WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 209: The Victory of Politics

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Enkrid rested a hand on his sword hilt and steadied his breathing.

Vanguard, spearpoint, tip, whatever people called it, he was at the very front.

That was how this large-scale battlefield had formed.

The terrain was flat enough to call it an open plain battle.

He had expected cavalry to crash in.

No, anyone could have seen that coming.

Which was exactly why coming out like this was madness.

From the enemy's perspective, they were probably wondering whether there was even one sane man on this side.

Even so, he had not expected cavalry to charge from the very start.

Thud-thud-thud!

The ground shook even though the riders were still far away.

The sound that shook the earth was one thing, and the actual distance was another, so it was not close enough for immediate swordplay yet. Still, they were fast. The gap was closing in huge bites.

The wild force bursting from the horses, the dust thrown up by hooves, the cavalry in matching gear.

Any of it could make a man afraid.

"Oh? He's loving this a little too much, huh?"

Rem, sharp-eyed as always, said it while watching the approaching cavalry commander. The man wore a helmet that covered his face, so could he really read his expression?

"You can see that?"

"I can feel it."

Rem snorted.

Were a barbarian's instincts really as terrifying as Jaxon's?

Or did some reflex just fire whenever he saw someone looking down on him?

Either way, Enkrid felt something similar.

He gauged the number of riders charging in. More than fifty.

Standing here were Enkrid, Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, and Audin.

He had sent Finn, Dunbakel, and Esther to the rear.

"I can fight too."

Dunbakel had protested right before they came out, but that was not something a beastkin who had cracked her head after following Audin and getting reckless could say.

Bandages ran from her left ear across her forehead.

"Haha, sister. You almost died. If you want to go to heaven, just say so. I can send you right now."

Dunbakel shut her mouth at Audin's polite murder threat. She had followed Audin, acted up, and gotten hurt. Hurt or not, he had never planned to bring her.

"She's way too weak."

Rem muttered beside them, then added they would settle it later.

His usual attitude was light, but that did not make his words light.

When Rem said, "We'll settle it later," it was terrifying for the person hearing it.

Dunbakel did not notice at all.

Enkrid dropped the brief thought. The cavalry was right in front of them now. Thud-thud-thud-thud, the earth shook as they charged and raised their weapons.

Under the sunlight, broad glaive blades flashed, angled diagonally toward the ground. They were not built mainly for thrusting, but for wide sweeping strikes.

The day was too clear.

Enkrid thought the bright sunlight suited his blade perfectly.

Then he only had to use it.

Chirring.

He drew his sword, gripped it with both hands, and gave it a slight twist.

"To hell with your walls!"

One rider at the front of the cavalry unit shouted as he closed in.

Enkrid used a technique from the Vallen Style Mercenary Sword.

Vallen Style Mercenary Sword offensive technique.

Flashbang.

His terrifyingly sharp blade reflected like a mirror.

He bounced sunlight straight into the enemy's line of sight and gifted him pure glare.

"Ugh!"

The rider flinched and raised one hand when the sunlight hit his eyes. The horse did not flinch, so the charge speed stayed the same.

Still, the momentum dulled a little.

Sun or no sun, the incoming glaive blade cut the air and tried to cut Enkrid's neck with it.

A broad spear blade slicing on a slant.

Reflected sunlight, his razor-sharp sword, opponent, enemy, sun, ground, horse, dust, battlefield, front line.

For an instant, Enkrid took in everything around him, then forgot all of it and sank in again.

He forgot himself, forgot the world, and left only enemy and sword.

As the flying glaive blade came in, Heart of Superhuman Strength pounded.

If the nerve he gained from Heart of the Beast kept him from even blinking at an incoming spear blade, his sharpened senses let him read the timing.

Enkrid swung his sword straight down and smashed into the glaive blade.

Claaang!

That clear ringing sound was where everything began.

Strength packed into both arms met a rare masterpiece blade and locked into harmony.

Crack!

Against a line of leveled spear blades, Enkrid shattered the first one.

He had no time to watch the broken blade fly off. In that world where only enemy, sword, and self existed, all he had to do was swing.

He knocked away incoming blades, battered them aside, slipped past them, and split anything that opened up.

Thud!

His blade cut through a gap in the horse armor and sheared off the horse's front right leg.

Hot blood poured out, and a pain-filled scream ripped through the air.

Heeiiing!

That scream faded into the distance, and spear blades kept coming without pause. That was the nature of a cavalry charge. Once it started, it could not stop.

Inside Enkrid's inner image, in that world with only sword, enemy, and self, Ragna's words slipped through a tiny instant.

"When you move into Heavy Sword Style applications, you train two kinds of cuts."

Normally, someone would explain a technique's usefulness before training it, but no one expected that from Ragna.

"Lion Cut and Steel Cut."

The explanation was rough, but Enkrid understood.

Lion Cut did not mean literally cutting a lion. It meant splitting a dynamic target in one strike, as if cutting down a lion charging at you.

Steel Cut meant cutting refined hardness even when it stood still.

Dynamic force and solid toughness, first one at a time.

Later, both at once.

"If you want to gain Will, you will need both."

Ragna's final words stayed deep in Enkrid's mind, and Enkrid understood that the technique Ragna had shown before, Severance, began with those two Heavy Sword Style cuts.

Enkrid cut through charging riders and thought of Lion Cut.

In his inner image, traces of swordsmanship remained. His body reacting through Sense of Evasion, his hands, feet, and blade all cut through charging cavalry.

Whoom, thud, craaack!

Three kinds of chaotic noise hit his ears at once.

A horse and rider, split from head through foreleg, collapsed in a heap on the ground behind him.

"Aaagh!"

A rider who fell from his horse screamed. An unlucky rider. That final scream was his death cry.

He struck his head wrong as he fell, his limbs trembled, and he died there.

That was how one charge ended.

Of course, no one on Enkrid's side died.

* * *

Cavalry used the horse itself as a weapon. Meeting a horse charge head-on?

A Giant or a Frog might pull off a stunt like that.

But was that really smart?

Say you block one horse, then what about the group pressing in right behind it?

If getting crushed under horse and armor was your hobby, maybe that was a fine method.

Right. Normally, meeting a cavalry charge head-on was insanity.

That was true no matter how confident you were, so what were those people?

Marcus watched those who responded to the enemy cavalry charge.

From the moment Enkrid struck down a blade to the largest soldier there.

Maybe because of his size, that one stood out first.

'Was his name Audin?'

A devout soldier who began each day with prayer.

At the same time, a soldier who was very good at beating people, Magic Beasts, and Demon Creatures to death.

He met the cavalry charge head-on. He knocked away incoming blades with a short forearm-length club, caught a charging horse's head with his palm, then twisted it aside.

Could a blade really deflect that far from a hit like that?

Could anyone really change the direction of a charging horse with arm strength alone?

Heeiiing!

That was not the end. The horse collapsed sideways from that one blow. He took the full force of the charge and redirected it aside. Marcus was beyond impressed. He was dumbfounded.

'Impossible.'

It was an astonishing stunt. In truth, Marcus could not see clearly, but Audin had not even struck the blade directly.

He had struck the shaft at the joint.

The opposing rider had only anchored the shaft into a rear saddle slot and gripped it around the middle. That was their core tactic. Their method was to cut in sync with charge speed.

Audin faced that without giving a single step.

After dropping one rider, the devout bear ducked under the next incoming blade, then smashed the head of the third horse he met with his club.

Boom!

This time the horse died without a scream. Its skull burst through the horse armor and blood sprayed out. Audin gave a gentle smile through it, though Marcus still could not see that much from where he stood.

Audin was not the only one standing out. If Audin had been the opening, next came the axe-wielding madman.

"Huaa!"

With a shout, Rem struck a glaive blade with his axe edge. Strangely, the axe edge and blade stuck together and did not separate. Then, as if tangled in vines, he was dragged backward along the blade with the rider, and he immediately pulled off a ridiculous trick.

Still in that dragged posture, he grabbed the middle of the shaft, stepped on the horse's head, and climbed over the rider.

Marcus watched and still had no idea how that worked.

In truth, that only worked with speed and reaction faster than cavalry, plus absurd brute strength.

Crunch!

From up there, he gifted the rider an axe blade to the head.

Then he moved sideways like a leap toward the next horse, and one rider tried to draw the Estoc at his waist.

The Estoc was a thrust-only sword.

Before he could fully draw it, his shoulder line was cut.

It looked like magic made by an axe edge flashing like lightning.

Rem killed two riders that way, then rolled across the ground.

Somehow he did not get trampled by hooves, and somehow he dodged cleanly to the side.

Marcus could not understand it at all.

It looked no different from an acrobatic troupe one might occasionally see in a central city.

Enkrid stood out just as much. He shattered the first incoming blade with pure force, then cut the next, then cut again. The way he dodged and cut while splitting horse and rider together looked brutally direct, but the slashes themselves felt so clean that just watching them cleared the chest.

Beside him, Ragna showed similar movement.

The difference from Enkrid was that, instead of bold sweeping cuts, he seemed only to lightly stab and place his sword, yet he still nullified the cavalry charge.

That too was astonishing skill.

The heavy, weighted sword strikes Enkrid used to break cavalry charges were thrilling and satisfying to watch.

In the middle of all that, one of them was not even visible, but what did that matter.

No one paid him any mind.

What mattered was this.

The cavalry had charged, yet more than a dozen mounts vanished from the charging side, while those who had been the target of the charge were completely fine.

Horse blood and rider blood stretched in long lines across the ground.

Blood left by horses that kept running while carrying dead riders.

Those whose heads had burst or whose bodies had been split in half by slashes left fountains of blood behind.

Dust kicked up by hooves mixed with blood and turned red.

After seeing all of it, Marcus spoke.

"Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir."

"Who was it that gathered those men in one place?"

The lieutenant recited what they had already learned in their investigation.

"The previous battalion commander."

"That idiot did manage one useful thing."

The previous battalion commander had probably not intended a situation like this.

He had likely dumped all the troublemakers, starting with those who assaulted superiors, into one unit and planned to use them as meat shields or expendables for easy gains.

That bastard had always enjoyed stealing subordinates' credit, so if they fought and died, he probably thought their deaths would become his achievements.

Too wasteful to throw out, too troublesome to keep close.

In truth, he had meant to use them as disposable blades.

Gathering that kind of pure chaos into one unit on purpose?

No need to think twice, that was clearly meant as a throwaway card.

'Then a guy named Enkrid stepped into that mess and turned it into a picture.'

Marcus the politician grasped, from his seat, how the Troublemaker Squad had begun.

Yes, the previous battalion commander was an idiot, and no, he had not planned this.

"But good work is good work. I almost want to pin a medal on him."

Binding those men together and placing Enkrid as squad leader had been a true masterstroke.

Look at them. Was it not astonishing?

If Marcus was astonished, the enemy commander who had ordered the charge was appalled.

Under Bantara Viscount's Forces, he commanded cavalry specialized in cutting down infantry.

He had no choice but to stop. He had to wheel and reform. Twelve out of fifty were dead.

That he himself had survived? Pure luck.

If he had been inside their range, he would have died too.

The commander had seen a blade pass him in a blur.

He had seen the man in front batting blades aside too.

His name was Enkrid. The same name he had first heard on wall postings, owner of absurd rumors.

'That was bluffing.'

It had all been inflated nonsense.

A trick to make this army retreat through fake reputation.

So this charge should have carved them all into chunks of meat.

Was this a dream?

"What the hell is this?"

The commander said it. For a moment, he nearly lost his fighting spirit.

But he could not. This battlefield had only just begun.

While wheeling and reforming, he saw four survivors.

He saw blue eyes under the rough helmet of that black-haired bastard.

The man looked deep in thought. Then he muttered something to one side. The words did not carry.

The commander had just hardened his resolve again when it happened.

Thunk!

"Ghk!"

A blade suddenly drove straight into his neck. It felt like someone had stabbed his throat with a torch. Burning pain spread from his neck through his whole body. He froze instantly.

"Captain!"

He heard his subordinate shout from behind. He tried to open his mouth, but no proper words came out.

That was what happened when the vocal cords were cut and a hole opened in the throat.

"Grrrk!"

Blood foam bubbled from the commander's mouth, and his head dropped hard to one side.

Cause of death: stab wound to the nape.

The one who gifted him that was a reddish-brown-haired man named Jaxon.

Sound vanished. Even the murmuring stopped. In that instant of shock, while everyone stared, Jaxon began moving, fumbling with his hands.

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