WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 170: The Crawl of Joy

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"Can't you open the door? Just a crack, enough for one person to slip through."

Enkrid said it, and the flustered soldier asked back.

"Right now?"

Their eyes met. Enkrid nodded.

"Yeah, now."

The soldier blinked.

Where do you even start? With the fact that opening the door would let the Gnoll pack outside pour straight in? Or that opening it at all was essentially impossible? Should he ask whether this man had perhaps not noticed the people actively bracing against it to keep it from swinging open?

While the soldier was still picking his words, Enkrid offered a compromise.

"Didn't you put in some kind of side door next to the main gate?"

Completely casual. Outside, Gnolls and Hyena Beasts were charging at the walls even as arrows bristled from their hides like porcupine quills, and yet his tone suggested he'd stepped out for a picnic.

Panicking changes nothing, Enkrid figured. It never did. He'd lived through today over two hundred times, and he knew too well that if left alone, those things would keep at it. They always did.

But then again.

'I've been surrounded by those things and hacked away at them. Kill a few and the rest just charge in like berserkers.'

Not something he could say out loud.

At least they'd managed to stop the initial breach. A decent start. Expecting a decent start to carry all the way through would be foolish, but it was still better than starting badly. No question about that.

Either way, they couldn't open the main gate every time someone needed to pass through. There had to be a smaller emergency door somewhere. Any settlement built to this scale usually had one. Pioneer Village it might be, but the intention to eventually raise a proper fortress was obvious from the quarry, from the laborers and craftsmen brought in first, all the construction-minded people assembled here from the beginning. Easy enough to read.

That observation had been Kraiss's, of course. Enkrid had just listened and nodded.

When you're pouring everything into training, there's no attention left for details like that. But Kraiss talked, and there had been over two hundred repetitions of today on top of it. At some point, even someone with the brains of a ghoul should've picked up on it.

Either way, Enkrid had to cut the knot of repetition. And for that, he needed to get outside.

"There is a side door, actually."

Still flustered.

"Then crack it open. That's an order."

Plainly absurd. The soldier knew he shouldn't comply, but something about Enkrid's total calm got his feet moving anyway.

"It's over that way."

He still hesitated. Enkrid walked to the side door. There it was, just left of the main gate. Wide open, it looked big enough for two people to pass through at once.

Guurk!

A Gnoll's cry, right on the other side of the wall. That seemed to shake something loose in the Self-Defense Force soldier's head. He finally spoke.

"If we open it now, they'll flood in and we'll all die trying to stop them."

We can open it, but we'll all die if we do. So no.

A polite refusal.

Enkrid didn't pause. "Esther?"

They weren't quite the type to communicate through glances alone, but right now, something passed between them.

Esther nodded. The small panther had grown a little since then, though she was still on the smaller side. Small didn't mean harmless.

"That thing's a monster, a real one."

As Rem had said, Esther was no ordinary beast. She proved it right then.

A Hyena Beast had been scrabbling at the palisade with its stubby legs, trying to haul itself up. Esther just scaled the wall, step by quick step, and went straight over the top. She drove her claws into the wood and walked the surface like flat ground. Even accounting for how sharp those claws were, the speed of it was something else entirely. Anyone who didn't know better would've thought she was simply walking up the side of a wall. Even Enkrid, who knew exactly what she was, saw it the same way.

"She's climbing the wall?"

A stunned soldier muttered, his eyes about twice as wide as before. Those who'd seen her walk across rooftops and up trees wouldn't have blinked, but an outsider seeing it for the first time couldn't be blamed for gaping.

The wall stood more than three times a grown man's height. Esther went over it like it wasn't there. Going over wasn't even the end.

"Wh, wha, she--"

The soldier watching couldn't finish his sentence. Just stood there with his mouth open.

Hard to blame him. Esther had cleared the wall and dropped straight into the chaos below, right into the thick of the Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts. Her job was to throw that symphony into discord, pour oil over whatever arrangement they had going.

Enkrid had expected exactly that. Esther delivered.

Rrrr.

From beyond the side door came a low, heavy growl, nothing like the cries of Gnolls or Hyena Beasts. It rumbled through the air and struck the chest like a fist, the kind of sound that made your knees go soft just hearing it.

"Don't shoot the panther!"

Deutsch Fullman's shout followed right after.

Guurk! from the Gnolls, and threading through it, the panicked yelp of a Hyena Beast.

Khurk!

Gnoll death rattles, a few of them.

Guuk! Guuuuuk!

The Gnoll cries pulled back. Just slightly. The cluster pressing at the side door had scattered. Enkrid's focused hearing caught it.

"Now."

The soldier said "Huh?" at the murmur and didn't move.

This one needs to start training from scratch. Reactions this slow, what good is he.

"The door."

Enkrid grabbed the soldier's wrist and pulled, speaking as he moved. His grip tightened naturally, and his fighting spirit rose with it. The controlled killing intent he'd learned to shape through the Gate of the Sixth Sense, something close to bloodlust but held on a short leash.

"Hic--"

The soldier started hiccupping, but that hardly mattered. His hand reached for the latch, reluctant.

"If this goes wrong..."

"I'll take responsibility. I'm this village's military commander."

Then why is the military commander going about suicide this way?

The thought crossed the soldier's mind. His hand moved anyway.

Click.

The latch came free.

"Don't lock it after me. Brace it and hold. I'll need you to open it again later."

"What?"

What in the world is this man saying.

The side door cracked open. Whatever havoc Esther had wreaked among the Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts, every one of them had their backs turned. Gnoll skulls, all facing away. Right in Enkrid's line of sight.

At least none of them were wearing helmets. Small mercy. Most were threatening enough just for having weapons in their hands. Helmets wouldn't have made much difference to him anyway.

Stepping through the side door, Enkrid let his arms hang loose. The moment he was fully outside, he drained the tension from his body and threw his throwing knives in every direction, keeping only the Whistle Dagger back.

Drawing a bow and throwing a blade were entirely different things. He gauged the weight on his fingertips, whipped his arm, and four throwing knives punched into the skulls of turned-away Gnolls in rapid succession.

No Gnoll survives a blade the length of a hand buried in its skull. That was obvious.

Four Gnolls down, and as a Magic Beast turned to look, Enkrid was already in front of it.

Whoosh.

A cut from above to below, starting from middle guard. Short, clean, nothing wasted. It split a Magic Beast open from back to flank.

Crunch.

His sword took spine, viscera, and bone in one pass. Two pieces. At the same moment he stepped left and drove his knee into another Magic Beast's skull. The hip torque caved it straight in, and with the skull compressed inward, both eyes shot forward and dangled by their nerves.

Two Magic Beasts dead. Then Enkrid let himself go.

What he'd gained from training the Sense of Evasion was Coordination. The instant he saw, the instant he felt, his body moved. He slipped into the middle of them and danced. A brief sword dance, and three Gnolls and two Magic Beasts lay scattered across the ground. Skull, chest, skull again. One Gnoll ended up with a silver-coin-sized hole punched clean through its body, the result of short top-down slashes combined with thrusts.

Thud.

The door behind him finally swung shut.

'Were they just watching?'

Must have stood there with their mouths open, given how slowly they'd gotten it closed.

Clatter-clatter!

The sound of locking followed right after.

'I said don't lock it.'

Well. They were hardly going to leave it open. Getting back in was a problem for later. Right now, there was work to do.

Gnolls and Hyena Beasts fell in droves under Enkrid's blade and his brutal hands, and seeing it, the rest threw themselves at him and Esther both. Even at two against the world, fighting side by side was obviously the better call.

Esther moved toward him. She didn't just run. The panther was devastating. Breathtaking.

Tap. She kicked off the ground and drew her raised claws in a long sweeping slash. Whatever those claws caught, Gnoll or Magic Beast, it split from one to two, two to three. Skull or chest, it made no difference. Overwhelming strength and cutting force moving as one.

Esther charging, Gnolls and Hyena Beasts pressing at them both with weapons and fangs and claws.

"Esther, cover my back for a bit."

What?

Esther's eyes asked. Enkrid didn't answer.

'This bastard.'

Anger flared for an instant. He drew the enemy's attention, then cut his presence to nothing. That wasn't all. He rolled through the blood of the Gnolls and Hyena Beasts he'd killed, pressed his belly to the ground, and went flat.

So who was left for the enemy to focus on?

It had all happened in a blink. Esther and Enkrid charging in, a flash. Double digits of Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures cut down, just as fast. Esther drawing eyes as she advanced, another instant. Enkrid gone after that, in one more.

The eyes of the Gnolls that had taken hits bled red. Like madness.

"Guuuuuk!"

Red-eyed with fury, they threw themselves at Esther to kill her. She gave way neatly, keeping just out of reach. She wanted to ask Enkrid what in the world he thought he was doing, but she could already see him crawling along the ground on his belly. Several Gnolls stepped right over him and he swallowed his breath and kept going.

Whatever he was after, he was clearly after something.

'Idiot.'

That idiot had asked her to cover him. Esther huffed through her nose and threw her mana-reinforced body into motion. The mana woven into her claws and her superhuman strength combined into a cutting force that defied explanation. She split the skulls of two charging Hyena Beasts into three pieces, then played keep-away, drawing them along without being caught.

This was what that lunatic had meant by covering his back. Why else would he have dumped this miserable pack of Demon Creatures on her and disappeared.

She was right. It matched what was in Enkrid's mind exactly.

Trampled by Gnolls, his smell masked beneath enemy blood and flesh and entrails, crawling with killing intent suppressed the way he'd seen from Jaxon, Enkrid's target was clear.

The Gnoll that looked like the leader.

* * *

Enkrid knew his talent had changed.

'Different.'

Different enough that missing it would've taken a special kind of dullness, and Enkrid wasn't dull. He felt it. He knew it.

Where before it had taken countless repetitions just to scrape one thing into his body, this time was unmistakably different.

Today had been for the Sense of Evasion. All of it.

Those days of repetition had included todays that felt like a total waste. He'd fought through those too. Crawled through them. Never stopped. Every single one went into one step forward.

The change touched his swordsmanship and other things besides.

"If you know how to pour out killing intent, you know how to hide it."

That was when he'd asked about the Pierce Without Killing Strike, the strange technique Jaxon used.

"You don't need to learn it, but understanding the principle wouldn't hurt."

His mouth said that. His eyes said something else. Those eyes looked like they were scolding him for still not having a proper grip on the Sense of Evasion. How long are you going to keep dragging your feet.

Enkrid didn't let it bother him. What were you supposed to do about something that wasn't there yet? Keep going until it was. He'd asked because he wanted to know, and he'd gotten an answer.

A thrust made purely through motion, with killing intent wiped out completely. So stripped of killing intent and momentum that even someone watching it straight-on could doubt it was aimed at them.

That was where the explanation ended.

In the two hundred or so todays spent on the Sense of Evasion, controlling his own killing intent had been part of the work. Something that had seeped into his body through the process of dodging, and dodging again. Reacting by sensation alone, not killing intent. To pull a change in reaction speed out of himself, he'd thrown away momentum entirely and chased after the body's raw capacity to respond.

That was when he understood.

The way to hide and kill his own presence. Something an assassin would recognize.

Not perfect, of course. Just concealing his presence a little, breathing slow and long, passing off an impression of the real thing.

'This alone isn't enough.'

He rolled through ground soaked in Gnoll and Hyena blood and wrapped his arms around a Gnoll corpse as he crawled. Anyone watching Enkrid right then would've been struck speechless. He had a Magic Beast draped across his back and was crawling at a terrifying speed anyway.

'Crawling. My greatest specialty.'

When it came to moving on your belly, Enkrid was beyond first-rate.

He crawled. And crawled.

Esther's sharp cry came from somewhere behind him.

'Sorry. I'll give you two pieces of jerky when we're through.'

He kept going, steady and unhurried.

By the time he reached the mound, only a handful of Gnolls and Magic Beasts remained nearby. He kept crawling up the slope. Rolling through the ground had left a foul, sharp blood-stench clinging to his body. Demon Creature blood always smelled that way, nearly unbearable.

To Enkrid, it was familiar. Back when he'd lived sword-in-hand as a mercenary, this was just another day. He'd learned then too that Demon Creature blood hid more than you'd expect.

He reached the top of the mound, and something settled inside him.

His target was right there.

How could he not be pleased?

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