Eternally Regressing Knight Novel - Chapter 972
Chapter 972: Chapter 970 – The Spell Butcher
Chapter 970 – The Spell Butcher
‘The Spell Butcher.’
Living entirely consumed by sheer madness, Zaiden cultivated a hyper-tuned perception dedicated exclusively to seeing and unraveling spells.
Relying on that terrifying instinct, he felt spells and physically severed them.
He became the absolute natural predator of every single Mage in existence, fundamentally forged the concept of ‘Spell Murder’, and ultimately became known as the Spell Butcher.
‘Every single magical society desperately mobilized everything they had just to kill him.’
They fiercely attempted to achieve their desires countless times, but by endlessly repeating ‘today’, the Spell Butcher systematically crushed every single one of their ambitions.
This technique was the legacy left behind by a man who had lost absolutely everything, a man who lived his entire life cursing and despising the world.
‘Endlessly repeating today.’
He didn’t even bother counting how many ‘todays’ he had lived through.
His singular, burning desire was that no one wielding magic remained anywhere in this world—that not a single one survived.
And so, entirely engulfed in blind hatred, he lived his life slaughtering Mages, over and over again.
‘No, he wasn’t truly living.’
He was merely agonizingly breaking down piece by piece.
He slowly decayed and withered away.
His mind plunged into a bottomless abyss, and unimaginable suffering followed, but did any of that matter?
Killing magic, and returning every single person who wielded it back to the dirt.
Even though he was overflowing with sheer madness, his Will remained absolutely pure.
And because it was pure, it was desperate, and because it was desperate, it was brilliantly radiant.
‘Radiant madness.’
Enkrid became Zaiden and experienced his life.
And those were the exact words he drew out to define the man’s existence.
Wielding that radiant madness, he severed and pierced through spells.
When he was young, there was a popular nursery rhyme warning children that if they misbehaved, the Knight of Wrath would appear and ruthlessly snip away their wicked hearts.
Of course, during the era Zaiden actually lived in, no one referred to him with a title like that.
To them, he was simply the Spell Butcher.
The moniker ‘Knight of Wrath’ was attached to his legend by future generations.
A relentless entity that violently appeared everywhere, engaging in endless, suicidal combat without ever caring for its own well-being—that entity was later revered as the Knight bearing the alias of ‘Wrath’.
‘So that old story was actually true?’
Enkrid had heard the tale a few times himself.
Although it wasn’t always sung as a nursery rhyme, it was a story every parent would inevitably tell their children at least once.
Because demonic beasts, monsters, and bandits were very real, physical threats, they couldn’t be used as the bogeymen in these fables.
He had always assumed the Knight of Wrath was just a boogeyman fabricated by people.
‘A Knight who ultimately ran rampant, using sheer wrath as his nourishment.’
“They are filthy. They are repulsive. They are an absolute plague.”
It was the mantra that echoed endlessly within Zaiden, the Knight of Wrath.
He had witnessed the absolute ugliest, most grotesque aspects of humanity, and he violently filled the gaping void left by losing everything he cherished with pure wrath.
I took up this sword to slaughter every last one of those repulsive degenerates.
And my very first priority shall be the absolute eradication of every single spellcaster.
He remained flawlessly faithful to the voice echoing within him.
What is this?
Where am I, and when is this happening?
The answer arrived the exact moment the question surfaced.
It was the process of opening his eyes.
The exact boundary between dreams and reality right before waking up.
Suspended in that liminal space, Enkrid violently accelerated his thought processes and continuously analyzed the situation.
Amidst the swirling chaos, a grating, cackling laugh violently intruded.
“Whether it is hatred or joy, they are merely two sides of the exact same coin. Ultimately, they both lead to madness pointing in a singular direction. Don’t you agree? It’s so deeply satisfying to watch everyone act like absolute morons.”
The mocking, derisive tone and the grating cackle instantly brought the image of the Ferryman to mind.
Several other voices abruptly cut in, aggressively voicing their own opinions.
“Even if you are utterly consumed by madness, the path still continues forward.”
“No matter what happens, the ultimate destination is exactly the same.”
“It was always going to end like this. You should just pick a decent ‘today’ and settle down while you still can.”
There were three distinct voices.
One merely observed, another offered bitter pessimism, and the third aggressively urged him to give up entirely.
“He is merely offering assistance. Stepping out from behind that assistance and standing on your own two feet is something you must do yourself.”
A new voice, radiating genuine goodwill, spoke up.
And finally, a question was asked.
“So, what are you going to do?”
What do you mean, what am I going to do?
Even as he listened to the voices echoing within him, Enkrid’s objective remained crystal clear, and his Will was absolute.
Swordsmanship is an exhilarating joy.
However, he hadn’t fallen so deeply into that ecstasy that he forgot absolutely everything else.
“Wake up, Enki.”
Zaiden spoke.
His tone was perfectly calm, yet Enkrid could feel an endless, suffocating wave of agonizing regret, lingering attachment, and profound remorse within those words.
It felt fundamentally different from the man who had been completely consumed by madness and transformed into the Knight of Wrath.
Zaiden’s final memories surfaced in Enkrid’s mind.
“So because of that, every single Mage in the world is a monster and a villain?! This is absolute bullshit! How the hell does that logic make any sense?! If you use a sword to murder a child, you’re an absolute son of a bitch, but you can also use that exact same sword to slaughter the demonic beast trying to eat that child!”
It was a very young Mage.
He was likely hailed as a promising, once-in-a-generation genius or something similar.
Coughing up mouthfuls of blood, that young genius desperately screamed at him.
The hilarious irony was that Zaiden hadn’t repeated ‘today’ even a single time while fighting the Mage standing before him.
The young Mage had meticulously prepared, successfully restrained Zaiden, and completely overpowered him.
But instead of killing him, he desperately attempted to talk to him.
If the Mage had simply killed him, the ‘today’ that should have repeated itself would have briefly paused before inevitably marching forward into tomorrow.
And so, Zaiden was forcibly anchored to the present by an external force.
His aimlessly drifting vessel was violently brought to a halt.
If he hadn’t just finished fighting three bastards from the Masters of the Golden Thread right before this encounter, this never would have happened.
Perhaps that was exactly why they say the Goddess of Fate and Luck is incredibly fickle.
Because the infamous Spell Butcher had ultimately been captured by a Mage.
“Exactly what caused your madness? I highly doubt you just randomly went insane for absolutely no reason, so let’s at least hear why you harbor such a burning hatred for Mages.”
The conversation that began in that exact manner ultimately culminated in a fiercely passionate, blood-spitting argument.
“And what if the person wielding the spell is fundamentally righteous?! That comrade of mine you just punched a hole straight through? On his way here, he saved over a thousand people who were going to drown in a massive flood!”
Was it a lie?
Or was it the truth?
Did it actually matter?
Even if those words were the absolute truth, did that give him a valid reason to stop what he was doing right now?
Of course not.
He knew perfectly well that no matter how much he swung his sword, none of the people who died would ever return to him.
He also knew that the gaping, jagged hole in his heart would never be filled with anything other than pure wrath.
He would never again be able to speak of peace or happiness.
“What a profoundly, incredibly pathetic existence you are.”
The young Mage—no, the young Sage—had already glimpsed the underlying principles of the world, and he looked at the wrath-consumed Zaiden with the exact same eyes he used to gaze upon the ultimate truth.
“You think it’s perfectly fine as long as you get to violently vent your own anger? Is that really the right answer? Is this truly what you actually desire?”
He completely immobilized him with spells and just kept spouting absolute nonsense.
He was a black entity.
All Zaiden had to do was sever him.
“Snap out of it! Is magic inherently evil?! Of course not! People are evil! The bastard who used the magic is the one who’s evil!”
How many days had passed?
How many weeks?
Months?
Completely losing all sense of time, he remained a captive.
Several Mages greedily eyed his physical body, desperately attempting to capture him completely intact.
They were undoubtedly planning to turn him into a mindless Death Knight or something equally horrific.
But the young Sage was different.
“I pray that one day, you will finally find your peace.”
His desire was entirely selfless.
Exactly how much time passed after that?
Zaiden finally took a single step out of his black-and-white world.
He partially regained the sanity he had shattered precisely because he couldn’t bear to weigh right against wrong anymore.
From that moment on, his singular, burning desire was absolute peace.
A tiny, secluded cabin where he would never encounter violent storms, let alone bandits, demonic beasts, monsters, or even other human beings.
A life where he would simply wake up, chop firewood, stoke the fire when it snowed, and just quietly consume his daily meals until the end of his days.
His only desire was peace.
He no longer wished to feel joy or happiness.
Because he knew the agonizing pain of losing them, he refused to fill his heart with them ever again.
Taking a terrified step backward, completely unable to ever dream of a future again, he permanently trapped himself in ‘today’.
That was his absolute end.
“It was the absolute worst.”
Another Ferryman spoke.
None of the Ferrymen would have ever welcomed the ‘today’ he endlessly repeated.
Furthermore, Zaiden had absolutely refused to listen to a single word anyone else said.
He was completely insane, and he endlessly repeated ‘today’ while utterly submerged in that madness.
“He was a truly miserable bastard back then.”
Yet another Ferryman chimed in.
Zaiden, who had desperately begged for peace, ultimately changed, and every single epiphany he had agonizingly earned throughout his brutal life was flawlessly passed down to the Enkrid of the present.
“Desire peace, but…”
I want you to experience that happiness once more.
What was Zaiden’s true, ultimate desire?
What was the genuine wish of the Ferryman who claimed he only desired peace and wanted to become an unchanging, immovable rock?
To be reunited with his dead wife and children.
His adoptive father, his friends, and his comrades.
Because he desperately dreamed of that absolute finality, he actively aided Enkrid.
Completely abandoning his very ego as a Ferryman, he bet absolutely everything he had on him.
‘Long-cherished desire acknowledged.’
I will support your dream as well.
Enkrid opened his eyes.
The Ferryman had deliberately stepped in, firmly reaching out a hand from entirely outside the suffocating grip of madness to pull him out.
“You crazy bastard! If you don’t snap out of it right now, I’m going to smash your skull in with my axe!”
The exact moment his sanity returned, Rem’s furious shout blasted his eardrums.
‘As if you even could.’
He could actually afford to casually throw around arrogant thoughts like that now.
Ah, right, that was just a thought.
Enkrid opened his mouth and spoke.
“Is that a challenge?”
“…Challenge my ass!”
Rem yelled back from a distance, currently locked in a brutal melee against the fairy and the dwarf.
Just from a quick glance, it was obvious Rem wasn’t being pushed back in the slightest.
While making that observation, Enkrid raised his Engraved Weapon, Today.
It wasn’t an Ego Sword, yet he could clearly hear the blade speaking to him.
‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’
It asked if completely drowning in sheer ecstasy and just playing around wasn’t exactly what he desired.
The second reason he had fallen so deeply into the sheer, intoxicating joy of swinging his sword was entirely because of this blade.
Today had flawlessly synchronized with his Will and instantly joined in on the fun.
It felt exactly as if they had just shared an incredibly intense, satisfying play session.
Enkrid clearly felt the terrifying flow of mana violently surging toward him.
Half of it still resembled incoming swords.
Perhaps he actually needed to succumb to the madness again to fully see them as such.
‘Throughout countless, endless todays.’
Zaiden had ultimately found a completely new direction.
He had figured out exactly how to physically perceive spells without being violently consumed by madness.
Although he knew how, he had simply chosen not to do it, but every single thing he had awakened to was now fully known to Enkrid as well.
The Ferryman had once again voluntarily stepped up to act as his absolute master, and Enkrid fully embraced the teachings.
‘See everything as swordsmanship.’
He was no longer violently intoxicated by that phrase; he now clearly distinguished its meaning and accepted it with absolute clarity.
The true key was explicitly learning how to compartmentalize his thought processes.
The reason Enkrid was able to flawlessly execute what Zaiden had taught him on the very first try was simply because it was a method Enkrid already knew and was perfectly capable of performing.
‘Cognitive Partitioning.’
The hyper-tuned perception required to physically detect spells was fundamentally built upon a foundation of sheer madness.
Maintaining that exact state, Enkrid read the violent flow of mana.
“Merd-Ku-Baten!”
The deafening roar of Eudokia, the bastard calling himself a Master of Astrael, violently shook the air.
Several distinct voices overlapped and resonated simultaneously, creating a terrifying shout that sounded heavily imbued with profound mysticism.
Simultaneously, a massive surge of mana violently writhed, rapidly coalescing into a blinding cluster of light directly in front of Enkrid.
The light morphed into a humanoid figure and instantly launched a devastating thrust with a massive spear of pure energy.
He had completely recreated the ‘Death Knight’—one of the absolute pinnacles of necromancy—into a spell he called the ‘Knight of Radiance’.
It was an absolutely terrifying display of skill, completely befitting the title of a Master of Astrael.
It was a spell of such absurdly high difficulty that even Esther wouldn’t dare attempt to carelessly mimic it.
Because it lacked a true physical form, it fundamentally could not be cut, and as long as the light itself wasn’t extinguished, it would never die.
While Enkrid could have simply wrapped his blade in Will using the ‘Formatting’ stage to fight it, he absolutely didn’t need to.
Just as the man named Zaiden had done in the distant past, Enkrid was now the absolute, unquestionable natural predator of every single Mage in existence.
The Knight of Radiance violently thrust its spear, simply brushed past Enkrid, and instantly collapsed.
Exactly like a swarm of fireflies abruptly scattering into the wind, the cluster of blinding light completely dissolved into the empty air.
Through the heavily plummeting rain, Eudokia’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror.
His violently bloodshot eyes glared at Enkrid as if he wanted to brutally chew him to pieces.
Thick, dark blood continuously streamed down his chin.
A terrifying light of absolute resolve flickered in Eudokia’s eyes.
He had already violently sacrificed a portion of his own internal organs, permanently burned away a section of his Spell World, and completely incinerated half of the priceless artifacts he carried.
The torrential downpour grew even heavier.
If I just burn a few more artifacts, it should buy me a brief window of time.
The exact moment he thought that, formed a hand sign, and prepared his next spell…
Just moments ago, Enkrid had been an absolute madman completely intoxicated by swordsmanship.
Meaning, he had only cared about the sheer thrill of clashing head-on with every single blade that flew at him.
So what about now?
“You fight with your brain.”
It was something Luagarne had relentlessly drilled into him countless times.
The Enkrid standing here right now was a fully realized Knight forged by her absolute teachings and his own grueling combat experience.
The initiation was exactly the same as before.
He violently charged straight ahead, and Eudokia instantly deployed several defensive spells to block his path.
A wall of razor wind, a crushing burial of solid rock, an invisible prison of pressure—and more.
However, instead of clashing head-on with every single one of those spells, Enkrid violently accelerated.
BOOM!
To anyone who wasn’t a Knight, the battle ended almost laughably fast.
In a microscopic fraction of a second, Enkrid completely vanished, and when he reappeared, his sword was already buried to the hilt directly through Eudokia’s stomach.
The heavy rain relentlessly poured over the shoulders of the Knight gripping the sword and the Mage with a gaping hole violently punched through his gut.
“How exactly did you pierce my defensive barrier? Because you kept violently severing the mana flows from the outside, I specifically altered it so that you absolutely could not touch me without physically shattering the barrier itself.”
Eudokia demanded.
The moment he realized Enkrid was casually butchering his spells, he had instantly modified his defensive barrier, yet it had still been effortlessly pierced.
Enkrid replied in a perfectly flat, matter-of-fact tone.
“With sheer brute force.”
So what if severing the intricate flow of mana required terrifying precision and delicacy… Enkrid also possessed the catastrophic, raw physical power to completely obliterate the spell head-on.
Furthermore, he possessed the tactical intellect to know exactly when to employ which method.
This was the absolute culmination of everything he was.
Thick, dark blood continuously streamed from between Eudokia’s tightly clenched lips.
“To think I would die like this…”
He calmly, almost terrifyingly, accepted his own ultimate end.
Ultimately, he didn’t attempt anything foolish like sacrificing the very last drops of his life force just to force out one final, desperate spell.
He simply stopped.
If the spell he was currently manifesting had been fully completed, he absolutely wouldn’t have been defeated this easily.
Then again, it was incredibly hard to call this an ‘easy’ defeat.
It had been an apocalyptic tidal wave of countless spells.
Blazing infernos, absolute zero frost, razor winds, crushing earth, blinding lightning, lethal toxins, acidic fog, and even mind-shattering mental domination.
And the absolute monster who had ruthlessly severed, pierced, and butchered his way through every single bit of it was standing right in front of him.
‘I suppose I merely did the other bastards a massive favor.’
If another Master were to step forward to face this monster in the future, they would undoubtedly prepare far more meticulously before initiating combat.
A Mage is fundamentally at their most terrifying when they remain completely shrouded behind a veil of the unknown.
Although, a significantly wiser Master would likely refuse to fight this monster in the first place.
Because engaging an anomaly like this yielded far more losses than potential gains.
“What a profound shame.”
Eudokia stared blankly up at the sky.
The heavy storm clouds completely obscured the moons and the stars.
If demons constantly dreamt of ascension, Mages gazed at the stars and endlessly pursued the ultimate truth.
“What an absolute, profound shame.”
Those were the final words left behind by a Master of Astrael.
Enkrid casually yanked his sword out.
Thick, dark blood aggressively spilled along the blade, only to be quickly washed away by the relentless rain.
The man who had brutally butchered spells, gripping a sword radiating an eerie azure light, slowly turned around.
— You did well.
He heard the calm, yet profoundly distant voice of the Ferryman echo in his mind.
***
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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-1120+ daily chapters from monday to friday for a month.
-KNIGHT – Cost 20e – Chapters 1050-1120 + 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**