WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 266: A Premonition Close to Certainty
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The assassin disguised as a middle-aged noblewoman felt her mouth go dry.
Each time those blue eyes beneath black hair followed her from behind without emotion, a chill crawled up her spine.
'Here.'
The instant she stepped into the reed field, she tried to hide.
She would shake him off, then show him her specialty.
That was when it happened.
Boom!
A thunderous blast rang out. What was that? She instinctively drew her dagger. Poison coated the blade, and she leveled it forward.
Then a shadow suddenly fell over her.
It came right after a sound like a leather drum bursting, or lightning striking.
Her reaction the moment she heard that blast was excellent, but that was all.
"Here, right?"
At the strange question, the woman looked up.
Flash!
Lightning struck above her.
Her thoughts ended there.
A person with their head split in two cannot think.
He activated Heart of Superhuman Strength, kicked off the ground to close the distance, and brought his sword down in a vertical strike, splitting the assassin's skull.
Simple, but no assassin there had expected that kind of speed and decisiveness.
Was this not the moment to catch his breath, watch for hidden assassins, and worry about prepared traps?
Instead, at that very timing, he charged in and split her head open.
Blood burst outward, spraying red across Enkrid's clothes.
Enkrid found himself admiring the sword in his left hand all over again.
'This was just a sword I carried around?'
Once again, he realized how extraordinary that dwarf's craftsmanship was.
It did not have the cutting edge of a true masterpiece, but it was sturdy and sharp enough.
More than that, he liked the thick blade.
It could knock away almost anything with the flat.
It was more than just likable. It was overwhelmingly practical.
He would not even need to carry a separate Guard Sword. In other words,
it was a blade he could use in almost any situation.
Enkrid stood still in the reeds, admiring his sword, then let that hand hang loose.
At the same time, he drew another sword with his right hand.
Shrring!
A blue-glinting blade slid free.
It had been a Demon Sword, but now Tutor had become a hard, sharp masterpiece that stood above any other blade.
With both arms hanging low, he looked around.
They had hidden so well that not a single one of the men concealed in the reeds was visible.
Was that a problem?
Not at all.
He was simply curious.
What gave these guys the confidence to come at him like this?
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Three round objects flew over his head and exploded above him.
Puh-buh-buh-boom!
Dull gray powder rained onto the brittle dry reeds, and the reeds collapsed and scattered.
Poison powder.
And Enkrid had already moved.
This was why he had made that loud entrance and killed the middle-aged woman assassin first.
In terms of individual combat tactics, Enkrid was already high-level.
Why would he not be?
The Vallen Style Mercenary Sword was an illusion-sword line built on personal tactics.
On top of that came his evolved physical ability and perception, his combat experience, and everything he had learned through repeated todays.
Most of all.
'Sloppier than Jaxon.'
Among his sparring partners was Jaxon, a monster from the assassin line.
Jaxon's sword always came fast without sound, striking without a trace of presence.
All those days Enkrid had spent trying to absorb that into his senses had not been wasted.
Enkrid's terrifying awareness took in everything around him.
At least within his range of perception, he instinctively sensed hostile presence.
If it felt like an enemy was there, one was there.
If it felt like something was flying from somewhere, something really was flying from there.
He stepped lightly and launched himself forward.
All kinds of things rained down on the spot where he had been standing, but now it was useless.
Jack of the Black Blade Bandits, who had just split two Whistle Daggers between his hands, froze with his mouth wide open.
When did he get here?
Enkrid thrust his sword.
Thud!
He pierced the assassin's throat and pulled the blade free, then briefly sheathed it.
Shing!
He grabbed the man by the collar and threw him aside.
The body flew, and a long arc of blood streamed from his neck.
It landed far beyond the spread of poison smoke.
Enkrid immediately bent and sprang sideways.
His body raced with terrifying speed, completely silent.
Pashashashashak!
The sound of reeds collapsing rippled through the field.
"Fuck!"
One assassin shouted. The mouth of a man who was supposed to stay silent no matter what had opened on its own.
Of course it had.
That thing was a monster.
No matter that they were first-rate assassins, the pride of the Black Blade, this was impossible.
To kill a monster like that, would they not need even a master from Georg's Dagger, the top assassin guild on the continent?
His question was brief.
A broad blade reached him first and cut his neck.
Shuk, thud!
The severed head floated up.
Between the reeds hiding their lower bodies, the assassin group felt fear.
Boom!
But their hands did not stop.
If they wanted to live, they had to kill him. That fact had not changed.
They burst poison smoke and threw poison darts, throwing knives, and throwing axes.
Several pouches that released poison spikes under pressure also burst.
Everything had been prepared to kill one man.
Enkrid blocked what needed blocking and dodged what needed dodging.
His senses, beyond human limits, told him what would happen next before it happened.
'Half-step back.'
Someone had already approached without a sound. Enkrid twisted his waist and smashed the man's head with a snapping elbow.
Bang! The impact rang out.
The assassin who specialized in silently taking people from behind had his skull burst.
An eye that could not bear the pressure popped out and rolled on the ground. The cracked skull spilled blood and brain matter. Pink flesh peeked out between the fragments.
Enkrid did not even glance at the man he had elbowed.
He knew from that hit alone the man was dead.
After the elbow strike, Enkrid hurled his Gladius forward with full force.
The instant his left hand traced a half-circle in the air, the sword looked like a spinning disc from the side and slammed into another assassin's head.
Thinking it was their chance, two assassins moved in sync from left and right and threw a net.
The moment the net spread and covered the sky, Enkrid was already pulling out the sword he had thrown.
It was the harmony of Heart of Superhuman Strength and forward stepping.
The step called a lunge, the swordsmanship step that drives forward.
He mixed in a slope step.
Originally, it was a large forward diagonal step used to evade incoming attacks.
He just mixed them as they came.
Passing steps and gathering too.
He did not bother separating anything.
Then he added brute strength and thigh muscles strong enough to withstand it.
The forward step became a sprinting thrust that drove straight in.
A sideways slash became a long cutting line that swept across a whole stretch of reeds.
Put simply, Enkrid was using swordsmanship against the entire assassin group.
He had only widened the range dramatically.
He did not realize it himself, but this was a method used by a near-squire-level swordsman against many enemies across an area.
It was a technique for slaughter built on swordsmanship.
And this result was inevitable.
From the start, Enkrid had reached where he was through what he learned and trained.
So he moved and fought based on the many sword forms he had learned and absorbed from people around him.
Into that, he mixed his Flowing Sword Style.
The quality of his weapons made up for any lack of force.
Of course, strength was relative.
"Ghk!"
To the assassin caught by his smoothly advancing sword, it was simply the Reaper's strike.
Even wearing armor with an impact-dispersion spell over the chest, one assassin could tell at least two ribs had broken.
He broke the spell with raw force. Calling it brute force almost felt too mild.
Enkrid's strength kept growing by the day, and now he had Heart of Superhuman Strength.
He did not envy Frog at all.
'What kind of absurd...'
What kind of power was this?
Enkrid moved into the second attack as if it were nothing.
With the harmony of step and Heart of Superhuman Strength, his body vanished from the assassin's sight for an instant.
What should have been a simple side step to take the flank looked like ghostlike teleportation to his opponent.
He flickered out of sight, and blue lightning hammered down over the assassin's crown and passed through.
Another assassin died.
Poison mist spread everywhere, but Enkrid did not care.
No, he held his breath, burst through the poison smoke in one rush, and killed an assassin with a Zimmer-style thrust.
"Kgh, you cra, crazy..."
He forced his way through poison smoke and did this?
The assassin who had endured inside the smoke with antidote in his mouth left the word crazy as his last words and went to his god.
Enkrid kept moving with both swords hanging low.
Bsssss.
Sashashashashak!
Countless reeds were cut by those blades. It practically announced exactly where he was.
He did not care. He wanted them to see him and throw something. If they threw anything, it was much easier to pinpoint their positions than if they stayed hidden.
The outcome was clear.
Out of more than fifteen Black Blade assassins, only two remained.
"We stepped in the wrong place."
A first-rate assassin, and their leader, spoke.
His name was Barcelo, a man who had come into the Black Blade from the Eastern Continent.
At one point, he had been called an assassin equal to those in Georg's Dagger.
First-rate among first-rate.
His specialty was taking the rear with claws and tearing out the back of the target's head.
Yet even Barcelo could not find an opening in Enkrid.
Every time he moved around Enkrid and switched positions, Enkrid's gaze kept sliding toward him.
'He sees me?'
What kind of impossible sense was that?
He could detect the presence of a top assassin like him? How?
Because of that, Barcelo's feet had frozen.
The other survivor had already fled.
He was the one who had to create distance and report what had happened.
While running, something suddenly caught his neck, and with a choking grunt his cervical spine snapped and he died.
Tanned leather was oiled, heated over fire, and treated with special chemicals. After repeating that several times, it became a thin but tough tool.
The fleeing man's neck caught in it. His body lifted off the ground, his neck bone failed under his own weight, and the one holding that leather cord twisted and yanked it, snapping the neck completely.
The assassin's body dropped in a heap after hanging for a moment.
A man appeared as if rising from the fleeing assassin's shadow.
It was Jaxon, with reddish-brown hair.
"A little late."
Jaxon said that and moved.
Toward where Enkrid was rampaging.
And there was also an elf who had reached this place one step earlier than Jaxon.
"Am I late? Or is my love too fast? Love is always fast. It strikes my heart and passes without sound. I do not think I am late."
The Elf Company Commander spoke while standing at one side of the reed field.
Enkrid felt her presence, but left her alone for now and faced the last remaining opponent.
The leader stood still.
Enkrid had recognized him from the beginning. This one moved on a different track from the others.
His steps were different. Every trick for hiding his presence was different.
Finding him was not hard. Enkrid's instinct had already gone beyond normal limits.
Even when he heard no breathing and sensed no clear presence, he still had a sixth sense that someone was there.
Then someone was there. He could feel it even if the other side only leaked killing intent toward him.
It was pure instinct, and also thanks to the technique called Sensory Art. From the opponent's side, it had to feel like cheating.
But what could they do? Jaxon at Enkrid's side was a mad genius in this area, not only gifted by birth but honed through relentless effort.
What Enkrid had learned from that genius through repeated todays had now ripened in his body.
"He is mine."
Enkrid said to the elf. He had left this one on purpose.
It was like a final special course.
The opponent was a skilled assassin, so he ought to be different.
The leader of the assassin group that had been nearly annihilated fitted weapons onto his hands.
With dry clicks, the man stepped forward with claws on both hands.
"Promise me this. If I kill you, you let me live."
At the reply that came back without pause, Barcelo understood there was no path left for him to survive.
Even so, he kept one last move hidden.
Would that bastard block even this?
Tap, tap, tap.
Barcelo started running through the reeds.
Poison smoke lay thick to his left, and bodies and metal were scattered on the ground.
The target re-sheathed one relatively short sword, then came forward gripping one long blade with both hands.
He was not that fast.
There were no lightning steps like before.
He was only closing the distance with his sword ready.
Tak tak tak!
The footsteps of the Reaper.
Sashashashak.
And the sound of reeds crushed under the Reaper formed a duet.
Barcelo sped up. He lowered his waist halfway.
Reeds whipped past him.
With that low posture and claws forward, he committed from the opening move.
The match would be decided in one strike!
He repeated it to himself and revealed his hidden move.
Pop! Crack-crack!
A third hand burst out of his chest. It tore through his clothes. His chest had looked thicker than normal, and now the hand sprang out.
It happened at the exact moment Enkrid's blade and his claw met.
This was his true hidden move.
The third hand was something implanted through mystic means, and in that hand was a long piece of metal thrusting toward Enkrid's chest.
'Huh?'
Barcelo felt his right claw hand stop obeying him.
The moment he clashed with Enkrid's sword, Enkrid's force pressed and drove his claw, forcing a specific movement.
That made the dagger in the third hand strike his own claw.
Clang!
At the same time, his left claw slashed at Enkrid's head, but Enkrid ducked and evaded.
Before he knew it, Enkrid's posture was lower than his own, and then Enkrid raised his head.
Barcelo saw blue light. Two blue lines, long trails like falling meteors.
A black mass wrapping those two blue lines from above brushed past him.
He tried to yank his arm back in resistance, but he could not.
Slash!
The sword that had knocked away his claw had already cut off both arms, no, even the third hand.
After that, something like a red-hot poker gouged into his torso and rose upward.
"Kyaaaagh!"
Barcelo screamed. But no one could hear it.
His head screamed, but only inside him.
Enkrid flinched when he saw the third hand.
'What is that?'
Luckily, his body and senses had moved on their own.
The instant he saw that third blade, he redirected the claw with Flowing Sword Style, blocked the dagger, and lowered his head.
It looked simple, but in that process his eyes felt like they were burning and his skull turned hot.
It was overload from his brain taking in all incoming information at once and making judgments.
Enkrid raised the redirected blade from below and cut upward.
It was an extension of the first sword form he had built in a Flowing Sword shape after seeing Snake Step and Swallow Blade's linked-sword style.
The flowing blade itself did not carry violent force, but masterpiece-level sharpness supported it.
He cut through all three arms and advanced, stamped the ground with his toes, stepped, twisted his body, and drove the sword in.
From piercing the opponent's abdomen to drawing the blade upward, Enkrid did not hesitate once.
The sequence was perfectly smooth, but to his opponent it must have looked like a monster's strike that severed arms and split a body in lightning-fast cuts.
After killing the last opponent.
"What is this?"
His soldier Jaxon was approaching,
and the Elf Company Commander was spouting nonsense.
"A blood engagement ceremony?"
"Hoo."
Enkrid let out a long breath, glanced over the men he had killed, and said,
"Guests."
"Quite a fiery welcome for guests."
Jaxon muttered as he approached.
A small leather pouch was visible in his hand. Holding it, he roughly searched the dead bodies' clothes.
Something Enkrid had seen before came out in his hand.
A pouch of the same type in each hand. He loosened the strings and tipped them slightly, and glittering powder scattered out.
Powdered drug.
"A familiar drug."
Jaxon said.
At that moment, Enkrid remembered the powder he had found on the Black Blade messenger in Martai.
He also remembered the drug that bastard Frog had taken.
Those two drugs, as Enkrid remembered them, were almost identical. The feel and the strange smell too.
A fact he had learned from his habit of never letting anything around him slide.
And if he knew it, the company member in front of him would know it too.
He was the sharp type who never let anything slide.
"Did you interrogate Frog?"
Jaxon asked.
Everyone knew Frog had been beaten down and brought in alive. Of course Jaxon knew too.
He probably knew Frog had rampaged after taking the drug.
Would Kraiss, who loved running his mouth, have stayed quiet?
And all of this felt connected. It was pure instinct, but a premonition close to certainty.
With that premonition, Enkrid shook his head.
Interrogation was what he would do from now on.
"I want in on this talk too. Leave me out and I will pout."
The Elf Company Commander cut in from the side. Enkrid nodded.
She had shown interest from early on. Her tone was light and full of jokes, but the force in her green eyes was not light at all.
It looked like proof this was no ordinary problem.
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