A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 510

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 510: One Who Dreams Is Qualified to Make It Real

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The same day, a little different each time.

One day he grasped a knack in his right foot and found it applied differently to his left. Then that day repeated again.

The Boatman appeared from time to time, and Enkrid still respected him enough to keep his mouth shut.

By now, the Boatman no longer got angry over something like that.

This bastard is just like this. The Boatman said only what he had to say.

"It is already over."

He said it as a bard singing of despair, a farmer planting seeds called futility.

Enkrid let the Boatman's words wash past him and turned his mind back to what mattered: gathering Will in his left foot the way he had in his right, learning to hold firm.

Whatever was said in front of him, that was what he did.

When he gathered Will in his right foot it felt like driving a sword straight down, so he tried the same with his left. It did not work at all.

Why?

In the end it came down to control. He ought to be able to move it the way he moved his hands and feet.

It was invisible, yet it came from his own body, and it refused to obey him. All he could do was repeat, and repeat again.

The Boatman's expression shifted strangely as he stared ahead, lost in thought.

His eyes widened slightly and his chin drew back a fraction. That alone changed the whole impression of his face.

With that altered look, the Boatman opened his mouth, and what came out was different in tone and content from anything before.

"Reduce it."

Completely out of nowhere. Enkrid blinked, wondering what the Boatman meant.

He had occasionally sensed that the Boatman's personality was not entirely singular, but watching it lurch and shift right in front of him like this was a first.

The Boatman snapped back to his usual self almost at once. Today's version was the kind who took endless pleasure in saying useless things.

"Go. Go and enjoy it. Today, which holds nothing enjoyable, only suffering in full."

It was only after repeating this one day more than fifty times that Enkrid finally learned the knack of gathering Will in his left foot.

It felt like learning to move each finger all over again from scratch.

He could feel it clearly and knew it was part of his body, yet to move it he had to attend to each piece deliberately, and then he had to forget that deliberateness.

Only then could he use it naturally.

To close his hand around the sword at his hip, how must his fingers move?

Between the simple act of slipping the grip between thumb and forefinger lay everything: how to press force into the third, fourth, and fifth fingers, how the web of his palm gripped and held. Every part of it had to be learned fresh. More than learned fresh, it felt like relearning how to breathe.

What he had done unconsciously he now had to do consciously, over and over, until it sank back into the unconscious.

The whole process felt utterly foreign, but if something could be repeated, he thought of it as manageable.

Can you throw a boulder the way you toss a pebble? That would be easy enough.

That thought passed through him too.

As the days repeated, Enkrid saw many things.

Had it started with Audin blazing with light?

"Please take this."

It happened while he was gasping because he had triggered Will wrong. Jaxon tried to make him swallow a strange medicine. He did not know what it was, but he could tell it was something extraordinarily rare.

A round pill, roughly twice the width of a thumbnail. Pink, with a surface that looked hard.

The smell alone set it apart. The moment he caught its scent, his mind cleared and his vision sharpened.

Instinct told him that swallowing it would not kill him.

"Any man still breathing can be saved by this. Give up on Will."

From what Jaxon said, taking it would leave him a wreck, but he would survive.

In Jaxon's eyes there was a heat Enkrid had never seen there before. Eyes holding a heat that said if he refused, Jaxon would beat him until death took him. It was Jaxon's last resort, because he could not stand by and watch someone die. Enkrid refused. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and hold on.

As Enkrid lay dying, he watched Jaxon's face crumple. So twisted that even after seeing it he was not sure what he had seen. Had Jaxon ever been capable of that expression?

There was a day like that.

And there were other days too.

Another came as he pushed once more toward death and bought a brief reprieve through pain.

"Come out!"

Rem chose a rougher method. Enkrid's organs had burned away in the Will, and only a few last breaths remained. Standing before him, Rem's hair began to whip in the air.

There was no way to say precisely what Rem was doing, but instinct felt it.

What Audin had done blazing with light, what Jaxon had done with the medicine, Rem was doing something close to the same.

He was right.

It was a sorcery called Life Return.

A forbidden sorcery that gnawed at its caster's own lifespan, and in one respect comparable to the spatial displacement sorcery that had been used on Enkrid before. In what respect? In the sense that luck was required.

Rem failed. Even his extraordinary talent and his years of life were not enough to catch the soul of a dying man.

Enkrid's body grew rigid again.

"Damn it!"

That was the day he heard Rem's voice gone rough with fury. In an instant, wrinkles spread across Rem's face.

Those three were not the end of it.

As he learned to send Will to his right arm, his left arm, each part of his body in turn, and make it stay, he died again and again.

As long as even a breath remained in him, everyone made similar attempts.

"Take it. Make it stay in your body. You can live."

Sinar tried to give him the vital essence she carried inside herself. That essence touched Enkrid's back as a green light the size of a fist, and it was useless.

"Cough."

The moment the elf's essence scattered without effect, part of Sinar's own body scattered away like dust. One arm disappeared just like that.

Even so, her expression stayed composed. No, she wore a faint smile.

"Go on ahead."

There was a day when he saw a sorrowful smile on Sinar's face that he would never normally have seen from her.

"Father, Lord above!"

Teresa sang a hymn at the top of her voice on another.

"I will take you into my world."

Esther spoke with glittering stars in her eyes. Those stars shone and tried to pull Enkrid's barely-breathing body somewhere else.

Esther had intended to seal Enkrid inside her World of Spells for the time being and hide him from the death god's gaze. It was a trick using a curse, and naturally it did not work.

"Not a chance."

Curses were the Boatman's domain.

Beyond that, Esther was not even ready to cast her spell properly.

The spell failed. Mana surged back the wrong way. As the price for forcing the world into being, both of Esther's eyes burst with a wet sound.

There was a day when Esther looked as though she wept blood.

For reasons he did not understand, Fell took the Idol Slayer and drove it at an angle through his own stomach.

Useless. Fell only coughed blood.

These days, those days, drifted past before Enkrid's eyes. They flowed on. Like a scrap of cloth dropping into a river, soaking through, sinking beneath the surface, gone from sight, today sank and flowed and disappeared.

In each of those vanished days, everyone did something. Enkrid watched them and died. Died, and died again.

"Did you enjoy the sight?"

The Boatman asked. Enkrid did not answer.

"Give up. Move forward. I have prepared walls for you to clear, one at a time as you go. Is the path you want not this one?"

The Boatman said it. How many days was this now? He had stopped counting. There was no point.

This particular day was one he could have escaped at any moment he chose.

And yet he dug in out of stubbornness? The Boatman said the path was wrong, that Enkrid was clinging to hollow stubbornness, that without any certainty this was the right way, why push forward?

The Boatman was probably right.

His own choice might be wrong. So what?

If the only way to know was to go, then he had to go. That was what Enkrid did.

"Are you not resentful of the heavens?"

The Boatman asked.

"Do you not hate this world?"

The Boatman asked again.

"And the god who put you in such a world with such talent? Are you not bitter toward them?"

Finding someone to blame was easy. The Boatman kept urging it.

Then partway through, just like before, that other personality suddenly broke to the surface and said only this.

"Reduce it."

Reduce what, exactly.

The personality that slipped out vanished just as quickly. At some point the Boatman stopped relying on words alone. He dug through Enkrid's memories.

Those he had failed to protect appeared in dreams. Nightmares began. Darkness moved in.

"You will be left alone, floundering in a land where the sun never rises."

But Enkrid had already walked that road. He had lived through it in the desert.

What the Boatman tried to take were people, values, and meaning. What Enkrid actually lost was only his comfort.

Because people did not disappear, values did not disappear, meaning did not disappear, just because you could no longer see them.

"In the end you will come to wish for death."

He dreamed of an arrow flying in and punching a hole through his heart.

"Look directly at the darkness that lives inside you."

Even if he became a knight, what could a single swordsman change?

Could he cut his way out of a desert?

What was so remarkable about protecting a few people with a blade?

The Boatman kept muttering. He shook Enkrid without pause.

Even if there were no delusions, could there truly be not a trace of soot?

There was. Wounds too, and scars, and suffering. And still he knew how to move forward. So he simply moved forward.

Enkrid took a step. Toward the sun, toward the dream that was his goal.

Would he live or die?

Would he stake his life on something uncertain?

For what?

In the nightmares and in the repeated days, in the past when he had failed to protect someone, and in a boy who dreamed of becoming a herb gatherer he had once protected, in all of it Enkrid had seen something.

Call it light and it was light. Call it a Flower and it became a Flower. Call it a star and it was a star. Call it a dream and it was a dream.

He murmured light, stars, dream, turning them over and over.

Only then did his field of vision suddenly open wide and let him see his own body from the outside.

The moment he caught hold of a certain current.

It was hard to put into words precisely, something like a sense he had finally found.

He had been wrong.

Will was not something you forced into motion. The better way to say it was this: because he had been blazing this trail all along, he now understood how to walk it.

The fragments of understanding he had won crossing the desert connected and joined to older realizations.

From the thrust he had clawed out in desperation on the very first day to everything he had come to understand pulling himself out of the desert.

Complexity and simplicity.

Discarding and blending.

Enkrid had never managed to discard a single thing he had learned, trained, or understood.

Aoara had told him to discard, but instead of discarding he had blended.

"Reduce it."

The Boatman said it. Reduce what? It did not matter. Whether what the Boatman meant was his will, his dream, his purpose, his ambition, his desire ,

The Boatman was telling him to throw it away.

But Enkrid had not the slightest intention of doing that.

He would not reduce or discard a single thing.

When he first dreamed of knighthood and swore to protect, what he had sworn to protect was everything behind him.

He would not let go of even one of them.

He had made a vow in childhood, sworn it to the stars, to the sky, to the sun, gazing at the two moons, that he would keep it.

A traveling bard's song had given a dream to one small boy. A single line of that song had shot through him like a meteor and left a hole in his chest, a mark that never faded.

Those who dream have already earned the right to see it through, Enkrid had told himself that countless times. He had held to that belief. Even if it was blind faith, he would not let it break his Will.

He would no longer stand by while a child died at his back.

"No."

Enkrid answered. He would not reduce it. A declaration of Will.

In that moment, a storm swept through the inside of his body.

It was not something you forced into motion. You had to let it go. All that was needed was to hold on to what mattered.

Enkrid felt the wind. Wind passing through his body.

Enkrid felt the sunlight. Sunlight entering his body and filling him with warmth. Sunlight and wind wove together, dyed everything orange, and filled the world before his eyes.

The days Enkrid had repeated numbered more than five hundred.

He had been blind and the place that held him was a labyrinth, but he had felt his way through it hand by hand, memorizing each turn, and in the end he walked free.

"That is, without question, a madman."

The Boatman's voice of wonder grew distant, and with it the Boatman's presence faded away.

Enkrid blinked. It was his favorite time of day. The hour of sunset, when the sky felt very close. The orange filling his eyes was the sunset glow.

Stretch out a hand and the clouds were within reach; swing a sword like this and he could cut down anyone. Strength surged and boiled through his whole body.

A sense of omnipotence flooded every part of him. Every gaze resting on him from nearby stood out sharp and clear.

Amid the feeling that he could do anything, Enkrid sorted with complete clarity, utterly precisely, between what he would do and what he would not.

He also knew how to sustain the omnipotence rising endlessly inside him and the Will that was its source.

"I should sleep."

Enkrid said it and closed his eyes.

The eyes watching him wore no laughter. One of them came forward and caught him as he fell back.

* * *

"Got him?"

The one who stepped forward and caught Enkrid was Ropord. He just happened to be close by.

The others did not move at all. That was fine. Falling backward was not going to crack open the back of that man's head.

More than anything, everyone was too stunned to find words.

Into that silence, Sinar's voice rang out.

Got him? That was the question she threw at the air, at all of them.

"Looks like it," Rem said.

"Confirmed," Jaxon said.

"Did the Father lend his hand?" Audin murmured in amazement.

Ragna gripped and released the handle of his sword, over and over.

Ruagarne puffed out her cheeks but could not make a sound. She was too surprised.

Two people in the group did not understand what had just happened.

Ropord and Fell.

What was that? Ropord had no instinct for it and had simply moved on reflex when Enkrid said he was going to sleep.

Fell tilted his head, gripping the Idol Slayer out of habit.

Something had clearly happened and something had clearly changed, but what it was he could not say.

Still, without any particular reason, he suddenly felt a surge of motivation. Enkrid had been eating enormously, sleeping, resting, and then staring quietly at the sunset, and had blinked slowly a few times and collapsed, and watching it made something run through Fell.

He wanted to get up right now and swing a sword. He had to do something.

Fell rose to his feet, stepped away, and headed for the training grounds. He could not bear to sit on this feeling.

It was as though someone had forcibly stuffed motivation into his body.

Ropord was much the same.

He had felt a similar shudder, and it seemed like he had gained something close to an insight.

Both of them had been touched by the Will that had poured out of Enkrid naturally.

Esther stayed seated and opened only one eye.

She called up a piece of her World of Spells to look, and a great star appeared in the seeing eye.

What did he do?

She did not know. But one thing was plain. The man who had kept his dream on the tip of his tongue every ordinary day had now made it real.

"Seen stranger things."

That was what Rem said.