WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 507: The Black Flower and the Golden Witch

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"Take my disciple as your adopted son."

Baron Philip ruled the region as its lord, but he had nothing particularly outstanding about him. What he did have was ambition.

Someday.

He would become a lord with vast lands. His ambition, though, bordered on fantasy. That changed after a swordsmaster called Lorenzo appeared.

Lorenzo told him to adopt his disciple as a son, and Philip agreed.

Word spread outside that the adopted son had simply come with his own sword instructor, but the truth was different.

The disciple was a prodigious spearman. He fought with a spear in one hand and a shield in the other, and he was skilled enough to cut down a dozen or more ghouls in an instant.

"Impressive."

The words left the lord's mouth before he knew it.

He had never seen someone this capable in person.

Every soldier in his territory who fancied himself a fighter was no match at all.

Lorenzo, the instructor, fought even better than his disciple and adopted son, Caevan.

Both of them had offered to become his strength.

"I have long admired the Baron's benevolent and upright character. I came thinking this might be a good resting place for a wanderer who has lost his way, but if you would rather we leave, we will go quietly."

Those were the words Lorenzo had spoken when he first came to him.

Rumors had been circulating that skilled fighters all across Naurillia were looking for masters, the civil war having thrown the entire country into chaos.

That kind of opportunity had come to him as well.

'Why not me?'

Philip believed he was no lesser than Enkrid, the man whose name was on everyone's lips. Enkrid was not even proper nobility. Just a mercenary who had landed himself a position through luck.

'Some drifter with a sword.'

A man who had built his reputation off the back of the civil war.

Was that envy? Yes. It was.

Then all he had to do was take that reputation away. He had quietly gathered the nobles around him, applied pressure, and fixed his hungry eyes on Border Guard, that prize overflowing with opportunity.

Philip had done all of that. And this was the result.

"I smell something. That one's a noble."

Rem, who had once made a name for himself as the Noble Hunter, said it with a twitch of his nose, as though imitating Dunbakel.

He could not actually smell that, but anyone with eyes could tell.

The feathered hat, the thick shirt with padded shoulders, the leather boots reaching up to the calf. It was obvious.

So he already knew and was simply toying with the man.

"Who are you? This is the Viscounty of Philip."

Three of those watching the two fighters were on horseback. Enkrid looked up and said, "Enkrid of Border Guard."

There was nothing more to add to that introduction.

Baron Philip blinked several times.

Who? Enkrid's name, whether people liked him or hated him, was one nobody in the region could claim not to know.

Even those who tried to belittle his achievements could not pretend ignorance of it.

"Are you an impostor?"

The baron asked out of suspicion. Enkrid ignored it entirely and said what he had come to say.

"Did you start something with me?"

"...What?"

What the hell is this man saying?

"I asked if you started something."

Respect for nobility had its limits. Enkrid knew exactly what intangible weight he carried.

A noble? A baron? Laughable.

He already held the rank of general and had been granted lands across the surrounding territories as someone who had helped end the civil war. If noble titles were the issue, one letter would settle it.

And if any problem did arise, Marcus would handle it before it went further.

Besides, Crang's letter had already told him that dealing with a few of these people was fine, that they even wanted it handled.

"You insolent..."

The baron exploded. He shouted from horseback and jabbed a finger at Enkrid, that finger trembling.

General or whatever, how dare this man who wasn't even a noble..."Caevan!"

Lorenzo called out. His adopted son Caevan dismounted. He narrowed his eyes and gripped his spear and shield, weapons he carried with him everywhere. His gaze swept across the two of them. These were not easy opponents, he could sense that much, but he did not think he would lose easily either. At the same time, killing intent rose in him.

He had settled here from the start with exactly this kind of thing in mind. Stirring chaos inside Naurillia was the goal.

But the opponents were far worse than he could have imagined.

The moment that killing intent surfaced, Rem reacted.

"Oh, give me a break."

Rem let the words drop and stepped forward in the same instant. His sole bent as the front of his foot touched the ground and his heel came up. Then Rem disappeared. That was how it looked to Caevan.

It was, if one had to call it anything, a fight that was not a fight at all.

Before Caevan could even thrust his spear, Rem had already closed the distance and swung his axe.

It was a speed that fell entirely outside Caevan's range of perception.

The axe came down on the crown of Caevan's head just as he was awkwardly starting to raise his shield.

Thud.

His skull caved in.

"Caevan!"

Caevan's instructor, Lorenzo, shouted too late. He leaped from his horse, and Rem was already in front of him. He grabbed the dismounting man by the throat with one hand and drove him straight into the ground.

A human body tossed like a kite in the wind. That was the kind of brute strength it was.

There was a stone half-buried in the dirt, its top barely peeking out, and Rem brought Lorenzo's head down onto it with precision.

Crack.

A human skull is rarely harder than stone. The scalp split open, the bone protecting the brain shattered, and blood and matter poured out.

Rem tossed Lorenzo aside and slapped his hands clean.

These were men not even worth drawing a proper axe for. Enkrid had the Demon Slayer nickname, and yet every manner of pest still came crawling.

'Good thing I brought a hand axe.'

He had picked one up from a smithy on the way here, the kind used for splitting firewood.

Using his Inherited weapon for something like this would have made his own axe sulk.

He had killed two people, but it was not particularly remarkable. Drawing a weapon without a word was a declaration of intent to kill, and that in turn meant accepting the possibility of one's own death.

That was just the nature of fighters.

Killing between people who faced each other with weapons, spear or sword or hammer or axe, was common enough.

The baron's mouth hung open.

To Baron Philip, Caevan and Lorenzo had been extraordinary fighters. He had doubted there was anyone short of a knight who could match them.

He had not known.

That above the sky there was another sky, and that there was a world beyond what he could see.

The curtain fell on his clumsy delusions, on the hollow ambition that could not even be called a dream.

"Did you start something with me? You also sent assassins?"

Enkrid asked again. Not one of the watching soldiers had any intention of stepping forward. They were all frozen solid, as though winter had arrived long before its time.

"...Pardon?"

The ambition and delusion that had settled deep inside Baron Philip were gone, and in their place, the will to survive opened its eyes. The thought that he stood before a lesser man had vanished entirely.

His opponent was the Demon Slayer.

"Let's just take his head. It's faster."

The savage brute beside Enkrid said it.

"Don't take his head. I'm not a killer. If I killed everyone who picked a fight with me, they'd start calling me the Demon General."

Enkrid answered.

"Please spare me."

The baron said it immediately, having listened to the two of them. It was a single sentence squeezed from whatever courage he had left.

He did not trust the soldiers behind him. A sound choice. Those remaining soldiers were already on their knees, weapons and all.

What crime had the soldiers committed?

"Starting today, you will work the fields with your own hands."

Looking over the soldiers, Enkrid could see that eating well and doing this work on the side was not the situation here.

The Viscounty of Philip was not impoverished, but it was not a comfortable territory either.

All of it had started because Philip put his faith in two worthless men named Lorenzo and Caevan.

The baron nodded.

His territory had originally begun with land granted to him to be farmed from the ground up.

Just looking at Enkrid made his legs shake.

That was only natural. When someone became your enemy, fear followed.

Enkrid had it under control, but possessing Will meant that one's presence quietly pressed on the people around them.

Someone who stood against him might feel something like standing on the edge of a cliff, a sudden, dizzying sensation.

"Thank you."

Baron Philip lowered his head. Being absorbed as a vassal territory under a greater lord was not something to be particularly ashamed of.

"Were there a few more of these?"

Enkrid tossed the question out, turning away from Philip.

"You're going to all of them?"

"We're already out here."

An exchange between Enkrid and Rem, right in front of Philip. Philip had not been the only noble who had tried to pick a fight with Krais.

Since they were already out, Enkrid had decided to go around and see every last one of them, like a touring performance.

Some nobles had allies like Lorenzo waiting for them, while others had simply been swept along by the current and thrown their support behind a friendly noble, the way you'd set a fork on someone else's plate.

Nobody had expected Enkrid to handle this personally, though anyone who knew him might have seen it coming.

Krais had more or less anticipated it.

So they swept through the group of nobles. The ones truly beyond saving, the ones who had stolen wives and daughters from their own people, were given some suitable pretext and had their heads taken by Rem. The rest were absorbed as vassals.

No matter that the opponents had provoked the fights, no matter that Crang had given approval, going around lopping off noble heads at every turn would have caused an uproar. But there was no shortage of pretexts.

"How dare you insult my honor!"

Local nobles, when first approached, all tended to speak fiercely, and those types invariably went through something resembling a final struggle.

Rem, having heard what they said, would pick up some worn glove from the ground and throw it in the noble's face.

Throwing a glove had been the symbol of a duel challenge since ancient times.

"That's right. I insulted you."

Thwack.

Some got a nosebleed from a waterlogged leather glove to the face. Others erupted in a torrent of curses.

"Your mother is a ghoul!"

That sort of thing. Rem let it slide without a second thought. What was the point of talking to a corpse?

"Fight in my place!"

The noble would then put forward a champion.

"Your champion's life is yours to stake as well. Then I'll put my captain's life on the line too."

That captain was Enkrid, naturally.

Whether Enkrid made his identity known or not, most situations unfolded in roughly the same way.

They could not go around cutting noble heads without even this kind of flimsy pretext.

The kingdom had its own order.

What Enkrid and Rem were doing could be called something like an improvised trial by combat, conducted within the bounds of that order and what passed for law.

In the end, though, this whole thing was nothing more than a casual outing.

Rem's faded reputation as the Noble Hunter rose high again from all of this, but that was a small matter.

Rem did not think about it either.

Enkrid returned to Border Guard and settled back into an ordinary routine.

Some days he spent time with Odd-Eye, other days he wandered among his squad members and asked them questions.

He also made rounds through the city, and as word spread that he had dealt with a number of the nobles and that Border Guard's reputation had grown fearsome, people began to target Enkrid in a different way.

Specifically, a group of ladies launched a relentless campaign on Border Guard.

Heavy perfume, billowing dresses, and faces known for their beauty across the region, the ladies cast their fishing lines in pursuit of the prize catch that was Enkrid.

What they did not know was that a fishing line was useless on dry land.

"One meeting and he'd fall for her."

"You think there's a man alive who doesn't fall for my face?"

"You can do it, Rowen. Any man who sees you and isn't moved isn't a man, he's a eunuch."

Backed by parents and relatives and setting out with every confidence, the ladies ran into two walls.

The first wall was a black-haired beauty currently rebuilding her World of Spells, lately spending her time observing people, watching their lives, and coming to understand them anew.

Black-haired and blue-eyed, Esther was a witch who made the cheeks of some of those ladies flush red.

A beauty that could make even women fall for her.

"The Black Flower, Esther."

That was how the nickname someone gave her began to spread.

"I suppose I'll have to give up."

"I'm going back."

Some turned around, and some held on. Surely there was at least one thing they had over the Black Flower Esther.

Those who remained then ran into the elf, Sinar.

"The Gold Witch."

A beauty not of this world. There was simply no way to put their own faces forward here.

What was an elf doing here?

All of this had happened while Enkrid paid it no mind. From these events came a rumor that spread far and wide: the lord of Border Guard walked with a witch on one side and a flower on the other.

It was also why the volume of love letters had dropped noticeably.

"Apparently that's what happened. So they call Commander Sinar the witch and Esther the flower."

It was a story Krais had shared with him. Enkrid just nodded. "Is that so."

What did any of that matter?

There were more important things to be turning over in his mind, things to examine and sit with.

He had given a warning to those who picked fights with him, specifically those who had laid hands on his people.

That was one task done. He had done it simply because the urge moved him. Having done it, he felt at ease.

That was enough.

"I'll be going."

Krais was a busy man. He said what he had to say and left.

"Sure."

Enkrid answered without getting up and sank back into meditation. He was turning over what he had heard from his squad members.

"Hm? You're asking how I use Sorcery?"

The first had been Rem.

"How do I use it-I just use it. If there's one difference, well, it's like this. Divine manifestation is basically the power of a spirit dwelling in my body. Say a bear's power is in me, or a wolf's legs are in me, that sort of thing. They say you draw it out when you need it, but the spirit is always with me."

He remembered the way Rem had smiled as he said it. Rem had come back from the west, crossed swords with Ragna, and made clear he had stepped into a different world.

Jaxon had quietly started avoiding direct matches with him.

Audin had conceded defeat.

"I would lose if we fought right now, Brother. There is no point."

To be precise, he had emphasized the word "right now," so even though he was admitting defeat, it did not quite sound like that.

It sounded more like: let's settle this later.

After Rem, Enkrid had asked Sinar something similar and received an answer.

"There is a current in the world, and I entrust a part of myself to that current."

That was her answer to how she had risen to the rank of elf knight.

"It just happens."

He had asked Ragna too, but Ragna's explanation was a mess.

Even so, it was useful to Enkrid.

The Eastern Mercenary King's words about seeking diverse experience could be read as an instruction to observe differences, but also as an instruction to find common ground.

The way a knight used Pressure, and the similar technique Rem used, Sorcery called fear infusion, the two were different.

But they were the same. The effect was the same. Both crushed the opponent. That much was identical.

His thoughts spread out and scattered, then gathered and solidified again.

Aoara had said that more than any special technique, you simply had to swing. How was that possible?

If Will was carried by intention, then swinging alone would produce a strike nothing could stop.

Training the muscles, training the technique, steadying the heart, standing the mind upright.

Those things drifted through his head.

What made a knight's Will different?

Enkrid sat on a tree stump, felt the breeze, listened to the birds, heard the shouts of soldiers going through their drills, and sank into a single thought.

Not drawing it out when needed. Keeping it open all the time.

A door exists, and you keep it open at all times. Before, he had only opened it when necessary. A fierce wind blew in from outside, so that was all he could do.

No, it was more that he could not leave the door open without holding it. That was the real constraint.

The wind he could bear.

How would you keep the door open all the time?

One method came to him, and Enkrid opened his eyes. Ruagarne was watching him with idle calm, her gaze unhurried and composed.

The eyes that had been shut a moment ago and now opened were uncommonly still. Like someone who had finished making a certain kind of preparation.

"I'm heading to the dining hall. Coming?"

Enkrid rose to his feet and said it. Ruagarne shook her head.

"Not in the mood."

Enkrid walked toward the dining hall. Right now was the time to eat.

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