Enkrid placed his hand on the hilt of his sword, steadying his breath.

At the vanguard—whether one called it the frontline, the tip of the blade, or the spearhead—he stood alone at the forefront.

The battlefield stretched wide before him, a flat expanse worthy of being called a plain.

A cavalry charge was inevitable.

Anyone could have predicted it.

Which was precisely why standing here was madness.

To the enemy, it must have seemed as though no one on this side was sane.

Even so, Enkrid hadn’t expected the cavalry to charge this soon.

Thud, thud, thud!

The ground trembled as the cavalry thundered forward from a distance.

Though still far enough that swordplay wasn’t immediately necessary, they closed the gap rapidly.

The wild power of the horses, the dust kicked up by their hooves, the unified armor of the riders—all of it presented a terrifying spectacle.

“Look at him. He’s so excited, he might burst,” Rem said, her sharp eyes fixed on the approaching cavalry commander.

The man’s face was obscured by a helmet, yet Rem seemed to read his expression.

“You can see that?”

“Yeah. It’s obvious.”

Rem snorted dismissively.

Was this savage intuition as formidable as Jaxon’s keen instincts? Or perhaps it was merely an automatic response to anyone who underestimated her.

Either way, Enkrid felt something similar.

He quickly counted the charging cavalry—more than fifty riders.

With him at the front were Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, and Audin.

Finn, Dunbakel, and Esther had been pulled back.

“I can fight too,” Dunbakel had protested before they left.

However, after tagging along with Audin and suffering a head injury, she was in no position to argue. Her left ear and forehead were wrapped in bandages.

“Dear sister, you were nearly sent to heaven. If you wish to go, simply ask—I’ll send you there right now,” Audin had said politely but with a chilling undertone.

Dunbakel fell silent, still nursing the consequences of her overconfidence.

“Too weak,” Rem muttered, leaving a vague but ominous parting comment.

Despite her usual casual demeanor, her words carried weight, chilling for those on the receiving end.

Dunbakel, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t notice.

Enkrid cast his musings aside as the cavalry drew near. The earth trembled with their approach, the mounted riders brandishing their weapons.

Through the sunlight, the wide, gleaming blades of their glaives shone brilliantly. Held diagonally, the weapons seemed designed less for thrusting and more for wide, sweeping cuts.

The blades shone too brightly in the sunlight.

Enkrid thought the gleam matched the brightness of his own sword’s edge.

So, he resolved to use it.

Shing.

He drew his sword, gripping it with both hands, and twisted slightly.

“To hell with their walls!”

The cry came from the lead rider as the cavalry closed in.

Enkrid executed a Valen-style mercenary swordsmanship technique.

Blinding Strike.

The finely polished blade, sharp as a mirror, reflected the sunlight directly into the rider’s eyes.

“Ugh!”

The man instinctively raised a hand to shield his eyes, causing a brief hesitation. His horse, however, didn’t stop, continuing its relentless charge.

The momentum of the charge wasn’t diminished entirely, but the momentary loss of focus weakened its force.

The gleaming glaive blade, aimed to cleave through Enkrid’s neck, sliced diagonally through the air.

The sunlight reflected off the polished weapons. Enkrid’s blade, honed to perfection, glinted sharply.

For a moment, Enkrid was acutely aware of everything—the enemy, the sun, the earth, the horses, the dust, the battlefield, and the vanguard.

Then he forgot it all.

In that instant, nothing existed but his enemy and his sword.

The Heart of the Beast beat fiercely within him.

With courage born from this power, he stared down the oncoming glaive without blinking. His sharpened senses read the timing of the attack perfectly.

With a vertical slash, Enkrid struck the blade of the glaive.

Clang!

The sharp sound rang out, marking the start of everything.

The strength in his arms and the rare quality of his sword combined in perfect harmony.

Crack!

The first glaive shattered.

Enkrid didn’t pause to admire the shards of the broken blade. In his narrowed world of combat, where only he, his sword, and his opponent existed, all that mattered was swinging his blade again.

He deflected, parried, and struck down incoming glaives, seizing every opening to retaliate.

Slash!

His blade sliced through the horse’s front leg at the gap in its armor.

Hot blood spurted as the horse screamed in pain, its agonized cry cutting through the noise of the battlefield.

The rider fell, his mount collapsing beneath him.

But the charge didn’t stop. Cavalry charges were like that—once they began, they couldn’t simply halt.

Amidst the chaos, Enkrid remembered Ragna’s words:

“When practicing mid-weight sword techniques, there are two primary forms of cutting to master.”

Ragna’s explanation had been brief and crude, but Enkrid had understood it.

“The first is the Lion’s Strike. The second is the Steel Strike.”

The Lion’s Strike wasn’t about slaying an actual lion—it referred to cutting down a dynamic, charging target with a single blow. The Steel Strike was about cutting through solid, stationary obstacles.

First, one learned each strike individually. Later, both were combined into a single motion.

“If you aim to attain Will, you’ll need to master both,” Ragna had said.

The memory of these words lingered as Enkrid faced the oncoming cavalry.

His blade moved reflexively, guided by the Lion’s Strike.

Whoosh. Thwack. Crunch.

Three distinct sounds filled the air simultaneously.

A horse and rider tumbled to the ground, the horse sliced from head to foreleg.

“Argh!”

The rider screamed in agony—a cry that would be his last.

Falling from his horse, he struck his head, his limbs convulsing briefly before he lay still.

The first charge had passed.

As expected, not a single casualty was suffered on Enkrid’s side.

***

Horses themselves were weapons in cavalry warfare.

Facing a charging cavalry head-on?

A feat performed by giants or warriors like Frokk, perhaps—but was it truly wise?

Even if one managed to stop a single horse, what about the mass of riders following behind?

Unless someone had a hobby of being crushed under the combined weight of horses and armor, standing directly against a cavalry charge was sheer madness.

That’s how it normally worked, at least.

No matter how skilled or confident one was, meeting cavalry in a direct clash was usually a death sentence.

But what were they?

Marcus observed Enkrid’s group as they responded to the charging cavalry.

From Enkrid deflecting a blade with his sword to the largest soldier among them, they all stood out in their own way.

It was the largest one, however, who drew his eye first.

“Was his name Audin?”

A devout soldier who began every day with prayer.

And yet, just as proficient at beating men, beasts, or monsters to death with his bare hands.

Audin faced the cavalry head-on.

With a short club, no longer than his forearm, he struck aside a lance aimed at him, then caught the head of an oncoming horse with his palm and twisted.

Could a simple strike truly deflect a lance so effortlessly?

And could a mere man change the trajectory of a charging horse with just his arm strength?

Neigh!

The redirected horse didn’t just veer off—it crumpled sideways, collapsing under its own redirected momentum.

Audin absorbed the full brunt of the charge and diverted it as though it were nothing, leaving Marcus in a state beyond awe—utter disbelief.

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

An incredible feat.

Though Marcus couldn’t see the finer details, Audin hadn’t directly struck the lance blade.

Instead, he struck the weak point at the lance shaft’s joint.

The enemy cavalry relied on a specific strategy: lances attached to saddles at the rear, gripped in the middle for balance. The tactic leveraged the speed of their charge for slashing attacks.

Audin not only countered this tactic but did so without retreating an inch.

The pious “bear” of a man avoided the next incoming lance by ducking and struck the head of a third horse with his club.

Bang!

This time, the horse’s head burst under the impact, blood spraying everywhere.

Audin smiled kindly amidst the chaos, though Marcus couldn’t quite see that detail from his position.

Audin wasn’t the only one who stood out.

Following him was the axe-wielding berserker.

“Haaah!”

With a loud battle cry, Rem struck a glaive blade with her axe.

Curiously, the axe blade and the glaive’s edge seemed to tangle, locking together like entwined vines.

Rem appeared to stagger backward, caught by the momentum of the horse and rider, only to suddenly seize the lance shaft, plant her foot on the horse’s head, and vault herself atop the rider.

Even as Marcus watched, he couldn’t quite grasp what had happened.

Such an act required reflexes faster than a cavalry charge, an impossible level of raw strength, and unmatched agility.

Crunch!

From her precarious perch, Rem drove her axe down onto the rider’s head.

Then, with a leap, she landed on another horse, dodging its hooves. A second rider reached for his Estoc, a narrow blade designed for thrusting.

Before he could even draw it, Rem’s axe carved through his shoulder.

A blur of motion and lethal precision, her strikes left two cavalrymen dead in her wake before she rolled to the ground.

Amazingly, she avoided the trampling hooves and deftly repositioned herself.

To Marcus, it was beyond comprehension—a spectacle more akin to a circus performance from the central cities than a battlefield.

Enkrid, too, was impossible to miss.

He shattered the first lance with sheer force, then continued to cut, parry, and slash through horses and riders alike.

Though his actions seemed brutish, his devastating strikes cleared the battlefield like a breath of fresh air amidst the carnage.

Beside him, Ragna demonstrated a contrasting approach.

Instead of powerful slashes, he used precise, measured thrusts to neutralize the horses’ momentum, rendering the cavalry charge ineffective.

His skill was no less remarkable.

Enkrid’s mighty swings shattered the cavalry’s charge, while Ragna’s finesse dismantled it with quiet efficiency.

Meanwhile, one individual remained entirely out of sight—but who cared?

The important thing was this:

The cavalry had charged.

Yet in that charge, a dozen riders had been lost, while Enkrid’s group remained unscathed.

The ground was stained with long streaks of blood from dead horses and riders.

Some of the blood came from mortally wounded cavalry who had continued to ride before collapsing.

The dust raised by their hooves mixed with the blood, turning the air red.

Marcus took it all in, then opened his mouth to speak.

“Adjutant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who was responsible for gathering them together?”

The adjutant, already familiar with the details, replied promptly.

“The previous battalion commander, sir.”

“That idiot actually did something useful for once.”

Marcus smirked.

The previous commander likely hadn’t intended for this outcome.

He had simply lumped together troublemakers who caused problems, aiming to use them as expendable assets for high-risk missions.

The man had a habit of taking credit for the achievements of those beneath him. He likely assumed that if they died in battle, their sacrifice would become his success.

They were meant to be disposable weapons—too troublesome to retain, yet too valuable to discard outright.

“Then Enkrid joined, and the picture came together.”

From his seat, the politically savvy Marcus understood the genesis of the Mad Squad.

The previous commander was a fool, but unintentionally, he had achieved something remarkable.

“He deserves a medal for this,” Marcus mused with a wry grin.

Binding them together and making Enkrid their leader had been a masterstroke.

Look at the result—it was nothing short of extraordinary.

While Marcus marveled at the display, the enemy commander who had ordered the charge was left dumbfounded.

The leader of Viscount Bentra’s cavalry—a unit renowned for cutting through infantry—found himself forced to halt.

He needed to regroup his formation after losing twelve of his fifty riders.

The fact that he had survived was pure luck.

Had he been within Enkrid’s range, he would undoubtedly have perished.

He had seen the flashing blade and its wielder.

The name Enkrid, which he had first heard attached to a wall and associated with absurd rumors, came rushing back.

“It was all exaggeration, wasn’t it? Baseless boasting to scare us off, right?”

That name, which had seemed like empty bravado, now stood before him, cutting down his men.

This couldn’t be real.

“What the hell is this madness?”

The commander muttered, nearly losing his will to fight.

But he couldn’t afford to falter—the battle had only just begun.

As he turned to regroup his men, he noticed something.

Among the survivors, a man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes stood out, muttering something to himself.

The commander couldn’t hear what he said.

Then, suddenly—

Thunk!

“Guh!”

A blade pierced his throat without warning, searing pain spreading from the wound like fire.

The world froze.

“Commander!”

He vaguely heard the voice of a subordinate shouting from behind him.

He tried to respond, but no words came.

When one’s vocal cords are severed and one’s throat is pierced, words are no longer an option.

“Grrkk!”

Blood foamed from his mouth as his head lolled to the side.

The cause of death: a stab wound to the neck.

The one who delivered it was Jaxon, the red-haired man of the Mad Squad.

Silence fell over the battlefield.

In the brief moment of stunned stillness, Jaxon began quietly gathering himself, moving as though nothing had happened.