Chapter 252: The Horse Thought
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 252: The Horse Thought
Torres heard a monstrous roar erupt from the forest long after Encrid had departed.
“Shouldn't we go support them?” an oblivious soldier asked.
Hyo-woon, a guard standing nearby, answered in his stead. “Support? Those four monsters could probably roast and eat an entire territory by themselves.”
Hyo-woon, a swordsman of northern descent, was a proud man. For him to say such a thing meant something.
Torres agreed. “Leave them be. They'll make their own way back.”
Who was he to worry about them?
Torres ordered his soldiers to harvest the centaur sinews and intact demonic beast hides, then burn the remaining corpses.
‘How many died?’
Dozens had perished in the previous battle, and in the first clash, Torres himself had nearly lost his life. Zimmer had nearly kicked the bucket right alongside him. It had been that dire of a crisis.
To Torres, it had seemed only logical to tuck tail and run. In fact, Torres had actually offered that very advice.
“My Lord—ah, Commander. If we stay like this, we're finished. There's a limit to how long we can hold out, even if we lock the gates.”
They had watchtowers, but no moat. What if those centaurs closed in and repeatedly battered the walls with clubs the size of uprooted trees? What if they just waited for reinforcements that never arrived?
“And? Do you have a solution if we abandon the territory's walls?” the Castellan had asked in return.
There was none. If anything, the outside was far more dangerous. The monsters were centaurs—they were cavalry. Outrunning them would be far harder than holding out behind the walls.
‘We were trapped between a rock and a hard place.’
Their only recourse had been to request reinforcements. That was the nature of a centaur colony. On top of that, their leader—a unique variant—made one's knees buckle with fear. When it let out its monstrous roar, your balls shriveled up. Some soldiers had literally pissed themselves.
Yet, a crisis of that magnitude had been resolved by a group of fewer than ten people.
Fwoosh!
Crackle, pop.
The corpses of monsters and demonic beasts burned, alongside three casualties. One had tripped, fallen, and been trampled under a demonic beast's hoof. The other two had died after charging out like idiots, boasting about showing off the "valor of the East."
Only three dead.
The number of slain monsters and demonic beasts was impossible to estimate, though it was likely over two hundred. It wasn't that the Mad Company had killed the majority of them; they had merely been a single blade tearing through the vanguard. It was the soldiers who had finished off the rest of the broken horde.
It wasn't a sunny day. Looking up at the sky, it seemed as though it might snow at any moment. After a full day of clearing the battlefield and catching a few winks of sleep, Torres was walking around when he spotted the group returning through the castle gates.
A drizzling rain was falling. It was the kind of day where, if it got just a bit colder, the rain would turn to sleet. It was a day of running around busily since dawn. It was the day after the battle. It was a day they could smile, simply because they had survived.
And now, the ones who had gifted them this ordinary day were returning.
Encrid and the Mad Company arrived with the dim sunlight at their backs. Not only had the heat of battle completely cooled, but everyone's tension had also unraveled.
And yet.
“The Colony Killer!”
As someone opened their mouth to shout first, the crowd of soldiers gathered near the gates joined in unison.
“Colony Slayer!”
“Long live the Mad Company!”
“Wooooo!”
“You're handsome!”
“Take me!”
“Fuck! Thank you so damn much!”
It was a chorus of praise for those who had displayed such absurd, overwhelming might—a mixture of relief at surviving the threat and the sheer joy of victory.
The drizzle soon turned white, like frost. It made sense, given how sharply the temperature was plunging. Torres watched Encrid as he was pelted by the falling mixture of snow and sleet.
Behind Encrid followed a wild horse exuding a strange aura, and the group carried a heavy chest. The giant glaive used by the monster leader was in Rem's hands, but none of that mattered.
Torres stood at attention as he looked at Encrid. He brought his heels together and pressed his right hand against his waist. Then, he bowed his head in respect. It was a military salute—a gesture of gratitude for saving their lives and rescuing the territory.
Encrid merely gave Torres a slight nod and walked past. Rem, following behind him, asked, “By any chance, do you know a decent blacksmith around here?”
“There's a dwarf who recently moved to the outskirts of the market.”
“Oh.”
Rem passed by, and the rest of the members followed indifferently. The cheering failed to slow their steps.
*
“I heard there's a dwarf?”
The master and incarnation of metallurgy, smelting, crafting, and engineering. Of course, not every dwarf was a master of metallurgy. Elves had their own elven metallurgy, and there were exceptionally skilled individuals among humans as well. But on average, dwarven smelting and metallurgy were superior and inherently outstanding.
So, a dwarf who had drifted into a human territory was bound to draw interest. As it happened, they were in need of someone with such skills. Though dwarves were said to be excessively greedy for gems and payment, none of them had any qualms about pouring their krona into buying weapons.
In fact, wasn't it better to spend some gold coins to get a decent sword? To those who lived by the blade, a good weapon was another arm, and good armor was another life.
Encrid, too, felt a certain emptiness at his right hip.
‘It would be nice to have one more sword.’
A sword crafted by a dwarf would be highly serviceable. He was already used to scavenging and wearing whatever armor he could find, and he had just acquired an inner armor made of demonic beast hide that wrapped around his body like bandages.
On their way in, the Castellan of Martai personally came to express his gratitude.
“It is thanks to you.”
“Don't mention it,” Encrid offered a polite, measured response.
The Castellan turned back, telling them to get some rest.
“There are no private rooms. The inner castle here is just as bleak as the Border Guard's,” Torres said, following behind them.
In any case, as they entered the quarters they were guided to, the topic Rem brought up was the dwarf. The quarters were a shared room with eight beds lined up next to each other. Just as Torres had said, the atmosphere was bleak. Aside from the eight beds, there wasn't a single piece of furniture. It was a place with no purpose other than sleeping.
“Since it's a wild horse, it probably won't even want to go near the stables. Should we drive a stake here and tie it up?” A soldier with a knack for handling horses approached, warily eyeing the wild horse.
Snort.
As if knowing they were talking about it, the wild horse shook its head.
“Leave it be,” Encrid said casually.
He had simply felt inclined to ask it to come along, and it had. That was all. If it wanted to leave, he intended to let it go.
Of course, the wild horse had no intention of leaving. Once it became half-beast due to the monster blood mixed in its veins, its herd could no longer approach it. The blood of a monster instinctively struck terror into beasts. For the same reason, it couldn't enter the stables either.
And for that very reason, the wild horse had to leave its home. Only then could the rest of its herd live in peace. That was its duty as the leader of the herd. To top it off, it had even dealt with the burning skeleton. Though, to be precise, the human in front of it had been the one to finish it off.
Just as Encrid felt toward it, the wild horse felt an unusually strange sense of familiarity with Encrid. In the world, people called this a connection.
“You did well. Rest.”
Whinny.
Seeing what looked like a conversation between a human and a horse, Rem stared at them for a moment before speaking. “Is that thing going to turn into a human too, by any chance?”
“It won't.”
It was different from Esther. It was just intuition, but he was certain.
“Don't be so sure. When that panther turned into a human, who could have guessed it?” Rem continued with his nonsense, which everyone promptly ignored.
As they were unpacking and organizing the chests, Krais returned.
“Uh, what is this thing?” Upon arrival, he had spotted the wild horse loitering in front of the quarters and taken a wide detour around it. Now, he asked with uneasy eyes, unable to tear his gaze away from the horse. His large eyes, which had seemed busy even after arriving in Martai as if he were up to something, were filled with sheer bewilderment.
“A horse,” Encrid replied.
The wild horse, standing blankly in front of the barracks without even being tied up, caught Krais's eye.
“Does it turn into a human too?” Krais asked. It was obvious at a glance that this was no ordinary beast. He was asking because Esther had set a precedent.
“It's a stallion. I'm warning you now: if you sneak up behind it to check, your skull will get crushed,” Encrid warned him in advance.
Esther had been fierce, but this wild horse had monster blood mixed in. There was no need to risk Krais getting a hoofprint stamped onto his chest.
“Do you take me for some kind of Rem?”
“Who are you calling a dumbass?” Rem barked.
“I'm just saying, even I wouldn't go behind a horse to check its balls.”
“I was just worrying in advance,” Encrid said. The guy was just so unpredictable. Krais wasn't exactly normal either.
“Fuck, you know I'm standing right here listening, right?” Rem grumbled.
“Yeah.”
The moment Rem spoke and got his answer, he smacked Krais on the back of the head.
Smack!
“Ow!”
Since the exchange had fully warranted the blow, Krais didn't even pout. He simply rubbed the back of his head a few times and moved on to the next topic. To be precise, it was something that had caught Krais's interest the moment he stepped into the room. He could smell it. The scent of gems.
“By any chance, what's in those chests?”
“Gems.”
At Encrid's reply, Krais's eyes transformed. Without fail, whenever krona was involved, he displayed the miraculous phenomenon of human eyes turning into gold coins.
After checking the chests one by one, Krais let out a low whistle. “This is quite a lot.”
“Have you seen the dwarf who came to town?” Ragna, who had been watching Krais admire the gems and gold, asked.
Hmm? Was Ragna interested too? Had he grown tired of using scavenged swords?
As Encrid watched and wondered, Krais replied. “Ah, I was actually about to bring that up. It really is a dwarf. It was my first time seeing one, and they're quite pretty.”
Pretty? He would have to see for himself to understand what that meant.
They spent the late afternoon organizing their gear and lightly warming up with the Isolation Technique. They decided to explore the territory tomorrow. To be precise, they were going to see the dwarven blacksmith.
Encrid ate his dinner and closed his eyes. It was time to do what he always did: a combat review.
‘What if I hadn't let it slip away from the start?’
Because he had let the monster leader escape, he had to pursue it. And during that pursuit, he had experienced a strange, heightened focus of his senses. He had always combined Single-Point Focus with his Sensory Technique, but the moment he threw his sword at the leader's head, it had been different.
Had his 'Will' moved?
No, that wasn't it. He knew what Will was now. It was willpower, and the intangible force based upon it. It was a mystery difficult to explain in human tongue. In a way, it was like a spell or sorcery, but it differed in that it was a power confined strictly to the individual. Those who trained their bodies and wielded weapons, or those who made their fists their weapons—it was manifested in such people.
So, no. What Encrid had felt when catching the monster leader, when throwing his sword at its head, was something that had been crushed, blended, and fused into one. He had seen what he needed to do next, and it felt as though his five senses had merged into one, transforming into something entirely new.
“It is called the Sensory Technique.”
The words Sachsen had spoken while teaching him came to mind. In truth, it was the result of everything coming together: the countless spars he had fought against Pel, his accumulated experiences, his realizations about life, his mindset, and even the Rejection he had attained through his Will. It was because all of these elements had harmonized.
“There is no need to divide it into the Gate of the Sixth Sense or the Sense of Evasion. It is all simply the Sensory Technique.”
Damn Sachsen. His explanations were just like Rem's. At the time, those words hadn't made a lick of sense.
Encrid closed his eyes and blurred his five senses. He entered the realm of the sixth sense. Even without separating his senses, he could hear, see, and feel. With his eyes half-open, he looked ahead and saw Audin praying.
“I follow the Father's will. Watch over Your lamb so that he may not lose his way.”
Was he praying for Ragna? That probably wasn't what mattered. It felt as though Encrid had opened a third eye. Though Audin wore a thick tunic with a broad overcoat on top, Encrid could feel Audin's physical form. Those dense muscles, that explosive power, and a posture that didn't waver in the slightest even while praying. The man's body was something complete.
As this sensory realization washed over him, Encrid unconsciously fell deep into thought, his mouth hanging half-open. He saw the direction he needed to take with the Isolation Technique. By blurring his senses, a new path had revealed itself.
‘It is all useless if I do not train my body.’
The physical body is the beginning of everything. It was an unexpected realization. Yet, it was also something he had already known. Though it was merely reflecting on what he already knew, that in itself was still a realization.
Encrid established a direction for training his body. Of course, he would need Audin's help.
Rem stared blankly at Encrid, who was lost in his realization. “Hey, you said there's a temple in Martai, right?”
Krais, who was sitting nearby polishing a few gems, replied, “Uh, yeah, there is.”
It was smaller than a cathedral, but there would still be priests there. Despite the bad rumors surrounding it, it did exist.
“That guy is definitely broken,” Rem muttered.
Krais glanced up to look at Encrid. He was sitting with his mouth half-open, drooling. “Looks normal to me.”
It wasn't like they hadn't seen him like this a hundred times before.
While no one else paid any attention, Dunchabel, with great resolve, opened her mouth halfway and tried to drool in the exact same way. From now on, she would learn and follow everything Encrid did. As her first step, she decided to try it herself to see if there was some hidden meaning behind his actions.
“Do you want me to crush your skull? Why the hell are you copying that?” Rem scolded her.
Dunchabel stubbornly kept drooling. Truly, she was a lunatic.
The door to the quarters was left half-open, and the wild horse, peering inside, thought for a moment.
‘Should I leave?’
It briefly contemplated whether it should just depart like this. It hadn't understood Encrid's words and followed him for no reason. Even before the monster blood, the horse had been exceptionally clever and intelligent. Thus, it was capable of making sound judgments.
If it were to leave, now was the time.
The horse thought.