A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 521

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 521: Greed Pushes From Behind

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Long ago, on the edge of death, Knight Aker had one thought. It would be a waste to let his swordsmanship disappear.

'To be precise, it is not the swordsmanship itself I regret losing. It is what I came to understand.'

He had stepped forward to teach many times, but never truly taught anyone. Geniuses tend to be that way, and Aker was no exception.

Teaching was not something he found enjoyable. But he wanted to leave his techniques behind, his swordsmanship and everything else, so just before dying, he hit upon a method.

Anyone who heard it would call it flat-out madness.

What if he stored his will inside a sword?

Aker's specialty was Transference, channeling Will into weapons.

'Will is willpower itself. Could I not plant my thought-self into that will?'

His Inscribed Weapon had been a gift received when he first took up the sword.

He reforged and hammered it anew, and the result became his Inscribed Weapon. It was the weapon of a lifetime, a blade shaped to the knight called Aker specifically, and his particular gift for Transference made the whole thing possible. Luck played a part too.

Because in certain matters, luck becomes the most important factor of all.

Aker sought a sorcerer's help for this, and in the end, he succeeded.

He planted his thoughts and his intent inside the Inscribed Weapon.

"Four conditions," he said.

He set the conditions under which the sword would awaken.

The first three were simple enough.

His swordsmanship would never truly die out, so the person had to be someone who had learned it.

Without grasping Will at minimum, there was no point, so the person had to have awakened Will.

And they had to be the sword's owner.

The fourth and final hidden condition was this: even after becoming a knight, the person still had to be someone who hungered.

The fourth condition was demanding, but by the same token, it was essential.

What was the point of teaching someone who entered the sword's inner world but had no desire to learn?

Essential, yes, but why the most demanding of the four?

Because if someone had already become a knight, they had already carved their own path with a sword.

The scrambling days of desperate learning were supposed to be behind them.

And yet, he had to find someone who still had the will to learn.

That was no easy thing to ask for.

Those who knew what Aker had done all called it meaningless madness, but to the knight himself, it did not matter.

He was satisfied.

And so the Ego Sword Aker was born.

This was passed down imperfectly through the generations, and that gave rise to things like the Demon Sword Tutor.

Some foolish sorcerer had stolen the secret arts of the sorcerer who helped Aker and used them to create Tutor.

Tutor was a Demon Sword that imprisoned a human soul, the Demon Sword that had forced Enkrid to endure death of the mind again and again. That was the Tutor he knew.

In other words, Tutor was a counterfeit.

Over the long years, Aker's swordsmanship had mostly been lost, but the fact that a portion of it ended up preserved inside the Demon Sword Tutor was not entirely coincidence.

Knight Aker created the Ego Sword Aker, and he died satisfied.

That was the final chapter of the story Knight Aker left behind. But beyond the story, something more remained.

Lingering regret. His regret was left behind in the sword as a thought-self.

And was that thought-self still intact?

A thought-self filled to the brim with lingering regret?

When even human souls trapped inside a sword turned into wraiths?

Could it not have become a wraith like Tutor, its thinking warped and broken?

That was possible.

The thought-self Aker had been trapped inside the sword for an enormously long time. Even as a thought-self, it was a being possessed of reason, so it could have gone mad. But it had originally been a part of Knight Aker himself.

Lingering regret it may have been, but Aker had been one of the three swords that protected the founding king of Naurillia.

His soaring strength of spirit carried over to the thought-self, and so the thought-self was not corrupted.

The goal Aker had set with that regret was not exactly noble, but it gave the thought-self a firm sense of purpose.

Being uncorrupted in mind did not mean everything was satisfying, though.

What had formed the thought-self was regret.

One could call it not quite a person, a wraith of the past that could hardly be said to truly exist, but even a thought-self had wants.

'I want to pass it all on quickly, finish what I have to do, and ascend.'

If the thought-self scattered, it would cease to exist, but whether that meant ascension or simple dissolution, it wanted to resolve the lingering regret that remained.

That was the wish of the thought-self Aker.

So when a being appeared who had cleared even the fourth condition without fail, the wraith Aker could not help but feel glad.

The fact that the person was a little unhinged did nothing to dilute that gladness.

The time he had waited was simply too long for that.

It was why Aker kept talking without being asked. It was consideration, meant to keep the other person from burning out by pushing too hard.

He had wanted to tease the man, but since the man never took the bait, there was nothing to be done. The other person was the one who would let him resolve his lingering regret.

"If you want to quit, just say so. Then rest and come back."

There was no need to die for it. Resting was fine when things were hard. That was the difference between the Demon Sword Tutor and the Ego Sword Aker.

As the thought-self Aker spoke, the man who had been kneeling on one knee with the top of his head bowed raised his face.

"Your face is going to burn up," Aker said.

Two blue eyes blazed. What had brought this man to this state? He did not know. Did not want to know.

He was simply glad there was a chance to resolve the lingering regret.

Even so, he felt a flicker of worry.

Is this not too much?

He keeps charging in? That was fine.

But Aker was not going to give this man the kind of mental death the Demon Sword Tutor had inflicted.

Still, if someone did not rest properly, did the mind not wear down?

So it made more sense to rest and then come back and face him again. That was Aker's thinking.

"Hey, give it up. You can come back," he said again, but the man in front of him had no concept of quitting.

"Not yet."

He did not finish the sentence, but it was easy enough to guess what was missing.

That he was still fine.

He had been repeating the same thing over and over.

"I only have one month," Enkrid said. He drove the tip of his sword into the ground, pushed himself upright, and raised the blade.

"You cleared the fourth condition, so you should have a little breathing room."

Aker's lingering regret was in meeting a successor to pass his techniques to, not in passing on absolutely everything.

What mattered was something in the spirit of it. The techniques themselves, once the foundation was laid, the person would learn and build on them alone.

That was Aker's thinking, but Enkrid thought differently.

One month. That was all.

Should he not make the most of that time?

Against Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, and Sinar, he could not fight with his life truly on the line.

Even if their skill outranked his, he could not pour out everything he had with genuine intent to win.

There was no way to know who might die and who might survive.

So he only fought with appropriate distance, appropriate killing intent.

But with the Knight Aker that the thought-self had manifested, he did not have to hold back.

Aker's sword had already punched eight holes through his body, but he had not died.

There was pain, but it was dull and blunted, as though he had swallowed a belly full of painkilling medicine before the fight.

It did not hurt that much, comparatively. Not against the pain of death.

"Does it not even hurt?"

Aker had worried that the pain would leave mental scars, but for Enkrid, this was manageable.

He was not actually dying, and he was not taking the kind of mental blow that brought him close to it.

Compared to repeating the same day endlessly, or being trapped inside the Demon Sword Tutor, this was relatively easy.

What he gained far outweighed the danger.

"Pushing too hard becomes poison."

"I know what I can handle."

"I genuinely hate you."

Aker said it again with a grin, but to Enkrid the words had not been ringing true for some time.

A quiet fondness. Something like that.

That fondness was what finally loosened Aker's tongue.

"I'm only telling you this because I have a feeling you will never leave on your own, but you are shouting too loud."

What does that mean?

Enkrid raised his sword toward Aker again and asked that silently.

"You shout too loud. You come charging in screaming that you are going right, so who in the world would not see that coming?"

Rem had called Enkrid's way of manifesting Will blunt. Ragna had called it cluttered. Jaxon had called it noisy.

"When did I ever..."

His mouth moved and the words came out, but his posture and breathing did not waver.

More than anything, Enkrid was having the time of his life.

Why would he not?

He had become a knight. Setting aside the sense of omnipotence, it was only natural to want to pour out everything he had.

And right now, he was doing exactly that.

What happens when you hand a water bottle to someone who has gone three days without a drop?

So even as he questioned what Aker had said, his body moved on its own.

"You crazy bastard, listen first and then come at me."

Bang!

Grass shredded and dirt gouged. Enkrid surged forward, faster than twice the charge of the junior knight he had once seen back in Greenfield, and poured strength into the hand holding the sword, letting his shoulder and elbow bend loosely as he drew the blade along the force of his momentum.

Crack!

Even with Dynamic Visual Acuity at a knight's level, the blade seemed to bend in the air.

Aker brought his sword straight up in a vertical cut.

His sword met Enkrid's and stopped it. A few more exchanges followed.

Enkrid pushed Aker's sword aside with force and tried to kick the back of Aker's heel. Aker pulled his foot away first, then drove his pommel down toward the back of Enkrid's sword hand.

If he stayed put, he would take the hit, so he would have to pull his hand away, but did he really have to? Could he not take one and give one back?

Here, he could.

The judgment was instant and he did not hesitate.

"What good is quick thinking if you announce everything in advance!"

Aker rendered every move pointless. He barked it out and leaped backward, opening the distance.

Enkrid, who had been planning to offer his right hand and plant a satisfying bruise on the wraith's face with his left fist, stopped.

What Aker had said finally landed.

"Will is will. I understand that it overflows, but what if you scatter it carelessly? If your opponent is at a similar level, they won't even need Future Sight. Without any mind-reading ability, your intent is plain as day."

Aker continued.

"Was that what you meant by saying I shout?"

"Yeah."

Aker nodded.

Aker was a thought-self created by a genius. Naturally, the living Aker had not been good at explaining things.

"Why doesn't it just work when you do it like this?"

That was what geniuses said when they tried to teach.

But the thought-self Aker had been given time, a great deal of it, to consider how to pass on what he had.

That difference showed. His explanations were, comparatively, quite good.

Compared to Rem, he's practically an angel.

Enkrid nodded. He blinked and turned the words over in his mind. Chewed on them. With an armed opponent standing right in front of him, he went into review. He slipped into a focused state and for a moment forgot where he was.

Standing perfectly still, he went over it again and again and began to sort through his thoughts.

"So rest up and come back later, hey, wait, is this bastard actually out of his mind?"

The thought-self was stunned.

With him standing right there, the man had suddenly gone half-lidded with a contemplative expression.

Enkrid stayed like that for quite a long while.

When he finally opened his eyes fully, he spoke.

"I think I understand."

"Understand what?"

"What you said."

After spending this much time inside the sword, surely understanding was not enough. Should he not have grasped all of it? The answer had been handed to him outright.

But no.

"Again."

Enkrid came at him again, and Aker had no choice but to pick up his sword and meet him.

Swinging the sword, moving the body. Fighting with full force, life on the line.

Through that process, Enkrid gradually came to understand how to handle Will, or more precisely, how to handle the enormous mass of it he carried.

If something was too heavy to move, what did you do?

Break off a piece and use it bit by bit?

Enkrid did not do that. He chose a different path instead of splitting it apart, because something in his bones told him that the splitting path would ruin him.

This path might not be the right answer, but should not the path his heart chose be the right one?

In a life, you can only ever walk one road.

Repeating the same day over and over did not mean you could undo every choice.

Even if you could go back to childhood and start everything over, life's choices still came one at a time.

So you gave your best to the path you chose.

There was no reason to leave regret at the forks already passed.

That was how Enkrid had lived, and so he did the same now.

Just as he swung his sword straight and true.

The great mass of Will inside him stretched out wherever it pleased. He caught each piece and brought it to heel.

"You brute."

Aker meant every word of it, but Enkrid kept doing what he was doing.

How much time passed?

He did not know. At some point, Enkrid felt he had broken through a wall.

It was after more than a hundred exchanges.

"What I just taught is the foundation. What makes Future Sight predictable is insight, by showing false intent, you plant complexity in your opponent's mind."

"Is that all?"

He had gotten a rough feel for the knack of it. He asked, and Aker let the smile drop.

"Not all of it, but rest first! I will not compromise!"

Aker was firm. Even in his eyes, Enkrid's mental strength was extraordinary, but no one in the world could keep going without food or sleep.

The mind was no different.

No matter how solid the will, wearing down was unavoidable.

Enkrid recognized that he needed rest, so he nodded.

"Then I'll be back."

The last word was missing, but the meaning came through clearly.

"Yes, come back."

Aker drove Enkrid out of the world he had made.

Outside, probably less than an hour had passed.