Chapter 137: Solovey, the Gale Knight!

A joust between knights brooks no complexity.

Two towering warhorses, bearing fully armored knights, charged at high speed, fearlessly hurtling toward each other's razor-sharp lance tips.

They crossed paths, and in a split second, victory and defeat were decided.

Amidst a high-speed charge, adjusting one's lance and body within the fleeting second or half-second of impact is exceptionally difficult.

It is akin to two heavy motorcycles colliding head-on at fifty miles per hour, while the riders must simultaneously adjust their postures and weapons at the exact moment of impact.

Moreover, this was no arena tournament fought with brittle, blunt wooden lances behind the safety of protective barriers.

Solovy wielded a heavy steel cavalry lance nearly three meters in length, tipped with a two-foot-long spearhead.

At the very instant of engagement, he slightly raised his arm while subtly angling his torso.

Cindarong’s lance tip grazed Solovy’s knightly breastplate, sparking a flurry of fire, before sliding past his armpit.

Meanwhile, Solovy’s heavy cavalry steel lance effortlessly pierced Cindarong’s chainmail gorget, drove straight into his throat, burst out from the back of his head, and punctured the steel helm as well.

Before death claimed him, Cindarong saw only the cold gleam of the enemy's lance tip, and then plunged into absolute darkness.

A flash of cold light struck first, followed by the lance thrusting forth like a soaring dragon!

The two-foot-long spearhead erupted almost entirely from the back of Cindarong’s head, the tremendous force tearing him from his saddle and leaving him suspended in mid-air upon Solovy’s lance.

Carrying Cindarong’s corpse aloft on his lance, Solovy charged another dozen meters before bringing his mount to a halt. With a casual flick, he hurled the defeated man's body some seven or eight meters away, dumping it right at the feet of Knight Edward.

Towering, formidable, and peerlessly valorous—once a bandit leader, then a count’s bodyguard, and finally an honored guest of the Gladstone family, Cindarong, the transcendent knight of the Western March, had been run through by a single lance thrust.

His corpse, weighing nearly three hundred pounds including his knightly armor, was tossed aside like a scarecrow by Knight Solovy.

"Anyone! Should you dare to take so much as a single step past the Western Watchtower, taste my lance!"

The five-hundred-strong troop fell into absolute silence.

Banner-knight Edward’s expression flickered with uncertainty. He put up a stubborn front for a full minute before waving a pale hand and barking, "Retreat!"

The hundreds of soldiers turned about like a routed, battered army, sluggishly making their way back home.

Solovy, the Gale Knight!

While he might not single-handedly annihilate a force of five hundred men single-handedly, he was entirely capable of charging through their ranks and unseating Edward and the other commanders.

The Order of the Gale Knights, under the command of the Northern Grand Duke, was one of the three great knightly orders of the Orlandis Empire, established seven years ago when the North joined the Empire.

Every year, it recruits hundreds of the North’s most exceptional young knights. Through three rigorous years of training and trials, only the top ten with the highest comprehensive scores are admitted as official Gale Knights.

Solovy was the third son of the former head of the Petukhov family, Romon’s third uncle. He passed his knightly trials and became a knight at eighteen.

By twenty-five, he had already become an official member of the Order of the Gale Knights. Even after retiring following five years of service in the Order, he was still only in his early thirties.

When such a figure returned to Isenpole, even the mediocre and incompetent Lord Tarik dared not slight him, immediately stripping the declining Miswich family of their fief and granting it to the Gale Knight Solovy.

With the North sparsely populated and villages limited in number, not every newly dubbed knight secured a knightly domain or became an official banner-knight upon their first enfeoffment.

Many proletariat knights had to make do with a tiny manor just to scrape by.

And that was considered fortunate; one could hardly remain a proletariat knight for life, scraping a living as a mercenary or a bodyguard.

In the woods beside the highway leading from the Western Watchtower to the Riverbend, Leo had witnessed the entire spectacle.

When the Gladstone family’s forces gathered in Isenpole, sharp-eared informants had alerted the Petukhov family. They had then dispatched a rider at breakneck speed to the Riverbend to deliver the news.

Seeing the formidable strength of the enemy force, Leo had personally acted as a scout, coming to investigate the situation and assess the options for a response.

Should they ambush, or should they hold their ground? That was the question.

Should they annihilate the enemy completely, or merely drive them away? That, too, was the question.

Yet at this moment, those questions were truly and literally resolved by the thrust of Solovy’s lance.

Riding out on horseback, Leo transformed into an enthusiastic fanboy, trotting up to Solovy to butter him up.

"Uncle Solovy, that was simply magnificent just now! Killing a transcendent knight is no different from slaughtering a chicken—you are truly an peerless warrior!"

The raw prowess Solovy displayed in skewering Cindarong with a single thrust filled Leo with intense envy.

Judging by the brief display of Cindarong’s strength, even with all his confidence, Leo wouldn't dare claim absolute victory; at the very least, it would require a grueling battle of three hundred rounds.

Witnessing Solovy’s ferocious might, he finally understood why Zhao Zilong had been able to charge seven times in and seven times out of Cao Cao's camp.

The man was undoubtedly a naturally awakened transcendent knight!

As for Leo, to this day he couldn't even manage a smooth horse-riding charge, let on perform a high-difficulty cavalry lance charge.

In the saddle, he could only hack away with a sword at foot soldiers; his combat effectiveness was actually lower mounted than fighting on foot.

It wasn't that a cavalry lance charge was inherently impossible to learn—with Leo’s physical attributes, mastering the basics was simple enough.

The real difficulty lay in applying it to actual combat and unleashing its true destructive potential.

You could see how expertly Cindarong had executed his lance charge.

Knight Solovy glanced at Leo and asked, "You are Uliyang’s prospective son-in-law?"

"Yes!"

Knight Solovy paid him no further mind, merely dropping a single sentence: "Tend to your domain well, and safeguard the peace of the realm."

With that, he urged his warhorse onward, riding at a leisurely pace toward his own fief.

Leo hesitated for a moment, then spurred his mount to follow.

Unlike the Riverbend fief, which extended thirty miles deep into the wilderness, Knight Solovy’s domain sat directly alongside the World Tree Highway, boasting exceptionally convenient transportation.

Crossing the World Tree Highway and passing through a mere few hundred meters of woodland, the view suddenly opened up before Leo, revealing vast expanses of farmland and village architecture.

This knightly domain was quite expansive, blessed with exceptionally fertile soil and effortless irrigation. Tiny streams flowed down from the southern mountains, traversing the domain and flowing northeastward.

Ultimately, they converged to reach Isenpole and empty into the Anzeno River.

Knight Solovy’s domain was bordered to the north by the World Tree Highway and to the south by a spur of the Borokbaku Mountains, spanning over twenty miles from north to south.

To the east lay a ridge of hills stretching from the Borokbaku spur to the Western Watchtower, serving as the demarcation line separating it from another knightly domain.

To the west, there were no other knightly domains whatsoever; all the way to the Bak Pass two hundred miles away stretched nothing but untamed wilderness.

The Borokbaku Mountain range served as the demarcation line between the North and the West, and between the West and the South. The Bak Pass, nestled beneath this majestic barrier, was the mandatory thoroughfare connecting the northern part of the Western March to the North.

Ever since Count Frielov and Tarhan Burke of the Western March had signed a peace treaty, Isenpole had not suffered the flames of war from the West for twenty years.

However, because the region stretching from the Bak Pass to the Western Watchtower lay on the border between the two realms and served as a buffer zone between Count Frielov’s domain and Tarhan Burke, it had perpetually remained a haven for wilderness bandits.

Bandit groups making incursions from the West, mountain bandit factions formed by local savages, and outlaw bands composed of fugitive criminals, deserters, and drifters all loved to establish their lairs in this region.

Not only did they ceaselessly harass nearby villages, pillaging pioneer domains and caravans, but they even dared to harass and assault the garrison forces.

The abandoned blockhouse occupied by the ogres had not formed naturally, either.

Yet a decade ago, the Western Watchtower patrol squad, organized by Rigolav, the head of the Petukhov family, spent five years entirely wiping out the bandit lairs across the entire expanse outside the Western Watchtower.

The strength of the wilderness bandits had diminished drastically; they could no longer compare to the domain armies of knightly lords, let alone some of the migrating alien minor tribes. Reduced to mere roaming outlaws, the region had only then managed to barely recover a semblance of human habitation.