WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 509: N.......

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"This is the wrong path. In the end, you will stop here."

The Boatman said.

Same as always.

Enkrid thought that and looked at him.

Gray, cracked skin. Eyes without pupils. A mouth that looked like the darkness at the bottom of a pit.

Every time he spoke, darkness seemed to seep out from inside his mouth.

That darkness whispered for him to despair, urged him to give up, nagged at him to lose hope.

He was not a child, so why all this nagging? Even a four-year-old did not nag this much.

"You are thinking something disrespectful."

The Boatman was as quick to notice things as Rem. Inside the dream or out, Enkrid was the same.

"No, I am not."

He denied it without missing a beat.

"You struggled and crawled your way here, only to stand before a wall you built yourself. How ironic. How very ironic."

There he goes again.

"Another disrespectful thought."

"No, I am not."

Did the dream change who he was at his core? No, it did not. Enkrid's greatest talent came through without restraint.

For a moment the Boatman nearly lost his temper at that shameless answer, but the patience he had cultivated over so long was not so shallow that something like this could shake him, and he held himself back.

"Be careful."

"Yes."

Why did he answer so readily and calmly, just like that? It made the whole thing even more grating.

The Boatman missed having a body. He missed the days when he had flesh and bone terribly.

If he had hands and feet right now, if he had some physical tool to act with.

"Now that you stand before a wall you cannot cross, what does it feel like? A wall you built with your own hands, no less."

Enkrid tilted his head instead of answering.

Only one today had passed so far. Was it not too soon to be talking about feelings?

Something like that crossed his mind.

"Disrespectful!"

"Yes."

"Careful!"

"Yes."

"Stop just answering me."

"N..."

Enkrid opened his mouth halfway, then closed it.

"Go."

"......"

"Get out of here."

"......"

Enkrid pressed his right index finger and thumb together, held them to his lips, and mimed sewing his mouth shut, then nodded.

A sincere, respectful gesture that said: you told me not to speak, so I will not, and I respect your wishes.

He thought as much as he drifted away from the dream.

The river rippled, and the purple lamp on the ferry swayed. It was the Boatman's arm trembling.

"To think I would be this moved."

The Boatman murmured in a toneless voice. He sat alone on the ferry again and looked at the spot where Enkrid had been.

It would end eventually. It always did.

No one could hold out forever against a repeating today.

Enkrid too would reach his end by remaining on the river. The Boatman knew that.

And yet, strange was strange. Interesting was interesting.

Some todays were already ones the Boatman knew, but some fell outside even his foresight.

Not a today that had once appeared and then changed. A today that had never existed at all had come into being.

That was what was happening now.

The Boatman had guarded this ferry for ages beyond counting. He turned that long span over in his mind.

Had anything like this ever occurred? No. Never.

That was why it was strange. That was why a flutter he had long forgotten stirred back to life.

He found that man irritating, yes, but there was also a part of him that sympathized with the very subject of the curse.

That too the Boatman found strange.

His will splitting in several directions at once, that was also something he had not experienced since becoming the Boatman.

There was a part of him that sympathized, a part that found him irritating, a part that wanted to hinder him, and amid all of that, a very small part that asked: what would happen if that bastard actually managed to escape each today, every single time?

It was a meaningless question.

No matter what happened, the end was fixed.

The Boatman knew that from experience.

And yet. If somehow. Just maybe.

'If he pushed forward and ignored all cause and effect.'

Whether the will of a single human being could do such a thing seemed doubtful.

But if such a thing did happen, what would he do? The Boatman let himself sit with that thought.

* * *

'Failure.'

Enkrid had failed, but he did not dwell on the reasons. He had never expected it to work on the first try.

Instead he tried to loosen the tension, to ease the nerves that had pulled taut without him noticing.

The reason he had started keeping his Will open at dusk, the time of day he loved most, was exactly that.

It was one way to relax.

Enkrid drew a long breath in and let it out, and picked up the thread of thought he had been following before.

He got up, loosened his body with the Isolation Technique, ate an obscene amount as usual, saw to his body, rested, waited for the sunset. And while doing all that, he returned to the same thought.

A meditation on knights.

'How to cut down a thousand people.'

How was that even possible?

The different means knights had each shown.

Enkrid still ate well. He stuffed his stomach without restraint. He needed to prepare properly for everything, and eating when he could was an old habit.

"Something go down wrong in there?"

Rem's pointless remark in the mess hall went in one ear and out the other.

"Eating well is also part of one's training."

Audin's words went the same way.

"Maybe you'd like to trade a few swings instead."

Ragna said something on the way out of the mess hall. Did he look more restless today than yesterday?

Maybe.

The first thought that had come to him at the start of this new cycle had been to relax. His muscles had clenched on instinct, his nerves had gone sharp. He recognized that.

An anxiety he had not felt before had surfaced briefly. At a time like that, sure, swinging a sword and working up a sweat would have been the easy comfort. But Enkrid shook it all off.

"Let's do it tomorrow."

When that tomorrow would come he had no idea, but he put off the sparring.

"Are you hurt somewhere?"

Ruagarne asked.

"I'm not hurt."

Enkrid answered with a smile and spent the day much as he had the one before.

In the middle of it all, he kept returning to the same thought.

How to cut down a thousand people.

His thinking was that each knight would rely on their own exceptional method.

Aoara, for instance, would use her connected sword. A sword that linked and kept linking would not stop after cutting one person, then two, then three, four, ten, twenty. It would not stop at all.

When would that sword stop? Only when something outside her expectations stepped forward.

What about Ragna? Under ordinary circumstances, his speed at cutting down enemies would probably be slower than Aoara's. If his opponents were packed close together, that would be a different story.

An image formed in Enkrid's mind of Ragna cutting through a unit formed up in a tight shield wall.

Clustering in front of Ragna was a blunder.

Even a decent junior knight would not dare try to hold that sword back for even a moment.

Where Aoara's sword flowed without end but might pause briefly before a wall, Ragna's sword would smash and shatter any flimsy barrier in its path.

Who was superior? That question had no answer. You would only find out by fighting.

Metal tearing through flesh and bone was an equal opportunity for anyone.

How would the others fight against a thousand?

Rem would leap around like a grasshopper, swinging his axe here and there. Throw, smash, cut, and keep going.

If someone asked who would cut down a thousand the fastest, Enkrid would pick Rem.

What about Jaxon? Cutting down a thousand enemies was hard to picture when it came to him.

If you asked him, what would he say?

"Does every last one of them really need to die?"

Would he not look back at you with that implied question: if there are a thousand of them, is it not better to go for the commander?

That seemed about right.

Thinking that far made him snort a quiet laugh.

"Did you think of something funny? You can tell me."

It was Esther's voice. Enkrid opened his lightly closed eyes and looked at the witch with black hair and blue eyes.

The nickname Black Flower suited her quite well.

Black hair, skin with a glossy sheen, large eyes, a high-bridged nose, and deep red lips.

Anyone would call that a striking face.

And the line of her chest visible through her robe would probably have any ordinary man volunteering himself as a slave without being asked.

"It's nothing."

Enkrid closed his eyes again. Esther did not press him further.

He watched her step back and settle onto the ground, then picked up where he had left off.

The knight of Azpen was someone he did not know well, so he could not picture it clearly.

The Mercenary King did not seem like the type to step out alone against a thousand.

What about Audin? What would Audin do?

Even without reaching the level of a knight, he felt like Audin could turn a thousand people into a bloody pulp.

He probably could.

Then what about being on the receiving end, of sword and fist and weapon hurled by those same knights?

Look at it from the other side, from the perspective of a soldier facing a knight?

Sheer luck alone would not stop a knight's sword. Even if the goddess of fortune showered you with kisses, surviving would be the most you could hope for.

'That makes sense.'

Knights who had actually cut down a thousand were rare. And yet they said a knight was someone who could cut down a thousand. They called it a disaster. What was it that made them that?

Will.

The formless force called willpower was the source that let a person push past their limits.

The sun began to set.

Today was similar to yesterday, but different in certain ways.

Odd-Eye had come near. Teresa hummed to herself.

Unlike yesterday it was only humming, but it was still pleasant to listen to. Audin tapped the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right, keeping rhythm.

Watching Audin keep rhythm like that, Enkrid thought he probably played at least one instrument properly. His sense of rhythm was something else.

"The body of martial skill begins with the feet. Moving the feet is a matter of rhythm. Do not forget that, Brother."

That was something Audin had told him one day.

Enkrid moved his Will and tried to match the rhythm of it like a song.

Thud-thump, thud-thump. Thud-thud-thump.

Like beating a drum, he drew out the Will and planted it in the tips of his feet. Drawing out Will when needed and controlling it was something he had already managed.

Now the task was not control. He had to plant it and forget it.

Forget it, and still have the Will remain.

'Can you maintain something while forgetting it?'

You can. He had learned something from Jaxon as well. The way to keep the senses open without thinking about it.

"Once you master the Sensory Technique, your ears open. Just because you can see and hear everything, does that mean you should look at all of it? Listen to all of it? If you try to perceive, hear, and process every single thing happening around you, you will go mad. So filtering down to only what you need is essential."

'Intuition.'

That was why something beyond the five senses, a sixth sense, was necessary.

Not examining each piece of information coming through the senses one by one, but cutting through it instinctively. By carving the ability to detect danger into the bone, you could maintain the Sensory Technique without thinking about it.

"Get through about a hundred near-death experiences and you will have taken your first steps."

Jaxon had said it as though it were impossible, but of all the conditions Enkrid had ever heard, it was the easiest.

Far better to hear than just try and it will work out.

Ragna was the sort of bastard who would say exactly that and nothing more.

A passing thought slipped in that he really was one insane, directionally-impaired bastard.

Either way, near-death experiences were something he had in abundance. He had actually died countless times.

Carving the instinct to detect danger into the unconscious had not been difficult.

Repeating today over and over had made it happen naturally.

Enkrid started the process again, drawing out the Will, letting it go, carving it into the unconscious.

Before long, the Will filling his entire body began to run wild on its own.

The formless force gathered into a single current and hammered at his heart. It felt like his blood was running several times faster than normal.

In reality no such thing was happening. It was only the Will moving that way.

Crack.

His heart burst again.

Another day repeated.

The next day, his lungs shattered along with it.

The day after that, part of his internal organs burned away.

Using it briefly and then dispersing it was possible. So why could he not gather it and hold it?

He did not know. He would find out one thing at a time from here.

Enkrid kept repeating.

"Dull creature."

The Boatman appeared sometimes, but Enkrid still mimed sewing his mouth shut every time.

Around the time fifty todays had passed, he changed his approach.

Instead of gathering the Will through his whole body, he would try gathering it only in his feet and holding it there.

It was not easy.

The Will would run wild and spread through his entire body.

How could he hold it in place?

Could sensation be the answer?

For Ragna it had been a path walked with long, easy strides. For Enkrid it was a path where he had to examine every pebble on the ground one by one and clear them all away before he could move.

No, he had not even been able to walk in the first place.

'Does it matter?'

Instead of walking, Enkrid crawled.

When had he not?

Did going back to that after having felt himself grow stronger recently not hurt at all?

Not really.

Every road he had walked until now had been a crisis. Crossing a crisis was not in itself hard.

Examine each step of the path, and if it went wrong, turn back and start again. Fine, then that is what he would do.

He had already seen the path. Correcting and repeating was his specialty.

How to activate the Will, how to breathe in that moment, the mindset, the posture, the formless sense needed to control the Will.

He went through everything one by one. It was a matter of doing it until it worked.

What he needed was Patience, the right mindset, and self-mastery.

Check each step, and if the path went wrong, turn back and start again. What you needed to keep repeating without wearing down was Patience.

His will was steady enough not to waver even through repeated failure.

The mental fortitude to endure the pain of the Will tearing through his body, that would be self-mastery.

Dying over and over, he sometimes had the sensation of every muscle, nerve, and organ, everything from his fingertips to his toes, being ripped apart.

In truth, it was not that hard.

Enkrid could do all of this. He was all right.

What he needed was nothing more than a dream that would not break.

And he already had that dream.

A dream that had once been shredded to rags, torn apart over and over.

He had stitched it back together and come this far.

For the first time, the Will that started from his feet found stability, just for a moment.

'First, the right foot.'

The instant he smiled with joy at that, the Will ran wild.

But perhaps because he had managed to control the right foot for even that brief moment, the process of the Will scorching and exploding through him from the inside was also slightly slower than before.

"Step aside, Brother."

For this reason, Enkrid could see something strange through barely open eyes as he lay dying.

Light poured from Audin's entire body. This was not a figure of speech. A halo flowed behind him.

The light became visible, turning into particles that scattered. It was divinity.

Radiating light, Audin bled from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

Whatever it was, it looked like he was prepared to die. His body was stout beyond measure, so maybe it would not kill him, but he was clearly pushing himself to something near that point.

The light gathered and drew close. Just before it reached him, Enkrid barely managed to move aside.

Reflex brought with it the sense that if Audin used that light, that divinity, on him, Audin would die or be badly hurt.

Right after dodging, Enkrid died. He went out without the strength for a single word.

Just before his eyes closed, he saw the light touch his body, but there was no miracle.

Divinity was miraculous, but it could not bring back the dead.

Though, just before death.

"Get up, Brother."

He heard Audin's voice.

The words came as blood poured from his eyes and nose.

That today was ending and a new today would begin was something he now knew the moment he opened his eyes.

"You mad bastard."

Enkrid said it to Audin for no particular reason as he sat up.

"Did you sleep well?"

Audin said with his usual smile.

Enkrid watched him for a moment, then shook his head and got up.

It was time to start a new today.

Having succeeded with the right foot, he seemed to have grasped the rough feel of it.

Letting yesterday go and meeting a new today, that too was already familiar. Crawling and walking and running toward tomorrow was the only thing he had ever been any good at.

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