WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 222: The War-Ending Soldier Who Ended the War
= = =
“No idea how they spread the rumor, but...”
Enkrid saw something deeply unpleasant in his opponent’s eyes.
The man did not look like someone who had come to cross weapons just to test his skill.
What filled his eyes was greed, raw avarice.
“War-Ending Soldier, huh? Isn’t that a little arrogant?”
Mercenary Ibarn asked as he raised his Morningstar.
His posture and attitude were openly threatening.
A full combat stance.
As if his whole body were saying, I can crack your skull with this.
Even so, Enkrid stood there and replied flatly.
“True.”
“Looks like you’re pretty confident in your skills?”
He looked like he could lunge without another word, yet he still probed first. Enkrid disliked that too.
“Enough.”
That vague answer made Ibarn frown.
“Fucking cocky. You piece of shit.”
It was deliberate abuse, a verbal trick meant to rattle the other side.
That had once been Enkrid’s specialty too.
Back when he was struggling to survive, there were days he used the sword in his mouth more than the one at his waist.
“Raaah!”
After being ignored again and again, Ibarn finally moved. He strode in and swung his blunt weapon without hesitation.
This was Ibarn the Choker? A City-class powerhouse?
He was far too slow.
Compared to Rem, he looked downright sluggish.
Enkrid was not relaxed enough to yawn, but he had room to spare.
Still, that did not mean he meant to fight carelessly.
If he fought, he fought at his best.
That was not lip service. Enkrid truly lived that way. In everything, he put in everything he could.
That was how a man without talent moved forward.
If he had faltered even once on the way to his dream, the current Enkrid would not exist.
Maybe he’s different from how he looks.
He stayed cautious. He doubted.
This could all be a personal tactic.
For mercenaries, baiting carelessness was almost a required skill.
Whooom.
Enkrid watched the incoming Morningstar to the very end, then stepped his left foot to the side. He turned half a circle and drew his sword.
Chring!
He swung the instant it left the sheath.
Ibarn tried to yank his weapon back, but it had already flown out on inertia. Trying to recover it tangled his movement.
“Ughk!”
The scar-faced mercenary clenched his teeth, spat out something like a battle cry, dropped his weapon, and threw himself to the side.
The blade cut empty air. On purpose.
Enkrid had figured he might pretend to evade and rush in, so he kept his slash simple and stayed ready to defend.
Why isn’t he coming?
He had not even meant to show an opening, but this was more than enough to charge into.
“Let’s do this barehanded.”
Ibarn spoke after losing his weapon.
What was this?
Enkrid felt it right away.
A fraud?
Later he learned that Ibarn the Choker got his nickname from his grip strength, but against Enkrid’s forearm, brutally trained through the Isolation Technique, it only left finger marks.
Then Enkrid broke his wrist with the exact same method.
“Kyaaaagh!”
Only a shrill scream rang out.
He was a fraud.
A false reputation built on lies.
“Mm.”
Kraiss swallowed a groan as he watched.
Some company members had come to watch after hearing about the first visitor.
Rem shook his head.
“Looks like only morons are gonna show up.”
Jaxon said nothing. Ragna said nothing. Audin did not add a word either.
The plan had been to gather people who wanted to roam the world and meet the strong.
But the first one to arrive was trash.
“You still want to continue?”
Enkrid asked Ibarn, whose wrist was broken.
“N-no! I don’t!”
Ibarn was terrified.
At this level, Bell could have handled him, Enkrid thought as he turned away.
“Don’t be too disappointed. Didn’t you say the adventure starts when you leave the village?”
Kraiss said.
He meant beginnings and endings did not happen at the same time.
There was a similar proverb in the east. You could not fill your stomach with the first bite.
Enkrid gave a quiet nod and thought.
Rem was intense and wild.
Jaxon threatened lives with detached calm.
Ragna pressed with swordsmanship and excelled at tactical exchanges.
Audin had extraordinary natural strength and remarkable control over his body.
Even with people like that around him, Enkrid still craved new experiences.
Something was still missing.
He wanted something different. He wanted to fill that gap.
The craving felt almost instinctive.
And the first opponent had been, frankly...
Trash.
An idiot had shown up. Was he disappointed?
No.
Enkrid was not the kind of man who got disappointed over something like this.
When it came to waiting and enduring, he might have ranked among the very best on the continent.
“It’s fine.”
Among those who came after, four out of five were the same kind of trash. Fools coveting Enkrid’s fame.
“If I beat you, do I become company commander right away?”
“Did you really train that body? Looks decent, but lacking.”
“Not drawing your sword? So if you die, you won’t blame me?”
Enkrid seasoned the table Kraiss had set exactly the way he liked.
Anyone who rushed him with sloppy skill got one arm or one leg broken.
A few were mercenaries with some name value.
One claimed he was a wandering swordsman training himself.
Another boasted loudly that he came from a Squire background.
Still, most were mercenaries.
Quite a few wanted the title War-Ending Soldier.
Seven more visitors came after that, and it was hard to find anything to learn from them.
Many were literally worse than ordinary soldiers.
Among them, one was at least decent.
“Beastkin, Barakal.”
His human speech was clumsy, but his natural athletic ability was exceptional.
For Enkrid, he was a rare opponent worth facing.
The Beastkin used Claw, blades mounted over the backs of his hands, and he was extremely good at irregular attacks.
He would jerk a knee up to draw your eyes, then swing a Claw down in a huge arc from overhead.
Or he would drop so low he nearly touched the ground and lunge in.
Moves only possible because of innate physical gifts.
Enkrid watched, experienced, and learned.
It was not a bad stretch of time.
Even without repeating this day, he spent those days absorbing, hammering, and tempering what he had built so far.
No threats and no walls changed nothing for him, so Enkrid lived each day as if he were repeating today.
* * *
Rem drove Dunbakel hard.
No, that was too mild.
“If you don’t do it right, you die. Beastkin.”
At first he treated it like a joke, but now his killing intent had started to mix in.
Why would it not?
Could she stand beside the captain and feel nothing?
That crazy Beastkin still could not use her own strength properly.
Then what did you do with someone like that?
You drove them to the edge of a cliff and shoved. When death was on the line, people either found strength or broke.
Rem did exactly that.
And he felt something too.
She has talent.
Her innate physical ability was different. There were sharp flashes in the way she used her body.
So she was different from Enkrid.
No, very different.
Her head was hopeless, but her body was special, which made her fun to teach.
Even so, she would never become like the captain.
“I’m gonna die.”
After he ran her through it a few times, she collapsed and passed out.
Endurance? Willpower? Even if she had those, the gap between her and Enkrid would still be enormous.
After half-killing Dunbakel, Rem thought of Enkrid.
By now, he felt Enkrid had improved considerably.
To the point where going easy like before felt awkward.
To the point where one small lapse meant he had to get serious.
As he measured that growth, one word came to mind.
“Knight.”
The road Enkrid wanted to walk was open to Rem as well.
Of course, not that knight nonsense people on this continent talked about.
Rem’s tribe had its own way.
Lately, he had been thinking too much for someone like him. That was why he drove Dunbakel even harder.
He cornered his opponent, and through that, cornered himself.
For Rem, that helped.
“Are you insane? Lying down? Sleeping? Are you sleeping right now? You stop training to sleep?”
At that harassment, Dunbakel forced herself up.
If someone told her this devil had crawled out of the Demon Realm, she would have believed it completely.
* * *
The War-Ending Soldier who ended the war.
“So this bastard is that bastard.”
Inside a small pub, one of the core executives of the Cursed Ground Holy Sect, which had been running all kinds of schemes in the north of the Pen-Hanil Continent, muttered to himself.
He had claimed an old wooden table.
It was early, so there were only a few people inside.
A sketch lay on the table, and Enkrid’s face was drawn on it.
The one who had ruined their plans again and again.
The one who had crushed the Gnoll colony at the Pioneer Village and eventually killed their followers too.
They had sent a Manticore and its handler as assassins, and he killed them as well.
An obstacle.
The sect executive made his decision.
That obstacle was spreading strange rumors and telling people to come find him.
“Go kill him.”
The Cultist gave the order.
They had people who could crush a Gnoll colony too. They had force to spare.
And they had force beyond that.
At the order, the woman sitting across from him stood up.
Her shoulders were twice as broad as most men’s, and her thighs were thick as logs.
Her eyes were so narrow her pupils were hard to see, and her lips were even thinner.
She was a swordswoman raised by the cult, with no talent for spells, who had reached her current position through physical power alone.
“Yes.”
The female warrior stood.
She was so tall she looked like a Giant.
In fact, Giant blood flowed in her veins.
The Cursed Ground Holy Sect had injected that blood into her through experiments.
Setting aside Will, her physical ability and combat power were fully...
squire-class.
Then killing Enkrid should pose no problem. There was no need to send an assassin.
If he wanted to spread rumors and gather people to kill him, fine.
They would let him die exactly the way he wanted, in a straight fight.
* * *
The Black Blade Bandits knew better than anyone how important reputation was.
“I don’t think we can leave it at us getting beaten and pulling back. Even if we retreat, we can’t just slip away cleanly.”
The trick Marcus had pulled had already been reported to the Black Blades Main Branch.
And one of the Black Blade bandits from the Black Blades Main Branch started plotting something similar to the cult.
If they killed the man Marcus had put forward?
Several nobles with ties reaching the center were involved. They were bound to those nobles by contract. This incident would narrow Marcus’s position.
It was contract fulfillment.
If needed, they were willing to kill Marcus too.
Before that, they would cut down whoever moved first.
Just as they settled on that, someone hidden in Border Guard started doing strange things.
The rumor of the War-Ending Soldier reached them too.
“So he’s saying, if you want to fight, come?”
The Black Blade Bandits had several fighters skilled in battle.
The Black Blades Main Branch decided to send one of them.
A plain-looking man with brown hair.
His nickname was Swallow Blade.
He got that name because the sword tricks he performed with a single blade were so uncanny.
“Wanna go handle a job?”
He was the kind who smiled while driving a knife into someone’s throat.
A deranged deviant who felt ecstasy in murder.
“Sure.”
A Black Blade executive sent Swallow Blade.
Swallow Blade came from a Squire background. Rumor painted him as a tragic genius expelled for killing too much.
If he had not joined the Black Blade Bandits, he would have died long ago.
Keeping that bastard around has cost us plenty of gold.
They had persuaded nobles who wanted him dead, hidden him, and spent plenty of Krona giving him what he wanted.
Why sharpen a blade if not to use it?
Now was the time to use it.
The cult and the Black Blades were not the only ones sending people.
Several people under Count Molsen moved as well.
“Interesting game he’s playing. Is there no warrior who will go prove the Count’s sword is greater than his?”
At the count’s words, two sons and one warrior stepped forward.
One of them was the man Enkrid had beaten before.
“I will go.”
The count did not bother stopping his son.
Whether the impression was good or bad, they needed to make their presence known.
And that was not all.
News of Enkrid reached places with no connection to Count Molsen, the Black Blades, or the cult.
“That friend of ours got that much stronger?”
It was the Rapier swordsman from the old Rockfreed Trading Company escort, when he could not reveal his name.
Out of habit, he brushed the spot where his mustache used to be.
Now it was shaved clean, so his hand found nothing and felt strangely empty.
“So they say.”
He had just finished several tasks.
Which meant he now had free time.
Should I stop by?
He had thought Enkrid would not improve much more, so if he had suddenly grown this much...
Maybe he really had sold his soul to a devil.
Either way, he could not just leave that alone.
There was plain curiosity too.
How exactly had he changed?
And it was on the way anyway.
“We’d have to make a big detour.”
A subordinate said.
The Rapier swordsman stared at the map for a while, then asked,
“Looks on the way to me?”
It absolutely was not.
The subordinate paused, thought for a moment, then answered.
“Yes, it does.”
Everyone else nodded along.
Given his force and rank, they had probably realized they could not contradict him.
A little head-clearing is good. Too stiff, all of them.
Thinking that, the man set off.
He was very curious how much Enkrid had changed.
* * *
After Enkrid knocked Ibarn flat, quite a lot of mercenaries came.
At first, he accepted every single one.
“This feels pointless. We should change it so he only fights people after they beat Bell, at minimum.”
Kraiss, watching from the side, summed it up cleanly.
So they did exactly that.
“Next!”
During training, not only Bell but several other soldiers stepped in.
Sometimes a soldier lost, and then someone at squad leader level stepped up.
If a squad leader looked close to losing, someone at company commander level stepped up too.
“That’s nowhere near enough!”
The 2nd Company Commander shouted, scar visible across his cheek.
“Uooh!”
“That’s it!”
“Paltor! Paltor!”
Unexpected cheers had now become daily routine.
Even Allen the innkeeper, who had been bewildered at first, now treated it as ordinary life.
“One more beer!”
He was busy selling drinks to the spectators.
The days looked like they would pass without anything special.
Then a warrior appeared who even took down Paltor, the 2nd Company Commander.
“I’ve never heard the name, but the skill is unusual. And she’s a woman.”
And so the female warrior stood before Enkrid.
The training yard behind the inn was now crowded, even with merchants from around the market coming to watch.
“Giant?”
Enkrid asked when he saw her.
He had never seen anyone bigger than Audin, and the fact that she was a woman made it even more surprising.
“Mixed.”
The opponent answered.
The voice was husky, but clearly female.
Enkrid raised his sword.
Tip angled up, weight centered at mid-sole.
His instincts told him one thing.
This opponent was definitely not easy.
The woman raised her weapon too.
A sword and shield.
The shield was a solid slab of iron.
You could tell just from what she carried.
She possessed monstrous brute strength.
= = =
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