오늘만 사는 기사(The Knight Only Lives Today)

Description / Comments

The protagonist is your average peasant who came across a wandering retired mercenary who saw “potential” in him, which got to the protagonist’s head and convinced him to try and become a Knight, a hero of the battlefield straight out of dynasty warriors mowing down zako. Except after many years of training he was still mediocre at best that even a young boy with 6 months of experience whooped his ass, but he still persevered on with hopes and dreams that maybe one day he’ll contribute in some manner. After many years as a mercenary he finally managed to make his way to the bottom run of the military handling the “undesireables” that are nearly impossible to manage, and where all of them are still better than him at fighting. One day when fighting in a battle he ends up dying almost immediately, yet for some reason he wakes up on the morning of the day of his death. Forced to repeat the day of his death over and over in the midst of battle, where he will either have to give up and surrender his fate to the ferrykeeper of the river styx, or persevere against impossible odds by slowly improving his skills enough to survive at least one more day. Will he crack under pressure and give up on life, or find some way out of this hell to eventually become the Knight of his dreams?

A rather fun series about a dude slowly getting better at fighting one death at a time, endlessly persevering since he has infinite lives and simply needs to keep trying in order to get better. The only way for the protagonist to lose is to give up and get on Death’s boat, which means that the stakes are fairly low overall. However the main draw of this work is each individual loop and his solutions to each one, along with his overall comraderie with his (OP) squad. It’s fundamentally still “OP Koreaman dynasty warriors all over the fools” but with a nice enough twist where the protag keeps “losing” over and over until he eventually just wins. It’s well written but every arc mostly plays out the same way and the only “end goal” is the protagonist being the coolest badass (a knight) so the individual plotlines almost solely serve to make him stronger.

The art is great and the action scenes are really well done, and that’s all that really matters for this series anyways.