A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 526

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 526: Big Brother, Little Brother, and Big Sister

= = =

Starting with the poison sand, Azpen's assault captain unleashed one trick after another.

Poison-coated darts. Throwing daggers. Caltrops scattered across the ground with practiced cunning.

The spiked iron caltrops rolled under Fell's feet just as he was about to step down.

He avoided them by landing only on his tiptoes instead of his soles.

Dodging everything, the poison sand, the darts, the daggers, the caltrops, Fell lost his balance. The moment his foot touched the ground, his body tilted slightly to the left.

'Got him!'

The assault captain had been waiting for exactly that moment. He drew his short sword and leveled the tip at Fell.

One strike. A single blow, but he had the means to land it even against someone at the junior knight level.

A magic sword with a spell carved into it. The inscription in the pommel detonated, and the forearm-length blade tore free of the hilt and screamed through the air.

Boom!

The sound hit like a thunderclap.

Fell's body was about to gain a new decoration when it went horizontal, rising clear off the ground.

Had Jaxon been there, he would have noticed that the soft tap of Fell's foot pushing off the earth came a fraction ahead of the boom that followed the blade's launch. But no one present had ears that sharp.

Shrrrrk!

The spell-launched blade raked across Fell's side, never touching skin, ripping through only the light-brown gambeson before passing beyond him.

The layers of cotton and padding stuffed inside spilled to the ground in place of organs.

By some odd coincidence, the fallen tufts of cotton and wadding settled over the entrails of the Azpen junior knight who had died in the earlier fighting.

Dull gray tufts became a blanket over the dead.

Tap.

Fell landed, straightened up, and raised his sword in front of his eyes.

Had he faked losing his balance from the start?

The assault captain watched his last trick fail and understood that the man in front of him was far better than he was.

Why had that thought come so clearly?

'I couldn't have dodged that.'

Whether by reflex or by calculation, the other man had done something he simply could not.

Of course, in a fight to the death, skill was only one factor. Not everything.

The assault captain dropped into a lower stance and lifted the axe hanging at his hip.

"Haah."

Fell sighed, looking up at the sky.

His gaze was not on the assault captain. Once at the sky, once at the ground, one sigh.

"Haah."

The assault captain had intended to counter the moment his opponent rushed in. Then his opponent let out a long sigh and said something that stopped him cold.

"Do you know something?"

Know what?

"I understand it all, I accept it, yet breaking the shell of the self I used to be is not quite as pleasant as I expected."

Fell's eyes drifted back to the sky as he spoke.

On his way here, he had resolved how he would live going forward. Born on the plains, raised as a shepherd, why was he standing here?

For what had he taken the field?

He had been working through the answers to questions like these.

'To move forward.'

He had watched the back of someone who advanced not just with stubbornness but with a blunt, wordless force.

There is a saying: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

Fell had watched Enkrid, and he had arrived here by passing through frustration and despair.

There had been a time when he thought his talent alone would let him catch up quickly.

"There are so many things in this world. And sometimes we face things we never could have imagined."

There was no moonlight, the sun was blazing, and it was nowhere near dawn, but sometimes a person got drunk on something without any of that.

He had found his answer, yet Fell was lost in the feeling of it. He sighed again.

Now he would have to leave the self of the past behind and greet the self of tomorrow.

He had made up his mind, but he knew without much thought that the process would not be easy.

"...Did you eat something bad?"

Azpen's assault captain muttered under his breath while quietly sliding his rear foot back. The man looked completely unhinged.

Fell lowered his gaze at those words and looked at the assault captain.

Because what the man had just said had actually landed.

"It seems so."

So he agreed.

"What?"

"Mm. The air. I must have swallowed the wrong air."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

The assault captain felt real fear now, not the kind that came from a blade.

He would rather have steel punched through him. Why was someone this good at fighting spouting this kind of nonsense?

Fell thought about Enkrid and what exactly was different about that man, what set him apart from everything else here.

'The atmosphere was different.'

How? There was something around Enkrid, like an aura carried on the air itself.

What had changed that aura? The air.

"Ahh."

A short sound escaped Fell as the realization struck him.

"...Stop messing around. I'm not dying at the hands of some lunatic!"

Azpen's assault captain hurled the axe in his hand.

A weapon he had used for years. Fell twisted and caught it.

While doing so, he turned the thought over again.

Was the air really different? The realization blurred almost as fast as it had come. That probably was not it.

Either way, his opponent had dropped everything mid-fight and bolted as if his backside were on fire.

The man sprinted toward his horse, threw whatever secondary weapon was sitting on the saddle in Fell's general direction, and fled.

Clatter clatter clatter clatter!

Hoofbeats hammered the earth, and a plume of dust billowed up and swallowed the view.

Fell had no intention of chasing him, so he had not even drawn his sword.

The soldiers facing each other across the line saw this too.

"He didn't even draw?"

Two soldiers, one from the Border Guard, one from Azpen, standing at the front of their respective lines muttered the exact same words without a syllable's difference, though naturally neither heard the other.

With Azpen's assault captain driven off, Fell walked back inside the line, and Krais came running up from the rear.

"Letting him go is actually better for us, but was that on purpose?"

"Just kind of ended up that way."

The hollow, sunken look Fell had carried was gone. He had shed his old shell and come out new. And with it, the mischievous light in his eyes, the same one from the very first time he had faced Enkrid, returned. Clear eyes, honest and bright.

The mischief in those eyes moved his tongue.

"Ropord, if you go out there and die, call me big brother for the rest of your life."

"I'd rather die on the battlefield."

He said it to his rival, the one he had grown to dislike in the fond way you dislike someone you know too well, and that rival stepped forward with his weapons.

Third of the four.

"Whoever wants to come out, come out! From the, well, from the Madman Squad, it's Ropord!"

Watching that, Krais felt something settle in his chest, just a little.

What they were doing right now, Abnaier had read the intention correctly, but it was also purely a desperate measure to stamp out his own unease.

Krais had two paths in front of him.

One was relatively safe, with fewer threats and variables, but required swallowing losses.

The other held considerable risk. If things went sideways, every last one of them might end up in the ground. That was how it looked to Krais.

Even so, he had chosen the second path.

'Commander, will this be alright?'

He asked it silently. The choice had not been his to make.

If it were up to him, he would have taken a third path.

Hand over the city without a fight, go into exile, and abandon anyone who died holding out. Save his own people and run.

Well. That was just talk.

Nurat had read him right. Krais no longer had anywhere left to retreat to.

There were too many faces he knew. Could he throw all of them away? He could not answer that easily.

Before Enkrid left, Krais had laid out the two paths for him and asked his commander a question.

"Is it alright if I act greedy?"

That was what Krais asked.

"When weren't you?"

Enkrid answered.

In a situation where smiling made no sense, Krais had smiled and said:

"Not something I expected to hear from you, Commander, but in that case, bring them all back alive."

Enkrid had smiled, that loose, easy smile of his, and answered with a look full of mischief.

"Sir, yes sir."

It came with a military salute that was half a joke.

Krais believed in that commander, which was why he had left Audin, Teresa, Ropord, and Fell here.

If not for that, he would have taken the first path. He would have sent all of them down the route the enemy was coming from.

No, not just them. He would have thrown in every ranger unit he had left, bled the enemy dry, and started the fight from there.

That would have been the best option.

Probably the tactic the enemy would have chosen too.

As Krais turned it over in his mind, at the edge of his vision, Ropord was in the middle of putting his opponent down.

"I'm the older brother!"

Ropord roared as he won.

"You crazy bastard, me losing doesn't make me your little brother!"

Fell shouted from the friendly line.

Krais wondered what was wrong with these lunatics.

After Ropord, it was Teresa's turn.

"Brothers and sisters. It is my turn now."

The urge to fight ran in the blood of those with Giant ancestry. She held it in check with faith, but when a moment like this arrived, Teresa still found it hard to resist.

More than anything, she had been fired up lately from watching Enkrid, so it was even harder to hold back.

When a female warrior as large as Audin stepped out, the Azpen line stirred.

Were they out of people to send?

They were not.

If they kept taking losses like this, morale would not just dip. It would look like they had already lost before the real fight even started.

So Azpen sent out a junior knight.

One they had been holding back as a genuine ace in case the battle tilted against them.

Far more skilled than the one Audin had faced.

"A mercenary? Bound by contract? Unfortunate. You look like you have Giant blood in you. Yes, it would be better for you to die here."

Inside Azpen, this one had earned the nickname "Emul the Sentencer."

Sentencing opponents to their fate. Not something done every time. The nickname came precisely from the fact that it was only done when the outcome was certain.

Audin had gone first; Teresa was fourth.

Of those four fights, the fourth was the second shortest. Right after Audin's.

Teresa took Emul's sword on her body and hit him with her shield.

She used the blade-deflecting body technique she had learned from Audin, but Emul's cuts were sharp enough that blood flew from her too.

Flesh was carved away. It had not reached bone, but calling it a minor wound was a stretch.

Even so, Teresa did not stop.

Drops of red scattered through the air. Three exchanges passed, and only Teresa bled, but bleeding had given her the opening to land a full shield slam.

Emul had quick enough wits to plant his foot on the shield and try to spring backward. He needed distance.

This range was not where he wanted to be.

As Emul jumped back to escape, Teresa let go of the shield.

She had not strapped it to her arm from the start, only gripping it by hand, which was what made it possible.

That she had been fighting while holding this heavy shield with one hand alone was strange enough that it was hard to anticipate what she might do with it next.

Naturally, Emul had not anticipated it.

"Ugh!"

The shield he had tried to use as a springboard suddenly offered far less resistance than expected, and the force he had loaded into his legs came up short. He managed only two steps back. Teresa moved with him, no trace of a smile on her face.

Their bodies seemed to overlap in the air for a moment. Then came a wrenching, grinding sound. Not everyone heard it.

"Fight! Win!"

The soldiers who had been cheering and shouting drowned it out.

The Azpen side was loud. Teresa had looked like she was on the losing end, so they screamed all the louder.

The Border Guard's regulars, by contrast, kept discipline even in their cheering.

Snap snap snap!

They called out in rhythm with the flag's movements.

"Bear siblings!"
"Teresa!"
"Giantess!"
"Teresa!"

Had Teresa heard it, she probably would have laughed wide and asked which brother or sister had come up with that chant. But there was no cutting through to the friendly line in the middle of a fight.

At close range, Teresa used one of the Valaf Martial Arts techniques, the cervical extraction.

A technique that required natural strength to execute flowered in her hands.

It was not a sophisticated move. Grip the head with one hand, slam the opposite shoulder down with the other, and pull. That was all.

Emul did not take it passively. The moment his head was seized, he drove his sword at Teresa's throat.

She turned only her neck to dodge, but this time blood came pouring out.

In exchange.

She collected a loose, dangling cervical vertebra as her prize.

Blood finally spilled after so long, the heat of it, the battlefield, all of it poured spirit into her.

With that spirit, she let the Giant nature she kept hidden cut loose. She roared.

"I'm the oldest sister!"

The content owed something to Fell and Ropord's influence, but still.

Both armies, having watched every fight, fell silent once more.

From Azpen's perspective, every single one of these people was completely out of their minds.

Setting aside how the fights had gone, they kept screaming unhinged things.

The question worth pausing on was why they had won so overwhelmingly. Azpen's commander could not make sense of it, but Krais quietly nodded to himself.

Think about it. On any given day, these fighters sparred against the likes of Rem and Ragna, knight-class opponents.

Had the Azpen soldiers sent out today been fighting knights every day?

'Not a chance.'

So this was, in other words, a predictable outcome.

Of course, he had still been uneasy right up until it happened. Seeing it play out in front of him was the only thing that finally let him breathe.

More than anything, these fighters had only been held back as a reserve for emergencies in the first place.

Show the enemy a wall with disciplined formation, then break the enemy's will with Audin and the others.

After this, the opposing side could not launch a full frontal assault.

That was what Krais had been aiming for.

* * *

'Bastard.'

After taking enough blows, Abnaier found the image of the opposing strategist rising naturally in his mind. Surely someone older, a seasoned veteran well into middle age. Everything about the approach said so.

Of course, that was wrong.

The opponent had a young, almost boyish face and large eyes, looking nothing like what Abnaier had pictured.

Not that it mattered, really. The image had just come to him on its own.

"Son of a bitch."

Abnaier could not hide his admiration. But this was only the beginning.

Winning did not mean forgetting certain things.

The ones sacrificed for victory.

Abnaier turned his attention from the front lines to where the real fighting was happening.

There, the fallen would carry their glory with them.

Everything had been for victory.

And Abnaier's strategy was working well besides.

He had arranged for the enemy to meet their opponents at precisely the timing he wanted, at the moment he had chosen.