WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 522: No Regrets

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When Enkrid stepped out of the ritual world Aker had made, he felt the wind lift his hair.

By the position of the sun, it had not yet slipped behind the western mountains. He had not spent as long as it felt.

His senses had sharpened enough over the years to track passing time on their own. A biological clock, more or less.

It told him now that not much time had gone by at all.

'It felt like quite a while on the inside, though.'

That was how it had seemed, but the facts said otherwise. The world in there was one where only consciousness drifted, so that made sense. Did that mean everything he learned there was worthless?

No. Getting his body to express it would take time, but it would come.

Enkrid opened his eyes and took stock of himself from the same stance as before. He was standing awkwardly with his sword in hand.

'Not hungry.'

He felt no particular urge to eat, and he was not sleepy either. After that sustained, concentrated stretch, he was not even dizzy. He was fine. He had been gripping a sword the whole while, standing throughout, and his arms and legs were not complaining.

"You're doing something strange every time I look at you."

Rem walked over and said it. His axe hung at his hip and his arms hung loose at his sides.

Through Sorcery, Rem had reached a level comparable to a knight's, and that let him catch glimpses of what the sword had been doing. He had watched Enkrid suddenly grip the sword, close his eyes, and start twitching, so he knew something was happening. He had used his Sorcery to gauge the state of things.

That was how Rem knew Enkrid's consciousness had shot off somewhere. More precisely, it had looked as though he synchronized with the sword and got locked inside it.

It was not just Rem. Each of them had been reading Enkrid's condition in their own way, so all eyes had drifted toward him. Enkrid glanced across those gazes and said, "Playing around with Aker."

"Looked that way to me too."

"Yeah. I'll go back in for a bit."

He said it, released his grip on the sword, and shook his legs to loosen the muscles. Then he walked to a stump serving as a chair in the corner of the training ground and sat down.

Ordinarily, entering the world Aker had built required a technique not unlike sinking beneath water, letting your consciousness descend. But Enkrid had met the Boatman so many times that this sort of thing came naturally to him. He had never gone willingly, but how many times had he wandered the border between dreams and waking?

Without waiting for Aker's invitation, he stepped back into that world.

* * *

"Feels like I should be surprised, but I won't bother. Time's precious, like you said."

Aker said it mid-fight, tossing the words out almost carelessly.

Under normal circumstances, a string of questions would have come first.

Things like:

Did I ever teach you the trick to entering the ritual world?

Do you know that your Will springs up like a spring that never runs dry, and that makes it harder to handle?

How did you come back this fast?

A mind this sharp should still wear down. I can see it's hard as steel, but how is that even possible?

It seems like you've survived hundreds of life-or-death situations. Did you cut some deal with the goddess of fortune?

Those kinds of questions.

Things that could not be explained. Things that defied explanation. That was what Enkrid was.

But Aker had decided not to ask any of it. He threw out the useless questions.

Why?

Because going up against this one had brought something boiling up inside him too.

"I won't go easy on you just because it's hard."

Aker said it through clenched teeth. The thought-self felt something like resolve rising within him.

"Yeah. Thanks."

Enkrid answered with total calm, and somehow that managed to irritate him. Both the tone and the content.

"You little..."

Aker laughed. At least there was no need to teach him psychological warfare.

A thought-self, an existence without a body, and yet Enkrid had set a fire going in the chest of that ghost.

After that, a month passed in real time. Inside the ritual world the thought had built from the sword, the time was beyond counting.

The thought-self had much to teach. Because that was his lingering regret, he gave everything.

"What are you going to do once you've gotten the hang of this? Just get the feel for it. You'll have to work it into your body again once you're out."

"Alright."

Enkrid asked for sparring without rest, and Aker accepted every request and kept talking.

By this point Enkrid had realized he did not need to pant for breath in the ritual world. Fighting here was not truly fighting with a physical body.

So, as Aker said, he just needed to absorb the feel of things. And that was what he did.

He tried to extract only the feel and take it in. Easy was not the word for it, though. He had to repeat the same motion dozens of times before he could listen to an explanation and repeat it all over again, and only then did he barely grasp the fundamentals.

"You're, what's the word, slow."

Or:

"How do you call yourself a knight? Why is your learning speed this bad?"

Aker could have said those things along the way. Enkrid had heard similar words often enough. But Aker did not say them.

A month was not much time. Aker was too busy pouring out everything he knew to leave any regret behind.

Unnecessary questions were ignored. The student's natural talent was just another unnecessary factor.

Would saying something about it change anything? No, it would not.

So he did only what was needed. The thought-self stayed true to his purpose.

That was how Aker spent the time.

"Show me the swordsmanship you've learned. You would have learned what Knight Aker left behind too."

The thought-self Aker had separated from the existence known as Knight Aker, so he referred to him by that name when he spoke.

Enkrid nodded.

The Numbers Game. Correct Sword. Nameless Sword Form.

Those were the names of the techniques. Enkrid showed the swordsmanship he had developed and reshaped in his own way.

Along with that came the method of sealing Future Sight: rousing dozens and hundreds of simultaneous killing intents to make his own intentions unreadable and throw the opponent into confusion.

"Do I look like some greenhorn who just made knight? That kind of trick only works on amateurs."

In the era Knight Aker had lived, there were far more knights than now, and battles were far more frequent. Building a kingdom from nothing required chaos more than peace, and the continent in those days was a rougher place.

Anyone who fell for that kind of trick was called a greenhorn back then. It was not an age like the present one, where knights hesitated to raise blades against each other, watching one another warily.

Historians and scholars of the current era called that period the Age of Strife. The Cursed Ground was relatively quiet then, but humans, Beastfolk, Giants, Elves, and dwarfs clashed in sprawling conflict.

Aker said all this while parrying the blade Enkrid drove at him.

Clang! Clang! Metal rang out between them in quick succession.

A blade pushing through the grass advanced, pressing the opponent back.

"Oh? Going to do it that way?"

Aker deflected, blocked, and launched a counterattack of his own, muttering as he moved.

"You've developed it well enough. Still want to learn the later stages of the Nameless Sword Form? Probably should."

Enkrid had no room to nod. Did not needing to breathe mean he should stop breathing?

That might have been fine for the thought-self Aker, but not for him.

He needed to move as though he had an actual body.

A flash of insight came and lit something up in his mind.

He kept his ears open and listened to what Aker was saying.

"The original name of this swordsmanship is Aker's Web. Aker liked spiders. He even raised them himself."

While learning the later stages of the Correct Sword Form and learning how to handle Will, Enkrid kept reaching for Will with that blunt sense of his, again and again.

Time was like an arrow already loosed. Once fired, it cannot be caught.

Time passed does not return.

Set aside the moments he stepped out to eat and sleep and rest briefly, and Enkrid had spent the entire month holding on to Aker without letting go.

If every meeting has a parting, this one was no different.

Aker knew his time was running out. And each time Enkrid came back to reality, he felt the blade in his hand growing dimmer, the grip that had once been so firm going soft.

By now he could crumble the blade with his fingers.

The great sword Aker, once hard and sharp and masterful, was gone. What remained was nothing but an old sword on the verge of falling to pieces.

Then, on one ordinary day, inside the ritual world, among the grass, Aker's form began to fade.

"Then I'll go."

Enkrid nodded and looked at Aker's face. From the cheeks outward he was changing into particles of light and scattering. From the cheeks to the hair, then his whole body turning into small motes. Looked at one way it was a beautiful sight, and looked at another, a cruel one.

Whatever he was, thought-self or otherwise, this was the end of an existence.

And Aker smiled.

Regret? Sorrow? Not a trace of either showed in his face or expression. His smile held no pain, no anguish, none of that. It was a deeply easy smile.

"Thank you."

Aker said it. The two of them had not had time for any deep conversation, so Aker had not said much about himself. He had thrown out small bits and pieces along the way, but there had been no room in between to speak of his regrets or what he had wanted.

Instead, they had swung swords. That alone was enough for Enkrid to feel what Aker had wanted.

Not that he had anything to say in return.

The human form the thought-self had assembled blurred and vanished. The particles of light scattered and shot skyward, like a small waterspout rising up.

At the same moment, the sky that had been pouring sunlight over the grass split open.

Light burst through the crack.

Flickering light, the illusion of hundreds upon thousands of shooting stars streaking across his vision, the process of opening his eyes back toward reality from the border between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Enkrid woke, opened his eyes, and let his head drop.

Crumble.

Aker, held in his hand, scattered like dust. He looked up, and the sun hanging in the sky pushed its light down through a thin skin of cloud, as if daring those clouds to try and block it.

A clear day, sunlight brightening everything around him.

"A grassy field in the middle of the day. Something Aker loved. This was his homeland."

That was something the thought-self Aker had said. He acted as though he was not sharing anything about himself, but he had ended up saying quite a lot.

He had claimed he knew nothing because he was only a thought, but he turned out to be more of a talker than expected.

"You learned Vallen's swordsmanship too, didn't you?"

"Vallen-style mercenary sword?"

"Why do you call that man a mercenary?"

"Wasn't he one?"

"He was a knight. One of the top ten, even. Do you think those techniques are dirty tricks? They are, in a way. But dig into them a bit more. You'll find a different flavor. They were built on the premise of handling Will."

It was the kind of thing that should have made Enkrid's ears prick up, but when he heard it there had been no room to let his attention wander.

There was simply too much to do.

Aker's teachings were one part of it. But Enkrid also needed to struggle his own way toward what he himself had come to understand and realize. Swinging the sword without rest and charging in had all been for that.

Either way, everything Aker had left came down to Enkrid in full.

No regrets left now. And leaving without regrets meant that the lingering will Knight Aker had carried was resolved.

With that, the royal treasure Aker had fulfilled its role.

More than its role, in fact.

What did more than its role mean?

Enkrid had realized that his own way of handling Will was clumsy.

Getting past that would require running into a wall again and again.

So he had fought Aker, and fought him again, and kept blasting Will until it ran out, then rebuilding it.

Since he was fighting inside the ritual world anyway, Enkrid had replaced the bricks he had stacked before with something harder.

'The one who should have said thank you was me.'

Enkrid looked at the sunlight falling around him and said it to Aker inside his head.

Without noticing, full autumn had arrived.

Autumn. A good season for fighting. A good season for war.

The heat had passed, so food did not spoil as quickly, and provisions were easier to keep. If forests or fields lay nearby, foraging locally would be simple enough too.

The cool breeze would feel refreshing rather than cold, and this was the season with the least rain, so clear days with thin cloud or none at all would be common. The sky would be high and the sightlines open.

The stage for war was Greenfield.

If the stage was an open plain with clear sightlines, it was a poor environment for tricks and schemes.

A frontal battle was what had been planned. At least on the surface.

While Enkrid had spent a month with Aker and was now working those lessons into his body, Azpen had sent a declaration of war.

"Hand over half of Greenfield and two of the expanded cities, and we will let this pass without a fight."

That was what the envoy who had come to the royal palace said.

"You cannot imagine I would accept those terms, so let's see what you can do. I'll watch what it is Azpen puts its faith in."

Crang sat on the throne and answered without scolding the envoy, without showing anger, his tone flat and steady. That steadiness was its own kind of dignity.

The envoy from Azpen was from the Ekins family, the house that symbolized administration and statecraft.

He withdrew thinking that the King of Naurillia had quite a large measure of composure.

Azpen moved like a roar. The whole continent grew noisy because of it.

They made full use of rumor.

That this battle would be Azpen's to win.

At first it was loose-tongued peddlers spreading the word. Then the owners of large merchant houses were talking about the war too.

Some among them were calling Azpen's victory.

These were people who had seen the army Azpen had assembled, a force wrung from the kingdom's very marrow.

Naurillia's response, by contrast, looked passive. At least on the surface.

The intention was to have Border Guard hold the line and then move the main army afterward.

Naurillia was not showing its full strength. Azpen, for its part, was hiding none of theirs.

The posture was: try and stop us if you can.

In the middle of all this, Krais was executing a plan of his own under the name of strategy.

"Preparations for departure are complete."

The man with the large eyes, whose future included running dozens of salons, looked at the people gathered in the training ground and said it.

Everyone was fully armed.

Enkrid had found a solid Valerian one-piece steel sword to replace Aker and was still carrying three swords. In addition, a Throwing Spear was slung diagonally across his back, so the large weapons alone numbered four.

Under the deep blue gambeson embroidered with gold, he wore Drake-scale leather armor. Around his left wrist, in place of a gauntlet, strips of leather were wound tight, with a clasp fashioned at each end to connect them. It was a wrist guard Aetri had made for him from leather he had received from a Giant merchant.

Fully armed, Enkrid stood as the Madman Squad gathered to either side of him.

Rem with his axe. Ragna with a greatsword resting on his shoulder. Jaxon with his arms crossed and eyes half-lidded. Sinar standing directly behind Enkrid, expression blank.

"Nerve-wracking, but reassuring."

Krais looked at all of them and said it.

His plan called for Audin, Teresa, and others to remain behind.

The rest of the force had to move.

"We march out together at the start and then split off immediately, right?"

Enkrid asked to confirm, and Krais nodded.

It was time to begin.

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