WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 367: Even Hardened Stone Has Brains.

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Moonlight shone over the city.

The Moonlight Beast could appear at any moment, yet Enkrid did not run.

He simply walked at a steady pace, his footsteps going tap, tap.

As he walked and occasionally checked his surroundings, a few residents lighting the tall streetlamps greeted him.

"Where are you headed?"

The resident glanced past Enkrid's shoulder and asked.

"Night walk."

The reply was calm.

"It's dangerous, I'm telling you."

It was the kind of exchange they had clearly had before.

When did they get this close? Eisia's eyes moved between them.

Enkrid whispered casually.

"He's a fruit vendor. Says his head's been aching lately because of his daughter's wedding. Pretty face, but she likes some bastard who puts his hands on every woman he sees."

"...How do you even know that?"

"It came up while we were talking."

Acting without hesitation was one of Eisia's own specialties.

Even so, she did not think she could do it like that.

As they kept walking, Enkrid spoke.

"Jaxon."

"If trouble breaks out, I can find it right away."

At that, Eisia glanced at the man called Jaxon.

He was exactly her type. Half-lidded eyes, neat lips, and a face that could make several women cry.

She also had a rough idea what he could do.

His senses were different.

For three days they had done nothing but eat, sleep, drink, fight, and spar.

It had been an intensely fun stretch for Eisia too.

Had Ruagarne said it?

That monsters swarmed around a man named Enkrid.

It came from Frog, so it was probably true. Eisia had known that already, but seeing it for herself made it sink in.

They really were all monsters.

How could Jaxon's fighting be summed up in one word?

Calculation.

Even Jaxon, who said he would not step in, ended up taking up a sword a few times. Not like that first spar with Enkrid where he had half his life on the line, but they still crossed blades.

And she learned a lot from that.

He watched movements, calculated, predicted, and fought. He put everything in his head and looked ahead to the next move.

What made that possible was his sharp senses.

His sight and hearing were on another level.

Becoming a junior knight also meant training all five senses.

What part of the road to knighthood was ever easy?

Eisia was in the knight order too, so she had trained those things as well.

Even then, Jaxon's senses were exceptional.

If you wanted to move one step ahead, you had to know first how your opponent's step would move.

Her master's words came back to her.

Jaxon did exactly that.

He predicted her sword and moved first.

She could not even properly use her specialty, tip-pointing.

Before she could begin the technique, his sword always came flying in.

Always on a line that broke her stance.

Or he struck the flat of her blade and knocked it off line.

His skill was unusual.

Of course, if they really fought head-on, she would win.

His sight, hearing, and prediction were outstanding, but the pressure from his single longsword was not overwhelming.

That did not make it any less lethal.

Still, he was beatable.

That was Eisia's judgment.

If Jaxon was calculation, then Ragna was a lump of instinct.

The problem was that this instinctive monster was often right when he followed whatever he felt like doing.

That bastard.

His sword reminded her of the bastard who had handed her a painful defeat and forced her to look back on herself.

In other words, a monster made purely of talent.

One monster of calculation, one monster of pure talent.

Eisia had never beaten Ragna even once.

"What is this?"

"A fast and heavy sword."

She had asked out of nowhere, and that was the answer.

A fast and heavy sword.

What a joke.

Easy to say. Making it real was talent.

Eisia could not reach for that. Jealousy would have been natural, but if she had let jealousy swallow her, she would never have reached her current level.

"Does someone else's bread look bigger? There are plenty of bastards with better techniques than you. They're everywhere."

Her master's teaching came back again. That was how much this sparring had made her realize.

Mine is good too.

Other people's things might look better, but she could break them down and make them her own.

She had too much of her own to blame talent, stare at her limits, and step back.

If the mind collapsed, the will collapsed, and if the will collapsed, the sword collapsed.

She repeated it like a spell, keeping jealousy as a stimulant. That was Eisia's method of growth.

Then she looked at Rem, and what could he even be called?

A crazy bastard, or a crazy genius?

Both.

If Jaxon was calculation and Ragna was instinct wrapped in talent, then Rem was...

"How is it? Can't block it, right?"

Fun. He was a bastard who lived for fun. His techniques had no fixed shape. Most of them were improvised on the spot.

It was the same with the things he chose to show.

Irregular and violent.

He ignored minor wounds and charged in.

Ragna improvised a lot too, but his style ran on a different track.

Rem was pure fun. He fought because he enjoyed it.

That took talent too, of course.

And Rem added his own experience on top of it.

Making absurd movements work, doing all that for fun like a barbarian, that was Rem.

"How is it?"

The most striking thing he did was how he broke her tip-pointing.

What should that even be called?

Axe-edge pointing? Axe-edge masking?

He covered the tip of her sword with the edge of his axe.

That killed the force at her sword tip. Erased it. Bold and strange.

Then, when he closed the distance from there...

It was terrifying.

A madman was scarier than a brute.

That crazy barbarian looked like he would calmly take a blade through his own body if it meant pleasure and excitement.

Did that make Rem the most fascinating one?

No.

Enkrid remained.

Fascinating, and then even more fascinating.

Unique, and then even more unique.

Eisia could not shake that thought when she looked at Enkrid.

Like a lump of stone made by trampling and compressing it with care.

His fundamentals were beyond solid, they were hard. Yet he was not stiff.

His swordsmanship looked like he had repeated the basics tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times until they fused perfectly into his body.

It was like repeating the very beginning over and over until he shaped an earthen vessel that would never crack.

That fascinated her.

Most people refined their specialty. They built on fundamentals. Most sharpened their sword that way, learned physical techniques, expanded their skills, and made them their own.

Based on talent.

Enkrid was the opposite.

He could not move past each step unless he understood it properly. His was not a path crossed by talent.

His sword felt like he had forced his way through by revisiting and digging into every basic one by one.

A person who had hit his limits again and again, then still crossed them, broke through, and moved forward.

That was how he looked.

Limits gnawed at people. They wore down will. They brought up the word surrender and gifted despair.

Had he overcome all of that?

Probably not. Maybe it was just her own misconception.

Then how had he climbed to this level?

That alone fascinated her.

She did not know about anything else, but she knew one thing.

At the base of it had to be a vicious drive to improve no matter what.

Just looking at him made that word come to mind. A vicious madness that could make someone smile right before death.

Even while sparring with her, he never stopped training his body.

When she saw him make the Beastfolk Dunbakel slam stone-like objects into his side, she clicked her tongue.

That kind of thing did not even exist in knight order training.

She had once seen a priest break stone with his palm as ascetic practice, and it felt like that.

Each time he trained, she saw a quiet madness.

The other Beastfolk also had unusual skill and talent. Did that make them extraordinary?

She did not know.

But she was curious.

Where had he gathered people like this, every single one of them?

If Eisia had known this all started because a former Border Guard battalion commander, now stuck in the royal palace reading the room and playing both sides, had dumped them together with a live-or-die-on-your-own attitude, she would not have been able to hide her disbelief.

In any case, there was no arguing that they were strange people.

As she sorted out her thoughts while walking, they reached a place where alleys branched in all directions.

"Let's split here."

Enkrid spoke from right beside her.

Darkness sat in pockets all over the place.

It bordered the slums. It was also where a criminal guild had coiled itself.

"Here?"

Eisia asked back.

"Here."

Enkrid answered.

"Why?"

"I'll explain while we move."

"Eisia, come with me. Ragna, with Dunbakel. Jaxon and Rem, split up."

Those two caused trouble if kept together. Eisia knew that too, even from only a few days of watching.

And Ragna was the type who could get lost just walking around a mansion.

"Whoever loses him is a moron bastard, a loser bastard, an idiot bastard."

Rem hummed a strange tune with even stranger lyrics and headed into an alley.

"Then."

Enkrid moved first into the alley, then grabbed a wall and climbed up.

Some roofs were flimsy, woven from wood and straw, but some were coated in hard plaster.

As life within the fortress developed, residential areas outside the high-class district were usually packed tightly together.

Because of that, the roofs were connected, and anyone with good balance could run across them.

A few buildings were taller than the rest, high enough that a fall could break bones, but Enkrid did not climb that far.

He only took position on a roof that was solid enough.

"Why here?"

Eisia asked again. She was simply curious.

This was not her duty as a member of the knight order.

It was not part of the vow she had set for herself either, but work was work.

So success was better than failure. If left alone, more people would die. It had to be handled for the safety of the citizens too.

That was why she asked. She needed to know to respond properly.

"If you understand habits, it's easier to understand your target."

That was what Enkrid said. He continued explaining, and Eisia found herself nodding again and again.

"Only appearing on moonlit nights means it's like madness the target can't control by will alone."

True.

Because it was like madness, control was impossible. Because control was difficult, traces were left behind.

"If the target could control it perfectly, there wouldn't be this much noise in the first place."

That was true for the same reason.

If Eisia herself had to kill people in secret, what would she do?

She would pick a target and track that person's route first.

Then finish it quietly in a dark place.

Even without going as far as full assassination, that was the easiest way.

The knight order trained assassination techniques too, but if she did not need to use them, she would still do it that way.

The victims so far, except for one priest, were all commoners.

Once in the slums, three times in residential areas.

Enkrid had told her that too. It was clear he had already looked into it.

"The days of nonstop rain probably worsened the madness. If moonlight affects the target, a full moon would stir powerful urges and desire."

Right, that could happen.

It might not line up perfectly, but it was possible.

"If I were afflicted by madness and aware of it, I'd satisfy the urge in the place farthest from my own neighborhood."

That meant Enkrid had already narrowed down the culprit's location quite a bit.

The place farthest from the slum residential area?

Eisia's gaze naturally moved past the moonlight toward the center of the city.

Toward the place with its own inner walls, near the royal palace.

The nobles who could not stay inside the palace were around there.

"An uncontrollable urge will cause a disturbance, so the culprit would have to erase suspicion."

That was the end of the explanation.

Eisia understood and accepted it.

Goosebumps rose on her skin as she listened.

"When did you look into all this?"

"We walked around a few times before. I just thought it through based on what I heard then."

A stone hardened by being stepped on again and again, and it was smart too?

That question and surprise showed in Eisia's eyes.

Enkrid let the look pass without comment.

He had just gone through the market a few times and compiled what people told him.

Why didn't Eisia know?

Because she had no interest.

If she had truly stepped into this from the beginning, she could have known. But she had not cared about how many commoners had been victimized.

A junior knight had been attacked, so a junior knight had grounds to move.

The royal palace was already overwhelmed by civil war, so something like the Moonlight Beast was probably a secondary problem.

And it was not the first strange incident in the capital.

With the Assassination Union roaming around in broad daylight, everyone already knew public order was a mess.

Enkrid naturally judged no one would conduct a proper investigation, so he looked into everything himself.

From the first victim to those that followed.

He did not even need detailed interviews. Rumors bordering on ghost stories had spread and spread, and now there was no one who did not know the tale.

A few words from a fruit vendor.

A few from the blacksmith's shop.

A few from a gambling den guard.

A woodcutter, a timber merchant, a glass merchant, a bard, a library clerk, a tavern maid, a noble's escort.

He gathered and organized what they all said, then drew his conclusion.

The monk's testimony had been decisive.

"It was wearing clothes. A fairly expensive-looking coat. And that Demon Creature kept the moonlight behind it, ignored me, and pounced on the priest."

Even consumed by the urge to kill, it still made rational judgments.

Then predicting where it would appear became easy too.

Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts moved on instinct, but humans did not. Humans led with reason. So if the target thought and moved, all Enkrid had to do was look at what that thought was built on.

Divinity is threatening, so deal with that first. Then cause trouble far from your own territory so you do not get caught afterward.

A human turned into a monster through madness would not have stolen an expensive coat and put it on, so it was likely what the culprit had originally been wearing.

After that, those stories stopped entirely, so the culprit had probably been stripping off all clothes before transforming.

Jaxon's guess was Lycanthrope.

Enkrid had reached a similar conclusion.

And then.

Ooooooo.

From somewhere came a cry like a night bird.

Enkrid judged it came from near the direction Ragna had headed earlier.

"Let's go."

Only then did Enkrid start running, and Eisia followed after him.

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