WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 257: On Dealing with Morons (2)

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Kraiss did as Enkrid told him.

"A way to deal with the Black Blade."

Hadn't Enkrid told him to find exactly that?

Kraiss thought and thought, turning it over in his head.

It was already a given that the Black Blade would pull something.

Then what would they do?

No, before that, how had he even learned they had that intention?

Easy. The other side told him.

So they were kind.

"Or just morons."

He leaned toward the moron explanation, but that was not the important part.

"If you think about it, right?"

"Think about what?"

"These bastards. They kindly said they would not leave the captain alone, then the one who said it got his throat cut, right? And they still sent another person."

As he said that, Kraiss walked into a patch of sunlight.

He pulled his coat tighter against the cold morning air and kept talking.

Meanwhile, Enkrid was holding his sword and swishing it around.

To Kraiss, it looked like stirring stew with a ladle. Literally just swishing.

"This time they kindly sent someone who is not even one of theirs to tell us not to kill him. Honestly, maybe these guys are actually pretty tame?"

"Thieves are tame?"

"Or they are morons."

The enemy were morons, and kindly morons at that.

Even so, Kraiss kept imagining ominous outcomes.

That came from both the environment he grew up in and his own nature.

"What if they send a knight?"

If someone at knight level came, could they hold out?

He saw Enkrid training. Behind him was the closed lodging door.

A stone wall made of gravel and plaster, and between the walls, a dull dark-brown door.

Inside were a barbarian sleeping under a Warmstone and fur because it was cold, a bear of a man who had beaten a Priest just yesterday because he did not like him, a troublesome man who wandered off on his own despite having no sense of direction, a moody bastard who vanished whenever he pleased, a half-giant former cultist, and a beastfolk former thief.

"Could they even handle a knight?"

For a moment, that useless thing called hope slipped into his ominous thoughts.

Nonsense. A knight was a knight.

They were monsters. Disasters.

Kraiss shook his head.

"So what is the plan?"

Enkrid held his sword, swayed left and right, shifted his feet apart and together, and tried some kind of movement.

To Kraiss, it looked like a dance.

A dance done while stirring stew.

Kraiss stared at his captain as those ominous thoughts kept tearing through his head, then he spoke.

"We do everything we can."

He meant it literally.

The enemy had kindly told them an attack was coming.

"If I were a bandit."

If he were the head of the Black Blade and wanted to kill them?

"The captain is a squire who realized Will."

And everyone under him was a monster.

The dwarf compared people to metal through insight.

The elf compared opponents to animals and plants through that strange sensitivity.

And Kraiss saw his own company members as gold coins.

"How many coins are they worth?"

Impossible to measure. At his current level, he could not estimate their value.

From one angle, they were lunatics who caused nothing but trouble. From another,

"Unmatched fighting strength."

From an outside point of view, anyone would judge them an enormous force.

Kraiss's mind spun taut, weighing what those Black Blade bastards could do, might do, or were most likely to try, and the answer came out of his mouth.

"Assassination, ambush, poison, and persuasion."

Four broad categories.

Enkrid was no moron either. He paused his sword for a moment.

The next motion did not connect cleanly right away.

He had just tried to imitate Snake Step and failed.

"The trip back will probably be the first problem."

"The plan?"

At the same question again, Kraiss asked for only one thing.

"Company Commander Torres, no, is he a battalion commander now? If we ask Battalion Commander Torres for support, will he lend us troops?"

"Probably."

Why would he refuse?

The real issue was time. He could not leave his territory unattended for too long.

Enkrid did not need to point out what Kraiss already knew.

Martai was short on manpower too.

That was why they were already pushing a plan to hire mercenaries and turn them into private troops.

This time they were making it big.

They planned to pour in all the Krona they earned and wipe out every Demon Creature and Magic Beast in the Grateful Forest region.

Between Martai's response, the fight with the Colony, and his own training, Enkrid kept thinking.

For trade route safety, what could Border Guard do?

"What if we expand the patrol zone?"

What came to mind first was still vague. He needed to think deeper.

"We are heading back as soon as we get the weapons from the dwarf, right?"

"The moment we get them."

If nothing went wrong, that was the plan.

"Understood."

Kraiss disappeared from early morning just like that.

Enkrid returned to his own time. Time with his sword and himself.

At dawn, he had practiced the Isolation Technique with Audin.

Audin's words stayed in his chest.

"If you have found your answer to why you train your body, then the next question is how, yes? I believe I already taught you that method, did I not?"

Audin was a good teacher.

What he meant was that Enkrid should think for himself.

He said he had already laid that foundation.

Enkrid was neither dull nor stupid.

The only problem had been his body, which never moved exactly as he wanted.

Then what about now?

"To move forward."

He would face tomorrow. He could face it.

That mindset was still the same.

If anything had changed, it was this: it was twice as enjoyable as before.

Enkrid swung his sword. It did not matter if it looked meaningless.

That was how he thought.

That was Enkrid's way of meditation.

So he did it.

He entered his own world. He sank into it. He went down, watched, observed, and understood.

He layered thought onto his past realizations.

"No one tells me what swordsmanship I have to learn."

Even Ragna, who taught him Heavy Sword Style, did not care much if Enkrid used other swords.

Right then, that same Ragna came out, stood beside him, and swung the absurdly heavy sword forged at the Border Guard smithy before.

No flashy moves. He simply brought it down straight and true from above.

It looked as if sunlight itself were being cut by his blunt blade.

"Cut, then cut again."

No matter what blocked him, he cut through it. That was Ragna's sword, and his swordsmanship. That was the essence of Heavy Sword Style.

Enkrid reviewed what he had learned.

Vallen Style Swordsmanship was the Illusionary Sword.

His nameless swordsmanship was the Correct and Precise Sword.

What he learned from Ragna was the Heavy and Fierce Sword.

After that, he learned the basics of the Soft and Flowing Sword from Ragna and trained it alone to a certain level.

By watching enemies, he learned how to redirect and sway.

"No, I learned that from Audin too."

Valaf-style Grappling.

Martial Arts, in the end, meant using hands, feet, and the body as weapons.

The shortest-range weapons humans could use.

Then what were the basics of Martial Arts?

Redirecting, speed, heaviness, lightness.

Everything mixed together.

It could not be split into Correct, Heavy, Illusionary, Quick, and Flowing.

Valaf-style Martial Arts were a style that embraced all of it. A completed ideal.

But it was not swordsmanship. Still, he could graft parts of it onto his own sword.

Immersed as he swung, Enkrid looked back on what he had and focused on the Soft and Flowing Sword.

Even when training his body, he put weight on flexibility.

He still trained by lifting heavy stones and chunks of iron, but he also spent just as much time loosening and stretching every muscle fiber back out.

All of it was for flexibility.

Why the Soft and Flowing Sword?

Because he had properly opened the sixth sense.

"The Soft and Flowing Sword is defense, a defensive form."

For that, the most important thing was the eyes.

In other words, the senses.

Only by seeing and grasping properly could he twist the point of contact and redirect force.

Everything he saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt.

The five senses blurred and were replaced by one unified sense.

If his previous sixth sense had only been one branch of a new sense, almost an extension of the five senses, then now it was closer to a truly new sense in the real meaning.

There was a reason people called this opening the third eye.

At some point, Jaxon came out and sat on a rounded stone chair to one side.

It was a stone seat roughly carved from a large boulder embedded in the ground.

It should have been painfully cold to sit on in winter, but Jaxon did not seem to care.

Why would he?

Jaxon's own training had been harsher and more painful than this. Cold like this barely felt like cold.

In Jaxon's eyes was Enkrid.

"What is it..."

What made that man move like that?

It was the same old question.

But now, just as that question remained, so did Jaxon's reason to stay.

"It is tangled."

That captain had now become someone Jaxon needed to achieve his own purpose.

"Urrgh, stray cat. Why are you staring so hard?"

Rem the barbarian came out too, yawning wide and long.

The usual pointless provocation. Jaxon ignored him as always.

Rem's gaze turned to his captain.

"...Well, look at that?"

The barbarian showed surprise, which was rare.

Ragna and Audin were the same.

They were all people who had, at least once, swung a sword while immersed in their own world.

So they understood Enkrid's state at once.

He had fallen in and locked himself inside his world.

Was that dangerous?

No. It was an opportunity.

One of those training opportunities that came only a few times in a lifetime.

A chance to recognize his limits, push past them, and advance several steps in one go.

"Hey, cat, we need to control the area. Directionless one, you too. Oi, bear?"

"I know, brother. Sister Teresa and Sister Dunbakel should help as well."

Audin spoke, and they moved quietly.

From that sudden winter morning on, Enkrid's group formed a circle centered on the lodging.

What they did was simple.

"Do not come closer. Do not make loud noise either."

Control.

They pushed back everyone who approached.

"Hey, I heard you beat up a Priest. I came to talk about that."

Even when the lord himself arrived.

"That man was too shameful to be called a Priest, Lord Brother. In any case, not now."

Some people could not understand it.

A few soldiers frowned and muttered about what they were doing.

People who understood Enkrid's condition simply stepped back quietly.

More than half of Martai's barracks were easterners.

And easterners were tenacious, rough, and loud too, but

"You make noise, I split your head."

"They say silence is golden. The Lord said, shout on the battlefield, then speak gently when you return home. So please sew that mouth shut for a moment and stay quiet."

"Quiet. I cut."

"Do not cross this line."

The four handled it in their usual styles.

Dunbakel watched Enkrid quietly and moved her own body too.

Impatience tormented her.

That was exactly why she had to train like this.

Teresa once again found that man strange.

"I am Teresa the Wanderer."

After steadying her mind with that same thought as always, what she saw was him smiling like a madman while swinging his sword alone.

"Does he enjoy training as much as battle?"

She had been born and raised in the cult's embrace. Teresa knew little of the world.

Her world had been narrow. Even now, she did not know whether her choices were right or wrong.

Only one thing.

"I want to fight."

She wanted to swing her sword at the man now occupying the small training yard before the lodging.

Hard enough to split that thick skull.

She also wanted to slam her shield into his torso.

She wanted to throw punches and kick him too.

She wanted to fight.

As a chilling level of desire boiled up, right and wrong did not matter.

"Calm yourself. Rule your heart, sister."

It was Audin's voice, always by her side. Teresa adjusted her mask and answered.

"I am Teresa the Wanderer. I endure well."

Patience was a virtue.

She had not been born with that virtue, but now she wanted to keep it and learn it.

Only then could she fight that man and meet that moment of ecstasy.

* * *

Inside his own world, Enkrid sometimes wandered, sometimes ran, and sometimes crawled.

None of it mattered.

He thought about swordsmanship.

At one point, the Boatman appeared like an illusion and spoke.

Now he could see the face, and maybe that was enough to create a kind of attachment that had not existed before.

That happened when you saw someone often.

"Crazy bastard, this is not a wall I made."

What was he talking about?

It was an illusion. A hallucination.

So Enkrid ignored it. What mattered now was not the Boatman, and not another repeating today.

Correct, Heavy, Illusionary, Quick, Flowing.

Of those five divided sword forms, Enkrid had properly learned Correct and Heavy.

Even so, it felt uncomfortable. Separate from difficulty, he had never felt they fit him perfectly. Why?

"Clothes that do not fit my body."

Swords built with talent in front, on talent as a base, piled up on the soil called talent.

Not the path of the untalented.

He had not realized all of this at once, right then.

He only moved toward what came next, following what he felt in the realm of sixth sense and intuition.

Still walking, crawling, running.

Only this.

"Where does my path lead?"

He set his direction with that brief question.

And so Enkrid moved beyond the basics of Flowing Sword Style and found a new path.

It was the process of creating new swordsmanship.

Nothing happened all at once. When he came out of his immersion, Enkrid simply understood what he had done.

And he understood that what remained was to refine what he achieved today, make it part of his body, and keep building from there.

"Swordsmanship."

Compared with wanting to become a knight, creating new swordsmanship was madness on another level, and to others it would sound like empty lies with no practical value.

So what?

Since when had anyone else's gaze mattered?

When he came out of immersion, the sun was still high.

"So it was only a short while."

Thinking that, Enkrid lifted his head, and right in front of him stood a dwarf with the appearance of a young girl, lips pushed out in a pout.

"Hey, I am busy too."

Then the dwarf spoke.

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