WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 295: What's Your Dream?

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Enkrid stopped on his way out and looked up. A dim sky, heavy with dull clouds, loomed overhead.

"Looks like something's going to fall."

How many times had today passed now?

This time felt different. Before, no matter how many times it repeated, he still kept track of which "today" it was.

He remembered each day in a different way.

But not this time.

Why was this different? Why had he taken it differently than before?

Because his view had narrowed.

Because he felt he could clear what was right in front of him in one burst and keep moving.

Enkrid was human too, and impatience had crept in.

That impatience ate away at his vision. It blocked his sight and kept him from reading the full situation.

He felt like a racehorse.

Like blinders had been strapped to both sides of his eyes so he could only run straight ahead.

Who did that? The situation itself.

And the Boatman had added one extra spoonful of seasoning.

Had he been played?

Or had he learned?

He had learned. There was always something to learn in everything.

Enkrid looked at the dark sky, felt the wind, and smelled the battlefield scent that had lingered for two full days.

It did not stop at seeing, hearing, and feeling.

He forgot the eyes on him. He even forgot where he was for a moment. He pushed the current situation to the back.

Then he reviewed.

He replayed and replayed all the todays he had passed through.

Even for Enkrid, this was a first.

No matter how slow a child ran, it was not that long a stretch of time.

Within that short gap, his review began and ended.

"The Boatman's words were a problem too, but..."

The bigger fault was his own, staring at only one thing and burying himself in it.

"Focus Point can blur your vision too."

Everyone watching him was confused by what he was doing.

It was strange enough that he stepped out because one child came running.

It was stranger that he had gone out alone, as if to greet someone.

Then he did not even move toward the child and just stood there. That was the strangest part of all.

So to everyone watching, it was one absurd move after another, enough to tangle their thoughts.

"The fuck is he doing?"

One enemy soldier muttered.

"Just watch."

A Black Blade Bandits mercenary tapped the soldier's head and said it.

Enemy or ally, the whole scene itself was baffling.

Of course it was.

On one side, a child ran out. On the other, a man who had been fighting the enemy commander, the one called the Border Guard's hero, jumped out.

It was absurd, but everyone expected Enkrid to shield the child.

If not, then he would treat the kid as an enemy and cut them down.

People looked at one situation and guessed the next. That was expectation.

Right now, Enkrid drew every eye with behavior no one expected.

"Looks like snow."

Enkrid muttered alone in the middle of the battlefield, but no one heard him.

What was he even doing?

Confusion and disbelief tangled together and stopped both sides in place. They could only watch.

The old mage, keeping the spell-thread linked so the scroll could be triggered, remained in deep concentration.

If he looked away even for a moment, the thread of spell power connected to the scroll would vanish.

Then he could not activate it remotely.

The child had no room to look around.

They only ran because they were told to run.

I want to live.

The child wished for it desperately. From the moment they were captured, they had instinctively known there was no way out, but a shred of hope still pushed them forward.

Maybe somehow. They did not know how, but maybe they could live. Who knew if the goddess of fortune might shed a tear for them.

Luck was always a variable.

I have to live, no matter what.

The child's survival instinct moved their feet instead of tears.

And from the moment Enkrid recognized the situation and reviewed it, he caught several elements he had missed.

The scroll.

Someone is watching and triggering it. Not far away. Within my line of sight. This was never a move built on high expectations to begin with. Even so, it turned into a damned good dirty trick. How? They know me.

His intuition flashed again.

This was not the time for pure concentration.

If someone was watching him, he just had to hide his intent and buy time.

How to hide your intent from your opponent.

Pull their eyes away with an unexpected move.

That was basic Vallen-style mercenary swordsmanship.

So Enkrid showed his swordsmanship.

He mixed in what he had learned from watching Crang too.

Crang knew how to seize people's eyes and command the atmosphere.

Enkrid imitated that.

A gesture, subtle shifts of the body, his injured foot drawn back, force loaded into his right foot for the Limping Step.

Anyone watching would think he was about to spring forward.

If Crang gathered focus through speeches,

Enkrid gathered every eye through movement.

From a stance that looked ready to burst forward, he set his hand on the sword grip.

He's drawing.

He's cutting.

His movements made everyone think that.

Only then did the child finally see Enkrid.

Ah, I'm going to die.

The child gave up on life.

Their steps slowed.

Enkrid entered the mage's sight. The mage prepared to trigger the scroll. He widened his view and fixed on the target more precisely.

He planned to trigger the spell once the child took five more steps.

From that stance, Enkrid used a technique.

It was called swordsmanship, yet it was something beyond swordsmanship.

Could this truly be called swordsmanship? Hard to say.

Vallen had called it both a technique and an art.

Vallen-style Mercenary Sword, Distraction Feint.

Flinch.

From the stance of bursting forward, Enkrid gave a sharp twitch of his shoulder and turned his head to the side. He was too far for anyone to read his expression, but to every eye it looked like he had been startled and snapped his head sideways.

People did not need words to convey intent. Actions were enough.

You do not hide intent, you cover it.

He only needed a brief opening.

Even the mage's focus wavered for a moment at Enkrid's sideways turn.

Was something there?

Everyone's awareness shifted sideways for that short instant.

Lykanos and all the enemy did it.

Graham, their allied commander, Audin, and even the Madman Company were fooled.

It was perfect.

And there was nothing there.

Only dry, rough, skin-cutting wind carrying a whip of dust.

"We got played!"

Lykanos shouted.

In that gap, Enkrid ran forward.

Sense of Evasion was an instinctive trigger.

Enkrid laid intent on top of it.

Combining all his todays, the fastest sword flew.

The force in each joint of his left fingers was controlled, and the muscles extending forward were loose and flexible.

His body, on the other hand, felt heavy.

The air pressed on him like he was trapped in mud.

Inside that mud-thick pressure, his head and eyes burned hot.

He saw the child's shocked eyes, snot running down, mouth hanging open.

Everything looked slow.

In a world where everything had slowed, Enkrid alone thrust his sword forward.

The wind shoved backward with a whoomph.

The blade cut the tether holding the scroll. It thrust, then swept sideways, cutting every anchored point.

After the blade passed, shallow cuts appeared on the child's body.

This was not finesse. It was swordplay built entirely on speed and weight.

He could not perform the miracle of cutting only the outer clothes.

Tick.

The sliced scroll flew into the air.

Without stopping, Enkrid grabbed the child and leaped sideways as if flying.

The wound on his left shin split open from the forced motion, but this was no time to care.

The old mage had not fully taken his eyes off, but a gap had opened in his awareness.

That delayed spell activation a little.

Flash, the scroll flared again.

Enkrid held the child and rolled.

A burning heat scraped across his back. It felt like a tongue made of fire licking him.

His back burned, but he lived. The child in his arms lived too.

"Huaa."

He exhaled once, and hot breath brushed over the child's hair.

He lay tilted on the ground.

"...Ah."

Everyone fell silent. No one had words for what Enkrid had just done.

The allies were no different.

In that moment, still holding the child, Enkrid steadied his breathing and asked,

"What's your dream?"

"...Huh?"

The child was so dazed they could not even tell whether they were alive or dead. They could not answer properly.

It seemed they had wet themselves too.

His thigh felt wet.

Ignoring the filth running over his armor, Enkrid asked again.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

It was an ordinary question. He meant to calm the child, and it came out with a memory from the past.

It was not meant to be anything profound.

"I, I, I want to be a herb gatherer. I'll be a herb gatherer like my mother."

The child spoke. Those eyes, those eyes that had been full of terror, spoke of life.

They spoke of days still ahead.

A strong child. A child who had run toward death while still craving life with everything they had.

Enkrid had wanted to become a knight.

His childish dream from long ago had carried him to where he was now.

He often asked himself what he swung his sword for.

The answer was never fixed.

Still, today his sword would be for a child with a dream.

"Do that."

He rose to his feet. He pushed the child behind him as if tossing them back.

"Your back, your back..."

The child muttered in a trembling voice.

"Run. Don't look back."

Answering that mutter, Enkrid shouted without even taking time to settle his breath.

"Ragna!"

Come and hold my side.

He did not need to say more. Ragna would understand.

Enkrid's gaze turned forward again. It was right after the failed spell trigger.

Lykanos was charging in with a savage face.

Around him, men with bloodshot eyes came running with skewer-like swords. They looked wrong, like they had taken drugs. Their eyes were bloodshot, their limb muscles swollen larger than before.

They kicked off the ground with thickened legs and surged in hard.

"Kill him!"

Lykanos shouted and threw away his iron scabbard.

He had seen that strike just now. If he met it sloppily, he would be the one hit.

The enemy's injury did not matter.

Enkrid raised his sword too.

The blue-tinted longsword in his left hand pointed at the enemy.

He leveled the tip and met the rush.

Skewer-like swords came from four directions, left, right, above, and below, and Lykanos came from straight ahead.

At first glance, the blades looked like they were arriving all at once, but they were not.

There were slight differences.

He saw them.

Points and lines appeared and connected again in Enkrid's sight. Then he wrung his muscles and swung.

Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!

Five swords were knocked away.

The terrifyingly fast blades attacked with relentless precision, but not one touched Enkrid's body.

When all five thrusts came, Enkrid used his feet before his sword.

He stretched his left foot sideways, kicked off with his right, and took a sloped step.

His body naturally twisted halfway.

As his position shifted to the left, he knocked away the two blades coming from that side.

Then he moved his feet again, stepped back one and a half paces, and knocked away the two cuts coming from the right.

Last, he used the flat of his blade to deflect and flow off Lykanos's thrust.

Mistake!

If he blocked four underlings first, an opening should appear, and Lykanos should have stabbed that gap, but he did not use his fastest sword.

By his own standard, he thrust at only moderate speed.

Because of that, Enkrid blocked all five swords.

More than that, Lykanos saw his opponent's blade speed and nearly jumped out of his skin.

"You bastard!

Your skill jumped like this out of nowhere?"

At least in pure strike speed, Enkrid had never been at this level. Now he had suddenly risen to a level Lykanos could compare to his own.

In truth, it had sprouted from repeating countless todays and from all the experience stacked along the way, but the opponent had no way to know that.

It only looked like Enkrid had seen Lykanos's specialty once and copied it.

Of course, Lykanos had gained his own sword the same way, by watching others and training over and over.

Did that matter right now?

What bothered him was only what he had just seen.

Lykanos was sure that if he swung a few more times here, he could kill Enkrid.

But nothing ever went exactly as planned.

Thud!

A crisp impact kicked it off.

Slice!

The sound of skin and armor being cut through together.

Boooom!

"Aaagh!"

A dying scream followed with the noise.

Something crashed in from the side, crushing his allied unit as it came.

It was not a formation-level force.

It was one human charging alone.

Blond hair whipped in the air. No helmet. A man swinging a sword as long and huge as his own body like a storm.

Red eyes left lines in the air. Blond hair scattered over them, and the sword followed.

He swung so hard that even that massive, thick greatsword looked like it was bending.

Whoomph, crack!

He slammed down, whipped sideways, spun, and thrust.

Every strike was a killing art.

The unit Lykanos had raised with his own hands died without pause.

"Kghaa!"

They were getting pushed back even after taking drugs right before the battle. The opponent was a monster too.

"I've got this side."

Ragna said it as he came through and passed by. Blood dripped over his blond hair. A moment earlier, he had split one soldier in half with an upward cut, spraying organs and blood.

"Fuck."

Lykanos's eyes went wide. This was crisis. Danger. Threat.

But this could not be the end.

The Black Blade Bandits were not the only force here.

* * *

"Now!"

The Wolf Bishop decided that if they delayed any longer, they would not gain much from this.

"Destroy the unbelievers!"

At the bishop's shout, the fanatics rose.

Their actual numbers were not that high.

The main force on this side was the wolf magic beasts.

The Wolf Bishop gave an order to the leader beast linked to him.

"Kill them all."

Soon the beasts surged like a wave.

Their numbers were more than double what Border Guard had predicted.

Hundreds of beasts showed themselves across the field and charged.

"You need to move too."

The bishop turned and said it to the side. There stood a barbarian-born heretic, a man they had brought in as something like a mercenary.

The man stood blankly, spun his short spear a few times, and said,

"It's not my turn yet."

"This bastard?"

The Wolf Bishop deeply disliked him, but he still acknowledged his skill.

He said he came here to obtain something for immortality and ageless life?

What a joke.

If he truly wanted something, he should have devoted himself to the sect.

Trying to gain things through a deal, ridiculous.

The bishop mocked him and followed behind the beast horde.

Soon he saw enemy troops charging in.

"Heavy Infantry, forward!"

Some fools stepped out to block the front, but it was laughable.

"Brother."

When he called to the brother linked in his mind, one beast far larger than the rest rose among the wolf magic beasts.

Awooooo!

A wolf howl exploded. It was no longer a magic beast's howl but a demonic wolf's howl, crushing the air and pouring out pressure.

The kind of monster that made your knees weaken just by looking at it.

A wolf born as a demonic creature, a Dire Wolf.

Its matte black fur swallowed the surrounding light.

That made everything around it look even gloomier.

Sleet was falling overhead at that moment, but the heat the Dire Wolf gave off melted the snow in midair before it could touch its body.

It looked like their own future. Like they too would simply melt and vanish.

The lead soldier of the Heavy Infantry swallowed hard when he saw it.

Can we even stop that?

Doubt hit him.

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