Chapter 2: Return 

“Drip, drip.  “

The sharp, metallic scent of blood poured out from the pierced, severed flesh and pierced my nose.  

A hallucination?  

I had heard of it.  

The so-called life-flashing-before-your-eyes moments people see when they are about to die.  

But when they usually explain it, don’t they say that everything you’ve experienced in your life passes by like a panorama?  

And yet this… this was too vivid.  

The sight and smell were far too clear to be something conjured from memory, and even—  

I’m dead!  

The fierce murderous intent aiming to kill someone made every hair on my body stand on end.  

Could all of this vividness really be just an illusion?  

I looked around.  

Spread out across the wide-open plains was hell itself—a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood

“Ugh!”  

Overcome with unbearable nausea, I retched up what little food I had managed to keep down.  

For days, I had been unable to eat properly and had only brought up bitter bile.  

But in doing so, I caught the attention of someone nearby.  

“Ughhh!”  

Someone spotted me.  

Clad in armor and armed with weapons that looked out of place in this modern age, he charged toward me, eyes filled with killing intent.  

Without realizing it, I took a step back.  

Step—  

Retreating.  

Just moments ago, I had no regrets about dying.  

I thought I could accept death with a smile, even if it came immediately.  

But exposed to such a relentless will to kill, I could hear the primal cry of my remaining instincts inside me.  

“Save me. I want to live!”  

The instinct that had been drowned in despair, unable to voice itself, was now howling.  

“Hup!”  

He came at me without hesitation, swinging his sword.  

“Thud!”  

In my backward retreat, I stumbled over a corpse and fell.  

Thanks to that,  “Swish—”

I dodged the attack aimed at my chest.  

Pat!  

The sword was so sharp that a handful of cut hair scattered in the air.  

“P-please, spare me!”  

How desperate is a human’s survival instinct!  

Even now, in this ruined state after losing everything, I begged for my life.  

“Die!”  

But my pleas didn’t reach him.  

His eyes bloodshot red, he swung his sword as if killing me was the only mission on earth.  

In that brief moment,  “Slap, slap!”

Without thinking, I groped around.  

And something solid caught my hand.  

“Uaaaaaah—”  

Driven solely by the will to survive, I stabbed whatever I had grabbed.  

At that instant—  

“Thrust!”  

A horrible sound of flesh being pierced rang out.  

“Grrk!”  

A death throe.  

It was not me, but came from my attacker’s mouth.  

What was lodged in his chest was a broken spear.  

With superhuman strength born from the moment of death, I had pierced his heart.  

“Splash!”  

The blood he vomited drenched my face and body.  

The world turned red from the blood flooding my vision.  

And then—  

“Thud!”  

The lifeless body collapsed on top of me.  

I had killed a man.  

Murder—the one thing I never thought I would commit in my entire life.  

But at this moment, the feeling I had was—  

“I did it!”  

It was joy.  

Until now, I hadn’t realized how overwhelming and exhilarating it was to live—to survive.  

But was that realization too late?  

“Waaah—”  

“Kill them all!”  

“Exterminate them!”  

From the opposite side, I saw a group charging with shouts.  

Enemies armed with the will to annihilate me and the soldiers around me.  

‘Is this the end?’  

I had been lucky to survive once.  

But it seemed impossible to overcome this numerical disadvantage unscathed.  

As I absentmindedly awaited the next moment of death,  “Boom!”

The ground trembled with a rumble.  

Straight ahead, someone appeared as if fallen from the sky.  

Wooooooong!  

Clad in armor adorned with mysterious geometric symbols that emitted a strange light, he stood.  

“At last!”  

Just one man’s arrival.  

Yet the soldiers around him cheered as if he were their savior.  

Why?  

The enemy forces advancing numbered hundreds, maybe even a thousand.  

And yet the only reinforcement was this single man in bizarrely patterned armor.  

Why then was there this wave of joy rising where despair should have reigned?  

But my question didn’t last long.  

“Knight Kinzel!”  

His sudden shout thundered across the plains.  

The force behind it was immense.  

The nearly one-thousand-strong enemy force flinched and halted their advance.  

“As the 10th-ranked Knight of the Asran Kingdom, I vow to annihilate the soldiers of the evil Galia Empire who invaded our kingdom!”  

Knight.  

The word carried a weight beyond measure.  

“A-Knight?”  

“Kinzel? The one from the island battle?”  

The enemy, having belatedly realized it was Knight Kinzel standing before them, faltered.  

“Our enemy is just one! Don’t retreat. Anyone who retreats, I’ll personally cut down!”  

But there was no room to retreat.  

Those who looked to be their commanders stared fiercely with eyes wide open.  

Besides, they had the numbers advantage.  

I don’t know exactly what a Knight is, but the enemy had no reason to back down.  

“Kill them!”  

“Aaahhh!”  

The wave of troops that had paused surged forward.  

Facing the thousand-strong enemy head-on stood Knight Kinzel.  

“Swish— ” 

He drew his sword from his waist.  

The sword was etched with the same geometric patterns as his armor.  

Flash!  

The moment the sword flashed once—  

“Ugh!”  

“Ahh!”  

Screams echoed.  

‘When?’  

Like a streak of light, Knight Kinzel pierced through the enemy ranks, mercilessly cutting down every foe in sight.  

“Slash, slash!”

There was no second movement.  

Only one stroke at a time.  

In the blink of an eye, dozens of bodies were bisected.  

“Oh my god…”  

I couldn’t help but utter those words at the unbelievable sight.  

I had expected something closer to the godlike power shown by the world’s strongest awakened beings—sweeping away an entire force with a single strike.  

But Knight Kinzel overwhelmed the enemy not with divine power but with pure skill and movement.  

Pat, pat!  

Like lightning flashing, trails of light remained in the air.  

Wherever those trails brushed by, death inevitably followed.  

“Ugh, ugh!”  

“This is impossible…”  

After a brief time, the enemy forces realized how arrogant they had been.  

Knight Kinzel was strong, and none could follow his island battle-like movements.  

How could they fight an enemy whose movements they didn’t even understand?  

Their initial momentum completely vanished, and the enemy turned to retreat.  

“How dare you!” Knight Kinzel didn’t allow it.  

With movements even faster than before, at the peak speed of light itself, he mercilessly cut down the fleeing enemies.  

That’s all.  

How long had passed?  

“Drip, drip.”  

There stood only Knight Kinzel, holding a sword dripping with blood.  

With a victorious shout, he raised his sword toward the sky.  

“Waaaaah!”  

“Long live Knight Kinzel!”  

“Long live the Asran Kingdom!”  

As if on cue, cheers erupted.  

A battle that had been expected to end in defeat and death had turned to victory.  

I stared blankly at the scene.  

I still didn’t know what situation I was in, whether this was a dream or reality.  

But watching that sight, a burning desire welled up inside me.  

‘…I want to become that.’  

Knight Kinzel.  

The power he had, the overwhelming strength capable of cutting down a thousand enemies—I yearned to grasp it.  

‘I will get it, no matter what.’  

I had already resolved to die once.  

Whether I died here or there, since death was inevitable, I might as well struggle one last time.  

Even if it hastened my demise.  

Soon, I came to realize the truth.  

Where I had arrived was neither heaven, nor hell, nor some dream.  

It was undeniable reality.  

Yes, it was a kind of dimensional shift.  

A cliché found only in novels, movies, and comics.  

Like the joke about reincarnation trucks, I had been struck and crossed dimensions to arrive in a completely new space.  

The Gritia Continent.  

A land where wars for continental supremacy never cease.  

A unique characteristic of this world was that mysterious abilities—like magic, which we commonly call “special traits”—could be learned through effort.  

It wasn’t just magic.  

Swordsmanship and physical prowess, too, could be honed to transcend human limits.  

Those who reached the pinnacle of this mastery were called ‘Knights.’  

They were the core military force of their nations, considered one-man armies, boasting incredible power, as their title suggested.  

There’s a saying: “Manbu Budang.”  

It refers to someone who, through wisdom and bravery, can overcome ten thousand men.  

In Gritia Continent, Knights were such beings.  

Having reached the apex of physical limits, they constantly trained themselves and answered their homeland’s call as human weapons.  

Just this tells you how the Gritia Continent was a world where swords and magic were everyday.  

Laws were less important than the sword, and power was authority.  

Yet surprisingly, the continent had seen a fairly peaceful era.  

Many kingdoms, duchies, and theocracies had been established but coexisted without encroaching on each other’s territories.  

But human greed knows no bounds.  

Tragically, a tyrant arose in Galia, the continent’s largest empire.  

Emperor Belmond.  

A tyrant who personally killed his father, the former emperor, to usurp the throne and immediately launched a conquest war for continental dominance.  

Thus began the First Continental War.  

Countless kingdoms were mercilessly trampled by the Galia Empire.  

The entire eastern continent was covered with the Galia Empire’s banners, and those who survived the inferno were the Northern Tribal Federation in the north, Basilia Theocracy in the west, and Asran Kingdom in the south.  

Of course, the Free City of Pitlo and the Tower of Magicians remained in the center, but as they maintained neutrality, they were exceptions.  

A conquest war lasting ten years.  

Leftover corpses bred maggots and unknown insects, causing plagues to run rampant.  

The land, saturated with death’s aura, withered, and crops that once brought abundance no longer grew.  

I fell onto this brutal continent during the height of the war.  

More precisely, I was possessed by a mere soldier of the Asran Kingdom named Randol.  

At first, I thought I might have some special ability.  

After all, this was a dimensional shift.  

The usual cliché would be receiving a status window or special powers.  

But not at all.  

Like a powerless man from the modern era, I was just an ordinary soldier.  

A soldier who had to struggle to survive and would be killed quickly when war broke out.  

So I fought to survive.  

I spared no means or method to live.  

No matter how much I was humiliated, I didn’t get angry, and licking others’ boots became routine.  

Not because I wanted to, but because I had no choice.  

A powerless soldier had to be good at crawling to survive.  

But did anything change by surviving?  

It did.  

Only after a long time did I realize that I too had an ability.  

It was Immortality .  

Ah, not the usual kind of immortality people think of, but the kind that means you don’t age and cannot die unless externally harmed.  

If my body wasn’t damaged, I could live forever.  

I actively made use of this fact.  

I carved out time to train.  

In truth, it was a feeble struggle.  

Think about it—how much could an ordinary modern man change by training?  

But what if that training went on for one year, ten years?  

I made full use of my lack of aging and trained again and again.  

And not long after, my talent(?) was recognized, and I was accepted as a Knight’s apprentice.  

An apprentice, someone who could become a Knight in the future—a kind of disciple.  

Of course, I didn’t become a Knight at once.  

For decades, I served as an apprentice while moving up the ranks.  

Finally, with my master Knight’s approval, I was able to become an official Knight.  

I was issued the Knight Sword and Knight Armor, symbols of the Knight, and served as Calcen, the No. 100 Knight of the Asran Kingdom.  

Time passed.  

At one time, I was Calcen, No. 100 of the Asran Kingdom.  

At others, Nordahn, the No. 95 Guardian Knight of the Northern Tribal Federation.  

And at times, Render, the No. 58 Knight of the evil Galia Empire, which continued its conquest wars.  

I changed my identity deliberately.  

Because my agelessness once caused me to be mistaken for a demon.  

Having almost died due to that misunderstanding, I switched identities appropriately and moved toward one goal.  

From the start, my goal was singular:  

To reach the pinnacle of Knights.  

Like living only to grow stronger, I slowly climbed the Knight ranks.  

It took nearly 100 years to reach No. 2.  

The funny thing was, it took twice as long to reach No. 1.  

Only geniuses with talent, effort, and hundreds of years surpassing mine could hold the honor of No. 1.  

Fighting the geniuses born every time seemed impossible with my mere talent.  

But I didn’t give up.  

If not in 100 years, then in 200 years; if 200 wasn’t enough, then 300 years.  

Even if it took 1,000 years, I would never stop struggling toward the peak.  

And finally—  

Thrust!  

The Knight Sword, imbued with countless magics, pierced my opponent’s heart.  

“…Impressive.”  

The blonde man, drenched in blood, the pinnacle of the Galia Empire and the continent’s greatest Knight, Anheim.  

Collapsed.   

He fell without resistance.  

Everyone, “Waaaaah—”  

Cheers echoed.  

After a long time, I finally stood at the pinnacle of Knights and the continent, known as Myers, the No. 1 Knight of the Asran Kingdom.  

I looked around.  

The duel had ended with victory.  

The empire’s soldiers in despair, the kingdom’s soldiers cheering in response.  

Toward them—  

Slash!  

Like when I first arrived, I raised my sword toward the sky.  

And in the next moment—  

Flash!  

The light reflected from the sword, far too bright to be sunlight, dominated the entire area.  

‘What is this…?’  

It wasn’t unfamiliar.  

It wasn’t hard to recognize this somewhat familiar phenomenon.  

“Boom!”  

The impact hit my body.  

At that moment, I realized.  

‘I’m back!’  

Amazingly, it was the light from the truck’s headlights—the same truck that hit me before I crossed dimensions to the Gritia Continent.