WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 466: No Longer Equals

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The dying sun lit half his face. The other half looked darker for it.

Sunset light cut between the two of them.

It divided them, as if the light itself had chosen sides.

Enkrid had dropped his smile. His face was blank now.

Rem looked even more indifferent.

Both had their arms hanging loose, weapons still sheathed.

Dunbakel and Ruagarne felt the pressure radiating from those two relaxed stances.

The quiet right before a storm.

That was what Dunbakel thought.

Waves rising in a swamp.

That was what Ruagarne thought.

Similar, but not the same. They were watching from different angles.

Dunbakel was looking at what was about to come crashing in. She fought on instinct and gut, so she knew a single moment's choice could decide who won.

Ruagarne, on the other hand, loved a battle of reads. She figured whoever was winning beneath the surface, before anything even moved, would have the edge.

Both were right.

A quiet fight, but with waves building underneath.

This was the most serious sparring session the two had ever had, and the slowest. Most of the time Enkrid just charged in from the start, and more often than not Rem kicked things off by swinging an axe out of nowhere.

Thick clouds spread wide and even across the sky.

The sun dipped past the west, and two dim moons began to show themselves, faint and blurred.

The orange sky eased into a slow violet.

Staring at the horizon made it feel like the sky and earth had pressed together.

A hard gust came, seemingly rising from that same horizon, and cut straight between them.

Whooooom.

A strong one.

Out here in the west, people called weather like this a "low sky," and wind like this they called the "goading wind" or the "blocking wind."

Rem had told him that on the way here.

Walk into it head-on and it felt like a wall pushing back against every step. Come at it from the other direction and it felt like hands at your back, pushing you forward.

Strange weather, out here.

Enkrid faced the wind without flinching and raised his hand to grip Aker's handle.

By then Rem had already drawn his axe.

A soft rasp of steel.

He pulled Aker free and took it in both hands, eyes locking back onto Rem. Rem took both axes, one in each hand, and let his arms hang loose again.

Enkrid lowered Aker's tip from level, tilting the blade into a slight downward angle instead of keeping it parallel to the ground.

"Oh."

Ruagarne rolled her big eyes and let out a small sound of admiration.

Rem pulled his left foot back slightly and shifted his weight to the right.

The tip of Aker was aimed at Rem's left thigh. Rem had adjusted so he could dodge the moment it came.

This kind of exchange kept going.

To borrow Ruagarne's words, it was waves crashing inside a pit of mire and mud.

When Enkrid pushed a wave out, Rem either blocked it or stepped clear.

"You think this'll ever end?" Rem taunted.

Enkrid privately agreed.

This was a test, nothing more. A measure of how far what he had learned and built would actually carry.

He had raised his Pressure, but something like that was never going to work on this brutal barbarian.

So what about using the battle of reads to break the opponent's momentum? That was a technique of sorts, one he had learned from Ruagarne.

"You already know how to set up to win before things start, don't you? You just do it a little more openly."

Adjusting the sword belt, shifting your stance, repositioning your feet, all of it was preparation to win.

If pointing your sword tip in a certain direction, or keeping a short blade in your hand ahead of time, could give you the high ground, wasn't that the right call?

Of course it was.

It just did not go down smoothly against Rem.

Blade and axe moved at the same time.

Clang!

Aker came down in a sweeping arc, and both axes crossed to stop it. Even as they blocked, the axe blades tried to hook the sword and wrench it from his grip, but Aker pulled back the instant it struck them. He had read Rem's intent to bind the blade from the start and broke off the exchange on purpose.

A chip of axe edge spun up into the air, but neither of them cared.

"Not bad," Rem said with a grin.

"Same to you," Enkrid grinned back.

Then blade and axe went for each other's throats, bellies, chests, thighs, forearms, fingers, slashing, thrusting, striking, hammering without mercy.

Clang! Tang-tang-tang-clang!

Steel proved its worth to steel in the violet wash of the evening moons. Sparks flew, each one declaring its own hardness, scattering in search of flesh to bite into.

After several exchanges back and forth,

Kring!

A crash, and Enkrid drove himself into Rem's space.

Rem saw it coming and snapped a knee up. Enkrid took it on his left forearm.

Thud. Thok. Smack. Thwack.

Ruagarne and Dunbakel both saw Aker driven into the dirt.

The thud was Aker hitting the ground.

The thok was Rem's left-hand axe dropping.

That all happened in the same instant Aker and that axe met each other.

Enkrid stepped back, rubbing his left forearm with his right hand.

The smack had been Rem's knee catching him there.

"...You've gotten damn good," Rem said.

"I think so too," Enkrid answered.

Why wouldn't he have?

Experiencing Knight's Strike had given Enkrid changes he never could have predicted. It was both a foothold and an accelerant for everything that came after.

What he had done: knocked one of Rem's axes away with Aker, driven into Rem's space, and sent a palm strike at his chin with the right hand.

Rem had read the move in that instant, tried to break the charge with his knee and twist his waist out of the way.

That was the moment Enkrid's hand did something close to Knight's Strike.

It came out at a speed Rem had not expected.

He could not dodge in time.

The thwack was the sound of Rem taking it on the chin.

Not something he had thought could happen in a spar against Enkrid, but it had happened.

Rem's head swam. He could push through it, he had before, but a loss was a loss.

He sat down right where he stood.

"Hah, feels like I might puke."

A solid hit to the chin had that effect.

"You turned your head at the last second," Enkrid said, picking Aker up from the ground.

Not a clean hit. But it counted. If the fight had continued?

I can take him.

So the outcome had been decided here.

"Grrrrrr."

Ruagarne's cheeks puffed out like never before.

Even to her eyes, the growth was startling.

Dunbakel was more startled still.

Her golden eyes went wider than the moons hanging in the sky.

She stared at Rem for a long moment, then asked, "Did you get weaker?"

Crack.

Rem rolled his neck left and right a few times, stood up, and said, "Come here and we'll find out."

He had not gotten weaker. He had recovered from that hit without even needing to breathe through it.

But in a real fight, that would have been a real opening.

"Ugh!"

Dunbakel took a few hits that day, and Enkrid quietly steadied his breathing.

Something inside him had been building toward an eruption, but it sputtered out and cooled.

Happy, but not drunk with it. Satisfied, but not laughing.

Just confirmation.

So this is where I've reached.

Just proof.

He had watched Aoara die. He had watched her fight. He had survived today once again.

Enkrid could now imitate the movement of a knight's hand.

"There's not a junior knight left who'd give you trouble," Rem said, after pounding on Dunbakel for a bit.

"One more?"

"...Fine. Let's go."

Ruagarne had been deeply surprised, but she accepted the result.

In a way, you could say it made sense. Had she not already watched him fight that monstrous Ghoul?

Even so, she was surprised. Why?

Can't exactly not be surprised.

Every time she watched Enkrid, she could see him reaching the limit of what was possible. It was hard to understand how his skill had climbed this far.

He looked exactly like someone who had risked their life thousands of times, grasped something through all of it, and then spent hundreds of days more refining what they had grasped.

Even in ordinary moments, he poured every hour into swinging the sword and thinking about it.

She had helped him through some of it. She had watched it all.

Enkrid already had more experience than anyone on the continent. By far.

The sum of all that experience, a body sharpened by it, technique refined with care, and ideas that catch the opponent off guard.

That was what had pushed him past Rem.

In the second spar between Rem and Enkrid, nobody got hit on the chin. Nobody went down.

But Enkrid was certain.

I can take him.

If he decided to, he could break Rem.

Equal? They were no longer equal.

The advantage was his.

"I can tell you just thought you could grab me any time you felt like it," Rem said. "Drop it. Yeah? You know it'd be different if we were fighting for real."

"Same goes for you. I haven't been going all-out in our sparring either."

"...There's something about the way you talk that really gets under a person's skin."

Before long it was the third round.

Rem's eyes changed. Enkrid's presence changed too.

"Someone's going to die," Dunbakel said, her sharp senses catching the shift in both of them.

It was the second camp of the day, reached after a full day of walking.

They had gathered dry brush and lit a fire. Both of them turned their backs to it, and the sword and the axes moved again.

This spar was not long.

Every single exchange was lethal instead.

Clang!

The metal met less often now. Rem's weapons were not the same steel as Aker, so each clash only wore his blades down further.

The axe edges had turned serrated without anyone noticing. You could have called them axe-saws and been right.

The two of them were fighting at something close to full intensity.

Inside that, Enkrid was surprised all over again.

Rem showed yet another side of himself, moving as if their sparring matches had never told the whole story.

Killing intent passed between them.

Then, without a word, both stopped.

Shoulders heaving, breath coming rough at the corner of the mouth.

Neither of them lost to the other in raw stamina, yet here they were. That was how much mental energy they had burned.

The sword and the axes hung pointed at each other's hearts.

"Mess around," Rem said, breathing hard, "and you're getting a hole. Right there."

"You're already dead," Enkrid answered, equally winded.

"Hell with that."

"Get out of here."

They stared at each other and both laughed.

"That's good," Rem said, stepping back. "We've got ten-odd days of walking ahead, and I can tell you're going to keep asking for matches. Fine, I'll spot you a few."

"Not spotting me. Losing."

Enkrid had to point that out.

"Yeah, yeah, fine. Say I lost."

Rem said it and found it genuinely strange.

Funny feeling.

Losing itself was rare in his life. It was not for nothing that he had been called a genius.

There had been days when they called him the strongest in the west, the greatest talent among the western peoples.

Among everyone who had ever taught him, almost none had lasted more than a month.

Learning Sorcery had been a bit tricky, back then.

Even so, he had learned it, practiced it, and made it his own.

Several Sorcerers had argued over him as a successor.

And then he had left that land.

Even after leaving, losing had been rare.

Recently there was that crazy directionally-impaired bastard, and the wildcat had gone berserk on him once, but before all that, even the concept of losing had been hazy.

So losing could not be familiar. You would think it would sting. But it did not sit badly with him.

Different from how it felt going up against that directionally-impaired bastard.

Why doesn't it feel bad?

A few reasons, probably. One of them was that this insane captain of theirs clearly had no intention of stopping, and that had something to do with it.

Enkrid was not using him as a checkpoint to pass and move on from, and not using him as some final destination to arrive at, either.

Just something that happened.

Something that happened along the way, while chasing his own dream.

That was why he was still swinging that sword.

"Camping out here is uncomfortable in a few ways," Dunbakel said while building up the fire.

"Thirsty too," Ruagarne added.

The further west you went, the drier the air became, so it made sense that Frog would struggle.

"Right, let's see," Rem said and started digging into the ground.

Enkrid and everyone else looked at him.

"Give it a moment. Need something sweet to drink."

This was the west. The land he had been born and raised in.

There were headaches waiting further in, but that was further in.

Shame not to enjoy the now.

Always have fun. Always.

Was that not his own creed?

Rem dug loosely at the dirt, shoved an axe blade in, hooked something behind it, and pulled up.

Crunch.

The ground gave way more easily than expected, and something rose with it.

A round fruit, too large for one hand and a touch small for two.

"Fruit grows underground?" Enkrid asked, curious. Something like a root vegetable?

"Western specialty. Ground squirrel fruit."

The hard outer shell was packed dirt. Rem broke it open and a wrinkled fruit sat inside.

He shook off the dirt, drew the axe blade across it, split it in half, and liquid sloshed inside.

"Try it. Taste it once and you'll never forget it. Old merchants used to call it heaven's water."

Enkrid took the fruit first and swallowed a mouthful.

Sweetness started in his mouth and seemed to spread through his whole body.

Intensely sweet, but not in a way that turned unpleasant. One sip and you wanted another.

"Too much and it'll actually make your mouth drier, so one a day per person is about right."

"You're the official guide for the west. Decided," Enkrid said with genuine admiration.

Rem swore at him.

That word, guide, set off cursing in him by reflex.

Of course he was the guide. Who else had been showing the way this whole time?

Every now and then the captain had a way of saying one thing that flipped something inside you completely.

This was different from admitting he had lost a spar.

Being compared to that directionally-impaired bastard, even indirectly, made him thoroughly irritated.

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