A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 491

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 491: Juol Cried, Then Ended Up Laughing

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Juol laughed through his tears.

Right. Rem wouldn't just keep taking hits like that.

He had no idea what it would look like once Rem found his real Sorcery, but even now, he could keep up with him.

Well then, Bon, pretty fun, isn't it?

Rem had spoken with his axe. Enkrid had to answer back.

He gripped Aker and settled into his stance.

Since fighting the Giant and the Sorcerer, Enkrid had replayed every past experience like a man possessed. Old habit. And his conclusion was this.

Every fight had been missing something. None of them had fully satisfied him.

What a shame.

The Giant had only been strong. The Sorcerer was no swordsman.

He had felt flickers of pleasure, moments of exhilaration. The insights he gained mid-fight had given him a jolt of something electric.

But all of that had grown from what came before.

So it would be a lie to say he didn't want to cross swords with a real rival.

The Giant's strength was threatening, but its technique was garbage.

Being powerful gave you an edge, sure, but that couldn't be everything.

Timing and precision mattered more than raw force. The difference between a cut born from proper form and one thrown out carelessly was enormous.

Driving an opponent into a corner through precise form.

That was the Correct Sword. The Correct Sword Style he had learned from Tutor, the Demon Sword, deepened further by Ruagarne's experience and Enkrid's own time and effort.

A sword to back Rem into a corner.

Crown strike, wrap-and-strike, diagonal slash, high horizontal sweep, Heavy Sword Style spinning cut.

Every motion carried one message.

He was going to thrust with one hand.

That was the last piece, the most critical attack in this exchange.

Rem was ready for it. Of course he was. Why would you get caught by something shown to you?

But while Enkrid pressed with clean, correct form, he wove in a lie.

A sword that deceives.

The Illusionary Sword Style. Enkrid built every move in the exchange toward a single deception.

He made it look like the one-handed thrust was coming, then closed the distance in an instant. The moment he launched off the ground and crashed in close, Rem saw the gap shrinking and swung a punch with the fist gripping the axe.

Enkrid grabbed near the ricasso with his left hand for half-sword fighting and brought the blade forward.

Left like that, the punch would drive straight into the flat of the blade.

Smash through the blade with the angle of the punch? Rem could have done it, but his opponent was Enkrid, and the sword in that hand was a magic sword.

So instead of slamming his fist into the blade, Rem bent his wrist and turned the axe-head to meet it.

Blade and axe-head caught, clashed, separated, caught again.

Ti-ti-ti-ting.

Two pieces of iron met and threw off sparks of delight.

In that sliver of a moment, Enkrid released the ricasso, raised two fingers, and drove them at Rem's eyes.

Valaf's Martial Arts, the blinding technique. A feint aimed at the opponent's opening, half a beat faster than anything he had shown before.

Still, Rem threw his head back and dodged.

Tick. The fingertips grazed the tip of his chin. A drop of blood flew, and a few strands of gray beard went with it. Enkrid's fingers had torn the skin.

Rem immediately kicked out, and Enkrid caught it on his knee.

Pak!

They traded blows and broke apart, and the moment they did, Enkrid brought his sword straight down in a vertical strike.

Arath, watching from behind Rem, thought it looked like two streams of blue light falling from sky to earth, twin shooting stars.

Enkrid's eyes gave that illusion.

A full-power Heavy Sword Style overhead cut. A Knight's Strike, too.

Everything in the fight had been building to that one move.

Ordinarily their sparring ran at eight out of ten.

Going full ten out of ten meant both of them risked real injury.

But they had both gotten so absorbed that they burned everything without thinking. For one moment, both turned serious and went all-out.

Rem saw the blade rushing in and raised his axe to meet it.

It looked like brute force against brute force. Just before the two weapons collided, the wrist driving Rem's axe upward softened and curved.

He caught the descending Heavy Sword Style strike on the axe-head and let it glide off to the side.

The Flowing Sword Style. A sword that flows.

Both of them stopped.

Enkrid with Aker held at a diagonal, Rem with his axe raised at chest height.

Fight any further, and one of them might die.

That was the kind of spar it was. Could you even call it a spar?

Juol had been holding his breath without realizing it and finally let it out in a rush.

After fighting like that, they both smiled.

"Hrk, how was it?"

Rem asked.

"That was genuine," Enkrid said.

A smile crept onto his usually blank face.

"Damn fun."

Rem cackled. He already knew that without being told. When the captain was truly enjoying himself, his expression changed, and it seemed the man himself had no idea. The way he smiled like a kid who just got a gift meant he still had something pure in him.

"You're both insane."

Juol said it from where he had been watching.

"I nearly dropped a child," Arath said.

"That's a little alarming," Rem answered.

Dunbakel said nothing and simply nodded.

Those two were always like this.

Ruagarne shivered again. Lately she wondered if she kept watching just to be surprised by Enkrid.

He has grown frighteningly fast.

With Rem fighting at full intent, Enkrid's current level came through all the more clearly.

And he will keep growing.

It was the first time she had ever looked at Enkrid and thought he wasn't hitting a wall, that he was genuinely still climbing. If her instinct for reading talent wasn't broken, she was certain of it.

Why did she feel that? Ruagarne had her own small realization.

Watching Enkrid smile, the thought came to her naturally.

The smile. The joy. The exhilaration.

Enkrid chases his dream. And he enjoys the process. That is why he never stops.

The sight of that smile, that grin, drove the realization into her mind all at once.

"If we go at it like that again I might lose my future children, so let's save the next round for after I've found my Sorcery. And I need a new axe."

Rem held up his axe as he said it. Fighting at full force had left hairline cracks running all across the head. One tap would shatter it. Enkrid nodded.

One more round like that and one of them might not walk away.

"Fair enough."

He answered and went about packing up camp without a fuss. They were traveling again.

Demon Creatures appeared occasionally along the way, and they passed through stretches of strange terrain.

"This is where a black meteor fell. From here south, they say the earth meets the horizon in a flat line."

Rem, Juol, or Arath would step up to explain things like that along the road.

The Demon Creatures were no real opposition, so Grime's Path had turned into something of a tour.

With Enkrid and Rem both in the party, the lopsided strength made that inevitable.

The flat land where the horizon clung to the earth was dry ground with almost no grass. Large trees, boulders, and low hills were scattered here and there, but mostly it was just wide open land.

So wide that if your eyes were sharp enough, you could probably make out what the distant moving dots were.

It looked barren, but where the sunlight and wind came together, it turned calm.

As they kept going they reached the place where they had fought before.

"That's the Sand-blocking Canyon. Like the name says, you pass through here and you're heading into the River of Sand Without Return. You know the River of Sand means a desert?"

He had heard a desert was nothing but sand. He had never been to one.

"That land is the worst place for a Frog," Ruagarne said.

She had felt the dryness wearing on her for a long time, though she had endured it well enough.

Watching her fight, she had done perfectly fine even when opponents shouted to rattle her, which made you wonder if Ruagarne had more patience than any other Frog alive.

Some Frogs flew into a frenzy the moment their Heart Armor took a scratch, but Ruagarne was cool-headed most of the time, except when facing Cultists.

Juol said getting a look at the desert was difficult.

"Walk in and everyone gets lost and dies."

Arath added that. Enkrid said he had no particular desire to go inside.

Traces of the battle from a few days ago should have been visible, but there was nothing left. The Giant's corpse had been disposed of somewhere too.

The canyon ran deep inside. They passed through the cleaned-up entrance and went in, and one wall was riddled with holes. High up on a cliff face that you had to crane your neck to see, what looked like cave mouths dotted the rock in clusters.

"Sacred Ground," Juol said.

This was the Sacred Ground of the western lands. A site that stood as the symbol of Sorcery and served as a cemetery all in one.

Whether you would feel some holy presence there, he honestly wasn't sure.

It was strange, certainly. The caves alone were remarkable, and now and then an animal could be seen climbing the cliff face.

Was that a monkey? No, it looked more like a bear.

"Bear-ape," Juol said, and went on to explain. Somewhere between a bear and a monkey.

Why something like that existed here was anyone's guess.

"It's a sacred animal. You can't hunt it."

Meaning even if you were starving, you could not eat one.

It had pointed ears and a round body and looked a bit slow.

Maybe because people never harmed them, a bear-ape wandered over and set something down before moving off.

Red berries. Cut one open and it was packed with tiny seeds like a pomegranate.

"Spirit fruit. Tart, but sweet and good. We received a gift, so we should give one back."

Juol brought out pieces of lucky fish and some kind of grain-flour snack. The bear-ape approached with mild caution, took the food, and left. Its eyes kept rolling toward them the whole time, so it wasn't entirely without wariness.

"Cannibals are the type who would even attack bear-apes, but from the reaction it looks like they're not hiding here."

"The ones that ran last time?"

"Right. There are probably hunters tracking them down even now. They moved as a group, so it won't take long. The western lands are wide, but there's nowhere to hide."

Enkrid remembered driving a dagger into the back of the last one, the one who had been swinging the short blade.

The hit wasn't in a good spot. Moving freely would be hard.

Was Sorcery as good at healing as holy power?

If so, the man might still be on his feet. If not, walking was probably beyond him.

The back, right near the spine. A clean thrust.

Unless the man happened to be wearing something like the bandage armor Enkrid used to carry, some relic of that sort.

Without that, it would be a serious wound.

And yet somehow he had been a fugitive this whole time.

Not caught and thrown in a cell. Not already dead.

That alone said he was no ordinary man. And he had been genuinely skilled, no question.

"Let's move."

Grime's Path didn't end here.

They traveled with talk and sparring and cooking and throwing Dunbakel into lakes.

Most of it was done on velopter-back, and the land felt far wider than anything on the continent.

No mountain ranges cutting across the view.

Out on that road, a ghoul burst out of nowhere.

They had been riding west for a good while.

Grrrrwww.

A ghoul. Rare in the western lands, the kind of Demon Creature that was practically a symbol of Cursed Grounds.

Dunbakel stepped forward.

The curved blade at her hip came out and took the thing's head in a single stroke.

Thwck. Black blood poured from the neck, severed like a bundle of dry straw, and the head tumbled across the ground. A few more ghouls appeared after that. Then Arath spoke in a serious tone.

"Rem. From here on is forbidden territory."

"I know."

"I'm saying don't go further."

"I know."

He kept walking anyway and said as he went:

"I said let's walk the real Grime's Path."

The legend the hero Grime left behind did not end happily. He found the Cursed Ground, fought the Demon Creatures that poured out of it, and died. His end was less happy than it was desperate, and that desperation was what made it great.

"There's a Cursed Ground in the western lands too," Rem said.

Cursed Grounds were spread across the whole continent. The one in the south was said to be the largest, but that didn't make it the only one. This was all secondhand knowledge, passed along through hearsay.

"And there's one with a name."

Rem knew more than Enkrid did.

He had seen it during his coming-of-age rite in the western lands.

A secret only a few knew. During that rite, Rem had approached the boundary of the Cursed Ground and looked inside.

"This one goes by the name Silence."

He said it, then stopped walking. He smiled and asked:

"Want to take a look?"

Nod.

Enkrid nodded without missing a beat.

He wanted to take up the sword to protect the backs of those behind him. That was the knight he dreamed of being. And the Cursed Ground was one of the things standing in the way of that dream.

What had killed Aoara was a Balrok, a creature born from a Cursed Ground.

"Arath, it'll be fine. You know why this one is named Silence."

Juol thought it over for a long while before consoling her. She gave a reluctant nod.

Twenty-some days of riding on velopter-back.

Not at full speed, but fast enough. The destination was the Cursed Ground.

Pressing further, the yellow-brown earth slowly turned black.

Not just black, a dull, lifeless dark that began to carry a raw, bloody smell.

Grrrwww!

Ghouls popped up occasionally, and there were warped ratmen too. Not in large numbers. Far too few to call this a real Cursed Ground.

The grass around them disappeared entirely, and low hills blocked the way ahead.

Low, but stretching far in both directions, and completely black. They climbed partway up. By this point even Arath had stopped saying anything.

Some western folk claimed that setting foot here was enough to kill you, but those who knew, knew.

No such curse existed. Going deeper would do the body real harm, but they weren't even at the entrance yet.

This was just land close to the Cursed Ground.

Beyond the black mist was the real thing.

Standing on the hill and looking out, odd flickers of color appeared through the dull darkness.

Gray trees. The mark of a Cursed Ground.

Their shapes were strange.

Branches and leaves gathered together into something that looked like a woman with wild, tangled hair.

The rocks were shaped like human hearts, a flat, lifeless reddish-brown with no shine to them. Wind blew, but it wasn't the cool breeze they'd had until now. It was heavy and dull and full of something oppressive.

The gray forest of a Cursed Ground, that was the curse that had fallen on the City of Aoara.

Knight Aoara had split that curse open and cut it down.

And now, the curse laid over the western lands stood before them.

Black mist spread left and right, thick enough that the view never fully opened up.

"Demon Creatures came out of there exactly twice, and both times the western lands nearly fell," Rem said. Old history.

"The Violet Demon Lord was one of them. In terms of Sorcery, they say an absurd name carries no power, so that was supposedly why it was named that."

Was the Violet Demon Lord's Curse what the Fortune-Teller Tribe had laid on someone?

Enkrid saw something burning in Rem's eyes.

The will to end this Cursed Ground. There would be a reason.

"Did someone you knew get hurt? Family?"

When the Violet Demon Lord appeared, perhaps it had been that way.

And a dying father might have said:

Run. Don't fight. Leave the Cursed Ground alone.

The people of the western lands would not do anything about the Cursed Ground. Touch it, and the only thing left is death.

That couldn't have sat right with Rem.

A father's enemy. A family's enemy. Was that it?

Rem snorted and said:

"What are you on about? I just don't like having it as a neighbor."

Completely unbothered.

"That's all?"

Enkrid asked.

"What else do you need?"

That was a neighbor who lived pretty far away.

The thought crossed his mind, but it was a very Rem answer.

He didn't like it. Simple as that.

Enkrid felt the same way.

"I didn't bring you here to charge in right now, so hold off."

"Hold off on what?"

"You were about to charge in."

"Me?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because you get a little unhinged the moment you see a Cursed Ground or a Demon Creature. Same as that Frog with Cultists."

"Me?"

"Yeah."

The look Rem gave him, like he was watching someone who had lost their mind, was deeply irritating.

"Charging now is suicide. Get your head straight. Damn. If talking doesn't work, I'll stop you by force. Arath, get ready."

Rem was dead serious. Enkrid swore before he could stop himself.

"You piece of..."

"Dog's death is what it'd be! Get yourself together!"

Enkrid couldn't hold it and swung Aker at him.

In a place called forbidden territory, within spitting distance of a Cursed Ground, the two of them scuffled for a while. Not seriously, though.

The sparring ended when Enkrid drove his fist into Rem's ribs.

With Rem's Sorcery out of the picture, Enkrid had the edge.

Both of them were sweaty when they suddenly started laughing.

It had been a joke they both planned together.

The Cursed Ground could wait. They would wipe it out, but there was no need to throw their lives away today. That was what the whole thing was saying.

A pair of absolute lunatics.

"Anyway, I'll be back here again."

"Yeah, let's deal with it properly and clean it up then."

"Agreed."

They got up. Arath looked them over carefully. Something had to be wrong with their heads, talking about cleaning up a Cursed Ground, laughing about it like nothing.

Juol's chest was just pounding.

The ambition they had shown was too absurd to be real.

And yet his heart hammered hard.

Anticipation swelled up in him. He understood all over again why people gathered around Enkrid, the honorary warrior.

Because he could fight well?

Plenty of people could. Rem was one. In the past, the western lands had warriors too.

Because he was handsome?

That wasn't it either.

The dream.

The scale of ambition was different. The way the dream was chased was different. Which meant the way of living life itself was dazzling to look at.

A person like that naturally drew people in.

That was what moved Juol. He cried without realizing it.