WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 464: Standing Before the City Gate to Speak

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The short blond junior knight quietly let her sleeve fall as she caught the presence near the doorway.

A moment later, the thin blade hidden along the inside of her wrist was in her hand. Not because she sensed a threat. It was habit.

She asked with a trace of wariness.

"Something you want to say?"

Rem, the western barbarian and Enkrid's companion, was leaning against the doorframe. He looked at her without expression.

His eyes gave nothing away. He spoke in a flat tone.

"Where did you learn that poison technique?"

A strange question, but the junior knight understood at once.

The west. A barbarian. Someone she had once saved. The pieces connected themselves.

She also knew that the poison technique she used was not ordinary.

Poison is not a single thing.

Jaxon, for instance, drew from plants, animals, and minerals. He blended arsenic, belladonna, poisonous mushrooms, and countless others into compound poisons.

What the short blond junior knight used was nothing like that. Hers was a poison crafted through Sorcery.

The refinement process was similar, and the application was similar enough, but,

Rem thought to himself: the method of making it is completely different.

Nobody picked that up without being taught. And he knew the method himself.

The blond junior knight decided the man before her had no crooked intent. She also remembered what he had done on the battlefield. It had not been for Aoara or the city, but it had helped, that much was clear. Besides, the Sorcery poison was not even her main technique.

In other words, she did not consider it any kind of secret.

"I happened to save someone who was injured. They taught me afterward."

The blond said it plainly.

"You saved their life?"

"Probably? They were a little strange, I think. Considering they barely made it out alive, the nerve they had was something else."

The blond turned the memory over as she spoke.

Rem thought of someone he knew.

That friend would have been saved and still run his mouth with some embarrassing nonsense, too proud to show any gratitude.

"Is that so. Alright."

As long as it had not spread through the wrong hands, that was fine. He already knew it would not have.

He had just wanted to confirm it.

Now that he had come all this way and asked, Rem felt he understood why he had done it. Finding traces of where he had come from even here felt like a sign that it really was time to go back.

He had done what people called warding off misfortune, driving out the bad luck before something big.

This last battle had been that.

He had fought with half a life on the line.

Honestly, more than half.

His ribs still ached. The bruise swelling along his side had not gone down, and walking was uncomfortable.

He had no other reason to linger, so Rem turned to go. As he did, the blond spoke behind him.

"Thank you."

The sincerity in those words pulled his mouth open.

"That person. He was grinning that bright stupid grin right to the very end."

The blond smiled at that.

There would be days with tears, but from here on, she would try to smile as much as she could.

That was what Aoara would have wanted.

After leaving the blond's house, Rem looked up at the sky.

The sun beat down hard. Not warm, just heavy and unpleasant. The air had lightened slightly and then gone thick again.

It was not like the western sun at all. Even after yesterday's rain, the air was damp and close.

On a day like this, standing still was miserable enough, but everyone around him moved without complaint.

Rem walked straight through the city, just a bystander taking it all in.

Look at all these diligent people.

That thought was still in his head when he reached the lodging, and there he saw the most diligent of all of them.

His mouth opened before he thought about it.

"Well, what are you doing there, shaking like that?"

Enkrid was gripping his sword and swinging it very slowly.

You could see the effort to control every last fiber of muscle.

It was a training method he used when he wanted to pick apart each motion and dig into it.

Rem had tried it a few times himself. It was not especially interesting to him.

He had not felt much need for it, either.

He had watched Aoara fight, for instance, and felt no particular urge to learn anything from it.

What was there to pick up from something that obvious?

But Enkrid would have been different.

He would have to chew through everything he had seen and absorbed, piece by piece, and swallow it down.

Rem knew that, but the urge to give him grief felt like some kind of instinct.

"Reviewing."

Of course, Enkrid never changed just because someone gave him a hard time. He answered without looking up and kept going.

Frog stood with arms crossed in front of her.

"One should be grateful to whoever built that body."

Ruagarne had been watching for some time now, and her conclusion was that Enkrid's body was one of the foundations he stood on.

She had seen him reproduce the Knight's Strike.

His muscles could have torn apart. The excessive Will expenditure could have left him hollow and sent him crumpling to the ground.

But his body had held.

That was what struck her as remarkable.

And the Will consumption? The hollow feeling that came after draining willpower dry?

Those questions followed, but,

The Void Curse had not taken hold.

The Void Curse meant losing all motivation after pushing too much willpower. Even after drawing on strength beyond what his vessel could hold, Enkrid had not fallen to anything like a Void Curse. The state of having nothing left to burn, some called it exhaustion, others burnout.

Under normal circumstances, he should have collapsed.

Even Romen, who was used to reproducing that Strike, had been gasping and sitting down on the ground.

After crushing the bipedal spider Demon Creature with his blunt, club-like greatsword, Romen had stopped dead, completely defenseless. If Eisia had not stepped in front of him with everything she had, Romen would have claimed a spot at that afternoon's funeral.

And yet Enkrid was fine.

Fine enough to rise the moment the Load on his body cleared and start swinging his sword again.

No wonder it was remarkable.

Ruagarne could not imagine anything more interesting to her than this.

* * *

Enkrid split his time evenly, half swinging his sword, half in stillness.

Right now he needed the stillness, so he had dropped down onto the dirt in front of the lodging.

To anyone passing by, he looked like someone with nothing to do, staring blankly at the sky.

His eyes did follow the clouds.

They had piled up thicker than usual today, great rolling masses of white.

On one side, low heavy gray clouds hung so close they almost touched the ground. It looked like rain by the afternoon.

His gaze drifted across the sky while his mind turned without rest.

How did she block it?

The Balrok fragment lowered its stance and charged. A surprise aimed below the knee.

He would have dodged first, but Aoara carried the swing she had aimed at the Balrok's crown straight downward, cutting off its move.

The blade dropped and tried to split the Balrok's head open, and the Balrok felt it and pulled back.

As fast as it had charged in.

What the Balrok fragment showed was impressive, but Aoara's swordwork was more impressive still.

How had she done it?

Once it would have been beyond him. Now he could almost see it.

The experience of imitating the Knight's Strike with Will as its base.

That experience had given Enkrid a new set of eyes.

Break Aoara's motion apart and it became readable.

The same as before.

Connecting point to point through the feet. The sword follows.

A blade that responds instantly at any moment.

Like reaching your hand toward a cup, changing your mind halfway, and pulling back.

An acceleration of that kind of reaction speed.

You do not set the destination while you reach. You react to each moment as it comes.

The downswing is practiced, and afterward the form bends to match whatever the opponent does. Could you do all that while still committing fully to the strike?

Aoara had.

Whether it was possible or impossible was beside the point.

He had watched someone do it right in front of him.

Enkrid himself did not know it, but that was the core of Aoara's technique.

Her sword did not travel along a fixed line. Instead it marked the most efficient point available at any given moment and drew its line from there.

It was a swordsmanship that rendered the Correct Sword master's reading of moves meaningless.

Drawing out whichever of the Five Sword Styles was needed in whichever moment it was needed, that was the heart of it.

It was only possible because a knight's physical abilities and Will-based reflexes went beyond what should be reasonable.

A swordsmanship only a knight could use.

She had built it after becoming a knight.

Before that, Aoara would have beaten everyone on basics alone.

In a way, it resembled Rem's technique.

He thought he understood now why Rem said there was nothing to learn.

It was all pulling out what the body had absorbed in the realm of instinct.

The clouds shifted and tangled, moving like Aoara's sword. Enkrid brought his own blade down in front of them in his mind.

The clouds changed again. Gray clouds became the Balrok fragment, swinging a red rod on an arc that was hard to predict, at angles impossible to anticipate.

It was barely a sword, just a rod, but the heat clinging to it scorched the skin.

The clouds kept changing.

At some point they became Ragna's blade.

Then the eastern Mercenary King's thrust with his spear.

Experience it.

The Mercenary King had said that.

It had been excellent advice.

Enkrid knew what he had to do.

"Commit everything I have to memory, perfectly."

The words came out as if he were talking to himself.

"Having a nice dream, were you?"

He must have closed his eyes somewhere along the way. When he opened them, there was the gray-haired western barbarian.

Rem, standing three paces off.

He was one of the cleaner barbarians, and also the squad member who put his axe through the skull of any noble who stepped out of line.

He was the one who had told Enkrid about Veloptera, the Dark Sky, where the black meteor fell, the tribes that worshipped power through cannibalism, the river of sand you could not cross back from, and the origins of Sorcery, while leaving out anything about himself entirely.

He had kept his own story out of it on purpose.

"You said you're heading west. When do you leave?"

"This body of mine might get me killed if I go now. Actually, I'd probably die for sure."

"Did you crack someone's head open out there too?"

"Not exactly. There are, well, circumstances."

Enkrid looked up after hearing that. Most things would not have made him curious.

But right now, what he saw was Rem, the lunatic axe killer, showing something that looked a little like fear.

That Rem?

He could not help being curious.

Even Ruagarne, who had been chewing on a bug to one side, glanced up.

"Kurruk."

She shifted her cheek. In human terms it would have been something close to "oh, interesting."

"Mind if I come along?"

Even Dunbakel showed interest. She had been off to the side, absorbed in working her body, but the sight of Rem of all people hesitating, showing something like reluctance, had painted a picture for everyone.

"You're all half out of your minds, aren't you? I have no idea why any of you would want to follow me."

Rem's eyes held clear displeasure.

"I want to see it. Never been to the west."

Enkrid drove the nail in.

"You're not busy?"

There was nothing pressing. As long as Azpen did not make a move, Border Guard would be fine.

Crang had not sent word about anything, so there was no immediate trouble.

And if things had been urgent, would Krais have stayed quiet?

Someone would have caught a hawk and sent it. Or sent a messenger.

No such word had come. That meant things were fine.

If anything nagged at him, it was what Squire Rug had said before, something about whether Lopod had gotten himself beaten to death by Ragna.

Or Fell, that Shepherds of the Wilderness type, getting himself smacked around for causing trouble.

Beyond that, nothing to worry about.

Ragna had a knight's strength now.

Even if he wandered off and crossed into Azpen's border, the one in danger would not be Ragna, it would be Azpen.

"I'm not busy."

He settled on that and said it.

"Did I ever say I was going west and coming back? I don't think I did."

It almost sounded like a threat.

Stay out of it if you want me to come back.

That challenge stirred something in Enkrid.

"I'll just stop by."

Need to see what he's been hiding.

He kept that to himself.

"You're really going to follow me?"

Rem looked like he was about to get annoyed, then shook his head.

"Do what you want."

Whatever he was thinking, it was not a refusal. He nodded.

And so Dunbakel and Ruagarne ended up heading west too.

The group rested three more days. By then their bodies were sound.

Rain came twice more in that time, but perhaps because Aoara had killed the Cursed Ground Core, the weather had cleared compared to before.

The sky was high and cloudless, the air sharp. The sunlight bit just as hard as always.

Knight Aoara was at peace, but the sunlight over Aoara the city felt rough and fierce.

Enkrid packed his things and came out. Rem, Ruagarne, and Dunbakel followed.

Eisia joined them on the way.

"Leaving?"

"Have to."

"Said your goodbyes?"

"More or less, last night."

He had gone to find Romen in the middle of the night to tell him they were going.

Actually, he had tried to leave two nights earlier, but Romen had held him back.

"Stay one more day before you go."

No reason to refuse. Still nothing urgent.

A light drizzle had started too, which was not ideal weather for setting out.

"Alright."

He agreed and spent one more day. This morning was after that.

He loosened up with the Isolation Technique and checked his gear, and found he had not a single Whistle Dagger left.

He had thrown them all in the fight. He had tried to recover them, but the blades were too damaged to reuse.

It would be nice to find a few decent knives somewhere along the way.

The thought crossed his mind, but there was nowhere to get any right now.

He had stopped by the forge and found every single smith had closed their doors by some shared agreement.

"Look, we've got nothing to sell you. Not one thing."

The stubborn craftsman's words stuck in his head.

It did not sound like there was nothing to sell. It sounded like they had decided they should not sell to him.

They were on their way out when Eisia said something out of nowhere.

"I had actually given up on half of it."

"On what?"

Her footsteps fell into Aoara's rhythm as they walked.

"I thought it was enough to eat one meal a day with my little sibling and just get by. Looks like I was wrong."

What she had given up on was the will to push further.

Eisia said she had found that will again.

When he asked why.

"Because I saw Knight Aoara's back."

Eisia said it simply.

Leaving Knight Aoara's city, Enkrid thought again about what her death had meant. It had touched everyone on that battlefield.

That was when they reached the gates.

Romen was standing there with his greatsword across his shoulder, blocking the way.

"I still cannot understand it."

He said that. The intent in his eyes was plain, the intent that said no one was passing through that gate behind him, not right now.

Behind him stood a formation of soldiers including Millio, and the short blond junior knight.

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