A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 381

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 381: I Could Go Crazy from How Excited I Am

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Enkrid looked at the tip of the sword Eisia leveled at him.

It was the same as before.

Eisia's body vanished, leaving only the blade, then only its tip, that single point swallowing his vision. His sense of distance disappeared. Eisia was nowhere to be seen.

Soon, the sword tip began to tremble.

Right from the start, this again?

Why?

Did my words provoke her?

It sounded like she was telling him to prove it.

Steady breathing, a wall he had to overcome without killing, the Boatman's words, the trembling sword tip.

That trembling point split. He saw several points now.

He imagined batting each one away.

In every image, the one doing it was different.

He was Rem, then Ragna, then Jaxon.

As he kept facing Sword-Tip Aim that way, he felt the traits of those he had copied with stark clarity. Of course he did. He had learned and trained through each of them.

Rem's way was to blend in and play along.

Jaxon cleared the board before it was even set, then fought only on his own stage.

Ragna smothered the will his opponent showed with his own will.

Enkrid retraced them one by one.

Across more than three hundred todays, he repeated it over and over.

They all seemed different, but they were the same.

Why could Rem and Ragna do that?

Sense.

It was possible because they had fine, precise senses.

For Jaxon, that might take the form of all five senses. For Ragna, it might show only when he held a sword. The conclusion was the same.

Enkrid sharpened that precise sense. After going in circles, he returned to the starting point.

"You little bastard?"

Eisia spoke. Her voice rang in his ears. In Enkrid's eyes, the point vanished and everything blurred away. Naturally.

He had closed his eyes.

Darkness came. Then through sound, touch, and sixth sense, he felt everything and swung his sword.

He cut down on a diagonal, left foot as axis, waist turning, his whole body's spring loaded into the strike. His blade moved like it dropped straight out of the air.

"You think that'll work!"

Eisia shouted, yanking her sword back into a defensive stance. It was a simple diagonal slash, but Sword-Tip Aim could not stop it. Sword-Tip Aim meant nothing against someone who was not looking.

In that instant, Enkrid's blade seemed to stretch and suddenly gained speed.

Clang!

To deflect an attack, you had to catch the exact impact point, and a sudden speed shift made that difficult.

Enkrid made that shift, but Eisia instantly twisted her wrist and flicked his blade aside.

If she could not block even this much, she would not deserve the title of squire, or the name Red Cloak Knights.

Enkrid hauled his deflected sword back with brute force and brought it down.

Whoom!

Eisia stepped back.

When Enkrid opened his eyes, Eisia had already leveled her sword tip again and reset her stance.

"Don't want to admit it broke?"

Enkrid asked, still in his follow-through posture.

"Do it again," Eisia said.

He did not even need to close his eyes. Enkrid deliberately blurred his focus. Leave only a vague image and concentration wavered. Sword-Tip Aim was an Illusionary Sword that fed on an opponent's concentration.

That was enough.

Any lack in vision could be replaced by his other senses.

Clang!

From his lowered finishing posture, Enkrid twisted his wrist and slashed upward. The sword shot up like lightning. Eisia could not ignore it, so she blocked. She caught it with her blade held horizontal, then jumped back to bleed off Enkrid's raw strength.

Blade met blade, then split apart. Sparks burst between them with a hard crack.

Even deflected, the force still rattled her whole body. Eisia knew perfectly well she could not beat him in strength.

Focus returned to Enkrid's half-blurred eyes.

"One more time?"

Then he asked.

"...What are you?"

From Eisia's perspective, this made no sense.

Once could be luck, but twice?

Truth be told, she had known from the first one.

Enkrid had broken Sword-Tip Aim.

But how was this possible?

During sparring, he had struggled just to deal with it, let alone find a solution.

His technique had been incomplete, and from the start he lacked experience against this kind of skill.

So what was this?

It felt like he had trained against her sword alone hundreds of times.

That was how precisely his attacks came in, and it drew a crack across Eisia's heart.

My mind is wavering.

The moment she realized it, Eisia steadied herself. She evened out her breathing.

When your mind shook, your momentum faltered. So Eisia ignored it. No, she widened her mind until she could understand it.

"Fine. So this is that absurd talent Ruagarne talked about?"

"I got lucky."

A common excuse. It sounded like a taunt. One corner of Eisia's mouth lifted.

"People tell you your way of talking is annoying, don't they?"

"Sometimes?"

"Yeah. You're annoying."

"Thanks for the compliment."

She would not beat Enkrid with words. Even in the knight order, there were not many who could run their mouths like this.

So Eisia let her sword speak for her.

Sword-Tip Aim was not all she had.

Even if a technique was broken, mastery did not shoot up overnight.

That was a fact. Yet before ten exchanges had passed, Eisia's common sense began to crack.

Enkrid's technique now showed a level of completion it never had before.

His swordsmanship, once lacking precision, had grown refined.

For example, the gap in his deflect-and-counter had narrowed. Before, he overbent his wrist and gave opponents time to prepare. Not anymore.

From the angle of his wrist to the force used to deflect and push aside, everything was just right. Precision showed in every motion.

Unbelievable.

Was this the kind of talent that made your tongue click on its own?

At this level, his talent surpassed those she called seniors in the knight order.

Eisia deflected his thrust, saw his sword curve like a snake, and had to move her feet to evade it.

His responses were faster than before, and his feel for timing had improved as well.

He had not merely broken Sword-Tip Aim.

How?

Had he found some great teacher and swung his sword to death for months?

The shocks kept coming, but Eisia steadied herself again.

"What is Will?"

It was heart, conviction, and will.

How could someone broken in heart win in reality?

She used her master's words to steady herself. That was what Eisia did.

Those words worked in Enkrid's current situation too.

He had steadied his own heart by saying he did not want to kill Eisia.

Eisia did the same in real time.

As expected, a squire's mindset was different.

"Hah!"

She blew her stray thoughts away with a shout. Pivoting on her right foot, she drove that rotational force into the sword in her right hand and thrust.

It was the third Will technique, after Pressure and Illusionary Sword.

High-Speed Thrust.

A technique similar to Enkrid's Momentary Will.

It was also one of the knight order's fundamentals.

Speed was always truth.

Clang!

Enkrid took the thrust on the flat of his Gladius.

He did it by using Momentary Will himself.

This too.

Back when they sparred before, even when he used Will, he used it in rigid, separate beats.

The breakpoints were obvious. When he used Momentary Will, he needed visible setup. It showed in his form.

But not now.

"You blocked that?"

"Think it's luck and try again."

At some point, both of them were smiling. Enkrid spoke as he chopped down, and Eisia feinted a horizontal block, then slipped away.

As his blade lost its line and cut through empty air, she came in with High-Speed Thrust again.

Enkrid twisted his body. The sword tip grazed his cheek by a hair.

Skin split with a tiny tear, and droplets of blood scattered.

They clashed, swinging and contesting blades. Enkrid had surpassed Eisia's Sword-Tip Aim, but he failed to completely overpower her.

To be exact, it was a draw.

If both had truly meant to kill, one of them might have died, but neither intended that.

So it ended with both of them exhausted and wounded.

Enkrid was stabbed in the left upper arm and could not raise it. Eisia took a deep cut to her calf, reducing her mobility.

After they stepped apart and paused for a moment, Eisia asked:

"What are you, really?"

Then she spoke again, unable to hide how absurd this felt.

"No, damn it, why are you smiling?"

From Eisia's view, Enkrid was grinning from ear to ear.

That alone was ridiculous.

There was a limit to enjoying a fight. Smiling in a situation like this meant something in his head had to be broken.

By then the sun was setting. The light through the window faded, and dusk began to settle in.

Eisia frowned. Even then, Enkrid was still smiling.

Did he lose his mind while fighting?

Maybe he really had.

Looking at Eisia, Enkrid spoke.

"I'm so excited I could die."

"What?"

What was he talking about?

Enkrid's eyes looked as if they still held the vanished sunlight. In them burned a light made of passion and fervor.

Then he finished.

"I'm going insane with joy because there's still a way to climb higher."

He meant it. Pure joy, without a trace of impurity.

Enkrid had gone beyond Sense of Evasion and Sense of Attack, adding finer precision to his senses.

Even though the techniques he had learned had each advanced by a step, he still could not completely overpower Eisia.

That was why.

There was still farther to go, more to temper, more to climb, and he could see it, feel it at his fingertips.

That made him unbearably happy.

"You crazy bastard."

Eisia calmly named what he was.

He heard that often.

* * *

"That is not a wall."

The Boatman appeared in his dream. Lately he seemed freer than before.

Enkrid could not answer. It was a dream. More like a passing afterimage in a single instant.

Still, it was an afterimage that remained vivid in memory.

No matter what happened, he felt he should follow the Boatman's words.

"Kill her."

Someone gave that order, and it felt like he had to obey.

Enkrid cheerfully ignored all of it.

"What a ridiculously good morning."

Before sunrise, Enkrid muttered to himself and went outside.

Rem, half awake and squinting after being roused from sleep, watched his back and tilted his head.

"Why are you crazy first thing in the morning?"

A dark mood had been spreading since last night, so what exactly was supposed to be good?

That was what Rem meant, but Enkrid did not care.

He kept going, training his body with the Isolation Technique. His thoughts lined up on their own and reached a conclusion.

Thoughts about walls.

A wall was a condition.

If the condition was killing that thrust freak.

There were times when the condition was simply surviving.

There were times when the condition was just taking a knight's sword once.

In all those todays, had there ever been only one path?

No.

So this time was the same.

No matter what the Boatman said, Enkrid did what he always did.

In other words, whatever he wanted.

A little later, Esther shifted into human form and said she was heading out. Seeing that, Enkrid said:

"Bring melon on your way back."

Melon was a precious fruit from the south. Hard to get on this side of the continent.

"You get worse every day."

Esther said it flatly and moved on, deciding it was impossible to understand that human.

"Why are you so excited? You look like you're about to take off."

They had not known each other for just a day or two. Rem could see his captain was more excited than ever.

Jaxon noticed too and watched with an odd look. Dunbakel kept losing focus for some reason, and Ragna had never been the type to care about things like this.

It made sense for him to be excited. Naturally.

A heavy weight had been tied to his heart, and now it was gone.

When you wore sandbags and took them off, your body felt lighter.

On top of that, he could see the path ahead, and walking it was deeply enjoyable.

"Ah, just thinking about knocking someone down makes my heart race."

Enkrid said.

Rem obviously could not understand what he meant, but he did not press.

Soon a Palace Security Commissioner appeared, and after watching Enkrid smack him in the head and knock him out, Rem only asked:

"Was this the one you meant you'd knock down?"

Had he known the Palace Security Commissioner was coming?

That was what Rem's question meant.

Enkrid smiled.