall, he completely vanished into the darkness.
That was the end of it.
Because Andrew had concentrated the entirety of his Will into his thighs to maximize his explosive forward speed, changing direction mid-sprint was physically impossible.
He violently slammed his right hand into a stone statue of the God of Abundance erected near the front of the estate, used the momentum to violently spin himself around, and chased after them, but he lost their trail almost immediately.
“How the hell is there anyone that fast?”
Andrew muttered in disbelief.
When they clashed swords earlier, the bastard clearly hadn’t been at the level of a true knight.
But to call him just a professional assassin… Andrew’s mind became a tangled mess.
Naturally, Rem had deliberately suppressed his own skill.
If an assassin possessing the overwhelming martial prowess of a knight pulled a stunt like this, it would draw far too much suspicion far too quickly.
The name of this operation was ‘The Capital Killer’.
Rem hadn’t forgotten that.
“Who’s next?”
After ditching Andrew and slipping through the alleyways, Esther leisurely strolled into the back alley behind the tavern where Enkrid and Rem were hiding.
A foul stench, heavily laced with the smell of piss, assaulted their noses, but all three remained utterly unfazed.
There was no one here amateur enough to wrinkle their nose just because it smelled a bit bad while on a mission.
“I think the next one will be much easier.”
The shrill blast of whistles echoed from within the Duke’s estate, and bright lights began spilling out into the streets.
They had lit not only candelabras and torches, but also magical lanterns—a highly expensive type of Spell Object.
“And the maids?” Enkrid asked.
Because those who could be saved absolutely should be saved.
“Four of them were placed under a hypnotic suggestion. They are perfectly fine now.”
Naturally, for Esther, breaking a hypnotic suggestion induced by a spell was as effortless as sipping a cup of lukewarm tea.
Enkrid verified their location on the map stored in his mind and immediately moved out.
The next target was a much smaller estate.
He believed it belonged to some Viscount’s family.
***
“These damn nobles, no matter how many you kill, they just keep crawling out of the woodwork.”
Rem delivered the performance of a lifetime yet again.
Standing right in front of a wardrobe where a terrified servant was hiding, he intentionally muttered loudly enough to be heard, flawlessly executing his role as the deranged ‘Noble Slaughterer’.
He then violently yanked his sword free from the minion’s split skull.
Schluuck.
As the blade tore free from the bone, thick blood dripped down.
The blood wasn’t pitch black.
Just because someone was a minion didn’t guarantee their blood would be black.
Because there were those who only had their minds completely dominated, and those who had willingly defected to the demons while entirely in their right minds.
The next target was exactly that kind of bastard.
A piece of trash who had willingly defected to the demons while completely sane.
***
“Who are you? Did the King send you? He caught on faster than I thought.”
It was the owner of a small merchant guild.
His eyes were sharp, and his body was clearly hardened by rigorous combat training.
“You are all so arrogant. In the end, we all die anyway. Even that almighty Empire couldn’t completely eradicate the Demonic Realms, so how do you ever expect to survive making enemies out of every single demon? How can you fools not see that this is the side that actually survives?”
A cultist.
He could tell just by listening to the bastard speak.
This, too, was likely thanks to his vast accumulation of experience.
“Our God resides within the Demonic Realm.”
The bastard acted exactly in line with the impression Enkrid got from him.
Spoken like a true cultist.
Dark, ashen soot violently erupted from both of his hands as he ruthlessly thrust them forward.
Of course, that entire sequence of actions was brutally severed before it even properly began.
Right before the bastard even finished his sentence, Enkrid closed the distance to point-blank range and slashed vertically.
With a single, flawlessly precise vertical strike, the bastard’s body was cleaved perfectly in half.
As he did, Enkrid internally marveled once again.
‘Whenever I need it to, it becomes exactly like Night Stroll.’
His sword transformed just like that.
It became even sharper and more lethal than Night Stroll.
It perfectly accepted his Will and resonated with it completely.
Esther snapped her fingers—Click.
The black, ashen soot crumbling from the corpse violently dispersed, reducing to fine powder that scattered across the floor.
“Next.”
The three of them assassinated a total of five targets that night.
They were nobles, prominent merchants, and tavern owners.
Not a single one of them could be called ‘ordinary’.
They were all in positions capable of exerting significant influence over their surroundings.
Or, they were deeply embedded directly beside someone who held a highly influential position.
***
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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-1110+ daily chapters from monday to friday for a month.
-KNIGHT – Cost 20e – Chapters 1040-1110 + 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**