A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 488

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 488: Spoils, Bracelet, Gift, Food

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Whether the head sorcerer woke up or not was none of Enkrid's concern. He had things to do.

Those things started with the Isolation Technique, tightening and oiling the muscles, and included having Ruagarne beat him with a blunt club.

Thud.

Even at moderate force, the breath slammed out of him. That was exactly right.

It had to hurt. If it did not hurt, the body would not harden.

He had taken so many hits that it almost felt like the Will of Refusal was triggering right at the point of impact.

He was not sure yet. Repeating it consistently would tell him soon enough.

While he was training like that, taking blows,

"Do you enjoy getting hit, sir?"

The twins walked over and asked.

"I'm training how to take a strike to the ribs."

Enkrid answered half-jokingly, and both twins furrowed their brows at the same time.

Was that really useful training?

A reasonable thing to wonder.

"If just anyone tries this, they will wreck themselves."

Ruagarne gently warned the two.

"Then what do you do, Honorary Champion?"

This time it was a different western warrior who spoke. A man with three deep scars running from his forehead, across his left eye, and down to his cheek.

He had said something about being tricked by a Demon Creature called a Kabikat when he was young.

From then on, his name had become Three Claws.

"I started with something like a ball of cotton and gradually switched to harder things."

Enkrid straightened up as he answered.

There was nothing secret about any of this.

When Audin had taught him, there had been no talk of hidden arts or secret techniques. And it could not really count as a secret technique anyway.

He had said cotton ball, but it had not been a real cotton ball.

You could not exactly call Audin punching him at moderate force a cotton ball.

Thinking back on it now, it was a stupidly brutal method.

Would he do it again if asked? Of course he would, since he had gained something from it. But did he want to?

Even Enkrid had to pause at that question.

It hurt like nothing else, and at the time he had no idea what he was going to get out of it.

He had done it because Audin kept pushing him along.

Once he felt the results, it was fine enough.

"Still sounds painful."

One of the twins said something dull, then moved on to something even duller.

Geomnarae was their father.

The story went that Enkrid had saved him.

"We're truly grateful."

The two, who looked like they could knock out a bull barehanded, suddenly seemed almost simple and sincere.

Enkrid did not know the full weight of it, but to the twins it genuinely meant everything.

In fact, all the western folk felt that way.

If Rem had not come back, if Enkrid had not been there, if Frog and the beastfolk had not come along ,

Taking that worst case to its end, Geomnarae would have burned his own life to fuel a sorcery.

Geomnarae could have fought like a champion for a brief moment, then shriveled up like a mummy and died.

That was the price of defying the natural order.

Just dying was one thing, but dying like that was said to carry terrible agony, and the weight of it would follow even into the afterlife.

They were grateful he had not let their father end that way. And grateful he had saved the Western lands.

"Sure."

Enkrid let it pass, still treating it as nothing remarkable. He had nothing particular to say.

What, now that he had saved their lives, should he demand they pay him back in kind?

That was not why he had done it.

Besides, he had been the one to receive something first.

After finishing the Isolation Technique in the morning, he trained his swordsmanship, sparred with Ruagarne, and exchanged blows with Dunbakel here and there.

He also crossed with Geomnarae in between.

Not bad at all. Geomnarae wielded an axe in one hand and a spear in the other, and he handled both at a skilled level.

"Who do you think taught Rem?"

"He said he learned on his own."

"Son of a bitch."

"On that point, I agree completely."

They stopped mid-spar for a moment to bond over a shared subject.

Cursing Rem was its own kind of pleasure. Geomnarae was a cheerful man at his core. Most western folk tended that way.

The fighting was over, and Enkrid had watched as warriors pressed their foreheads to the ground, calling him Honorary Champion and all the rest.

Many expressed their thanks, the twins among them.

A few women even said they would marry him if he just gave the word.

Ruagarne shook her head looking at them.

"Forget it."

She mentioned there was a black-haired beauty waiting for him back home, and an elf too, and so on, and one by one they gave up.

Jiba kept showing an iron will, but it did not amount to much.

Since hearing that the head sorcerer had woken up, Rem had been nowhere to be seen.

Enkrid had nothing pressing to do, so he kept training, and western folk had gathered thickly around him.

Everyone was working their own bodies, so some watched his training and some sparred with him.

"Hyah!"

"Chah!"

"Yah!"

Among them were children fighting with wooden sticks, two sticks each.

Beside them, girls had gathered off to one side and were playing at something like house.

"Husband, where have you been all this time?"

One girl swatted the back of a gray-haired boy with a Hand Blade strike. Whether it counted as house play was debatable, but in terms of content, yes, it did.

It looked like the story of Rem and Arath.

That would probably live on as a legend passed down by word of mouth.

The tale of a husband who fled in the night, came home alive against all odds, and went right back to being lovey-dovey with his wife.

"That's a decent title."

It felt like it could become a real story just as it was.

If being a traveling bard had been his dream, he might have fulfilled some calling as a storyteller, but it was not, so Enkrid swung his sword.

Then he stopped for a moment.

A stray thought had surfaced.

He planted Aker's tip in the ground and let the fragments of that thought drift up on their own.

What was that hallucination?

It had been during the fight with the Apostle.

"You're trying to just cut someone who's gone incorporeal? You're a bit dumb, aren't you."

He had heard those words. Hallucinations, seeing things that were not there, those happened often on the battlefield.

In the middle of a brutal fight, he had once watched a man beside him scream for his mother, rush forward, and get skewered on an enemy spear.

Fear had conjured the vision and pushed him over the edge.

Dunbakel had shown something similar when fighting in the gray forest Cursed Ground. Fear had seized her and she had bolted.

So was this that kind of hallucination?

No.

Enkrid had never seen things that were not there, never heard sounds that were not there. His mind had never broken down and gone to pieces.

The wall of will built on solid foundation inside him had never crumbled. So unless a spell was involved, he would not fall for illusions.

Then what had that been?

He did not know. It had not come again since.

So what should he do about it?

He ignored it. That was his decision.

Instead, he turned his thoughts to what he had collected after the fight.

Things the Apostle had buried in the ground, things that had come off the body.

Among them was one unusual item.

A silver cup. The outside was embossed with a pattern of tree roots, so detailed and precise that a tree seemed like it should actually be growing there on top of the cup.

But there was no tree. Instead, the inside of the cup was stained a deep violet.

The same color as a Giant's blood.

"Smells off."

As Dunbakel had said at the time, it had a musty odor. Unpleasant, yet it kept pulling the nose back.

"Can I smell it again?"

Dunbakel had said that more than once.

Spending the whole day zoning out and dozing, then suddenly asking to smell something, it was obvious that either Dunbakel, or the silver cup with tree-root embossing, or both, had something wrong with them.

"Are you out of your mind?"

Enkrid put it gently. He also used his hands and feet while he was at it.

He kicked her shin with his left foot and slapped her forehead with his right palm at the same time.

A variation of Vallen's mercenary sword style, both limbs extended simultaneously.

Dunbakel dodged the foot but not the hand, took the slap on the forehead, made a short noise, and stepped back. Even she seemed to feel something was not right with herself.

"That thing is strange. The smell keeps coming back to me and I feel like I need to sniff it again. And I want to grab it and run off with it."

"Hold it together."

"Oh. Yeah."

Enkrid convinced her without needing to reach for a better fist, and she gave in more easily than expected.

The tree-root embossed silver cup had come from inside the Apostle's clothes.

As an object belonging to a Cultist, it carried an outward sense of sanctity.

In other words, it was absolutely not something from the Cursed Ground.

"Best to find a proper Priest and have them handle it. It's not sorcery. You should bring it along."

Rem had said the same. Naturally it ended up in Enkrid's keeping.

It was not that Dunbakel lacked self-control.

"There are objects that entrance people simply by existing. This looks like one of those."

Ruagarne, who had gone glassy-eyed at the sight of the Cultist before calming back down, said as much.

A corrupted Sacred Object, something like that?

Back on the continent, hand it off to any temple and they would deal with it, surely.

Or maybe he would need to find a virtuous Priest.

A virtuous Priest, now that was no small task.

About as common as a thief with a conscience, a kind-hearted bandit, or a king who put the people first.

But a Priest who could wield divine power? That much was findable.

Audin might know someone.

The man did nothing but pray every day. He seemed to dodge around whenever a Priest came to town, but he might still know someone.

Good, then he would ask Audin later.

Beyond that, there were several other items that looked like magical tools. He stuffed all of them into his pack.

His load felt heavier than when he had set out, and that was not his imagination.

There were things he had received from the City of Aoara too.

And there were spoils gathered after the fighting in the Western lands.

Spoils, was that even the right word? It felt more like he had only taken the things that were too awkward to leave behind.

On top of that, there was the Carmen Collection with its transparent blade, the one he had to deliver to Jaxon.

At this rate, if he traveled around for another year, he might need a cart instead of a pack.

That was not an idle thought.

"Long journeys call for good fortune."

Jiba's mother, along with several other women, gave him a bracelet woven from leather, cloth, and hair.

A bracelet for wishing luck, and a sorcery tool to keep insects away.

It only became a working sorcery tool if the maker wove it with pure goodwill and genuine prayer. That was what happened here.

Everyone who made it prayed with one heart, elevating it into a sorcery tool.

Good fortune to the foreigner, the Honorary Champion.

A many-colored woven bracelet appeared on Enkrid's forearm. It was generously sized, meant to be tied above the elbow, around the upper forearm.

He also received a strangely shaped dried fish whose flesh had gone completely hard, however they had managed it.

The tail was brittle and the eyes had been removed from the head. Honestly, it looked like it could double as a club.

He was staring at it wondering if that was the point when the friend who had given it spoke.

"It's a fish caught in a big lake, dried out. Strange shape, right? If you do it like this, it's easy to carry around."

As he spoke, he snapped off the head and tail himself, dropped them into a dry cloth pouch, then opened the flesh to the sides and flicked out the dry bones one by one with his fingers.

Looking at the opened body after that quick prep, the method was clear enough. Remove head, tail, and guts, then dry just the flesh.

Not smoked, by the look of it.

"Wind does all the work out here."

Wind-dried, then.

By the coast they would salt it and let sea winds do the work, but here they had developed their own approach.

Dried in sandstorms, was one way to put it. The details were beyond him, and he was not particularly curious.

"You just tear it like this."

The man showed him how.

Tear the flesh into strips and carry them in the pouch. A portable dried ration.

"Boil it in water and it makes a rich broth."

Even though it was dried fish, the smell was almost nothing. Whatever faint scent there was had nothing in common with the usual fishy stink.

"Good smell, right? They coat the outside with powdered herbs. Makes your mouth water."

The man wiped his nose with the back of his hand as he said it.

Enkrid just listened.

Either way, since it was offered, he tore off a piece and tried it. The taste was distinctive. This was food you had to soften with your own saliva.

Hard at first, but after chewing it became more manageable. He had eaten it cooked before, but eating it raw like this was a first.

The texture was strange at the start. The more he chewed, the softer it got, until eventually it just melted away gently.

The more he chewed, the more a nutty richness came through.

He was told it was a prized food, not something just anyone carried around.

The dried fish you threw in water for stew could be made pretty carelessly, but if you wanted to carry it like this, you had to put in the work to keep it from spoiling.

Food you could carry for a year or two, that was genuinely impressive.

Something like the pemmican common on the continent, but far lighter in flavor and easier to eat.

Pemmican had a rank smell after a while, and the taste was beyond description.

On the battlefield, the combination of grit-filled black bread and pemmican was often said to be more threatening than the enemy.

And old pemmican on top of that? Enkrid would eat it if he were about to drop dead, but even he would end up with his tongue curling.

Of course, if food was scarce, eating without complaint was the correct attitude for any soldier who lived on a battlefield.

"What do you think? Ha ha."

The friend who had given it laughed with a clear, bright face.

He said it was high in nutrition and easy to carry, the food of hunters who worked this region.

There was more tradition tied to the food, and it made for a good story.

The friend who had given it was also a pretty good storyteller.

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