WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 432: Like Black Lightning

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Enkrid did not spend his time waiting for Ragna idly.

That was only natural. He had always been that kind of man.

It was the same now. He had called Rem out, grinding sword against axe.

Clang!

A silver-edged axe blocked Aker's diagonal strike and shoved the sword away.

Enkrid tightened his arm, twisted at the waist, and let the force slide past him.

Rem caught it, feinted as if pulling his axe back, then chopped straight down.

Bang!

Their weapons met and split again.

Sparks spat between the blades.

Neither side gave even an inch on offense or defense.

After that, they kept trading techniques and counters.

It was a brutal conversation between sword and axe, with no room to breathe. No human could survive without breath.

Both men drove their stamina to the limit, enough to make their vision spin.

This was already the twelfth time they had reached this point. Hours of fierce sparring had gone by, enough to leave even Enkrid panting.

Rem was no different.

"Hoo, huh, watch closely."

Rem stepped back as he spoke, then rounded his lips.

In that posture, he sucked in a breath. His ragged breathing settled. His heaving shoulders calmed.

By instinct, Enkrid read the line the axe would draw from Rem's shoulder.

As expected, Rem swung.

No, it did not end with one swing.

Enkrid barely met it with Aker.

Clang!

The edges crossed. Enkrid twisted away at once.

Rem's axe work kept coming, impossible for someone who had just been gasping for breath.

Rem's axes had always been vicious, sharp, fast, and heavy.

Whenever an axe made from absurdly light steel came flying in without recoil, it sent a chill down the back of the neck.

Now it was even worse.

He had been panting, then suddenly did this?

Between the rapid, recoil-less strikes, the other axe came in too, off-beat.

The axes in both hands shattered tempo and rhythm and pressed him without pause. Enkrid blocked with Aker and Gladius, feeling as if he were catching every raindrop in a storm with bare hands.

This was not the kind of attack you could stop just because you saw it coming.

Rem was still holding back.

If he had not, this exchange alone could have taken at least one of Enkrid's arms.

"You squeeze it out when you think it's over. I call it Handful of Breath."

After saying that, Rem breathed even harder than before. His complexion had turned a dull purple. He had held his breath and poured out every last bit of strength from his whole body.

Rem still taught more through action than words.

That was easier for both the teacher and the learner.

After steadying his breath, Rem spoke again.

"Use it wrong, and your heart can burst and kill you. Or your blood vessels burst and kill you. Damn, sometimes it even feels like your lifespan gets shorter."

It was far more dangerous than Heart of Superhuman Strength.

Originally, it was a technique used while protecting the body with sorcery, but Rem had modified it and used it this way.

He could do that because of what he had recently realized while drawing on sorcery.

And this was a technique that crazy captain bastard in front of him could probably use even better than he could.

"If you want to land even one hit, learn it and come at me."

His spar with Ragna was in two days.

Rem was making it clear he would help.

Enkrid had no reason to refuse, so he accepted. He got up in the morning, loosened his body with the Isolation Technique, then learned Handful of Breath from Rem.

Rem also gave advice in between.

"I was born ambidextrous, but captain, you aren't."

"What are you trying to say?"

While teaching Enkrid, Rem kept honing himself too. Anyone could see it.

He trained harder than ever, sweat pouring down.

Because of that, Dunbakel was having a miserable time too, and the unit Enkrid had told her to form had been pushed aside.

Enkrid did not force the issue.

Dunbakel was not the type to do it just because someone pressured her.

Kraiss also thought building the unit was not urgent.

"Troop organization matters, but there is no chance of war right away. Nothing will happen for at least a year."

That was how long it took a king to stabilize a country.

More than that, after seeing Border Guard policy, Naurillia was setting up outposts in every city connected to the capital.

The kingdom and the Border Guard were developing in the same direction.

Of course, Enkrid spent that time swinging his sword instead.

Anyway, Rem was swinging his axes more faithfully than ever, unit creation or not.

He was sparring Enkrid through all of that, so Rem's explanation could be a little rough.

"Right now, it isn't really about using both hands. It's this."

"Explanation, hoo, hhhup, give me more."

Enkrid tapped the ground with his sword tip, steadied his breath, and spoke.

Rem thought for a moment, then asked,

"Uh, can you write with your left hand?"

He could not.

He could draw Spark with his left hand and activate Swift Will, but he could not write with it.

"If you're going to use both hands, use both properly. If it's sloppy, it's worse than not using it."

He had no intention of forcing himself to always fight with a weapon in each hand. Still, Rem was right.

If he had something, he had to use it properly.

Otherwise, it meant nothing.

Now, only opponents who demanded at least that level were left.

Two days passed quickly, but this time Enkrid stalled. Ruagarne stopped him.

Of course, that happened because Enkrid agreed.

"Delay the spar longer. You'll ask why, right? Fine. You know your skill won't jump dramatically from just a few more days. But you can temper your mindset. You can't throw away what you learned from the Mercenary King, can you?"

Ruagarne never gave the answer first.

Realizing it alone came first. She helped that process, but she never handed over the answer from the start.

That was Ruagarne's way.

Enkrid delayed for a few more days.

During that time, he practiced writing and eating with his left hand in parallel.

"If you've made your muscles flexible and firm, using them is what gives them meaning, brother-nim."

Audin helped Enkrid too.

Enkrid learned a few more Valaf-style Grappling techniques.

One joint lock and one striking move.

Not every technique could have a name.

Ragna just watched in silence.

In that time, Enkrid reached the point where he could write letters with his left hand, though his handwriting was awful.

He had to send a reply to a royal letter anyway.

When Kraiss saw that, he asked what the king's letter had said.

"What does it say?"

Surely it was about checking the King of the East and promising this and that.

Had the letter not arrived after news of the Mercenary King came in?

When he saw the letter arrive, Kraiss had quietly worried.

His prediction was way off.

"It's just him complaining that he sat on the throne and it's one hell of a job."

"Complaining?"

He nodded.

At a time like this?

Was Crang strange, or was his captain strange?

Kraiss had no way of knowing.

Anyway, it was a reply to that letter.

The kind that said, if you chose to do it, then do it properly.

Enkrid set down the quill in his left hand and clenched and opened his hand.

'Not enough.'

He could not use his left hand like his right overnight. Still, he felt he understood what Ruagarne meant. So he rose from his seat and headed outside.

The sun was high overhead, and the day was brighter than any other. Not a single cloud, and the smell of heat stung his nose.

The scent of heated stone, dry soil, and fresh grass mixed together. It was not a bad day.

He and Ragna had said two days, but it happened after a full week.

Ragna had waited without complaint.

In that time, Ragna became certain he could control his sword perfectly.

Even when he swung with full force, he could stop after cutting only a single strand of hair. He could stop cleanly enough not to leave even a red mark on skin.

If they had done it after two days, the spar might have ended with an arm cut off. Not now.

"You waited a long time."

They stood in the center of the training ground. Ragna swung his sword alone in that same spot every day.

From the outside, it did not look like he was training some grand sword art. If anything, it looked sloppier than before.

Rem sat off to one side with his arms crossed, on a chair he had made himself.

Next to him sat Audin on a huge stone he had dragged from somewhere and used as a seat.

Dunbakel, Teresa, Pel, and Ropord were also watching.

Jaxon was absent again today, and Esther was too.

Both were busy with many things.

Enkrid did not care about anyone's gaze.

He raised his sword and aimed. Aker's tip became a single point aimed at his opponent.

Pressure, force built on willpower, reached Ragna.

Ragna was unaffected.

To Enkrid's eyes, Ragna did not feel intimidating at all. He looked weaker than before.

"If you miss it, you die."

The instant those words left Ragna's mouth, it happened.

It was outside perception. He could not see it with the Eye That Sees One Inch Ahead, and only his sixth sense barely caught it.

Before he knew it, Ragna's black blade had cut across his thigh.

The slash came in at an unexpected angle.

It was also too fast and too perfectly timed to even try blocking with Aker.

Relying on his sixth sense, Enkrid barely managed to shift his center of gravity backward. Because of that, his body tilted back, and the wound was not fatal.

The black edge of the blade passed over his thin pants. Blood slowly soaked the cloth from the torn spot.

He understood from that one strike.

"Knight?"

Enkrid said.

"At the threshold."

Ragna stayed calm. Rem, watching, found that calm attitude even more irritating and spoke.

"You spenadul bastard."

Spenadul was a western word. A direct translation was a bastard who would smoke tobacco with his anus.

In western usage, it carried the deeper meaning of wanting something while doing something completely pointless, though in the west it was commonly just an insult for a lazy bum.

Naturally, nobody understood what he said.

Even if they had, they would not have reacted.

Ragna calmly raised the black blade. The black greatsword made of enormously heavy darksteel sat in one hand, yet it looked lighter than a rapier.

If he swung it like that, the edge looked like it might bend like a whip.

He did not project overt pressure, but anyone looking at Ragna right now would feel like stepping back.

His sword looked like an unavoidable heavenly punishment, like a black thunderbolt about to fall from the sky.

He had not swung yet, but everyone watching could already see the force of the strike he was about to unleash.

Audin's brow tightened slightly. It was not a slash he could block while bound by a Prohibition Seal.

Teresa saw a vision of her shield splitting before the sword even fell.

Cold sweat ran down Dunbakel's body.

She saw her own death. It was a slash she should never face if she wanted to live.

The veins stood out on the hand with which Pel held Idolslayer.

Ropord remembered the true knight from the knight order he had seen exactly once.

Ropord had seen it right too.

Ruagarne stood to one side, silently watching Enkrid.

Everyone was tense.

That was what a knight was. A natural disaster that changed the very air around it just by existing. A calamity.

What if that calamity stood in front of you with a sword in hand? What if that sword was aimed at you?

Frog's bulging eyes did not leave Enkrid, not Ragna, who had reached the threshold of knighthood.

To be exact, she could not look away.

'He's smiling?'

Enkrid smiled.

It was the same smile he had worn when the Boatman first told him he would die, the wall would stop him, and he should repeat this day.

No one could have known, but it was true.

Enkrid smiled.

Whoosh.

The black thunderbolt came without thunder.

A thunderless blade looked ready to split Enkrid in two.

Clang!

Of course, that did not happen.

Drip.

Enkrid raised his sword over his forehead to block, got driven back, and cut his forehead on the blade he was holding. Beads of blood ran down.

Right before the black thunderbolt fell, he had crossed Aker and Gladius to block it.

The timing was razor-thin, but he blocked it.

He had twisted Gladius in a hurry, scraping the skin on his forehead, and that was why blood ran.

The blood running in beads was not little, and Enkrid's face turned red.

Even so, he did not close his eyes.

No sudden enlightenment came.

Still.

Enkrid had spent his whole life searching for methods, losing the path, and wandering for signposts.

He was a madman who had stitched together shattered, torn dreams and made it this far.

That was why this moment made him happy.

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