WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 167: On a Today the Moon Rises

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On the hundred and eighty-sixth loop, Enkrid grasped what Coordination actually meant. His body was starting to respond differently.

Clack.

The moment he sensed a spear tip flying from behind, he turned and caught the shaft. Like a stunt. He twisted to avoid the blade aimed at his back and reached out in the same motion, hand closing around the shaft. A scene from a rehearsed play.

After that, a single Thwack was enough. Blade cracking across a skull.

See it. Picture it. The body moved on its own.

"Isolation Technique is the foundation that lets you control your own body with ease, brother."

Audin's words finally sank in. If he hadn't drilled his body through Isolation Technique countless times, none of this would have been possible. Whatever he imagined, the movement followed, and naturally, the gaps in his own technique became visible too.

'Minimum movement.'

A realization tied to managing stamina. Large movements burned more than necessary. Burn more than necessary and you couldn't hold out. No waste in movement. Now that he knew, he'd cut it down.

Training in the Correct and Precise Sword had helped too.

'Predict the movement.'

That cut down on wasted motion.

Without realizing it, Enkrid's swordsmanship was advancing another step. Not by design. Just a side benefit of desperation, of pushing himself to his limit.

Not yet two hundred loops in, stomach turning from the stench of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts, he smiled.

The rush of growth filled him. Even through failure after failure.

He never stopped. Never stopped working out how to take the next step forward. And then the thinking paid off.

A loop past the two hundredth. Every nerve in his body stood on end.

An incoming blade. He saw it. Around noon. He sidestepped left and the blade carved through empty air. A spear tip jabbed in from the side, an axe coming from behind. He ducked, shoved the shaft aside with his palm, and took the axe on his shoulder, letting it glance off.

Scrape.

Leather armor scratched, no wound. More came: spears, Gladiuses, axes, clubs. A variant Gnoll swung a club as thick as a grown man's thigh in a straight overhead arc.

He felt the sword in the way.

Hindering his movement. A liability.

Enkrid sheathed it. Then, mid-movement, he undid the belt entirely and let it drop.

His body got lighter.

Whoosh. Swish. Weapons on all sides. He couldn't track every one. Just watch them, and react one at a time. He forgot himself and poured everything into seeing and reacting.

Before he knew it, the noon sun had cleared overhead and was tilting west.

The cunning Hyena Beasts kept going for his ankles. He dodged those too. Sometimes stepping back, sometimes pressing forward. He spun sideways and drove his knee into a Hyena Beast's belly as it closed in, then threw himself into a Gnoll pressing in from behind, shoulder-checking it away and using the recoil to right himself.

He watched an incoming blade and tapped the Gnoll's wrist aside.

"Grk?"

The Gnoll's blade slid sideways and grazed its companion's skull.

"Guurk!"

An enraged Gnoll swung its hammer.

Whoosh.

Wide swing, wide arc, not hard to dodge. The problem was only that five or six of those came crashing in at the same moment.

So what do you do.

Watch them one by one and react. Shove the spear shaft aside, dodge, dodge again. No thought of killing. Purely the Sense of Evasion, instinct, intuition, and sharpened senses working together.

The sunset came without him noticing. The moon lifted its head.

Day and night, he hadn't registered the shift. He was too busy dealing with everything around him. Dodge, deflect, sidestep, move. Not a fight of killing and dying. Something more like a game of tag.

Across the repeating loops, Esther had positioned herself on a rooftop more than once, presence concealed. Even she could see it.

'What is that?'

Trying to put it into words, nothing made sense. Enkrid was dodging alone inside a wave of Gnolls. Just holding on. Death was coming either way, unavoidable. And yet. Why. Why. Why.

'Why are you smiling. You.'

The question bloomed inside Esther. It would vanish when the repeating day passed. But what Enkrid was doing was enough to astonish even her. "Acrobatics" didn't begin to cover it.

He was playing. Dancing among the Gnolls and the wave of Demon Creatures. Like he'd die at any moment, and yet he didn't. Dodging axes, dodging clubs, deflecting, blocking.

Sometimes he grabbed a Gnoll and wrapped his arms around it.

What else was there to do? Stand still and you get beaten to death. So Enkrid grabbed a Gnoll from behind and moved its arm like it was his own, using it to block another Gnoll's attack. An incoming axe, knocked aside with the club.

Crack!

Madness. No attack at all. Pure evasion.

The sunset ended, the moon rose, and the day, like a carriage reaching its destination, rolled to its end.

Moonlight spread softly in every direction, lighting the summer night. A place full of nothing but stench and corpse-smell, the heat of iron, the reek of Demon Creatures.

Enkrid had made it through. More precisely, he'd made it to the end of a day. The day had ended without him finding the leader.

'Ah.'

Only then did the trance break. Only then did he realize what he'd done.

'Ah.'

A second exclamation, silent inside him. Fair enough.

He'd discarded his weapon. Done nothing but evade. Why? Why had he done it that way?

Instinct.

That was how he got it. Pure evasion. Seeing and reacting. A talent he'd never had to begin with.

A change in reflexes and physical capacity. A tower built from Isolation Technique, filled in by Sense of Evasion, mortared together by death after death between poison and blades across all those repeating days.

Hundreds had come at him. He'd held out. Killing them all was beyond him, that took a Knight. But holding out, purely holding out,

'That's possible.'

Exhilaration crackled through him.

A full day of Gnolls throwing themselves at him, enough to leave even them speechless. Of course, none actually were.

Enkrid's body was covered in cuts and scrapes. Blood ran down his cheek. Taking no wounds at all was never going to happen. But no fatal wounds.

At the end of that day, the end of that today, watching the evening light fade and the moon rise, he knew it was over.

"See you again. Next time, somewhere other than here."

He closed his eyes.

Would this be enough to break today? Just holding out? Not a chance. He'd expected it.

When he opened his eyes, the surroundings had changed. The Black River. A ferry. The Boatman.

"That won't be enough, will it?"

The Boatman passed him by.

Eyes closed again, then open. The hut ceiling.

Today. Again.

The day had reset in the blink of an eye. Proof, as he'd learned before, that holding out was no answer.

Not that it mattered.

The exhilaration still shook through his chest, but now wasn't the time to savor it. All those loops. All the information he'd gathered. The connections he'd drawn.

Enkrid kicked Kraiss the moment he was up.

"Get up."

"Ow, what is it, this early."

What else. It was the kind of day where you had to run yourself ragged just to stay alive.

The idea, something close to a shortcut, had come to him around the hundred and twentieth loop. Now he was going to try it.

He'd achieved what he'd originally set out to do. Surviving the day. The minimum condition he'd set for himself.

'Sense of Evasion.'

Alongside Heart of Superhuman Strength, his body had truly absorbed it now. He had it. The results of that relentless training were part of him.

Did he need to repeat this, then? This damned day?

He didn't think so. The people around him, watching him swing his sword with such single-minded intensity, tended to miss it, but Enkrid could talk and think just fine. And he had no issue with shortcuts.

* * *

Enkrid had set a goal. He'd achieved it.

'Held out.'

Making it through a full day, to the very end. He'd known instinctively that the end would still send him back to the original today.

No. A gut feeling.

'Breaking through the wall won't work this way.'

Holding out was never the answer. If it were, then with the sorcerer Ressa and the lycanthrope, running away would have been enough. With the unhinged mage who'd built his den in the city tunnels, just dodging his traps would have done it.

This was a curse. It needed to be broken.

Enkrid didn't know the exact answer, but he had some idea. He'd spent time working it out. What came to him was this: if today repeated because of a process of killing and dying, what if that process never started at all?

'Worth trying.'

Results come after the process.

"Did I mention I worked as a mercenary for quite a while?"

He said it after stepping outside in full gear. Sweat was already trickling down his forehead, grazing his chin. Hot. As always. Just gearing up first thing in the morning had his temperature spiking, muscles and joints waking up without a separate warm-up. No time today for Isolation Technique or training. This was good enough.

"Hm?"

Ruagarne tilted her head. What was this man suddenly on about. Her look said as much: Head hurting this early?

Enkrid kept going.

"I fought some Cultists once. The Cursed Ground Holy Sect."

He said it without expression. Ruagarne reacted.

"...You mean the Cultists."

Same as always. A cold edge passed through the air between them. Killing intent, sharp and unmistakable.

Enkrid ignored it. "You know them, by any chance?"

That came out a little stiff.

He wondered briefly whether he needed to work on his acting, but Ruagarne didn't notice. Her attention wasn't on his phrasing. The word "Cultists" had been said. To her, they were enemies she had to cut down without question. The subject of her oath.

"There was one I let get away back then. Strange how it only comes back to me now."

He tapped his own forehead. That felt stiff too. Acting really did need work. Too little rehearsal.

Ruagarne still didn't notice.

"Do you remember the one following that man Deutsch Fullman around?"

"Thick lips. Ugly face."

Frog's eye for people was sharp in its own way.

Right. A face like a fish.

Enkrid knew several others too. Over two hundred loops and counting. The fish-faced one wasn't the only thing he'd picked up. But that Cultist was certainly the most troublesome. In every loop, Ruagarne had gone after him and never come back.

"That's the one."

"You're certain? He's a Cultist?"

"Yes. On my sword and everything I have."

Ruagarne knew how much Enkrid valued his sword. It sounded like the way he made Heart Oaths. For a human, there was weight behind his words.

Ruagarne believed him.

"If you don't believe me, go ask him yourself right now."

"Then I'll go."

That was it. More decisive than he'd expected. Ruagarne took out her whip, coiled it around her hand, and walked at a near-run, headed straight for Deutsch Fullman. If he wasn't there, she'd find him somewhere else.

"What, uh," Kraiss said, staring. "What was that? That unbearably stiff phrasing?"

Had it been stiff? Probably. It didn't matter.

"You're going to need to move too."

Enkrid started walking. Across the loops, he'd timed it again and again. How the Demon Creatures came in such numbers. What the actual problem was. He'd looked for the cause.

Not knowing the problem would be one thing. But he knew.

'Stopping it is easy.'

For Enkrid, at least. He'd done this kind of thing before, more than once. No hesitation.

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