WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 323: One Strike

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An insight struck Knight Jamal like lightning, but putting it into practice was still work the body had to do.

Enkrid shot up to greet another new today, and Kraiss flinched beside him.

"What is it? Sleep paralysis?"

Enkrid only stared into empty air, so Kraiss kept rambling.

"I heard that happens when your body's run down. Get some proper rest and you'll be fine."

"Yeah?"

Only then did Enkrid answer absently, then turn the realization over in his mind again.

Could he do it?

It felt possible.

That sensation, that sixth sense, sent a sharp thrill through his whole body.

"Why does it feel like you're getting worse every day?" Kraiss muttered at his side.

Enkrid ignored him.

After that, he had to pour in twelve more days.

Inside this repeating today, he had to make sure the swordsmanship he had awakened truly settled into his body.

"...What is this?"

Ragna, who had helped with the process, looked surprised for once.

"Why?"

"When did you come up with this?"

"It just came to me."

"So this is talent, huh."

Ragna muttered to himself.

He did not even look that curious.

Enkrid refined the sword style, consulted with Ragna, and had a light Hand Blade spar with Sinar.

There was something different about the elf's hands.

Her knack for reading an opponent's intent was beyond common sense.

When he asked about it, she replied:

"It is an elf talent."

It was more than worth learning.

In fact, Enkrid realized he had already been using part of that talent himself.

After that, only training remained.

That was what he did best.

So he trained.

He repeated it over and over, honing and drilling his swordsmanship.

He was just as relentless about asking about the elf talent and stealing what he could.

Though calling it stealing felt off.

Sinar explained everything freely.

"If you twist it a little while reading emotions, you can do something close to mind-reading. Then you project that into combat."

More than anything, Sinar was one of the few who could actually explain things well.

Compared to Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, and Audin, she was an angel.

Calling her an archangel was not an exaggeration.

Audin did try to explain sometimes, but his view was that learning through the body was faster.

In other words, he preferred physical explanation over verbal explanation.

For the one learning, that was not always a good thing.

Anyway, based on Sinar's explanation, Enkrid repeated the process until that talent also settled into his body.

The shackles of foreboding helped again this time.

Sense of Evasion meant facing his own instincts head-on.

Where did those instincts come from?

From what happened right in front of him.

Warnings created by the sum of everything that brushed past the five senses in an instant.

That was what sixth sense was.

Sense of Evasion was an evasive technique that used that sixth sense.

Then what about the elf talent?

He could not copy a racial trait that read emotions.

So Enkrid used a different method.

He started with his eyes.

After learning Isolation Technique from Audin, he had trained his eyes to read an opponent's level.

Then he added concentration.

He treated the opponent before him as a single point and focused.

He kept his body, forged through Isolation Technique, ready to move at any moment.

He watched the opponent with Focus Point.

On top of that, he honed Sensory Art again and again until it was razor-sharp.

He saw with his eyes and felt with his senses.

That became the foundation for stealing and imitating the elf talent.

"You, just now, that..."

When he used the trick in front of an elf, even she was surprised.

Her expression did not change, but her pupil widened by a hair, so slight no one could catch it unless they looked through Focus Point.

Even Enkrid found it fascinating.

He had to sink in deeper than before and stare straight through his opponent to see it.

After learning how to spread Focus Point wide, he had now returned to the original method and learned how to dig deeper with it.

"I copied it."

"If this worked just by copying, no one would call it a racial secret art."

"Is that so?"

"When you greet the elf clan later, you should show that talent."

"Greet?"

"You should at least show your face once before we have a child."

The elf world was structured like a clan society.

He had heard they even had communal child-rearing, so the village itself, the hometown itself, served as parent, kin, and family.

"Would a human-elf mixed child not be unhappy?"

"It is fine. Wrap them in love."

Enkrid tried to shoot back with a joke, got turned around instead, and laughed without realizing it.

"You smile well."

Sinar said that as she watched him.

It sounded like she meant his smile looked good.

Enkrid let it pass.

It was time to focus again.

In the end, the elf racial secret art was about never missing an opponent's breathing, movement, or tiniest change.

A knight was still human.

Not a god, so even he had tiny gaps, thread-thin openings.

Enkrid planned to dig into them.

'This body is never getting fully recovered.'

Then he had to work with what he had.

What he lacked here, he decided to make up with force.

That meant Heart of Superhuman Strength.

Heart of Superhuman Strength would be the engine that over-drove his injured body.

He could not afford to care about his body breaking down from backlash.

If he worried about that, he would not get past today.

After the rough preparations were done, Enkrid suddenly realized something.

There was no need to drag this today out.

No, there was no reason to drag it out.

Was this overconfidence?

Arrogance?

Or a delusion?

He did not know.

You never know until it is on top of you.

So he simply moved forward.

Enkrid passed through one repeating today after another and greeted morning again.

Today.

The day he had to turn into yesterday.

Enkrid got up and scrubbed his dry face, and Kraiss asked, "Why? Are you sick?"

"Sick enough."

"What does sick enough even mean?"

"It means it hurts, but I can still move."

"Ah. Right."

Kraiss tilted his head at his captain's eyes, which looked a little unhinged.

Did he take something?

No, probably not.

"I am going to tomorrow."

Enkrid muttered to himself, burning with a resolve he had never shown before.

"Seriously, is there no priest around? You have a headache, right? While escaping enemy lines, did you fall headfirst off some cliff or what?"

Kraiss spoke loudly.

The man really was acting strange.

"If you fall headfirst off a cliff, you die."

Even after Sinar pointed that out, the look in Kraiss's eyes did not change.

The captain, who should have answered back at once, moved for a moment, then lay back down.

It was truly strange.

After that, Kraiss kept having one strange experience after another.

The captain who said he could move never got out of bed.

He just gave orders and did not move a finger.

"What is this, seriously?"

He said he could move.

Then why was the Elf Company Commander feeding him porridge?

Dunbakel had tried to feed him too, but she lacked finesse, so Sinar stepped in.

And Enkrid kept ordering people around, so Kraiss replied more and more irritably.

"I am resting."

"That is exactly what I am saying. To me, it looks like you're resting for your life. Did someone tell you the day you're going to die? All that's left is surviving and winning, so why are you like this? You're making people nervous."

It seemed Kraiss's foreboding antenna had kicked in.

Who rested this hard?

This was not the kind of man who acted like this for no reason.

"Training how to rest hard."

Enkrid shut Kraiss up with smooth nonsense.

Saying exactly what was needed at the exact moment was speaking skill.

Enkrid's speaking skill was outstanding.

"He hit his head and took drugs too. That is certain."

Kraiss reached his own conclusion.

Until sunset, just as Kraiss said, Enkrid rested desperately.

It was part of getting the best condition his body could still manage.

"Is the sun going down?"

"Huh?"

"Go check outside."

"Yes, soon."

After sending Kraiss to check the time, Enkrid finally got up just after sunset.

Then he started warming his body.

He checked each joint's flexibility, tensed and released each strand of muscle.

He adjusted the position of his sword belt with his gear.

Along with physical preparation, he set his mind in order.

He raised a single blade in his heart.

Everyone watched, wondering what was wrong with him.

No matter how they looked at it, he seemed strange.

He was never normal, but today he was even stranger.

"Captain, are you really sick?"

Kraiss finally asked in full seriousness.

Enkrid answered with complete sincerity.

"No. I am about to be."

Even if this worked, he did not think he would come out of it unharmed.

Riiip.

Just before Kraiss could say more, the tent tore open.

A plain-looking man with brown hair stepped in.

"Sorry about this."

The same line as always.

"One strike. That is the minimum duty I can keep."

He said something similar again.

He did not ask for understanding.

He had no need to. Those words were only for himself.

The moment Enkrid had been waiting for came next.

He moved first.

The enemy's awareness turned toward him.

It was time to show what he had prepared.

* * *

"Sir Jamal, please."

"Do you know what you are asking? This lowers my honor."

Abnaier had no answer.

"You know this cannot be done, too. No, there is no way you do not know. Right, you know, and you're still saying it must be done."

Knight Jamal spoke.

His words had weight.

They had thorns too.

They were sharp, but Abnaier gritted his teeth.

Even if he had to take the blow and the sting, there was nothing else he could do.

"Please."

"After this, you have no more favors."

"I understand."

Jamal did not frown. He did not curse.

There was no need.

The matter had already passed the point of no return.

Still, that did not mean he liked it.

"Once. I will swing my sword only once and return. You understand that is the best I can do."

"Yes. I understand."

Abnaier lowered his head.

A knight was also a being bound by honor.

They were people who upheld honor through oaths and vows.

Why did it have to be that way?

It was not just moral conviction.

Practical reasons were bigger.

If Will was willpower, how did one preserve it?

How did one grow Will?

There was a knight who swore to see the world through only one eye for life, and through that vow gained vision no other knight could match.

She was the female knight known as One-Eyed Luper.

Willpower could not be seen.

The moment one doubted oneself, that power weakened.

How did someone strongly assert something invisible?

They needed shackles that stirred their will.

Restrictions, vows, oaths.

That was a major reason those became the central axis of knighthood.

An oath grew stronger through vows.

On top of that, they clung to honor.

Those two letters, knight, were forgotten once honor was abandoned.

Among those who forgot honor, who still kept vows?

In the end, honor was also one root of the Will they built and protected for themselves.

One of its roots.

Because they had chosen honor for themselves.

Knights faced knights.

Jamal was breaking that.

Of course, those words could not always be upheld in war.

In chaos, they even used tactics that deliberately plunged into ranks of ordinary enemy soldiers.

Still, those were special cases.

There were convictions and honor that stood even above the rule that knights faced knights.

Loyalty, and another world of chivalry.

But now he had to cut someone while knowing the target was not a knight and not prepared for it.

'Even if they called me an assassination knight, I would have no defense.'

That was why Jamal disliked this job.

It was also why he planned to end it with one cut.

Even after saying all this, he would not swing carelessly.

He would read the target and strike at exactly the level the target could not block.

Even if he was doing something he disliked, this was tied to a vow.

'At least one forced promise is gone in exchange.'

Had he not already known he would have to do unpleasant things?

The only comfort was that this was for Azpen.

Jamal stood before the enemy Palisade and slipped in through a gap.

No matter how many sentries were posted, no one could guard every point.

Passing unseen by ordinary soldiers was easy for Jamal.

He only had to spread Will and read enemy positions.

After infiltration, it was even simpler.

Assimilation.

A technique based on Will that let his presence and existence blend into his surroundings.

A violent move would break that presence, and it was a trick that did not work against fellow knights anyway, but in this situation it was more useful than anything.

He could not use his own signature weapon for a job like this, so Jamal found an empty tent on the way and picked up a Shortsword.

The weapon had been maintained terribly.

Holding it, he scanned the area.

Finding the target was not hard.

'Once. Just once.'

He would swing sincerely.

The target could not block it.

Jamal himself knew that best.

These words were only to control his own heart, bound by restrictions and vows.

If he did not do even this much, his heart would remain unsettled, and an unsettled heart would hinder the growth of Will.

'There was no wrong choice.'

He steadied his mind.

He honed his willpower.

Jamal did exactly that.

Now it was time to act.

Not every knight was the same.

Back in his squire days, Jamal had to give up many things to get what he needed.

One of those things was making vows.

More bluntly, it was close to a contract.

He gave the other side what they wanted.

This job was one of those.

Riiip.

He tore the tent and stepped in.

His eyes followed the faces staring at him, then stopped on one.

It was a face hard to forget no matter where he saw it.

One man seemed to shine, even with a beard and flattened, tangled hair.

A face from a different world than Jamal's own plain features.

"Sorry about this."

Jamal spoke.

The target, Enkrid, showed no surprise and said nothing.

Instead, he moved his foot.

It was not stealthy, but it was not an open declaration of a direct charge either.

Still, it bothered him.

The intent to attack was there.

Jamal did not continue that thought.

He was only keeping his vow as a knight.

Even if this was close to a contract, he did what he had to do.

He had already said one strike was enough.

He had given the opponent a path to escape.

If even one person blocked him, he would turn back, that was the vow he had made in his own heart.

It was a knight's oath.

After that, Jamal decided his first move would be to split the heart of the target with the shining face before him.

Everyone planned to aim only for the heart.

Leaving the face intact would at least be something for that man's acquaintances and comrades.

His heart stirred, and his will rose.

His will rose, and his body moved.

The unmaintained Shortsword came free in the knight's hand.

Tiriing, tidik!

Even the sound of the blade leaving the sheath was not smooth, but it would not matter.

At least, Jamal thought so.

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