A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 457

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 457: You Might As Well Dance

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"Bows up!"

The command rang out, one Millio had heard a thousand times before. Drunk on the same surge of feeling as every other soldier on the wall, the commander still did his job.

Millio's eyes snapped to one side.

A mass of Demon Creatures had broken away from the forest and come forward in a tight clump.

The soldiers on the wall saw it and felt something close to relief.

So did Millio. Here was something worth pouring all that burning heat into, the kind that could set the whole body on fire.

"Aim!"

The commander's shout ran the length of the wall. Squad leaders echoed it back.

"Aim!"

Arrows were nocked, angles adjusted, sights leveled. Composite bows, strung with braided sinew and built from the bones of Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures, were drawn back.

Creeeeak.

Millio held the taut string and waited for the order.

Every soldier kept to their post.

The commander was busy reading the Demon Creatures, counting numbers as they charged.

Night made it nearly impossible. He squinted and focused and still could not see clearly.

One of his soldiers loosed a fire arrow.

It cut a low arc and landed among the enemy mass with a dull thud.

The Demon Creatures did not care. The fire arrow could do no real damage anyway. Black earth swallowed the flame. The blaze died in seconds.

One fire arrow was never going to light up the field.

"Good enough. Where it landed is roughly the middle of them. The numbers are manageable. Not that many."

For Twin Red Moons, at least.

Aoara swallowed the last part. She stood on the wall with her arms crossed, not moving.

The commander heard her and nodded.

The fire arrow they had all just watched would serve as their shared reference point. They would aim by memory.

"Fire!"

A flag dropped with his word.

Crack!

Wind, red moonlight, torchlight, long shadows, all of it tangled together. The commander, who had been watching only for the flag to fall beside the drawn archers, opened his mouth.

"Loose!"

A fine archer was someone who could hit what they aimed at.

A fine archer unit was a different creature entirely.

They were not marksmen. They were soldiers who put arrows exactly where they were told.

And these were fine, well-drilled troops. A bow company.

Arrows split the dark and poured down onto the charging mass of Demon Creatures.

Heated, hammered arrowheads punched into spiders from above and buried themselves in the earth.

* * *

Fwiiiiing!

Enkrid heard the cutting sound overhead. Arrows in flight.

The sound was coming from the friendly side, not the enemy.

What did that tell him?

That Rem and Dunbakel had done exactly what they were supposed to.

It was not only Millio and the other soldiers who had been stirred up. Romen and Eisia moved fast, and so did the short blond and the four Squires.

"We hold here."

Romen ground his teeth and said it.

"All four, rally on me."

The short blond junior knight stepped into the middle of the four Squires and took command. Her weapons were a short blade and poison.

The right call.

Romen and Eisia fell into step with each other.

Romen became the bold spearhead driving straight through, and Eisia became the shield that knocked aside spider legs trying to slip past the gap. A pair that suited each other well.

The Demon Creatures were thick in number, and the Twin Red Moons were up.

"Kill them all."

Romen did not hide the killing intent rising off him. He turned his back to a torch and brought his sword down.

Whoosh, crash!

His great club of a blade crushed six spiders at once.

That came after Eisia had cut in fast, swept a few aside, and herded them together.

Killing and striking, over and over. In the midst of it all, Enkrid felt something slide into range from outside his awareness.

Something sharp, coming up from below.

His lower stomach went cold. It was aiming for his gut.

He caught it just in time. His hand moved on reflex, dragging the Gladius out to swat it away. Left wrist rotating, a deflect-and-redirect combined in a single motion.

Clang, skreeee!

The redirect failed. Whatever was driving that single stabbing line carried weight behind it like a giant's blow.

Enkrid twisted at the waist.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

Flesh stayed intact, barely. The outer surface of the armor ground away, and that was it.

Without the bandage armor, he would have lost a chunk of meat at minimum.

What had come in was a Demon Creature's forearm, reshaped into a blade, tipped with poison-coated claws.

A Ghoul.

Its name was..."Jerix!"

Aoara's shout came down from the wall.

If he left it alone, she would come down and fight. Then today would be no different from every other repetition.

So from here on.

'I dig in.'

He would be stubborn about it. He just had to be Ragna finding his path.

In other words, Enkrid had no intention of giving this fight up.

"Romen! I'm making a bet!"

The shout burst out of him.

As it happened, something very similar had just popped up in front of Romen too.

A spider swordsman. A monster using all eight arms like blades.

Everyone froze. The creature carried an aura as overwhelming as a knight's.

In the middle of that shock, a shadow rose from behind the cluster of Squires.

An Owlbear.

Enkrid had not predicted every piece of this. But one thing he knew: whenever this kind of stage was set, the Owlbear always went for the weakest point first.

If troops had come out in front of the wall, it would have gone for them first. Every time.

So right now it was targeting the Squires.

He had worked that out before the shadow even started to rise, so as he shouted to Romen, he was already tilting his body halfway backward.

His eyes swept across the four Squires.

Torchlight, shadow, red moonlight, the short blond, the positions of all four Squires.

He took it all in at once and also caught the shape flickering behind Oliver.

Oliver had been gasping and wearing down for a while now. His endurance was weak.

That was what the Owlbear had spotted.

Enkrid swung his gaze back and at the same time planted his right foot out to the side, turning his hips in a half-circle. With the rotation he extended his left arm forward. The sword in that hand stood perpendicular to the ground, then became a disc splitting red moonlight as it carved through the air.

Whoooosh!

The moment the sword left his hand, rather than trying to recover his balance, Enkrid just kept spinning. A full turn. Aker came around in a horizontal sweep.

Clang! Thud!

Two sounds hit his ears at the same instant.

One from the Owlbear's direction. One from right in front of his nose.

Aker had struck the Ghoul's claws as they lunged for the gap, and the Owlbear had raised the arm it was swinging, crossed it in front of its chest, and blocked.

A few feathers were torn loose and dark blood ran, but the wound was not fatal.

The Gladius had bounced off to the side and hit the ground.

Somehow, lately, it seemed he had not actually cleaved anything with that blade, but it had done its part well enough.

Enkrid raised Aker horizontally up past his face.

Blue eyes caught the light, glinting through the blade and into the red moonlight.

The Ghoul, claws stopped, stepped back once.

Was it thrown off by having its attack blocked?

It did not have that kind of mind.

This was a monster that had learned to kill through pure instinct alone.

Still, it was something.

The name Jerix fit this one.

"He's lost it."

Ruagarne's murmur came a beat later.

He understood what she meant. He had turned his back on a knight-level Demon Creature to save his allies. That was insane by any standard.

Which was exactly why it felt so good.

'Damn, this is great.'

Enkrid did not bother hiding it. No reason to.

He was smashing apart what those creatures wanted, one piece at a time.

That was genuinely satisfying. And being able to fight like this was its own reward.

Enkrid smiled.

So far, it had gone the way he planned.

But would all of it go exactly as he intended?

Unlikely.

'You can't know everything in advance.'

Things never went completely to plan. Of course they did not.

Today repeated, but it could never be the exact same today every time.

There were things that did not change, though.

'Ghoul, Owlbear, spider swordsman.'

Three types of Demon Creatures. The rotten pack. The offerings designed to hunt knights. Those were fixed.

After them came the thing calling itself a fragment of Balrok, and the board it had laid out was fixed too.

So what was his part to play?

He had already decided.

"Your mother really must have been a Ghoul."

Enkrid said something meaningless. The Ghoul exhaled a rattling breath.

There was something like venom in that breath.

Poison on the claws, poison in the mouth.

"Brush your teeth before you go out."

Another piece of nonsense.

"You doing all right?" Ruagarne asked.

He was doing fine. This was, if anything, like warming up before a real workout. A ritual before the main ceremony.

Verbal provocation did not land on an enemy that could not understand it, but the physical kind had clearly hit home.

Look at that. The provocation was plain enough: you could come at him from the front all you wanted, because he had just taken a swing at the Owlbear behind him and he still was not going to lose to something like this Ghoul.

Grrrr.

The Ghoul exhaled again. Things had not gone the way it wanted, and the creature's frustration was palpable. Enkrid grinned wider.

"Are you trying to earn yourself the nickname Smiling Enkrid?"

Even Ruagarne was on edge.

The creature was worth that much.

Enkrid held onto his smile and thought about his goal.

Get Aoara out of this with her arms and legs intact and her energy unspent.

Get her out of this still smiling.

If what the enemy wanted was an Aoara who no longer smiled, a hollow shell drained of will, then Enkrid would show them an Aoara filled to the brim.

"What's the bet?"

Romen's voice finally came through.

He was watching the front and asking at the same time.

Enkrid felt Aoara approaching from behind. She made no effort to hide herself. Her Pressure radiated outward in every direction, pressing down on whatever lay ahead. This time, everything in its path was on the Demon Creature side.

Some of the spider creatures nearby saw her and bounced backward.

She had not even drawn her sword.

"That one's mine."

The will threaded through her voice was unmistakable.

Enkrid refused it.

"Wait your turn."

A short silence settled on his shoulders. Wordless pressure. Enkrid refused that too.

Aoara broke the silence.

"Do you need help?"

"Just cheer me on."

He answered without a pause. His path was already set. This fight, up to here, was his.

Stubbornness. Obstinacy. Spite. Fixation.

You came here for the prey called Jerix?

It was his now. His prey.

The will, close enough to pigheadedness, rose and became force.

There was no red cloak, but the back Aoara saw was one that was more than enough to stand among knights.

"Strange bastard."

It sounded like the highest praise.

Had she smiled after saying it? Probably. He had no time to look back and check.

The Ghoul's killing intent pressed in. One wrong flick of the eyes now and something close to the Azpen knight's strike would be coming for him, it seemed to say.

Enkrid opened his chest and let his body do the talking.

Come on, then.

The dice were thrown. Time to see what they landed on.

On the first repeated today, the faces on those dice had been the one unchanging constant. This battlefield had something like that too.

So what were the conditions for breaking through?

Simple. Survive. Even the Boatman had said it.

Run.

He called it goodwill, but it was not something Enkrid could accept as goodwill.

If all he had ever wanted was to simply survive..."I never would have had dreams like this in the first place."

Enkrid murmured it again. The will shone brighter with the words. The stubborn force rising off him in waves brought Aoara to a stop.

The Ghoul could not understand human speech, so it stood there motionless even after hearing him.

Enkrid steadied his breathing and focused.

He could imitate the Knight's Strike.

But would the enemy sit still and take it?

Tension locked up the shoulders. Better to shake some of it loose.

He fixed his gaze on the Ghoul and finally answered the question Romen had asked a moment ago.

"Romen, if you kill more Demon Creatures than me, I'll admit your face is better than mine."

Saying something like that at a moment like this was itself a kind of madness.

But if you could not enjoy a moment like this, you never would have made it to junior knight.

A knight was one talent in ten thousand.

Junior knight was a position no one reached without something close to that same rarity.

Without the repeated todays, he never could have reached this place at all. And here, in a place he should never have reached, he was talking about bets and stubbornness.

Enkrid felt every hair on his body stand up.

He had never thought it was fine to die.

But this moment, right now, was exactly the kind of moment he had been after.

A life standing in front of others, protecting what was behind him.

The life of a knight from the traveling bard's songs.

"I want to become a knight."

Those words had become a dream, then frayed and faded.

Now they were mended, and they held light again.

"Accepted."

Romen's answer came through.

Sometimes a man needed recognition from the person he was competing against.

"I'm just supposed to cheer?"