A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 475

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 475: Human Totem

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"Have you ever heard of a totem?"

It was a tool used in sorcery, he had said.

"You're the one who told me."

Enkrid answered from a chair in the middle of the tent. It was a low stool with no backrest, but not particularly uncomfortable.

Rem stood before him, playing the role of daily sorcery instructor.

"Right then, Captain is a Human Totem from here on out. You eat, sleep, and hang around right here."

He delivered the words with the gravity of a stern teacher.

Enkrid caught on quickly, as he always did.

Following Rem's instructions seemed like the right call.

Naturally, a few experiments had led to this point.

It had all happened a little earlier.

Rem had stepped in as mediator and led with this.

"Step outside. Go on."

Enkrid did as told. He walked out of the tent. About three steps out, Rem stood at the entrance with one foot in the doorway and spoke.

He waved a hand, back facing outward.

"Shoo, further away."

Enkrid did that too.

Dunbakel had come out of the tent and sat off to one side, holding her nose with one hand and watching. Ruagarne followed along behind Enkrid.

"They seem to believe you're blocking the curse," she said, taking repeated sips of water.

"That can't be right."

It had to be a coincidence.

He had joked about awakening divine power, but something like that couldn't actually happen.

He had never even touched sorcery.

There was no need to look back over his life to confirm it. He had been too busy swinging a sword.

Even now, what he really wanted was to turn over everything running through his head.

The twins attacked with a very particular rhythm. One used single tempo, throwing a spear on a precise breath, while the other used half tempo.

Watching them, all sorts of thoughts surfaced.

'What if you mixed the tempos together?'

His mind wandered back to what Aoara had shown him.

Her swordsmanship was grounded in the Basics. Tempo was one of them.

From ordinary single tempo came the counter that met it head-on, the half tempo that split the single, and then the double that packed two movements into one beat.

Tempo was another way of saying a single breath.

Ragna sometimes fit three or even four movements into a single breath.

Triple tempo, fourth tempo, maybe?

Names didn't really matter.

Aoara had done the same. She used split tempos and single tempos alike.

And the reverse too.

Sword strikes that were slower, stretched out longer.

She drew out the breath itself and let the tempo drag.

What would you call that?

If you had to name it, slow tempo would fit.

Not splitting but stretching. She wove in footwork and body movement so the arc of the blade carried on without end.

Against the Balrok fragment, Aoara had shown exactly that kind of unbroken swordsmanship.

Her sword never stopped. It flowed and kept flowing. He had found it deeply striking.

After Aoara, others drifted through his thoughts.

Ragna swung for a single heavy blow. He played mind games, he deceived his opponents, all to land that one strike.

But the goal always came back to one thing. Whether sword or shield, it was about connecting his hit.

The Mercenary King of the East used broken motion well.

His spearhead came lunging in from strange angles, disrupting gaps even as the movements looked disjointed and irregular. There was no pattern to be found in it.

He kept turning it over. Kept thinking. Kept working it out, then reproduced it with his body. Corrected the errors. Swung the sword. Repeated.

Walking along like that, moving his hand in something resembling swordwork, Ruagarne watched him with wide eyes.

'A man mad for training.'

Some people called Enkrid that.

Ruagarne agreed.

Training, then more training.

Enkrid was the kind of person who never tired of it, shaving time even from sleep.

Right now was no different.

His head was full of swordsmanship.

Sorcery, whatever else, what could he do about what was already rising up in his mind?

And this was genuinely fun.

The thoughts kept coming.

What if he split tempo wildly, like fracturing a breath into pieces?

There was a sword style that did that.

The Vallen-style mercenary sword.

'I thought it was just noise back then.'

Vallen-style mercenary sword. Free Breath Mixing.

A method of adjusting tempo freely. A technique that played with breath and rhythm.

How was it even possible?

By becoming fully fluent in every basic technique.

Was that an easy path? No. It was hard. A difficult path. Even so, he smiled. For Enkrid, it was an enormously enjoyable one.

Looking back now, no sword style hammered the Basics as relentlessly as the Vallen-style mercenary sword.

Even more than Ruagarne, the Vallen-style mercenary sword nagged constantly.

He hadn't heard it with his own ears, but it was as good as hearing it.

When he was learning the Vallen-style, he had read something like a secret manual, and on nearly every page there was something about the Basics.

"Get your stance right first. Without knowing the fundamentals, you cannot deceive your opponent."

"If you can't swing with a proper posture, you can't cut even straw."

"Build your body. Build it so you can hold the correct stance."

"Stance first."

"Focus on your sword-holding posture. Start from there."

"What must you do before technique? Think about it. That's right. Stance."

If all the passages about proper posture and foot placement had been cut, the manual would have been noticeably thinner.

But that was how important it was.

Most people who read it ignored those parts. Skimmed past them. Dismissed them as useless filler.

Enkrid had not. He couldn't afford to.

Those were the days when he had to grab at even a straw and swing it.

So that's what he had done.

To learn the Vallen-style, he had refined his stance and done exactly what was asked.

And it had been a truly excellent stance.

If Vallen ever came back and saw it, he might say this bastard was worthy of being called his student.

Though if they had met back then, he probably would have asked: with talent this pathetic, you think you can make a living with a sword?

Either way, there is a saying that to deceive someone, you have to mix in truth.

The Vallen-style mercenary sword was faithful to that idea.

Polish the Basics to a fine edge and use them to pull off all manner of deceptions, that was the Illusionary Sword. That was the Vallen-style mercenary sword.

Lost in all of that, he had wandered quite far from the tent.

"Come back!"

Rem's voice rang out from a distance. Enkrid turned and walked back.

Eyes watched him along the way. Sunken eyes, and blank stares with nothing behind them.

The weather was fine and the light was bright. Enkrid walked looking for shade, moving along beside a large tent.

It was probably going to amount to nothing. Some other factor must have been at work.

Why would the curse disappear simply because he was present?

As he got closer, he could see Rem's face had gone expressionless. Serious, in other words.

"Go on. Over there."

The playfulness had left Rem's voice. The woman who seemed to be the child's mother was kneeling on the ground.

The sorcerer Hira kept bringing a herb stick to her lips, one after another.

Puff after puff, smoke drifted across her face.

Enkrid did as Rem said.

After three rounds of coming and going, Rem muttered.

"Hell, can this actually be happening?"

But he nodded shortly after.

Trying to figure out the why felt like trying to navigate without a sense of direction. Things like dog droppings were unfolding here, and there was no point picking it all apart.

With reasons set aside, Rem decided to erect a Human Totem, and Enkrid had to go along with it.

Looking around, there were quite a few sick people. More than twenty.

Enkrid looked at them and thought.

Should he fetch a healer, or what they called a sorcerer out here?

Either way, becoming a Human Totem was several times easier than hunting down a sorcerer and holding a blade to their throat.

After Rem's experiments, Hira ran her own.

He made contact with the people holding the curse, sat still, and that was that.

The conclusion was reached.

He would be a Human Totem, stationed in the middle of the tent.

A proper chair appeared. A replacement for the low stool. His own dedicated seat.

A soft cushion was laid on it, and instead of the acrid-smelling grass that had been burning, a herb found only in the west began to smolder, giving off a faint, pleasant fragrance.

An earthenware vessel fired from red clay was moved from the tribal chief's tent to this one.

It was a device where a fire was lit at the bottom and the residual heat slowly burned the herbs, with four holes pierced at the top.

Smoke rose gently from those holes as the herbs burned inside.

"Oh, this smells good."

Dunbakel said.

Enkrid breathed in the scent that was doing away with the sour, musty smell coming off her body.

She was right. It did smell good.

Enough to make him want to scold her on the spot.

"Go wash. Now."

"Why."

"Now."

"Back in my village there was a saying that washing too often brings bad luck."

"Is that actually something Beastfolk villages say?"

Ruagarne knew Beastfolk ways well. She knew they weren't fond of washing, but she also knew they didn't throw around talk of bad luck lightly.

Dunbakel didn't push further. If pressed, the truth was she hadn't lived in the village very long. She had been driven out as a child.

"Shall I wash her?"

The child's mother, who had somehow become something close to a devoted follower, stepped over.

Enkrid was a little on guard around her.

Her attitude had flipped completely, and her temperament seemed to have shifted just as much.

Then again, thinking about it, westerners tended to be like this.

Direct, rough around the edges, and short on pretense.

The middle-aged man who had come after hearing Enkrid had stopped a curse had been the same.

"My gratitude, my gratitude."

Enkrid hadn't even known who he was, so he had just given a vague nod.

The child's mother looked at Dunbakel.

Enkrid read her expression.

Will saying something actually work? And if it doesn't?

The mother's hand slipped inside her clothing. She was gripping the karambit, a short curved dagger, turning something over in her mind.

"Hey, go wash. Don't make this complicated."

Enkrid kicked Dunbakel in the rear and sent her off. Beyond that, there wasn't much else for him to do.

He mostly watched Hira, who would occasionally bark sharp words as she tended to those who were improving.

"May this land be protected."

She muttered it as she continued to work through her patients without pause.

Was that also sorcery?

She pressed dull gray poultices beneath the patients' eyes, turned them over, and wiped their faces and limbs. It looked less like sorcery and more like devoted nursing.

"You're free to move around near the tent."

Hira's manner toward him had changed too. She was respectful now.

When he stepped outside, the twins were standing guard at the entrance.

It was because of the answer Rem had given when they asked what was needed.

"A training ground and sparring partners. That's all."

"You're not going to arrange it yourself?"

"I'm about to get busy."

With that, Rem left.

That was how Enkrid became a totem. It wasn't especially dull.

Sitting, he trained in his mind.

Outside, he moved his body.

The space directly in front of the tent was kept clear, so there was plenty of room to swing a sword.

He didn't act awkward trying to adapt to these western tribes.

After all the years spent knocking around as a mercenary and living by the sword, struggling to fit in wasn't something he was about to do.

In short, Enkrid was doing fine.

"Please, eat."

The child's mother waited on him attentively at his side.

That was the word for it. It went beyond looking after him, it was closer to serving him.

"I'll eat well, thank you."

Enkrid replied in an easy tone, wetting his throat with prairie dog fruit and working through things like roasted lizard meat.

Their cooking methods were familiar from his time with Rem.

They caught what they called field rabbits, brown-furred things, stripped the fur, removed the organs, then either mashed the whole body into a meat porridge or shaped it into patties and served it.

Nothing went to waste the way it did at a noble's table. They ate just enough, not a bite more. Still, there was plenty of nourishment.

The taste? All of it was good.

The habit of eating an animal whole must have come from a tradition born out of scarce resources.

About half a day passed, and as evening approached, a few children began drifting around nearby.

Enkrid looked up from cleaning his sword and watched them quietly.

'Did they come to look at me?'

Curious about an outsider? Up until a little while ago they hadn't seemed interested at all.

Some of them were curious, true. But he wasn't the point.

"Is Jiba okay?"

One child called into the tent. The mother came out and looked at the child.

He thought the face looked familiar, then realized it was one of the girls who had been playing with string that morning.

"I told you not to come close here."

"But they said it's okay now?"

Another child said.

Their faces, their voices, their eyes, all showed worry.

A friend had collapsed, and they had been hovering nearby.

Children were children, quick to run and play, but they worried too.

Enkrid just watched. There was no place for him to step in.

"Even so. Don't come close."

The mother, who had shed the resentment and hatred, sent the children away.

No sense letting bad luck rub off on them if they lingered.

"Benefactor, if you'd like something to nibble on, please have some of this."

The mother brought him dried plums.

Enkrid put one in his mouth and chewed. It was sweet. Beside him, Ruagarne kept drinking water.

When the woman noticed, she brought something for Ruagarne too.

Dried locusts, or something like them. She had caught live ones and brought them in a basket woven from branches, and Ruagarne puffed her cheeks out with delight.

Come to think of it, Rua might just be someone who lived for food.

Outside of eating, drinking, and relieving himself, Enkrid spent the whole day swinging his sword and grinding through training.

He could feel some kind of change taking shape, and it made the training more enjoyable than before.

The twins sparred with him occasionally. Rem stopped by now and then too.

"I'm going to die."

"From what?"

He asked because he wondered if something hard had happened. It was a bright moonlit night. Even without a single torch, eyes, nose, and mouth were all clearly visible.

"Arath won't listen to a word I say."

"How did you leave home, exactly?"

Rem hesitated, uncharacteristic of him, then answered.

"About ten days after we married."

"Ten days after, and then?"

"I just."

"Just what?"

"I ran off in the middle of the night."

This bastard was out of his mind. And he had walked around with his head held high after that? He would have to crawl back on his hands and knees with his forehead to the ground, and forgiveness would still be a long shot.

Enkrid gripped the handle of Aker, edge freshly honed.

"Put your neck out. Here, bend at the waist."

He said it while looking at the outer tent post, and Rem asked.

"What are you going to do?"

"Settle things with her anger. Taking your head to her seems like the fastest solution."

There didn't seem to be any other option.

Rem snickered.

Enkrid didn't laugh.

"You weren't joking?"

"I mean it."

"Come on, stop sticking your nose in other people's business."

He had pushed too far. Rem straightened his face and walked away.