WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 336: Land of the Gray Ghouls
= = =
Rem threw the axe in his left hand.
The moment his left arm drew a circle, the axe shot forward faster than an arrow.
To Enkrid, it looked like nothing but a long vertical flash of light.
Sense of Evasion reacted, and his body moved on its own.
He raised the flat of his sword and cut off the axe’s disc-like path.
From the side, it happened at the exact same moment Rem’s arm moved.
Clang!
With a crisp ring, the axe bounced off to the side.
His grip went heavy.
The force packed into that flying axe was anything but light.
And Enkrid was the one blocking it.
Rem’s left hand brushed his waist, and a stone popped into the air.
It looked meaningless.
Just one stone tossed upward.
But that throw created an opening, and Enkrid did not miss it.
He closed the distance, triggered Instant Will, and drove Spark forward.
It was the sword move he had named Lightning Thrust.
Starting from his thigh muscles, he used the spring of his whole body and launched himself as if flying.
Through all those previous todays, he had wandered battlefields again and again.
After seeing a knight’s sword, he had trained and trained, and now the move had become a smoother thrust than ever.
Even Rem could not ignore that streak of light as it shot forward like a single point.
Kka-ang!
Instead of throwing it, Rem twisted the one axe he still held.
He blocked Spark with the flat, the axe blade dented inward, and Spark punched halfway through it.
The instant it pierced through.
Spark’s blade twisted sideways with a grinding shriek.
The moment Spark broke through the axe edge, Rem twisted his wrist and bled off the force.
If he had not, that point would have been stamped right into Rem’s skull behind the axe.
Rem could use Soft and Flowing Sword principles too.
And he was very good at it.
When it came to weapon handling, he was the best in the unit.
Enkrid acknowledged that.
He yanked Spark back from where it had slid off to the side.
Crack!
The blade that had pierced iron came free.
He had loaded heavy-sword force into that instant of acceleration, so this much power was only natural.
Enkrid tried to strike again, but in that brief gap, Rem pulled a sling from his chest and spun it once overhead. In the same motion, the stone he had tossed earlier dropped neatly into the leather cradle.
A high whiiiiiing sound rang in Enkrid’s ears.
The sequence was so clean it looked rehearsed.
Rem had moved with all of this in mind from the beginning.
Prediction and foresight, calculation, and Rapid Cognition, forcing the flow of battle with them, it was an application of Correct Sword.
‘He got me.’
Enkrid had trained his own unnamed Correct Sword form too, and he realized at once that his calculations had fallen a step behind.
Paeng!
The instant the sound came, the stone flew in.
Its speed was beyond comparison with the daggers Jaxon threw.
It was several times faster than the axe from earlier.
Sense of Evasion rang a warning.
Enkrid felt heat blaze through his eyes and skull.
His concentration flared harder than ever.
He drove Sense of Evasion at full power and relied on his sixth sense to dodge the stone.
Using his left foot as a pivot, he threw his body sideways.
The stone went ping past his hair and shot behind him.
A boom sounded from the rear, like something had exploded.
As if a boulder had fallen from the sky.
Enkrid had no time to steady his breathing.
He dodged the stone, but the axe blade that followed forced an opening.
His posture had broken.
“Hup.”
Enkrid swallowed a short breath and swung the silver longsword up in a vertical arc, from bottom to top.
He used Heavy Sword Style’s vertical slash in reverse.
Rem’s axe turned back mid-flight.
‘Crazy.’
It was a feint.
If it could fool even his sixth-sense domain, then Rem had been deadly serious right up to the last instant before the strike.
Then the second stone came, and while Enkrid dodged it, the axe blade nearly scraped his neck.
If it had landed cleanly, half his neck would have been cut open. He had almost died.
Why did he survive?
He reflexively threw his neck back, and at the last moment, Rem also eased his force.
“You could die doing that,” Rem said after taking a few breaths.
“Then I’d enjoy it properly and go out that way.”
Enkrid answered as he got up from the ground.
“Dying in sparring?”
“That’s your idea of fun?”
Rem asked again, looking at him like he had seen something truly bizarre.
Enkrid answered without any change in expression.
“Yeah.
It’s exciting.”
“You crazy bastard.”
Rem finally said what he was really thinking, but the sparring continued anyway.
Enkrid kept learning new things.
Most of all, he learned from Rem how to handle many different weapons.
“You know the best way to train against weapons like axes, spears, maces, and flails?”
Enkrid did not.
He gave no answer.
Rem did not wait for one either.
Those words came after fifteen days of sparring that felt like standing half a foot in the river of death.
“Use them yourself.”
So Enkrid did.
For the remaining fifteen days, he used maces, axes, spears, halberds, and more.
Rem handled all of them as skillfully as his axe.
Enkrid’s experience had already gone far beyond a manageable level.
He quickly grasped a few key tricks and put them into practice.
Once you had the knack, learning the basics was not hard.
“No, damn it, why are you this slow?”
Rem complained without restraint.
After that, it was nothing but sparring, training, and more training.
Still, this time was deeply valuable to Enkrid.
He felt that clearly.
And soon came the moment to use that valuable time.
It was already decided.
“Right, this one’s called a Gray Ghoul.
Dangerous.”
Kraiss had been running around nonstop.
He came with a job inquiry.
More precisely, it was about coordinating with the center and piling up merit on this side, but Enkrid did not care about that process.
He was only a little glad that a proper real battle, something sparring could not provide, had finally arrived.
That did not mean they were leaving right away.
First he had to finish what he was doing.
Sparring was not over yet, and today was his day to face Audin.
“Ah, wait.
I’ll finish up and come.”
It was one day in spring, after winter had ended.
Kraiss could not stop his captain.
He did not need to.
Dealing with the ghouls was not urgent.
He sat by the brazier and waited for Enkrid and the others.
It was spring, but the wind was still chilly.
The brazier’s warmth seeped into him.
He got sleepy.
As he waited, Kraiss thought this job was the first step in Border Guard’s self-development.
He had plenty of reasons to think that.
His eyelids kept drooping.
Even half-asleep, his thoughts arranged themselves neatly.
* * *
From beyond the world of mental images, the Boatman watched the human now tied to him.
He saw death.
Again and again.
Even when he was not cornered, the man fought as if bent on dying alone.
So that was all it was.
He had gone mad with training and stopped caring about his own life.
Did he trust in today’s repetition?
No.
It was obvious at a glance.
He was just insane.
So did he die?
No. Even at moments when he should have died, he barely survived.
Was that skill or luck?
The Boatman judged it as skill.
The sum of his own skill and his opponent’s skill had twisted certain death off its line.
‘What kind of bastard is this.’
Today the Boatman spoke lightly.
He kept watching.
He would not leave praise anymore.
This was a man who took praise as fuel and pushed farther.
So now he would just watch...
“You crazy bastard.”
After repeating it, the Boatman’s temper fluttered loose.
He could not hold back and left those words in Enkrid’s mind while he was briefly unconscious.
It was praise.
Enkrid, who had drifted into the mental world for a moment, opened his eyes and tilted his head.
The Boatman had lived a long time, and those who lived long usually developed sharp instincts through experience.
He read Enkrid’s words from his eyes alone.
He understood what Enkrid meant.
Those eyes were asking, Aren’t you busy?
“I am busy!”
The Boatman shouted.
The mental world blurred.
In truth, he had nothing to be busy with.
Watching was his life and all of it.
* * *
When Enkrid opened his eyes, he replayed the final moment.
Audin’s fist had curved and whipped into his head.
The flow, the process, the trajectory, all of it was vivid in his memory.
‘I stepped.’
He had made an evasive step, but Audin had moved with him.
For a body that large, those feet were absurdly fast.
A blow like that usually snapped memory at the moment of impact, but maybe because of Heart of the Beast, or maybe because he had tried to carve the opponent’s afterimage, technique, traces, and momentum into his body until the very last instant, nothing was missing.
‘He bent it right before contact.’
He had bled the impact through his body.
He learned that from Audin, and now it was ingrained.
“I got the idea from the company commander’s Snake Sword.”
And Audin struck him with it as a new technique.
Enkrid felt it again.
Audin was a genius too.
He saw Enkrid’s sword and made something new from it.
Rem, Jaxon, Ragna, they all did the same in their own way.
All geniuses.
Even so, there was no reason for Enkrid to feel deprived.
When he finished sparring and entered the barracks, he saw Kraiss by a table with a brazier.
Kraiss sat in a chair, nodding off.
He looked sleep-deprived.
Esther was in one corner too.
She looked at Enkrid without expression.
“You’re back?”
That was her greeting.
“Yeah.”
She shifted between panther and human forms, and today she was human.
She still wore a black robe, but unlike before, she now had a soft dark red shirt underneath.
He had told her to cover more inside the robe, and she did.
It suited her very well.
“Ah, you’re here?”
Kraiss opened his eyes at the sound.
Enkrid had left saying only Gray Ghoul and gone to spar, so Kraiss had ended up taking an unexpected daytime nap.
It was short, but refreshing.
“Ugh, I’ve been pushing too hard lately.
If there’s some rare medicine, I should take it. Jaxon still isn’t back?”
Jaxon was the one who procured all kinds of medicine for Kraiss.
Kraiss found some replacements himself, but for herbs and restorative tonics, Jaxon was the expert.
“He’ll come when it’s time.”
Enkrid truly believed that.
Kraiss did not bother searching for him either.
“Now then, shall I start explaining?”
Kraiss said, wiping sleep crust from his eyes.
In any matter, sequence mattered.
Cause and effect mattered too.
There was always a difference between doing something knowingly and doing it blind.
That was Kraiss’s view.
Rem and his unit felt differently.
Ragna had been sleeping much more these days.
Rem would shrug and walk off, making slings or sharpening weapons Enkrid brought back with a whetstone.
Maintaining the weapon that sat right in your hand was a warrior’s basic discipline.
Though for someone who said that, he had used them pretty carelessly before.
Well, things had changed.
Knight bastards had started appearing.
Rem knew that much.
‘If one shows up, I can’t just stand there and watch.’
Where he was born and raised, there were no knights.
There were people called warriors.
It meant brave people.
People earned that name for a reason.
Come to think of it, had he heard that beastfolk also called their exceptional fighters warriors?
Rem did not care.
What mattered was what to do when knight-types showed up.
What did you need if you did not want to get crushed?
The same thing Enkrid did.
Training and discipline.
Rem did it too.
He pushed harder where no one could see.
So fatigue piled up.
For the past few months, it had felt like relentless pressure without a breath.
‘Never thought I’d work this hard in my life.’
Except maybe when he first picked up a weapon.
No, maybe harder than even then.
Enkrid had improved too, and facing him was no longer easy.
Every moment felt like walking on thin ice.
If things went wrong, Rem would either lose or kill him.
Teaching Enkrid how to use unfamiliar weapons had lowered that risk at least, but if he were satisfied with just that, he would not be that crazy bastard.
‘Crazy human, seriously.’
Rem reached his usual conclusion and lay down.
Everything was already done, and he had even visited the bath.
The aftereffect of soaking in hot water came back as drowsiness.
Audin left for prayer time, and Dunbakel and Teresa were not especially interested.
Esther had no interest to begin with, not even a little.
Only Enkrid remained, and Kraiss had expected that.
Since when did these people ever listen intently to long explanations?
He opened his mouth while looking only at Enkrid.
At least the captain listened, and that was fortunate.
If even he did not, that would be a problem.
“Do you know there are dangers scattered around Border Guard?”
Kraiss spoke at length, but Enkrid was, as always, an excellent listener.
And even when he spoke long, Kraiss knew how to summarize the core.
The point was this.
There were three places around Border Guard, places like Cursed Grounds that threatened the whole area.
One of them had to be dealt with.
It was called the Land of the Gray Ghouls, and because it lay southwest of Border Guard, trade routes to the western territory had to detour around it.
“That’s how it is.”
He also knew the internal political reasons, why it had not been handled until now.
‘Would he listen if I said it?’
Enkrid already looked uninterested.
“Ghoul?”
See. Enkrid cared only about demon creatures he could cut down and kill.
To everyone who came looking for Enkrid, Kraiss gave the same line.
“We are preparing for an important decisive battle next spring.
There will be changes in this region, so it would be wise to prepare.”
“What changes?”
One day, a noble under Count Molsen had asked that.
Naturally, it was not Viscount Bantara, the one who had rushed them before.
Maybe that earlier clash had bruised his pride, because he did not reach out to recruit Enkrid this time.
Seeing that, Kraiss once again felt the scale of Count Molsen’s ambitions.
‘After doing all that, he still tells us to come under him.’
How many problems came from the Count looking away?
He had even moved in secret.
He had sent his own people to threaten Border Guard.
There was no hard proof, but suspicion was clear.
If they truly set out to find it, they could probably find evidence.
Though if he denied it all, that evidence would mean nothing anyway, so finding it would still change nothing.
“Border Guard’s scale will grow.”
From fortress to territory.
Hinting that all this was preparation for that was enough.
Enkrid was the sword for it.
Then could Border Guard really do as it pleased?
People had even discussed treason when calling in Marcus, the former fortress lord.
To expand, they needed approval from the center.
That meant the royal palace was directly involved.
“Huh.”
If some nearby petty noble snatched Enkrid away, it would smear the royal palace’s face.
Since Kraiss had already thrown those words out, he naturally needed actions to prove them.
Clearing the Gray Ghouls was the beginning of those actions.
He explained it with those political dynamics mixed in, but Enkrid had no interest in any of it.
Kraiss finished.
What was the point of saying more?
Enkrid was already full of thoughts about going out to fight.
Still, he would not invite danger recklessly.
That was the kind of man their captain was.
‘He’ll handle it.’
The captain would do the captain’s work.
Kraiss only needed to do his own.
And he already was.
= = =
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