WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 447

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"Enki. Wave."

It was afternoon, the sun not yet down.

Eisia's words came like a summons. Enkrid loosened his grip on his sword.

Ruagarne had just been unwinding the whip from her waist, saying she would show him how Frog fought.

"Let's go. You won't see something like this every day."

Ruagarne wound the whip back around her waist and said it.

Enkrid agreed, and everyone followed.

"Off to watch a godforsaken place. Godforsaken, godforsaken, gooooodforsaken."

Rem hummed as he fell into step. Dunbakel dragged her feet and opened her mouth.

"Fine, let's go. The Cursed Ground. Oh, how thrilling."

Her voice held no thrill at all.

Enkrid half-jogged northwest through the city, his mind drifting to the junior knight he had seen on the Azpen battlefield. How his heart had hammered watching that red-cloaked figure sprint. That had been a junior knight. This was a knight. And it was real combat, not a spar.

It would be a lie to say he wasn't looking forward to it.

They arrived at the western gate. Two massive doors, each carved whole from stone. He almost wanted to ask how anyone had managed it.

About thirty soldiers had gathered, all carrying longbows, standing in a line along the top of the wall.

"You made it. First time seeing a gate like this?"

Aoara greeted Enkrid with a smile in front of the closed gate.

"Did you carve it yourself?"

"No. My grandfather did."

That sounded like a story. Not one he would hear right now.

"Hey! Rowena's man, show us some guts!"

A shout from outside the gate.

"Open it."

Aoara told the four thick-armed soldiers standing by the gate, then tapped Enkrid on the arm.

"Just watch from the wall today. Look forward to it, one man's devotion is about to show us a miracle!"

She called it to Enkrid, then turned and shouted toward the opening gate.

Enkrid did as she said. He put his foot on the stone steps leading up to the wall. Brick steps, rising steeply. The railing on the far side came up to chest height.

He gripped the railing and climbed. No dust on it at all. Proof that hands swept it every day as people came and went.

"Well now. Looks like a public execution."

Rem said it as he climbed up behind him, eyes lit like someone who had just found something entertaining.

"You think that's funny?"

Dunbakel showed something close to irritation, rare for her. She was the type who would sooner let Rem beat her half to death and fake a limp than show that kind of feeling.

Enkrid could tell the scene ahead had prodded some old wound in Dunbakel, but he let it pass. That was something she would have to handle herself.

"Yeah, it's funny."

Rem laughed.

Dunbakel shut her mouth and stuck her lip out in a pout.

Ruagarne said nothing and ate a dried bug. It was good to see her enjoy the creatures near the Cursed Ground as a delicacy. Tipping the tavern owner a few more silver coins for that would not be a bad idea.

Gurgle.

Snap.

Ruagarne shot out her tongue and swallowed the bug whole. The long tongue coiled around it and pulled it in, and somehow, watching it enough times, even that started to look almost endearing.

"Is it good?"

"Want one?"

Rem asked, and Ruagarne opened her palm.

A white bug sat on her slick, mucus-coated skin. A pupa.

Rem did not eat it.

Enkrid's gaze moved right along the wall. He could see Eisia climbing up on the far side. Their eyes met. She tilted her chin forward. Just watch, it seemed to say.

He looked at her once, then turned away.

"Oa!"

A shout from beyond the gate. Someone's battle cry.

"Oa!"

The soldiers lined up on either side answered in unison.

Thud!

The soldiers on the wall, longbows in hand, stamped their feet with each call.

"Damn it, I'll do it. If I say I'll do it, I'll do it!"

A single soldier standing out front shouted it.

The Wave had not even started, but Enkrid felt a prickling across his skin, something almost like foreboding.

From the top of the wall, the land beyond stretched out, and past the human side lay a deep gray forest. That was what happened to a place soaked in the miasma Demon Creatures gave off. That was why it was the Cursed Ground.

The ground directly in front of the wall was reddish-brown, but the soil darkened steadily toward the Cursed Ground. In front of the gray trees it looked nearly black, like rot. It smelled faintly of decay, like something left to spoil.

A mound of earth jutted up near the forest's edge like a burial hill, marking what seemed to be the tree line. Demon Creatures began crawling out from in front of it.

Grooooooooo.

The cry rolled through the ground and carried through the air and struck the wall.

To Enkrid's eyes, the sound became a spear, hurled from the Demon Creatures and stopped cold by the stone before him. His Sensory Technique had sharpened so far that he no longer just felt killing intent. He saw it.

All those hours standing his ground against a knight had not been wasted.

He could make out the mass of Demon Creatures beyond the gray trees. Some crawled out on all fours with arms too long to hold upright. Some had mouths split wide to either side, drooling. Some had two heads. Every one of them had long claws, and a few had toenails even longer than their fingernails. One of those walked on its hands, using its feet only for balance, tapping them against the ground now and then.

Split skin that showed the grain of the muscle underneath. Ghouls. Cannibals that fed on human flesh.

The spit-spewing Ghoul from the Colony he had dealt with before had been strange enough. Here there were things stranger still.

"The Cursed Ground evolves Demon Creatures."

Ruagarne had said that. He understood it now in a single look. And there were so many of them.

In just a short time, more than fifty had crawled out. Past the gray trees, as if hidden behind a black curtain, nothing was visible. And Ghouls kept coming from inside.

There was a reason they called it a Wave. Right now it looked like a mild tide, but the moment those things started running, it would become a true wave.

They were not ordinary Ghouls, of course. Even in the Cursed Ground, common Ghouls surely existed. But these had formed a Colony. They had colonized within the Cursed Ground, creatures gathered to claim land, chew flesh and crack bones and drink blood.

Different.

Under normal conditions, three or four soldiers was a safe number to take down one Ghoul. Experienced soldiers might manage two. But against these Ghouls? He estimated you would need at least ten soldiers in a proper formation, and veterans only.

Even then, get careless and a few would be torn apart and killed.

One Ghoul reached down, grabbed a stone from the ground, and crushed it to powder.

Underestimate them and you die. Were common soldiers supposed to fight things like this? Not a chance.

The sunlight seemed to dim. Out near the Cursed Ground, sunlight genuinely did not fall properly. The Cursed Ground seemed to reject it. The gray trees, the dark brown-black soil, everything made it look that way.

It was time for fear to arrive. Seeing hundreds of Ghouls crawling out of the Cursed Ground, you could feel it coming.

Grooooooo.

Their cry was like soot rising from underground. Low, thick, leaving a mark.

How does a person stand against fear that runs across the ground?

If it were him, Enkrid would draw his sword.

"Oh, shove it."

Rem sneered.

"Why are they holding a public execution?"

Dunbakel retreated into denial.

"This is your first time seeing Ghouls from the Cursed Ground, and your first time watching the people who fight here. Watch closely."

Ruagarne kept trying to pass something on to Enkrid. She seemed to have made it her goal to teach and teach again, right up until the moment before death. Maybe she thought that if she did not, nothing she taught would stick even one lesson deep.

An answer rose against the soot-scream from underground, from behind Rowena's man, below the wall.

"Oa!"

The same call as before. A shout standing against the soot that rose from the earth.

"Smile!"

After the call came that word, and the soldiers on the wall stamped down with a heavy thud as they cried the creed of these people, the mindset of those who faced the Cursed Ground.

"Die smiling!"

Every one of them was a person of Aoara, the smiling knight. So they would die smiling.

"I love you, Rowena!"

The soldier at the front, the one who had lost the bet, shouted it. Aoara was a person of her word. She had said it lightly, but she kept it faithfully.

A knight was someone who kept what they said out loud. That was a vow.

The Will was willpower, and willpower came from conviction. Someone who did not keep their own words could not properly use the Will they carried as a knight.

Groooo!

The underground cry raced across the surface.

The Ghoul horde charged.

Black eyes tore through the light. Greedy tongues searched for red blood and soft flesh.

Groooo!

To Enkrid's eyes, Rowena's man had the skill of an upper-tier soldier even by Border Guard standards. A soldier who would pull his own weight right away even in the Frontier Guard at Martai. But not someone who could hold off a Demon Creature wave alone. Still, he did not fall back.

From atop the wall Enkrid could not see the soldier's face, but when a spirited shout rang out from what he assumed was Rowena..."If you make it back, to hell with it, let's get married!", he knew exactly what expression the man was wearing.

He was smiling. And if he died, he would die smiling.

"You going down?"

Enkrid had already put one hand on top of the wall without noticing. Rem had seen it and asked.

"Maybe?"

He had always lived by where his heart led him. So that soldier was not going to die today.

Enkrid pressed his weight into the hand on the wall. It was high enough to give him a rough landing, and he was carrying quite a bit, but it would not be impossible.

"Looks like you won't need to."

Rem added it and flicked his eyes in a direction.

Below the wall, behind Rowena's man, someone who had been shouting launched forward first.

Not a quick and nimble sprint. A heavy, stomping run.

Thud, thud, pounding the earth for speed. The figure passed the soldier, carved a long line through the air, and arrived in front of the Ghouls.

Heavy as the stride had looked, the figure was faster than the Ghouls that had been charging forward on all fours.

It was just as Rowena's man met the first Ghoul head-on.

"I love you, Rowena!"

The soldier confessed one last time in the most lovesick way possible and drove his spear in. He had no attention to spare for whoever had come up behind him. He focused on killing the Ghoul.

The spear technique he showed was genuinely skilled.

Thwack. The speartip punched into the skull of a Ghoul lunging up from below. Calm. Clean. He drove it in properly.

The soldier tried to pull the spear free, gave up, and grabbed another one he had planted in the ground at an angle. Only then did he realize someone had come forward from behind him.

He shouted.

"Good start!"

The figure who had charged in looked familiar to Enkrid too, even from the top of the wall.

Squire Oliver.

"Oliver of the Hexagonal Mace!"

One of the soldiers lined along the wall called it out.

Oliver had an epithet, and he was in the middle of earning it right now.

Six Ghouls had charged. The soldier had killed one. Five remained.

Oliver held a long rod with a metal ball at the end. The head was hexagonal.

He slowed his run slightly, then kicked off the ground and hurled himself into the middle of the Ghouls. The change in pace kept them from reacting in time. A sound approach. Oliver swung the mace inside that space.

Bam, bam, bang!

Like a string of fireworks going off.

The mace cracked and crushed Ghoul skulls. Black blood and bone fragments sprayed into the air.

Oliver had not gone out alone.

"The bet's settled. Get back."

He pushed the soldier behind him.

The number of squires in Thousand Bricks was four. Each was close enough to a junior knight, though not quite there, better to call them all capable fighters.

With Oliver leading, the other three moved. Their weapons were similar in type.

One carried a flail: a spiked iron ball connected to a rod by a chain.

Another had a Morningstar, the same without the chain.

The last swung a war hammer with a long handle.

The four squires formed a line and pushed forward, swinging their weapons.

Crack, split, crunch, snap.

Bones broke and blood flew. From the middle of the fight, the four squires shouted.

"Die smiling!"

Enkrid thought of the charging junior knight he had seen on the Azpen battlefield. These fighters also wore red cloaks. It made his skin tingle just as much as that sprint had.

He resented Aoara's order to just watch.

He could have ignored it and gone down anyway. But there was no gap, no opening.

"Move."

Aoara went first.

The knight moved out with two of her junior knights at her side.

"Now it's getting fun."

Rem muttered. His hands were probably itching too.

Dunbakel pulled her chin in and pressed herself against the wall.

The two junior knights moved. The man used something shaped like a thick broad sword, though you could not call it a sword no matter how hard you tried. It had a handle and no guard, just a long, thick slab of metal with a rounded surface. He might as well have been carrying an iron pillar. He swung it like a wooden practice sword.

It was not a wooden sword.

Bang!

A single swing and three or four Ghouls were torn apart and sent flying.

The short blond junior knight fought entirely differently. She flicked thin daggers with a toss or drew a narrow awl-shaped blade, stabbed, and stepped back. Her style made no sound you could hear from the wall. The destructive force was different, but the lethality was about the same.

Groooa!

A Ghoul's cry came out sounding like a scream. Green smoke leaked from the nostrils punched into its face where no bridge of a nose existed, then black blood started pouring down. Then it swallowed once. The skull had not burst, but it went face-first into the ground.

"Oh?"

Rem reacted when he saw it. He seemed to recognize something.

And then there was Knight Aoara.

From within the Ghoul Wave, deeper inside, a creature stepped forward. Sagging, swaying, female in form. A Ghoula. The female Ghoul leading the pack.

It extended one arm toward Aoara. The limb stretched like soft tissue, boneless, and stabbed forward. Even from the wall, Enkrid saw it cross the friendly line in the blink of an eye. Watching from a distance, he could understand that the arm was stretching. If it had happened right in front of him, the shock alone would have slowed his block. That was how fast it was.

That one thing alone told you everything. This was a monster that could hold its own against a junior knight.

Down the corridor carved by the four squires and two junior knights smashing and stabbing through hundreds of Ghouls, the Ghoula's arm shot out.

In Enkrid's field of view, Aoara's back appeared. The knight swung her sword.

A diagonal rising cut, from low to high.

Done in place, it would have meant nothing.

But what followed gave it meaning.

Aoara stepped forward in time with the rising sword. Her body moved ahead. The knight's blade cut through the Ghoula's arm at an angle.

The stroke was not over.

Simple. The most direct line. The line connecting two points.

Enkrid had done this plenty of times himself, but never like that. Aoara marked a point where she stood, placed another point on a Demon Creature dozens of steps away, and drew the line. There was no other way to say it.

Swick. Crack.

Aoara left afterimages between the start and the end. The first, where she had kicked off from the ground. The middle, where she had cut the Ghoula's arm. The last, where she split it from chest to crown and brought her sword up high above her head.

"Nowhere to run."

Aoara said it.

The Ghoula died.

Enkrid shuddered.

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