Chapter 7: Things of the Past

Translator: Atlas Studios  Editor: Atlas Studios

Grasping the longsword tightly as he rushed toward the strange, fierce-looking monster, Gawain felt no nervousness, hesitation, or fear. If he had to feel something, it was only a tiny sense of being distracted and departing from reality.

He still remembered clearly the moment when his plane crashed.

He still remembered clearly when he was hanging atop this world for hundreds of thousands of years.

He had not adjusted to suddenly becoming Gawain Cecil out of nowhere.

However, in that moment, he grasped the old family longsword tightly, throwing himself at a strange monster that might be a demon or an undead creature.

Boom!

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The huge shock was sent through the blade, and all the distracting thoughts instantly disappeared.

With almost pure instinct, he dodged the monster’s claws. Gawain turned his upper body in a small semi-circle. The blade swung and drew an arc in the air slashing toward the monster’s shoulders. As the blade swung down, he tried to utilize the power contained in this body, directing that power to the longsword in his hand.

Upon stimulation by the power, the faint red thread on the blade near the hilt burst with a red light. Like a flame, the light extended rapidly down the blade. As it burned with intense heat, even the surrounding air started to distort.

The three-meter-tall monster felt the threat from the intense heat of the blade. Suddenly, with an agility that completely did not match his large figure, the monster leaned back, and Gawain’s slash missed the monster by a hair.

For a moment, Gawain inevitably got excited as he released this magic-like supernatural power from his own hand for the first time. Perhaps it was this moment of excitement that made him unable to grasp the rhythm of the first attack. But soon he composed himself and again infused the power into the longsword.

Sure enough, he was able to call upon Gawain Cecil’s abilities. This body had not yet declined to the extent that no power could be mustered from it. Though he did not know how much power he could draw, it was a huge boost to Gawain’s confidence.

He began to immerse himself in the battle and tried to translate the battle experience that did not belong to him into a power that he could use as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, Byron was engaged in a tough fight.

The mid-level knight was one of the top fighters in the Cecil territory. His fighting career before he swore loyalty to the Cecil Clan had allowed him to accumulate rare combat experience. However, he had expended too much energy back when the monsters were attacking the castle. Moreover, after being drained by the monster’s strange magic, the invisible injuries further reduced his combat power such that he could only muster forty to fifty percent of his original ability.

Taking on the monster’s repeated attacks, he had no choice but to hold up the longsword tightly, keeping himself from defeat, while saving as much energy as possible and finding the monster’s openings.

Rebecca gathered up her magic and sent out a skull-sized scorching fireball from the front of her staff. The fireball collided in the air with the shadow arrow from the spellcasting monster, causing a shocking explosion. She caught her breath and noticed Byron in danger, and she immediately shouted to the soldiers beside her, “The three of you, go help Byron!”

One of the soldiers hesitated. “But Lady…”

As Rebecca made a new fireball, she shouted, “We’re fine here for now, but if Byron falls, it’ll be over! As Lady, I order you. Go!”

The three soldiers had no choice but to obey the order as they went into battle with Knight Byron against the terrifying monster.

Gradually immersing himself into the battle, the memory and experience that did not belong to him was rapidly becoming his own, improving his ability to control his new body. This process gave him a great sense of accomplishment. When he slowly recovered from this immersion, he realized that he was already beating the monster into a pulp.

The aberration covered in flowing ‘mud’ was not invulnerable. It could still get injured when cut, and it would die when it got cut up too much. Though they were powerful and had a physical advantage, with the right method, the human body could still destroy them.

This was learned from experience seven hundred years ago.

The monster’s claws passed over his head, Gawain ducked, and with a counter, he sent the sword piercing into the opponent’s thigh. The monster finally let out a murky howl, and its body fell uncontrollably to the side. Taking this chance, Gawain shouted to Byron, “Try to attack their abdomen and lower limbs. Forget the chest, these things have no heart!”

Then he took advantage of this moment when the monster had lost balance, he turned and shifted himself behind the monster, raised the longsword and pierced into the monster’s back. “Besides the abdomen, their other weakness is at the back! Their lower back!”

Getting pointers from the Cecil ancestor, Byron’s spirit rose. With the coordination of the three soldiers, he quickly restrained the monster’s movements. Putting everything on the line, with the monster’s claw pierced through his shoulder armor, he went under the monster’s crotch, turned around and stuck it in its vital part.

The moment before Byron defeated the monster, the monster before Gawain dropped heavily to the ground.

After dealing with the enemy, Gawain immediately looked up at the monster in the distance whose shadow arrow collided with Rebecca’s fireball. But just before he could rush toward the monster, it suddenly let out a mournful howl before being sent into a spasm and falling to the ground.

Amber appeared behind the monster, with steel daggers in each hand that were tempered with poison, “I’m great at poking up asses.”

Rebecca put down her staff, her cheeks slightly reddish after the repeated casting. After catching her breath, she said seriously to correct Amber, “Lord Ancestor said the lower back, not the ass.”

Amber spun the daggers in two quick circles before it disappeared as she stored it somewhere. She stepped over the monster’s carcass and pouted as she walked over to them. “Tch, you have no sense of humor.”

After the monsters died, they began to disintegrate rapidly. The muddy flowing substance on their bodies stopped flowing. Then they gradually dried up, turned into crust, and lots of small cracks formed. As the freely changing “flesh” shed, the monsters quickly turned into a huge, contorted skeleton.

Standing beside the monster he had killed, Gawain watched the decaying process, and he seemed to mutter to himself, “So it was these things that attacked the Cecil territory…”

Herti looked at him curiously, “Ancestor, do you know where these monsters come from?”

From the battle earlier, Gawain had shown great understanding of these monsters that he even gave pointers on how Byron should fight them. Thus, this was something that he could not hide, and neither did he intend to hide this fact.

“We may still encounter them if we stay here. The passageways contain things that can suppress these monsters. They won’t enter so easily,” Gawain said as he walked forward. “I’ll let you in on more details as we go along.”

After walking some distance through the ancient underground passageway, Gawain broke the silence, “I did fight these things then. In fact, we mainly dealt with those things then. You should know about the history of the collapse of the Gondor Empire and the Second Settlement, right?”

“Of course.” Rebecca nodded. This history could be said to be a compulsory syllabus that they had to study as children of nobility. “More than seven hundred years ago, the Loren Continent had only one human nation, and that was the Gondor Empire, located in the center of the continent. It was the most powerful empire on the continent at that time. Even the Silver Empire built by the elves in the southern part of the continent didn’t dare to become its enemy. However, there was a disturbance in the Sea of Ether that surrounded this world that caused a catastrophe in the continent of Loren called the The Dark Wave. And the disaster broke out right in the land of Gondor. Almost in the span of a single night, the capital of the Gondor Empire and one-third of the empire was swallowed up by the Dark Wave and disintegrated by the surging elemental power…”

“It didn’t happen overnight. Actually, this process lasted for almost a month. The palace mages of Gondor weren’t doing nothing when faced with the Dark Wave,” Gawain interrupted, then motioned for her to continue talking. “But in the end, it still didn’t really matter. Continue.”

“Oh… oh,” Rebecca blushed, and she continued as though her parents were checking on her homework. “After that, the magical tide spread out from the Gondor Empire and eventually completely destroyed the entire kingdom. That was how the Gondor Empire fell. After that, as the Sea of Ether gradually calmed down. The Dark Wave became less powerful, and the survivors of Gondor began to rebuild civilization. As the central area the continent had turned to wasteland, it was no longer suitable for humans to live. Thus, they with the leadership of a group of pioneers, they ventured in four directions, north, south, east, and west, to leave the ruined empire. This was called the Second Settlement. Lord Ancestor, you were one of the most famous pioneers of that time.”

“Well, you’re pretty good in history,” Gawain praised her. “So you should probably know this too. Even after the end of the Dark Wave, the ruins of the Gondor Empire were still filled with lots of monsters that emerged from the Dark Wave. Those monsters were one of the biggest threats that humans faced in the Second Settlement.”

Herti’s eyes widened. “You mean…”

“Yes. Those things were the things that we fought then.” Gawain sighed. “They were born from the Dark Wave. They have the shape of a human, but they’re definitely not human. When the Gondor Empire collapsed, a large number of those monsters emerged from the ruins of the empire, and they continued to spread in all directions, chasing and killing the survivors. Thus, instead of being a journey of pioneering, the Second Settlement was more like a journey of escape. And even after we departed from the ruins of the empire and established a new country at the borders of the continent, the monsters didn’t stop coming. They continued to come from the empire’s ruins, frequently launching attacks on the perimeters of the civilized world… In the ten years after Anzu Kingdom was built, I was dealing with them almost every day.”

Rebecca’s eyes widened, She seemed deeply intrigued by these ancient legendary stories. “Ah, what about after the ten years? Did the monsters stop appearing?”

Gawain chuckled. He reached out to ruffle the girl’s hair, and smiled as he looked at the silly girl. “Silly child, your ancestor had already died by then…”

Rebecca, “…”