Chapter 2160: Chapter 2160

Jenkins’s full-force leaping strike, even before it found its mark, was enough to make the battle-hardened man inside the armor’s scalp crawl with dread.

Reacting with instinct born from crisis, the man abandoned his shot, raising his other hand in a desperate attempt to parry the downward cleave with his gauntlet. He had immense faith in his armor, but he had tragically misjudged the power of the weapon in Jenkins’s hands. Without even a pause, the left gauntlet, along with the hand inside it, was cleaved through as if it were butter.

Fortunately, the man’s reflexes were sharp. He immediately lifted the crossbow in his right hand, managing to catch the blade as it continued its descent. The man’s strength was far inferior to Jenkins’s, but the crossbow, a numbered item, was not something that could be severed in a single blow.

Even so, the sheer force of the impact drove the man’s heavy armor into the ground, his boots sinking a good two centimeters before he could finally stabilize himself.

“What kind of monster are you?”

He had never encountered an enemy who possessed a superior weapon, masterful skill, and overwhelming strength all at once. Typically, it was impossible for one person to embody all three.

Jenkins offered no reply. Seizing the upper hand, he kept his right hand pressing the sword down against the crossbow, then freed his left and drove a fist into his opponent’s abdomen.

With one hand crippled and the other straining to hold back Jenkins’s sword, the man had no way to block the punch. The armor was thick, but under Jenkins’s powerful blow, it was effortlessly pierced.

Even though his [Titan's Power] had been absorbed by the World Tree Seedling, the strength had not vanished. Planting his feet and twisting at the waist, Jenkins drove his fist through the front plate, through the man’s body, and clean through the metal armor on his back.

To be honest, while Jenkins had been prepared for a fight, his first opponent was not strong at all. In fact, without that crossbow and suit of armor, the man’s strength and speed didn’t even exceed the limits of a normal human. Latest content publıshed on novèlfire.net

Therefore, this battle was less a fight and more of an execution.

“I rarely kill people,” Jenkins said softly, “let alone a complete stranger like you.”

He pulled his arm from the man’s torso.

“I’m the opposite,” the voice from within the armor was muffled and weak. “I don’t need a reason to kill.”

“Do you have any last words?”

Jenkins asked again. When his hand had pierced the man’s abdomen, it had also drained his very life force. The man in the armor wouldn't die from blood loss, but from old age.

“Nothing to say. I’ve killed countless men in my life, and I’ve always loved to challenge the strong. To meet an opponent like you after death... I suppose that’s good luck. Not everyone has the honor of fighting a monster like you.”

After that, neither of them spoke again. Once he was sure the man was dead, Jenkins lifted the helmet and saw a scruffy, bearded man. His life force had been drained away, leaving his face as withered as a mummy’s, but one could still see the rugged features of the man he once was.

He was indeed a normal human, with the appearance of a tribesman from the northern snow mountains.

“Well, you were already dead here, so I suppose I didn’t really kill you,” Jenkins murmured again, looking up at the blood-red sky.

“So, how do I get back?”

The fiery doorframe had been a one-way portal; it hadn’t followed him into this arena.

Fortunately, as soon as the question left his lips, the corpse he held spontaneously erupted into flames. The fire flowed through the air, once again tracing the outline of the rectangular doorframe.

Jenkins didn’t step through immediately. He bent down to retrieve the man’s crossbow, a fine piece of equipment. But to his disappointment, his hand passed right through it, as if the weapon were merely a phantom.

“Knew it wouldn’t be that simple.”

Shaking his head, he straightened up and walked through the doorframe, returning to his spot before the metal forge. The position was the same, but now a steady stream of fire flowed from the ethereal frame, slipping through the cracks in the furnace gate and into the hearth.

The flames grew a little brighter, and Jenkins could feel a touch of warmth from the light, but it was far from enough. After all, his last enemy had been decidedly weak.

“If you only fight enemies of that caliber, you’ll have to kill and burn another twenty-three just to get the furnace back to its original glow.”

The man in hunting gear, leaning against the side of the furnace, spoke up as if he had read Jenkins’s mind.

“You think I chose that weakling on purpose?” Jenkins retorted without ceremony, before asking, “So, is there any way to gauge the strength of the enemies behind these doors?”

He expected silence, but surprisingly, the man answered, “Of course there is. The fire here is nearly omnipotent. It can be used to forge a tool for detection, but this pathetic little flicker is nowhere near enough.”

He turned his gaze back to the hundreds of doors behind him.

“This Mysterious Realm seems a lot simpler than I thought.”

The fiery doorframe that had returned him had vanished completely. Jenkins, holy sword in hand, blinked once, confirming again that the spiritual glow from each door was identical. Only then did he choose a new door and step through.

He found himself in a corridor inside what seemed to be an ancient building. A cool, drafty wind suggested that both ends of the passage were open to the outside.

The walls of the corridor were extremely high, but it wasn’t particularly wide. The floor was littered with corpses—and not the bodies of the living, but the bodies of the dead.

He didn’t advance immediately. Instead, he knelt to examine the nearest corpse, a mummy that had been sliced into three sections. Its former opponent had been incredibly skilled; from the clean cuts, Jenkins could imagine three swift, almost invisible strikes that had dismembered the body with brutal efficiency.

All the bodies were those of undead creatures, specifically mummies. Considering his surroundings, Jenkins even began to suspect he might have stumbled into a tomb left over from some ancient epoch.

“Is my opponent a tomb raider this time?”

He shook his head, casting aside thoughts irrelevant to the trial at hand. Taking two steps forward, he inspected another body, confirming that his opponent was proficient with daggers, short swords, or similar blades. The attacker was exceptionally fast and possessed considerable strength. There were no traces of spells, nor any lingering signs of divine arts.

In a place so saturated with the energy of undeath, the use of divine arts would have left an indelible mark. Thus, Jenkins concluded that his opponent was purely a melee combatant, a non-caster.

In the 18th Epoch, this was almost incomprehensible. The norm for all Enchanters was to excel at spellcasting, often at the expense of melee prowess. The very notion of someone who had touched the supernatural but still relied solely on non-casting abilities was baffling to the people of his era.

While it was possible in Jenkins’s time to create powerful knights and warriors through rituals, potions, specialized training like that of Bevanna’s family, or even the unique body modifications of the Church of Creation and Machinery, no one with any sense would bother.

After all, in the current system, anyone with talent and literacy could learn spells and divine arts with almost no barrier to entry. Even for the poor, there were spells that required no expensive materials. An Enchanter like Professor Burns, who focused heavily on martial abilities, was already an anomaly; someone who learned no spells or divine arts at all was unheard of.

“According to Papa Oliver’s lectures on the evolution of supernatural systems, the last time non-casting combatants were common was the 15th Epoch at the latest.”

Jenkins reasoned that the architecture and the tattered clothing on the mummies were too generic to provide any clues about the time period.

“The eras before the 15th Epoch were very similar to the fantasy worlds I remember.”

He continued his analysis, recalling Papa Oliver’s personal, informal categorization of the past eighteen epochs into four broad periods.

Mythological, Fantasy, Dark, and Modern. The Mythological Era was a time of which no written records survived, but it was the origin of most religious myths, a time when gods frequently walked the earth. The Fantasy Era spanned the tens of thousands of years around the time when non-human species migrated from the material world, a period much like the world of Dungeons & Dragons he imagined. The Dark Era was marked by successive failures to avert the end-of-epoch calamities, leading to constant civilizational decline. Finally, the Modern Era began at the end of the 17th Epoch, encompassing the last thousand years for which humanity had a complete, verifiable historical record.

Of course, this was just Papa Oliver’s casual definition, shared with his young apprentice during quiet moments at the shop. It held no academic weight.

Naturally, Papa Oliver had never taught Jenkins how to fight a non-casting, melee-focused Enchanter. The Church didn’t teach such outdated material, just as it didn’t teach one how to fight an ancient Balrog—the creature was long extinct.

But fortunately, Jenkins had never dozed off during his lessons. When business was slow at the antique shop, Papa Oliver had been happy to share historical anecdotes with his apprentice, so Jenkins wasn’t entirely in the dark.

First, non-casting melee Enchanters were not ignorant of how to resist spells. Therefore, using spells against them wasn’t necessarily more effective than overwhelming them with brute force. Second, these types of Enchanters, now extinct in the modern era, had preserved special combat techniques with cold weapons passed down from antiquity.

Some of these techniques were later crystalized into red martial-type abilities, like [Sword Dance: Whirlwind], while others were passed down through families, like the special techniques of Bevanna’s mother’s lineage. The vast majority, however, now lay dormant in the libraries of various churches and millennia-old illicit organizations, unlikely to be read by anyone unless by accident.

Even though Jenkins was fond of solving problems with his sword, he was certain that his own skill with a blade was no match for the true melee masters of his time.

He could only use [Sword Dance: Whirlwind] once. Although the ability was solidified within the Enchanter system, making its effect and power far greater than that of its old-world practitioners, if he missed his one shot, his opponent could very well unleash a relentless barrage of their own sword dances, perhaps even the legendary “Blade Storm.”