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I will come back after fixing the mess (3)
Adrian Leonberger stepped forward.
Am imperial knight stepped up and said, “It is not necessary for the royal family to intervene in the affairs of the knights.”
They wanted him to quietly watch as his knights died. The prince did not answer. He just kept walking. Then a paladin said, “He is still the prince of a country, a precious person, so take care not to hurt him.”
Three imperial knights moved, their swords still sheathed, reaching out their hands to detain Adrian.
‘Sasak!’ there was a flash of light, and the hand of a knight fell to the floor.
“Uh? Uuh!? Aahhhhhh!” the knight grabbed onto his severed wrist and gave a lengthy scream, but the scream didn’t last that long. No human can scream with a slit throat.
‘Paht!’ the knight fell to the ground as he took one last step. Adrian laughed as his blade tore into the throats of the other knights. The first prince then ran his finger along his bloody blade.
It was an outright provocation, a mockery.
“Wow!” Doris Dotrin exclaimed as he watched from the sky. “He just cut their throats.”
Doris had figured that Prince Adrian would exchange some words with the knights before swords were drawn. Instead, Adrian had started slicing right away. And even with a hundred knights facing him, he wore a proud expression. What great spirit!
It was certainly an impressive scene, but it isn’t possible to win wars with pluck and ambition alone. Adrian had cut down three foes, and there were still three-hundred imperial knights surrounding the delegation. Among them were two paladins, knights among knights.
Their power would be quite difficult to overcome all in all.
“Now you see me!” the first prince roared.
What was Adrian hiding? Why did he so confidently choose to do battle rather than escape?
Doris’s heart pounded, and he had lifted his buttocks from the saddle without realizing it.
“It looks really ugly right now. Please stay back,” Jin Katrin hollered, caring for his prince.
Doris had his attention solely fixed on Adrian Leonberger. Jin’s words didn’t even enter his ears; his nagging was nothing new.
He looked down at Adrian with anticipation.
* * *
The imperial knights began to move. Instead of responding to Prince Adrian’s provocation, they chose to narrow the siege and press in on the delegation.
It was then that Leonberg’s knights charged, all at once. A champion of the kingdom with a shining sword was in the lead.
‘Wgkadak!’
The vanguard of the encirclement collapsed at once, but not many died. The imperial knights had been wary of the kingdom’s champion, and as soon as she charged at them, they spread their lines thinner to increase the scope of their own assault.
And so the battle began.
Leonberg’s knights ran wild, and the advantage of the imperials’ encirclement soon disappeared. They had thought that simple numerical superiority would be enough to deal with the knights of the kingdom.
Their supposition was in error.
If Leonberg’s knights had been ordinary knights, the paladins of the empire could have made short work of them. The knights of the kingdom were no ordinary knights; they didn’t fight in the normal manner: With swords and shields. Fists, knees, heads: They swung whatever they could swing, and sometimes scooped up dirt with the tips of their swords and flicked it into their enemies’ eyes.
They fought more like mercenaries than knights, and they were very accustomed to melee warfare. They would be dealing with the foe that faced them, but then suddenly stab out their blades at another enemy, even changing opponents mid-strike.
It was the imperial knights who had to be vigilant. They had to be on the lookout for when a sword would strike out of nowhere as they squared off with the enemy in front of them.
None of the imperials had planned for such a situation because this was not how knights should fight. The imperial knights’ false expectation was their first defeat.
Their second defeat was that they believed that their paladins would be able to crush the enemy.
The imperial knights were now wracked with hesitation. They had come into the battle with their sanity intact, while the knights of Leonberg fought uncontrolled, as if their lives were in the greatest danger.
“Where are the paladins!?”
The imperial knight sighted the paladin and ran to him.
“Paladin! There you are!”
‘Deechur! Chika, chika, chik,’ something rolled to the knight’s feet. It was a head that been cleanly severed. It was the paladin’s head, and he had died without even getting the chance of blinking in amazement.
* * *
“Just a single strike,” Doris Dotrin repeated.
The paladin’s head had been struck off his shoulders after a single strike from Adrian’s sword.
The Dotrin Kingdom’s personnel were silent as they watched the battle, so surprised by what they saw that they could barely believe their eyes or ears.
It all looked quite ridiculous, but Doris couldn’t laugh: He felt the same as the others.
When he had seen a paladin become a headless corpse in the span of a second, he was astonished.
No matter how much the paladin had underestimated his opponent, Doris had not expected him to die so quickly. The same astonishment was felt by all the Knights of the Sky who had seen the paladin of the empire die.
Not one of them spoke.
After a while, Jin said that it must have been a fluke, with Adrian having put all his mana into a single strike to overcome his opponent’s greater power. It would never work twice, Jin added.
It was a reasonable guess.
The knights of the empire who had first stepped out to detain the prince had fallen to a similar trick, and the Sky Knights all agreed that such must be Prince Adrian’s ways.
It didn’t take them long to realize that they had guessed wrong.
* * *
“Considering your royal status, we were trying to save your life! You will be shown no more mercy!” the remaining paladin bellowed as he set out to rectify the situation, his Aura Blade deployed with full force from the start. An unpleasant energy wave, the unique energy of mana rings, reached the Wyvern Knights high in the sky.
“It will be difficult this time. The Leonberger family has forgotten their traditions, after all.”
Doris nodded as he heard Jin’s words.
The family of knights who had once been known as the clan of the Dragon Slayer no longer existed. All that remained was a royal family who had forgotten their traditions, a slowly-dying family.
Doris didn’t know why the prince had chosen to accumulate his mana in a mana heart, as he must have only created the shell without the kernel within himself.
Mana hearts that had lost their true essence were helpless when facing champions of the rings.
Perhaps Prince Adrian would soon be defeated, just like the Sword Masters of the past were so gruesomely defeated by the Knights of the Ring.
Doris definitely thought so, at least until Adrian opened his mouth.
‘Qawah!’
“Out of nowhere, the wind raged
“Green are the grasslands still”
“Scorching: The time when summer lives”
“A storm blew in from nowhere”
In the center of it was the Prince of Leonberg.
Doris groaned and got goosebumps all over. It was the reproduction of the ancient feat, a heritage of the ancestors. It was the manifestation of Muhunshi.
“They were fooling the world!” Doris exclaimed spontaneously. It was well known that the Leonbergers had abandoned their traditions and taken up the use of mana rings. “They didn’t forget!”
Prince Adrian had unleashed the power of Muhunshi as he faced his foe. Doris was very excited to discover that there was another successor of the ancients other than those of Ganwoong Burgundy’s line.
Still, his excitement quickly subsided, for Doris knew all too well that battles weren’t won by only an adherence to tradition.
Traditions were long and old stories, and life was brief.
If you don’t truly believe in it, the power of such an amazing feat will fade.
The verse might continue, but the power therein contained would not be complete.
If you possess an artifact, you might borrow karma from the Muhunshi poem, but Prince Adrian didn’t seem to possess anything that could be called an artifact.
It was unknown whether the Leonberger royal family had completely lost the relics or whether they merely aren’t gifted to the firstborn prince.
If there was anything that Doris knew, it was that the legacy of a family of great knights would be destroyed forever. Another tradition would disappear.
“Get ready.”
The Sky Knights lowered their visors in preparation for the assault.
“On three, we fly in.”
Doris was thinking of attacking right after the first meeting of blades.
“One.”
He could see Adrian gathering the storm into his blade.
“Two.”
The Paladin charged at the prince.
‘Klang!’
A roar broke out as swords met.
“Three!”
The wyverns hunched down and plunged to the earth. Doris was with his knights.
His posture was lowered, almost lying on his stomach, and he gripped a twenty-two-foot lance under his armpit. Mana was channeled to the tip of the lance. Doris was intent on piercing through the paladin where the man stood.
He studied the ground and locked onto his target – And then lost him.
“Huh?”
Doris widened his eyes. Beneath him, the battle raged. When Doris sighted the paladin again, the man was standing with his sword held out before him.
His entire body was filled with puncture wounds, and before him stood Prince Adrian, who Doris had thought had already died.
“The paladin has four rings, and I know, or thought, that the prince was weaker than that.”
The paladin shook in hatred. However, he couldn’t rush at the prince, and it had already turned into a cat and mouse game.
Doris was almost disappointed. His plan was to kill the paladin on behalf of the young prince and so save his life. He did it anyway, even if the prince had already half-killed the paladin.
“No! Oh shit!”
‘Kwap!’
As the wyvern leveled out and the lance pierced into the paladin, Doris heard the young prince swear behind his back.
“It’s mine! It’s my battle, my achievement, and this damned man dares steal it!”
It was a curse that Doris had never heard in his life, but still, he was not offended at all.
He did, in truth, intrude upon the game of another. Doris was surprised by the energy he felt. He realized that Adrian had completely recited a full verse of Muhunshi, without the use of a relic. It wasn’t even a common poem: It was a heroic poem.
It meant that the young prince had already reached the level of the heroes of old.
In this world, no matter what you do, you cannot deny the extraordinary. Even if it couldn’t be, if it was the reality, it was true.
Doris Dotrin turned in the air once more and landed in front of the first prince.
“Nooo!”
“What monster… Oouch!”
The imperial knights trampled on by the wyvern and speared on the lance screamed.
“Hah, do you know what you’ve done to me right now?” Adrian asked as he ground his teeth, still emitting the energy he had unleashed against the paladin.
Doris’s wyvern gave a low screech.
‘Creee.’
It sounded more like a groan than a threat, and it was the sound of an animal in fear.
To see a wyvern, who doesn’t even blink when facing a troll, screech in fear when facing a single human? It was absurd!
It was more absurd that in a world where only rare, damaged traditions existed, such a ridiculous guy as Adrian had appeared.
“What on earth are you?”
Adrian gave no answer to Doris’s question; he simply demanded that Doris repay the price of the stolen victory.
* * *
“And that’s why I came here as a messenger.”
Doris laughed brightly as he saw the people of Leonberger look at him with grim faces. The people around the table were silent for a while, so astonishing was the tale that had flowed from Prince Doris’s mouth.
Then, after a while, the one-eyed knight spoke up.
“So where is His Highness, and what is he doing?”
“Even if you haven’t asked me, I was about to tell you,” Doris said as he looked at all around the table.
“Adrian is now,” and here stopped speaking as he wet his lips with spittle, then continued, “My mind has become vacant… Ah! Adrian, along with the Sky Knights, is making a mess all over the place, as well as the knights of the delegation.”
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