Chapter 73: Kil 2

The instant the Illumination spell rose into the air, the knights were blinded by the sudden burst of brilliance.

They had spent so long living beneath the earth that their eyes were thoroughly accustomed to darkness. Faced without warning with such intense light, their vision vanished almost at once.

Yet not a single knight stopped.

Still unable to see, they continued charging toward the place where Kent had been standing.

Then, one after another, several of them suddenly felt their bodies lift into the air.

Their mounts had thrown them.

Some were hurled from the backs of the scale-armored beasts, while others fell directly into the path of the panicked creatures and were trampled beneath their feet. Terrified shouts and screams erupted everywhere.

This was exactly what Kent had intended.

Scale-armored beasts had two fatal weaknesses.

The first was light.

No matter how powerful one became, it retained an instinctive fear of bright illumination. Once exposed to strong light, it would try to flee.

The second weakness was its nose.

That was the most vulnerable part of its body.

Kent’s Fireballs had been aimed precisely at the noses of several of the leading beasts.

The pain sent them into an immediate panic.

Under normal circumstances, a properly trained scale-armored beast might not have fled so easily. But once several of the creatures turned and bolted, the others followed almost instinctively.

Within moments, the entire formation collapsed.

The beasts wheeled around and fled toward the darkness.

Some knights were carried away on their mounts.

Others became caught in their gear and were dragged along the ground.

Several were trampled to death.

Still others were left badly injured beneath the chaos of hooves and armor.

Even so, a handful of knights came through relatively unharmed.

Once their eyesight began to recover, they seized their bows and immediately opened fire on Kent.

Kent took one look at the archers in the distance and dropped flat onto the ground.

At this point, all he could do was smile bitterly.

After everything that had happened, those bastards were still alive.

There was only so much he could do.

But a moment later, Kent burst into laughter.

The warriors holding the bows had seen him suddenly throw himself to the ground and immediately began shooting with everything they had.

Unfortunately for them, carrying a bow did not mean one actually knew how to use it.

Arrow after arrow flew past Kent.

The closest one still landed a full meter away from him.

“Hahaha! You miserable bastards!”

Kent laughed so hard that he could barely contain himself.

He sprang back to his feet, shouted loudly, and charged straight at them.

“Run!”

The remaining knights glanced at one another.

Still unwilling to give up, they loosed several more arrows at Kent, but once again accomplished absolutely nothing.

Then someone suddenly shouted for them to flee.

At once, the knights turned and ran for the passageway.

Even while retreating, they continued firing several wild arrows back toward Kent.

“Ow! Damn it! You can’t be serious!”

Kent had been happily pursuing them when he suddenly felt a strange chill in his shoulder.

A heartbeat later, a piercing pain shot through him.

He looked down.

An arrow was sticking out of his shoulder.

Kent trembled from the pain and immediately began cursing at the top of his lungs.

“Damn it! Of all the shots they missed, one of those random arrows actually hit me!”

He dropped heavily to the ground.

“Good thing I know light-element healing magic.”

Kent gripped the arrow shaft tightly with both hands.

Fortunately, the distance had been considerable, so the arrow had not penetrated too deeply.

He could pull it straight out.

“AAAAARGH—DAMN IT!”

With one hard yank, Kent tore the arrow free.

Blood immediately welled from the wound.

The pain was so sharp that he sucked in a violent breath through clenched teeth.

He quickly focused his mind and cast a healing spell on himself.

Then his expression changed.

“Ahhh! Damn it! Is this really supposed to be healing magic?!”

The wound did close almost instantly.

That much was true.

But during the healing process, Kent felt as though an enormous invisible hand had seized the injured flesh and was brutally kneading it back together.

The pain was unbearable.

He clenched his teeth so hard that he thought they might crack.

By the time the wound had fully healed, Kent collapsed weakly onto the ground.

Every trace of strength had left his body.

He had never imagined that light-element healing magic could hurt this much.

“What happened? What happened?”

Keta had waited for some time, but Daphne never came back to report. Growing uneasy, he quietly crept forward to see what was going on.

What he found nearly made his eyes pop out.

Daphne stood frozen in shock.

Kent was lying on the ground, and there was still blood on his shoulder.

Keta immediately hurried over and demanded anxiously,

“What happened here?”

“Heh. Just a small misunderstanding.”

Kent glanced at the knights lying scattered across the ground, unable to hide the satisfaction in his heart.

His mood had improved considerably, so he gave a faint smile before adding,

“These fellows wanted to kill me.”

“Outrageous! Absolutely outrageous!”

The moment Keta heard this, he flew into a rage.

“To cause trouble in Muan City? They must have a death wish!”

To Keta, Kent was still extremely useful. The thought that someone had nearly killed him made Keta furious.

With an angry sweep of his hand, streaks of green light shot toward the surviving knights.

The moment the green radiance touched them, something strange began to happen.

Tiny leaves sprouted from their bodies.

Then came thin branches.

Before long, the knights themselves began to stiffen and twist, their flesh gradually turning into chunks of wood.

The transformation did not stop there.

The wood slowly withered.

It crumbled into fine grains like sand, scattering silently across the ground until nothing remained.

Dust to dust.

Earth to earth.

If not for the blood still staining Kent’s clothes and the armor and weapons scattered across the street, one might have believed that nothing had happened here at all.

Kent stared at the scene for a long moment before finally coming back to his senses.

“What a master of getting rid of the bodies...”

He could not help but mutter in admiration.

Keta nearly choked with anger.

The way Kent phrased it made the whole thing sound as though he had just murdered a group of witnesses and erased every trace afterward.

Kent stared at the aftermath of Keta’s casual wave of the hand, utterly amazed.

But more than shock, what he felt was excitement.

Whether it was someone else casting magic or Kent using it himself, the sight of magic always stirred something deep inside him.

Perhaps it was because he had come from another world.

Back on Earth, magic existed only in stories, imagination, and fantasy. But here, on the Twin-Star Continent, it was something real—something that could be seen, touched, and used to kill.

Even now, Kent still found it difficult to believe that all of this was truly happening.

Sometimes, it still felt like a dream.

This was not the first time he had killed someone.

Kent had grown up on Earth under a society governed by laws and rules, but those laws clearly did not apply to this world.

Here, laws seemed to exist mainly for ordinary people at the bottom of society.

Earth had its privileged classes as well, of course, but such privilege usually remained hidden. It was something that could not be displayed too openly.

This world was completely different.

Here, strength ruled everything.

The strong preyed upon the weak, and those with status and power made no effort to conceal their privileges. They displayed them openly, almost proudly.

As time passed, Kent could feel himself changing.

He was aware of the shift in his own personality.

But he had no intention of becoming the same ordinary man he had once been.

In this world, being ordinary meant being bullied.

It meant being trampled on.

And sometimes, it meant being erased without anyone caring.

So when the time came to act, he would act.

He would no longer hesitate simply because of the values he had once lived by.

Kent remained seated on the ground.

A short distance away, Daphne was crying in Keta’s arms.

She had never witnessed humans slaughtering one another before. This had been her first time seeing such violence up close, and the shock had clearly overwhelmed her.

Kent, meanwhile, was thinking about his own future.

What kind of path should he take from now on?

Should he devote himself entirely to cultivation, growing stronger and stronger until one day he reached the realm people called godhood?

Or should he live freely and make this life worth remembering?

He could see things he had never seen before.

Taste foods he had never eaten.

Travel to lands no person from Earth had ever imagined.

Back on Earth, Kent had once carried a dream that he had never dared to tell anyone.

He wanted to travel the entire world on foot.

To walk through every corner of the planet.

To experience different customs and cultures.

To see animals and plants he had never encountered before.

It had always sounded too foolish to say aloud.

He had been afraid that people would laugh at him or think he was an idiot.

Kent drew in a long, deep breath.

And now, that old dream of wandering across the world was becoming clearer and clearer in his mind.

“Kent. Let’s go.”

Keta’s voice broke through his thoughts.

He had been watching Kent sit there catching his breath. Daphne, meanwhile, had finally calmed down.

But when Kent looked toward her, she immediately slipped behind Keta and hid herself from view.

Kent did not know whether to laugh or sigh.

After all, everything he had done had started because of that girl.

Slowly, he rose to his feet and brushed the dust from his clothes.

Then he turned and began walking back toward Muan City.

Keta watched him go, a faint trace of admiration appearing in his eyes.

He had not actually seen exactly how Kent had fought.

Even so, the fact that a mage had managed to kill so many armored knights was impressive enough.

And Keta had noticed something else.

The wind-element mana in the surrounding air was still unusually chaotic.

Combined with the wounds on the fallen warriors, the answer was obvious.

Kent had used wind magic.

Keta might have been poor at dealing with people, but he had lived for more than ten thousand years.

When it came to experience and knowledge, there were very few things in this world that could escape his eyes.