WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 341: A Heavy and Fast Sword.

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Rem turned and knocked away a spear with his axe.

Clang!

The spearhead spun through the air and flew off course. Trolls were demon creatures of monstrous strength, but Rem was a human with monstrous strength too.

Audin ran forward and snatched a flying spear out of midair.

It had come roaring in with heavy force, yet the instant it touched Audin's hand, it stopped dead with a hard snap.

For something that had been moving so violently, it was stopped so easily it felt almost anticlimactic.

An abnormal scene made by abnormal strength.

It almost looked like he had ignored the laws of physics.

People said strength beyond limits could look like a spell.

This was exactly that. Pure muscle, trained to a ridiculous degree.

By raw strength alone, he was above Rem.

The Troll Five Brothers had no time to even register how strange it was.

"Hahaha!"

Audin burst into laughter and kicked off the ground. Every time his foot landed, a boom exploded and dirt shot up like a fountain.

Boom, boom, boom!

Not once, but three more times, dirt geysers burst from the ground.

Audin's body drew a long line and left an afterimage.

That huge frame cut down distance at an absurd speed.

To a normal person, it would have looked like he vanished. It was a charge born from heavily trained thigh muscles and perfect control over his own body.

The moment he saw it, Enkrid thought it was comparable to a junior knight's charge.

Audin rushed in and used the spear shaft like a club to smash a troll's skull.

With footwork faster than ever, the troll could not dodge.

Then he layered in Gather-and-Burst, the move Enkrid had just realized.

Crack! Boom!

The skull shattered and black blood blasted into the sky, almost inevitably.

Pieces of skull and brain matter sprayed in all directions. Blood fanned out from where the shaft struck, diagonally upward toward the opposite side.

The sun had started setting, and the area had already gone dim, but nobody there had eyesight so poor that darkness would matter.

So,

"Don't let any of them escape."

Enkrid spoke.

Dunbakel and Teresa sprang forward.

Audin laughed and kept beating the trolls down.

Enkrid watched troll arms get ripped off, troll eyes pop out and flatten, creatures famous for regeneration getting torn apart.

He had no reason to step in again.

The five trolls did not even dare to run.

If even one got away, it would hide deep, and from then on they would have to chase it like a game of tag. Even for Rem, that would be a headache.

Hunting a demon creature that was fully committed to hiding was a different kind of problem.

So they could not let any escape.

They did not.

Audin showed no restraint and dismantled three of them by hand.

Of the five, one was chopped into nine pieces by Rem's axe.

"What is that?"

After chopping it apart, Rem spoke toward Audin.

The question carried one meaning: why was that bear so fired up?

"Heh heh, what a fine night. The Lord is watching over us."

Audin only answered with a smile.

The last one went to Dunbakel and Teresa.

The two of them tore, crushed, and split it apart as if competing.

That was the end.

The troll never even got a chance to show its famed regeneration.

Sinar only watched. No, she had been too busy putting out the fire. Then she crouched, peeked her head up, and asked,

"Should I light it again?"

Enkrid looked at the sky and judged the time. Evening had passed. It was night now.

If it had been near dawn, resting before moving would have made sense, but did they have to do that? Nothing in this world had only one way.

Enkrid wanted to wash up, and he also thought this could be used as training. More than anything, there was no reason to endure the inconvenience of camping.

"Let's go back."

If they ran all night from here, they would reach Border Guard in two days.

If they pushed harder, they could arrive by tomorrow night.

Too much? Training like this was necessary too.

After getting injured before and taking rest, he had worked his body less.

So this was the perfect chance to overwork it just by running.

This would be good training as well.

With that line of thought, he pushed rest back until after they reached the city.

No one objected.

* * *

Word spread quickly that they had cleared three low-grade Cursed Grounds, more precisely two colonies and five troublesome demon creatures.

"I've got nothing to say."

That was Kraiss's first line, and he heard the news before anyone else.

Who could hear this and not be shocked?

Not in a bad way.

From the moment Enkrid came back and reported what they had done, Kraiss's mind started spinning at full speed.

If this was possible,

if there were not just one or two people who could grill, smash, carve, slice, and kill any ordinary demon creature that came near, and if those people would move as long as you asked them to,

ah, except one.

No, again, make that two. One was on leave too. Even so, this was incredible firepower.

Rem and Audin were stepping up more actively than ever too.

"Dunbakel and Teresa aren't forces you can ignore either."

Esther and Big Eyes were there too, but he counted them as outside the main set.

"I should go meet the lord."

Kraiss said it. Enkrid gave him a rough nod.

His eyes were shining again, so he had clearly thought of something.

He had probably spotted a way to earn Krona.

Enkrid washed, rested, ate, then dove back into the Isolation Technique.

Gather-and-Burst was a technique that needed the body to keep up.

Its core was muscle compression and explosion.

If he got used to it, he could probably do what had just been done to him earlier.

After beating trolls to death, Audin came over with a deeper smile than usual and demonstrated the technique himself for Enkrid.

"If you get skilled, things like this become possible too."

He said that while approaching with a hammer in his left hand.

The sight was deeply unsettling, but it also raised excitement, and that excitement paid off.

He came up to point-blank range. A body close to giant size looked down from above. Enkrid was not short either, but their eye levels did not match.

"Watch."

Audin spoke, thrust out his fist, and stopped it barely a knuckle away from Enkrid's stomach.

For a second, Enkrid wondered what he was doing.

Sense of Evasion activated.

There was no time to dodge. Instantly, he tightened his abs.

Boom!

With an explosion, more precisely the sound of something detonating right in front of his abdomen, Enkrid felt weightless. Both feet lifted off the ground. He flew for a moment, then landed two or three steps back.

He did not tumble around.

He kept his balance. Getting hammered all this time had not been meaningless. His toughness had risen sharply.

"What is this?"

"Gather-and-Burst."

Enkrid looked down at the floor. The dry dirt of the training yard held a clear mark.

A deep dent was twisted. It looked like a small vortex had formed.

"Ankle rotation."

Compression and explosion of the entire body's muscles.

Put everything in and show destructive force at barely one knuckle's distance.

The technique was brutal and attractive.

"Nice."

Enkrid said it in pure admiration, then immersed himself again. Both body and mind were fully occupied.

He was not only learning Gather-and-Burst.

Audin still pounded his whole body with the hammer. Everywhere there was muscle, except the head, he hit evenly.

After that, he roughly learned Dunbakel's whole-body elastic swordsmanship.

Then he got a shield from the forge, trained with Teresa, and learned how to handle other weapons from Rem.

"Does learning that many random things really help?"

Rem asked.

People often said depth mattered in learning, but that line never applied to this madman.

So he asked while already knowing the answer.

"It helps."

The answer was short.

In the realm of experience and instinct, Enkrid kept finding his path.

Was this the road to becoming a knight?

He did not know.

There was only one thing.

He was going crazy.

Joy and excitement swept him up. Euphoria rose through his body. He learned and mastered new things. And the speed they settled into him was different from anyone else.

"The captain's body might just be dumb. You can do all that Will business, and you're still struggling with this?"

Rem's sharp tongue cut in sometimes, but Enkrid did not care.

Compared to before, his current growth rate was hard to believe.

Ragna watched from one side with sleepy eyes.

He had not lost his drive.

He had seen a knight's sword, and because he had faced the road he needed to take through that, he was simply doing what he needed now.

Sorting and refining.

It was time to gather what he had, stack it calmly, and organize it.

Ragna had wandered the continent for a long time.

Half of it was unintended because he was lost, but he still met many people.

Each one showed different techniques in their own way.

Mercenaries and trading company fighters were like that.

Ragna was a genius, so he could see their techniques, grasp them quickly, and learn them.

One look and he copied it. Two or three repetitions and he reached the original user's level. Before two full days passed, he was above them.

"You're a demon. That's demonic talent."

A trading company's escort once told him that.

From those words, Ragna realized he was not like normal people.

He also gained a question.

"Should I keep going farther?"

No one around him could follow anyway. Was that a road worth advancing on?

Questions and doubt. And doubt started eating away at Ragna himself. At some point, he stopped going farther.

Even after his drive returned, he stayed at practicing what he had already learned.

He needed a trigger. That trigger was his battle with Squire Aya. Through that, he broke past his limit.

Why had he been able to do that?

Because what had been eating his heart for so long disappeared at some point.

"How long are you going to loaf around? Let's spar."

Yeah, it was because of this man.

Enkrid stood in front of him, sword in hand, and beckoned.

Ragna nodded.

His mind was sorted now, and he had finished sorting all the miscellaneous techniques that had stuck to his body over time.

Like the man in front of him, Ragna had started carving out his own path.

That meant the birth of Ragna-style swordsmanship.

Instead of staying trapped inside the Correct, Heavy, Quick, and Flowing forms, Ragna opened a new road.

"It's a Heavy and Fast Sword."

The words and motion came together. For an instant, Enkrid recalled a knight's sword.

Whoosh, the vanished blade folded space and appeared.

The speed was different. The weight was different too.

Enkrid raised his sword sideways to block, and the moment it met, boom, the impact ran through his whole body.

"Interrupted strike?"

It was different from Gather-and-Burst, but the power felt similar.

He saw a technique once and absorbed it into his own swordsmanship. Then he changed it to fit his body and applied it.

That was a genius.

"You crazy bastard."

Rem saw it, laughed, and raised his axe.

"Good, now I can finally beat your ass."

Ragna said it lightly to Rem while watching Enkrid get pushed back by a single blow.

"The hell is a lazy bastard yapping about."

"I said now I can beat you without killing you. Hard to understand? Should I show you with my hands?"

"Yeah. Let's do that. Let's see who dies."

Soon Ragna and Rem clashed.

Enkrid had stepped back, and he did not force himself in.

This was different from their earlier fights.

Rem was being pushed. Ragna had crossed a line.

That did not mean Rem was getting rolled over.

Enkrid burned that spar into his eyes too.

There was so much to learn it overflowed. Things he could not see before were visible now.

Heavy and Fast Sword, Ragna showed exactly what he said.

His sword looked light, but each collision with Rem's axe was unbelievably heavy.

Bang!

At the continuous thunderous blasts, nearby soldiers peeked over.

Some were shocked. Others were shocked too, but acted like this was only natural.

Were members of the Madman Company ever ordinary people?

Watching the two spar, Enkrid felt goosebumps rise all over his body, so excited he thought he might die.

So he could not hold back.

"Are you just going to watch?"

Enkrid pulled in Sinar, who had come over at some point.

He wanted to spar with her too, see and learn from the delicacy in her sword.

"Greedy fiance, and what will you give me if I give you this?"

Anything except the fiance part.

"You'll give me one date at least, right?"

The elf asked, and Enkrid could not suppress the urge.

"Sure."

One date for swordsmanship. It sounded like a joke, but both Enkrid and Sinar were satisfied with that deal.

* * *

"They swept the swamp?"

At Count Molsen's question, the butler reporting to him bowed his head.

"My apologies. I did not expect them to move that fast."

The one who had seeded demon creatures in the swamp was the Count himself.

He had blocked people from approaching with bell bugs and bloodsucking flies, and he had run several magic experiments there.

It was also a good place to gather precious magical materials, including medicinal herbs.

He had known that bastard Enkrid would strike the Land of the Gray Ghouls after leaving the city. Intelligence work was not for nothing.

Even if that Frog bastard rampaged around, how could he fail to get any information?

So yes, he had known.

"They also killed five trolls."

"What the hell are these bastards."

Even the Count could only be dumbfounded. Did they never sleep?

The road was rough, not even a place where a carriage could run.

Did they really run through areas with no roads at all?

He was so stunned he had no words for a moment. Discomfort passed through him, then he shook it off.

This was absurd.

It was already too late to make a move on that matter.

He could not exactly confess that he had released demon creatures.

Once he got what he wanted, all of this would become pointless anyway.

"The guild that says it will restore the kingdom's language has infiltrated the territory."

"Handle it."

"There are several troublesome mercenaries mixed in with them."

That meant the territorial security troops alone could not solve it.

The Count put the Madman Company out of his mind.

Then, once his head cleared, it gave him an answer.

"Send Matsu."

"Yes, my lord."

The butler bowed.

The Count sat in his chair and sank into quiet thought.

Preparations were still lacking. So he would have to wait. How long would that wait be?

At most, one year, maybe two.

Was climbing higher a human instinct? Or was it just his own desire, born and raised as a ruler?

He did not know. He would know once he climbed there.

Until then, he did not even want to know. The ignorance he had now would make the experience later more pleasurable when it was filled.

Until that day.

Will they still be alive?

Madman Company. Enkrid.

Was he not a very unusual man? An impressive one.

So when that time came, he had better not stand on the opposite side.

Otherwise, the Count would not be able to spare him.

If possible, the Count wanted to keep him alive.

A man who piqued his interest this much was very rare.

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