Chapter 45: Chapter 45

On the other side, after confirming that the instructor had used a javelin to blow the head off the “child” that charged past, Ron didn’t pay any more attention to the aftermath, because more enemies had already rushed over.

Right in front of him!

Having witnessed with his own eyes that child-looking enemy slit an apprentice’s throat with just a single finger, Ron no longer harbored the slightest shred of luck. He was, at his core, an adult.

While Justin and the others were still hesitating, the sword in his hand had already hacked forward. Thanks to his prolonged training, his entire state of motion perfectly aligned with all the prerequisites of the Ninth Sword Stance.

In that instant, Ron felt every ounce of strength in his body coalesce onto the blade’s edge. At this moment, he even noticed that the enemy charging toward him actually revealed a trace of astonishment on its face.

Following that, that trace of astonishment morphed into deep-seated hatred and a hint of fear.

Ron no longer needed any thought at this point. The longsword in his hand struck the enemy’s left shoulder, but the expected scene of cleaving the foe in two didn’t materialize. The sensation of the hit was also completely different from when he had been fighting the wolf pack.

It was an incredibly grating sensation, like a dull blade chopping into thick cowhide!

Aside from the skin being exceptionally tough, the opponent’s bones were also far beyond imagination. Ron’s sword swing, which concentrated his entire body’s strength, felt as though it had struck a steel pillar, without causing any deformation whatsoever.

Well, his sword strike had indeed been a bit off. Originally, he had aimed to chop at the opponent’s neck, but he hadn’t expected the opponent to suddenly grow a bit taller, and with no time to change his move, he could only forcefully hack into its left shoulder.

But if it were a normal human, Ron’s current strength would be more than enough to cleave them in two at any point on their body.

The opponent was not human!

At the very least, not an ordinary human.

Watching the enemy’s twisted expression as it reached out to grab him, Ron subconsciously kicked out, while simultaneously retracting his sword with a quick motion. Even though he was mentally prepared, the abnormal resistance he felt when withdrawing the blade still left him thoroughly shocked.

“Clang, clang, clang, clang!”

Ron used the momentum of his sword retraction to block the enemy’s finger strikes. Four impacts landed on the sword’s body, producing the crisp sound of metal clashing against metal.

These were fingers?!

They were clearly four short weapons!

At the same time, Ron leveraged the kick he had just thrust out to adjust his position and prepare for the next attack. However, the child-looking enemy moved even faster, and Ron could only raise his sword to defend.

Just as he was struggling to cope, two swords thrust forward from either side of him: one aiming for the enemy’s face, the other for its lower abdomen.

Unexpectedly, the enemy merely tilted its head to dodge the sword on the left, and showed no intention of evading the sword thrust at its abdomen. It actually intended to power straight through Karel’s thrust, which was fully aligned with the First Sword Stance, and continue its fierce assault on Ron.

In this clash of forces, Karel’s sword actually failed to pierce through the enemy’s body, only sinking in less than a palm’s length of the blade tip before it could go no further.

“Fall back first!” Ron shouted.

But he himself stepped forward with his sword once more. The initial exchange had already proven that hacking was no longer very effective against this kind of enemy. Instead, straight thrusts, which created a smaller wound surface, might be more useful.

The fact that Karel could break through its defense right now was clear proof!

Ron was well aware that Karel’s strength was inferior to his own. If Karel could stab his sword into the enemy’s body, then there was even more Ron could do!

As Karel and Justin retracted their swords, Ron delivered a straight thrust to the enemy’s chest. He didn’t use his full strength on this strike, and since he also hit the opponent’s rib, the blade only sank in half a palm’s depth, which was less than five centimeters.

If it were an ordinary person, a wound this deep would already be fatal, but the enemy was no ordinary person.

Ron withdrew his sword, and the blade tip actually didn’t have a single trace of blood on it. Seeing this, Ron understood just how troublesome this enemy was.

If it were just him alone, even with a sword against an unarmed opponent, he might not necessarily be a match for it. But he wasn’t alone right now.

And he had never advocated for solo combat anyway. Whenever he thrust at the enemy, his teammates would always use their swords to parry or feint, creating stable opportunities for his straight thrusts.

However, the main attacker was by no means just Ron. When it came to the attack formation against a single enemy, there had never really been a fixed main attacker. Whoever had the opportunity was the main attacker, and the rest would instinctively coordinate the assault.

Consequently, an extremely comical scene played out on the battlefield.

Such a powerful enemy, when facing five longswords alternating between attacks and cover, actually accomplished absolutely nothing. It could only rely on its powerful body to occasionally attempt a few strikes.

Most of the time, it could only take a beating!

Of course, being able to reduce the fight to this state was largely due to the enemy’s attacks lacking any semblance of strategy, with absolutely zero coordination between them. The strength of a single unit was also insufficient to overwhelm Ron and these apprentices.

After gradually adapting to the opponent’s assault, Ron was finally able to spare a fraction of his attention to observe the surrounding situation and the other squads around them.

Even the temporarily assembled seventh squad was trading blows back and forth with this kind of enemy that possessed powerful bodies but practically zero intelligence.

At the outer perimeter of the battlefield, seven or eight Knights had, at some unknown point, divided the battlefield into two sections. One section was where Ron and the other apprentices were, with each squad facing off against a single child-looking enemy.

On the other side, the elderly-looking enemies, accompanied by about a dozen children, were in a standoff with the Knights.

Of course, it was mainly the elderly people holding the standoff. The dozen or so children were continuously launching charges at the Knights, but the moment they got close, the Knights would use their spears to flip them up and toss them far away, over and over again.

“Those elderly people…”

Ron didn’t know if it was an illusion, but he actually saw wisps of black qi coiling around the elderly people’s hands. In the blink of an eye, the black qi vanished again.

However, he didn’t have much mental capacity to ponder that right now. His foremost concern at this moment was:

how exactly could he kill the thing in front of him!

Ron absolutely refused to believe that he could encounter a perpetual motion machine akin to a zombie while still at the apprentice stage. The problem was, where exactly was this thing’s limit?

Fighting the opponent for several minutes, whether in terms of physical or mental expenditure, was greater than the entire battle with the wolf pack just now.

“Ron, find a way to attack its injured spots. We’ll create the openings for you!”

The others in the squad had also realized where the problem lay, so they decided to let Ron act as the true main attacker. After all, Ron was the strongest among the squad’s members, and also the one with the fastest progress in Sword Stance training.

Only by letting Ron continuously strike the enemy was there a possibility of truly killing it.

…

“Thud!”

With a muffled sound, Ron’s sword struck the enemy’s chest once more. At this point, very little skin and flesh remained on the enemy’s chest, revealing a surface that was white as jade and even tinged with a metallic luster. Yet the granulation tissue on the wounds was still stubbornly and rapidly proliferating.

Ron didn’t know whether Formal Knights possessed such regenerative abilities, but the enemy before him genuinely left him stunned.