I’m a Holy Knight, but I Contracted with an Evil God - Chapter 30

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 30.
The Nerba River—the great frontier dividing the Central Region from the Eastern Region.
Over the dark-green waters rose a stone bridge, built in the age of the ancient empire, its imposing form casting a heavy shadow.
Yet what hung over the bridge was not quiet solitude.
The acrid stench of blood, and the ominous cries of a murder of crows.

“The Eastern Region’s welcome is quite elaborate, I see.”

Tristan, who had been leading the way, pulled back on his horse’s reins and brought it to a stop.
At the midpoint of the bridge, shattered carriages and countless corpses blocked the road.
Bodies of guards bristling with arrows like porcupines, and horses split open at the belly.
And across the ground, blood smeared in every direction.
To any eye, it was the scene of a vicious bandit raid.

…….

Leon took in the carnage without a word.
His brow furrowed slightly, but not from fear.

‘Do you feel it?’
【Yes. It’s remarkably subtle—easy to overlook if you weren’t paying attention. There’s an unpleasant residue lingering, like a stain not fully cleaned.】

Woven through the smell of blood on the ground was a foreign presence.
The moment Leon’s frown deepened, Tristan twisted his mouth and spoke.

“What, scared? If you’re going to be sick, do it in the river. Don’t foul the bridge.”
“I have no intention of that.”
“Playing it cool, are you? This is common enough in the Eastern Region. Just unlucky enough to run into some bandits.”

Tristan casually dismissed the matter and began to guide his horse around the bodies to pass through.
But this was a deliberate lie.
Even if he couldn’t pinpoint the source of the wrongness, there was no way an elite knight like Tristan could have missed the sense of incongruity emanating from the scene before them.
Once again, Tristan was testing Leon.
Testing whether he would freeze in fear at the sight of such carnage, or waste time chasing useless notions of justice.

“……Look, I said we’re just leaving.”

Irritation colored Tristan’s voice, but Leon paid it no mind and dismounted.
He walked toward the overturned carriage and began to sift through the scattered contents on the ground.

“Doesn’t this strike you as strange?”
“Strange how?”
“You say bandits did this? Do bandits leave behind everything worth money and just scatter it on the ground?”

Where Leon pointed, boxes of the finest silk and spices lay broken and abandoned.
Items from the Eastern Region, the kind whose prices soared at market.

“They might have been in a rush and couldn’t carry it off.”
“Even so, it’s too clean. There’s no sign they even searched through it.”

As if they had never cared about such things from the start.
Leon’s face, raised toward Tristan who still sat mounted, seemed to speak those very words.
Tristan’s eyes narrowed as he met that gaze.

……Hmm.

In truth, Tristan had already sensed it to that extent.
That this wasn’t mere banditry, but an attack with some other purpose behind it.
Just as Tristan was thinking ‘not bad’ once more, Leon added something further.

“And the cargo has increased.”
“What?”

Leon pointed to the deep wheel rut carved into one side of the bridge in answer to Tristan’s question.
The bridge was littered with traces of smashed carriages, making it clear these were the marks left by carts the attackers had brought.

“The wheel ruts are much deeper on the way out than on the way in. There’s no sign of stolen goods, yet the weight increased? That can only mean one thing.”

Leon’s gaze swept across the bodies of the guards.
Every corpse wore armor—all men-at-arms.
The driver of the carriage or anyone who might have been the merchant’s master were nowhere to be found.

“They didn’t take goods. They took people.”
…….

Tristan clicked his tongue involuntarily and dismounted.
He strode swiftly to the wheel ruts Leon had indicated and examined the marks carefully.
Indeed, Leon had been right.
The bandits’ trail split into two distinct paths.
As though the weight had changed.

‘He saw that?’

The observation was far too keen to dismiss as mere coincidence.
Barely fifteen years old.
With no real combat experience beyond training, yet he’d stood amid the corpses without blinking, comprehending the situation in full.

“……You’re right. Their target was definitely a person, not cargo.”

Tristan’s voice carried a note of excitement as he spoke, almost as if he were marveling at Leon’s judgment without quite meaning to.

“All that cocky talk, and turns out you really were the best among the candidates?”
“I’ll take it as a compliment.”

Leon replied matter-of-factly and remounted his horse.
Watching Leon’s receding back, Tristan felt an odd sense of displacement.
It recalled something Cepian had spoken of habitually—”Animal Instinct.”
How, once a soldier had enough real experience, instinct could move faster than thought.

‘……But wasn’t that something only possible for someone with Cepian’s level of experience?’

Leon, already crossing the bridge ahead, called back to Tristan, who had grown lost in thought.

“Are you coming? Didn’t you say this was common?”

Tristan gave a hollow laugh and mounted his horse.
He added gruffly, his tone now far less sharp and hostile than before.

“Coming, coming! Don’t rush me, you insolent thing.”

* * *

Once they crossed the Nerba River and entered the Eastern Region, dusk began to fall.
As darkness settled over the desolate, rust-colored earth, even the wind’s voice grew strange and unsettling.
Like the cry of some beast.

“Rest now. I’ll take the night watch.”

Without even lighting a campfire, Tristan settled against the trunk of a tree and spoke.
When Leon looked at him in surprise, Tristan added, his face heavy with irritation.

“Nights in the Eastern Region aren’t like the forests of the Central Region. I’d rather exhaust myself than have you doze off and botch things.”

Beneath the barbed tone lay a senior’s sense of responsibility and a wariness born of harsh terrain.
Leon lay down without protest, drawing his cloak over himself.

“Then I’ll leave it to you.”

Tristan made no reply, his gaze cast toward the distant horizon.
Silence fell.
Within that quiet, Leon’s breathing soon grew steady and even, and he slept; Tristan clicked his tongue at such obliviousness.

‘Has the boy no sense of caution?’

He was an unusual one in many respects.
Tristan decided to revise his thinking.
His own judgment that Leon was merely a child had been prejudice.
Leon was more composed, more audacious, and sharper-minded than Tristan had given him credit for.
Impossibly so for a mere fifteen-year-old.

‘Inborn temperament, perhaps.’

He could think of no other explanation.
There was no other way to account for the composure of a youth who, at such a tender age, carried himself as though he’d rolled through battlefields for a decade.

‘Good fortune and exceptional talent, then.’

Tristan bit his lip unconsciously.
As an Eastern-born man who’d clawed his way to the honored rank of elite knight, Leon’s achievements at merely fifteen were brilliant enough to twist his gut with envy.
The only flaw was his common birth—but even that was more than canceled out by being a Stigma Manifestor of such renown.

‘He has everything. Lucky bastard.’

The instant Tristan muttered to himself, he caught a faint sound.
A rustling, hidden within the wind’s whisper, that an ordinary person would have missed—but Tristan’s keen senses snagged it.
It was then that Tristan slowly gripped the hilt of his sword.

“…There are uninvited guests.”

At the low whisper, Tristan’s breath caught without his meaning it to.
Leon had definitely fallen asleep first.
And yet he’d woken at this whisper of sound?
That microscopic disturbance that Tristan himself could only sense while straining every nerve?

“Three of them… no, five. Shall we wait until they draw closer?”

As he spoke, Leon turned his head toward Tristan.
The motion was so natural—like the unconscious gesture of someone talking in his sleep—that to enemies at a distance, it would seem Leon hadn’t awakened at all.

“…Yes. We wait until they’re close enough.”

Tristan answered quietly and took his stance.
It wasn’t long before the creatures’ presence drew near.

Grrrrrrr!

What burst from the darkness was no ordinary beast.
The hairless red muscle with ribs thrusting through like armor plating could never be mistaken for the form of any living, common animal.
Exactly five, just as Leon had counted.
They were Corrupted Beasts born from Wasteland Jackals, creatures commonly seen in the Wasteland.

“Just as I thought—Corrupted Beasts here too!”

Tristan drew his sword while still seated and severed the neck of the first beast lunging at him in a single fluid motion.
Black blood scattered through the air, and the remaining four creatures froze where they stood, crouching low and growling.

Clang!

Corrupted Beasts are heavily influenced by the base creature, and the more severe the corruption, the further they drift from their original form.
The creatures before them had lost structural coherence, yet they retained the shape of Wasteland Jackals well enough that they were more likely to possess animal characteristics than those of true corruption.

Understanding this, Tristan cried out:

“Watch those jaws!”

Wasteland Jackals characteristically crush bones while feeding, granting them a bite force that was utterly terrifying.
With jaws torn open from ear to ear, these creatures’ maws were threatening enough to shatter stone.
Yet Leon’s movements proved those fears baseless.
The way he wielded a Greatsword as long as his own body with such ease drew involuntary admiration from Tristan.

“Hah!”

In the instant the first beast snapped its teeth at empty air, Leon’s Greatsword traced an elegant arc across its neck.
It was not a crude slash, but a precise strike that threaded cunningly between the exposed bones.
And that single blow severed its breath and destroyed the core in one motion.

Crack!

Leon did not hesitate.
Using the momentum of his spin, he cleaved the second creature lunging from behind in half at the waist, then drove straight through the third beast’s heart with an economical, flawless stroke.
Dispatching three Corrupted Beasts took scarcely more time than drawing a few measured breaths.
By the time Tristan finished severing the larger fourth creature and turned his head, Leon had already begun sheathing his sword.

‘Already finished?’

Tristan’s gaze fell upon the corpses of the Corrupted Beasts.
Judging by the clean edges of the wounds, all three creatures had died instantly from single strikes to their vital points.
Moreover, since the beasts had stopped moving the moment they were struck, it meant the wound locations precisely matched the positions of their cores.
Most tellingly—
‘…the bodies are so clean.’
Where Leon’s blade had passed, the shattered core gleamed white with oxidation.
As though it had been washed in holy water.
“So Purification really is his specialty.”
Tristan found himself muttering without meaning to.
The boy not only wielded his sword with exceptional skill—he possessed the ability to burn away corruption with nothing more than a swing of his blade.
There was no denying it.
What Ayla had said was not exaggeration, but fact.

“Not bad.”

So the boy’s skill wasn’t merely for show?
His mouth twisted in an ambiguous smirk as though speaking those words, yet the hostility that had colored his expression earlier had largely faded.
Leon swept his gaze over the corpses without deigning to reply.

“Shall we move on? It seems somewhat restless for us to sleep again right after such bloodshed.”

The face of someone proposing sleep after just engaging in a frenzied battle showed not the slightest flicker of emotion.
Seeing that composure, a strange smile played across Tristan’s lips.
He turned out to be more likable than expected.
Though I wish he had just a bit more courtesy about him.
It was an observation entirely indifferent to the actions I had taken.
Continued in the next episode ▶
A Holy Knight who made a contract with an evil god
Author
Ram Dat
Publisher
Kim Seok-hwan, Choi Se-ra
Published by
Grae Publishing
Inquiries
[email protected]
Publication Date
March 27, 2026
UCI
G720:N+A327-20260227066
※ This e-book is protected under copyright law. Unauthorized reproduction and copying are prohibited. Violations may result in civil and criminal liability.
※ Pentagram awaits your precious manuscript.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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