WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 528: F*ck, This Is a Scam

= = =

Sacrifice in war is unavoidable.

There is no getting around it.

Like giving up a knight to take a bishop, surrendering a bishop to take a rook, or trading a rook for a queen.

Victory without sacrifice had always been a distant dream.

With that in mind, Finn had gone into the mission prepared to give her life. That was her role in this battle. Or rather, that was what she had believed, and she had accepted it as a matter of course.

'If a traveling bard turned this into a story, what would I be?'

Many soldiers died, but the victory in that battle belonged to their side.

Would she have been one of the dead soldiers folded into a single sentence like that?

A skilled storyteller might have traced the Ranger Unit's exploits with more care, but one thing was certain: Finn had been ready to die.

Sacrifice was unavoidable. Someone had to fill that role, and it had simply been her turn.

She had steeled herself, accepted that this was the end, and then,

'Huh?'

The words died before they left her mouth. Finn only blinked. If an attack had come, her body would have moved on its own; years of training would have done what thought could not. But her mind had locked up, and that much was true.

What is this?

Something impossible by any measure she knew had just happened.

Was this a dream? No, it was not.

The pain from wounds scattered across her body told her clearly that this was real.

The blade that had opened her shoulder sent blood running down her forearm, hot, stinging, burning.

The sensation of reality was perfectly intact.

So what in the world was this man?

Her gaze drifted to Jaxon. Every one of her soldiers did the same.

At some point, the elf group they had been fighting was simply gone. In their place stood a single member of the Madman Squad.

'Reinforcements?'

The thought that it was only one person did not occur to her.

What occurred to her was that none of this made any sense.

This was the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range.

To cover half a day's distance at a full sprint, you would have to make a tremendous amount of noise. The Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts swarming these paths would have come slavering after anyone running hard enough, like animals seized by some feverish obsession.

And that was not even the whole of it. The quiet killing intent the elf group had been pressing out was simply gone. Unless they had suddenly fallen in love with peace and goodwill and retreated on their own terms, it was plain enough that they were somewhere having a chat with death.

'He killed them all in that short a time?'

The same enemies her unit had struggled just to hold off?

And Finn had not even noticed it happening.

Setting aside the raw ability to kill an elf group in the first place, the fact that all of it had been handled without a single trace of presence was what made no sense.

It should have been loud, chaotic, messy. That was normal. That was how things worked by Finn's reckoning.

But this man had appeared out of nowhere, as though he had fallen from the sky or risen from the ground, and had cleaned everything up in silence.

He materialized without warning and tidied the surroundings before anyone could blink.

One thing after another had happened entirely outside the range of Finn's awareness. She had swung her sword until her arms and legs were shaking, and now she stood there, unable to take another step.

If her body had kept moving, she might not have had the space to think at all.

But her body was still, and so her eyes took in what lay before her, and her mind started working on what her eyes were telling it.

Finn felt her perception straining against reality. Even so, she steadied herself.

A well-trained soldier did what needed doing, no matter the moment. That was the only way to explain how someone could charge to the front knowing full well they were going to die.

Years of training, more precisely, the hellish training under Audin and Sinar, had built a mind in Finn that could accept the world as it was and extract what the situation required.

'So is this a bad thing?'

Not a chance.

"The enemy commander was carrying a bow. The elf group fought in a way I've never seen before. I don't believe this group is all of them."

Those were the words Finn forced out. Jaxon gave no answer. He simply stood still and quiet.

His breathing was so faint it was nearly inaudible, his gaze fixed ahead, and yet she had the strange feeling he was looking directly at her, even though from where she stood, she should only have been seeing the back of his head.

* * *

"I'd like none of our people to die."

Enkrid had said it, and Jaxon had not considered it especially difficult to grant.

If it could not be done, that was one thing. But it was worth trying.

If a fight between a small group of elites decided the outcome without a full pitched battle, it was achievable. Fighting without recklessness, throwing down only where and when it mattered, meant friendly casualties could be held to a minimum. Calculated out, that held up. Though asking for not a single loss did feel a touch extreme.

"This is a war, though?"

It was a shameless goal, and Jaxon could not help pushing back.

"Yeah. If it can't be done, it can't be done."

Enkrid said it lightly.

Light in tone, but the will behind the words was anything but.

So he wanted no one on their side to die in a war.

How insane did that sound?

And yet he intended to do it. Even without Jaxon's help, Enkrid would push toward it. The intent behind the words showed through plainly.

'He got here by doing nothing but insane things from the start.'

This time would be no different for Enkrid.

Jaxon had decided to play along, though it felt strange enough, a man who could fairly be called a specialist in killing now turning his hand toward keeping people alive.

Still, he had made up his mind to live that way, and had torn Georg's Blade apart and rebuilt it with that in mind.

"Can't I be a little greedy? Why can't I win without killing anyone? Why not? Why is that not allowed?"

Those had been Enkrid's words before the sortie. In a playful mood, he had needled Jaxon with question after question, and Jaxon had not answered in words. He had only shaken his head. Inwardly, he had already said yes.

"How about Knight with the Cracked Head? Seems like a decent nickname."

Beside him, the barbarian had said something Jaxon actually liked for the first time in a long while.

In any case, Jaxon was doing exactly what Enkrid wanted.

He had spotted the moonlight elves moving on the friendly lines, come at them from behind, and killed every one of them himself. After that, he had stepped into the open to search for the archer who had vanished the moment Jaxon's work began.

The enemy's technique for concealing presence was first-rate, no breathing, no sense of anything, so Jaxon had deliberately made himself visible.

If he did not, the friendly Ranger Unit out on patrol would be in danger.

'A spell?'

No. Pure, cultivated skill, the same kind as his own.

Jaxon let a little more of his presence leak out on purpose.

He had never done this kind of work before, but being unfamiliar with something was not the same as doing it badly.

Exposing himself to protect someone. He had used himself as bait to draw out and kill a target before, but never quite like this.

While all of that was happening, Finn spoke, and even though Jaxon heard her, he gave no reaction.

He had already finished reading the situation.

He was not the kind of person who fumbled through a fight on instinct like a barbarian.

He was not a directionally-impaired bastard who charged headlong into things without a plan.

He was not someone who leaned on gods for everything.

'And definitely not the kind who charges out because something needs protecting and thinks later.'

Jaxon had been listening as he moved, had mapped what was happening from the sounds around him, and had already taken the position best suited to his way of fighting.

The moonlight elf group had been targeting the friendlies, so he struck from behind. After that, he showed himself. The most favorable position to accomplish what needed accomplishing, that was what this was.

A position to protect Finn and the Ranger Unit.

"Nobody move."

Jaxon spoke.

At those words, Finn and the Reconnaissance Team barely dared breathe.

He wanted to tell them to stop breathing entirely if it came to that, but it would not come to that.

The enemy, the archer, was not a knight.

Still, a tricky opponent, no question.

There was also something familiar about the presence, a feeling of having faced someone like this somewhere before.

Was it simply that hunters who had developed their talent all tended to feel alike?

No. This was different from that.

'Hawk's Talon?'

The name surfaced in Jaxon's mind.

When was it, the battle where the commander had been kicked by Frog?

There had been an archer with a name like that.

Could it be the same one? No. Whoever this was ranked above. His instincts said so.

What Jaxon did not know was that Hawk's Talon had long since been felled by Rem's axe and crossed the Black River.

The woman hiding now, fooling even Jaxon's senses, was Hawk's Talon's master.

Half the blood in her veins was elf blood, though her outward appearance was entirely human. A half-elf.

She had drawn on the talent buried in her blood, in her very instincts, and concealed herself with it.

None of that was information Jaxon needed.

Whatever the method, the enemy was hidden, and that meant he had to find her.

That was the nature of assassination work.

You only needed to plant one piece of metal in a body, and yet the maddening part of the job was finding the person in the first place.

Well, if Frog were the assassination target, one slash would not have finished things anyway.

That entire race lived by safety-first principles, sleeping in their Heart Armor.

In truth, Frog was simply sensitive about the word heart from the start, so that was only natural.

Setting Frog aside, what was the most frustrating part of an assassination contract?

Finding the ones who hid well.

Some burrowed like moles and vanished underground. Some slept in a different room of their own mansion every night.

Georg's Blade had expertise in gathering intelligence, and there were cases where compiled information allowed them to pinpoint a target's location, but when situations like this one developed, Jaxon made up the difference with his own ability.

He had handled things that way by relying on his natural talent, and because of that, the previous master who had once called himself his teacher had said something memorable.

"Shi-, cheating."

Not quite cheating, though.

Cheating was a word to save for when you were looking at someone like his commander.

'Will that never runs out?'

Fighting with something like that was cheating.

Was Fell the only one who had been shaken seeing Enkrid after his awakening? Jaxon had been moved too.

And perhaps because he had been moved, he had agreed to the absurd demand of keeping every single friendly alive.

'Someone with no heaven's blessing and no talent could still become a knight.'

"Why can't I go into a battle and not lose a single person on our side?"

Enkrid's words turned in his ear.

Small thoughts layered on each other, ideas gathered into a mass, and that mass shaped itself into will. That was what Will was.

Jaxon had been born with sharp senses, and Will was something he could actually feel.

Where elf Sinar spoke of Will in terms of vital essence, and Rem took it in as part of his Sorcery, for Jaxon it was simply something he felt.

Something unseen was not therefore absent.

Jaxon made his senses visible and loaded his will into them. He narrowed the wide circle spreading out from himself at its center, deepening the color within it.

Some people used Will to land a cut that severed anything.

Others drove Will to send an invisible blade through the air.

Jaxon had no such talent.

What his talent gave him instead was knowledge of how to carry Will on all five senses.

The pointed-leaf trees overhead blocking the sunlight, the dark shade beneath them, the softer shadows beyond the shade, the smell drifting through the air, the direction of the wind.

All five senses folded into one and opened the Gate of the Sixth Sense. He had layered Will over the Sensory Technique, and through that, Jaxon became aware of everything within the circle he had made visible.

The anxiety rising from the friendly soldiers at his back.

The presence of the archer somewhere in the trees ahead, an arrow now nocked and drawn.

Twang.

The sound of the string should not have carried at that distance, yet it reached him first.

Then an arrow came like a streak of light.

It was not aimed at Jaxon. It was aimed at Finn. The archer had been thinking even in that moment.

The intent was to open a gap by targeting Finn, then exploit it.

Jaxon grabbed Finn's wrist and pulled her sideways.

The arrow punched into the dirt with a thud, and a small stone beside the impact point skipped away and clattered across the ground. The stone landed with a tap, and Finn, dragged by the hand at her wrist, felt the pulling force vanish in the span of a heartbeat. In that same heartbeat, Jaxon was gone again.

Like smoke snuffed out, he slipped beyond the range of Finn's perception.

At the same time, the archer lost him too.

* * *

Ateroz's mother was an elf, and her father was human.

That human father had abandoned her and her mother, but Ateroz was fortunate enough to be accepted into elf society.

Around that time, elf society also needed its own revolution, and she was lucky enough to have a hand in founding the moonlight elves' combat unit.

After enough hardship, after enough power had gathered in her, she set herself a goal.

'Kill my father.'

Every man who scattered his seed carelessly was her enemy.

After killing her father, she set herself a further goal.

Kill every man who creates bastards.

To that end, she borrowed the power of Azpen, tracked down her father, and killed him.

Along the way she made several oaths, and took a portion of the moonlight elves to form a combat unit.

When part of that elf unit was struck down, Ateroz immediately hid and reached for her bow.

Then she loosed an arrow at the woman she judged to be the commander among those who remained.

'A gap.'

What she had wanted was a gap in the terrifying creature that had appeared without warning.

No such gap showed itself.

When the arrow missed its mark, Ateroz concealed herself again.

She gave herself to the shade and shadow that had kept her safe since childhood, but she felt the cold touch of a blade against her back before she could settle.

By reflex she twisted her body and swung the bow to strike, but the blade driving between her vertebrae was faster.

The person facing her was someone specialized in ending lives.

Ateroz had spent years killing the men who created bastards, and she recognized that specialization when she saw it.

Everyone's death has a story.

The half-elf who stood on Azpen's side had a story too.

But death ends everything.

And so a half-elf died, one who had once named the men who made bastards her enemy and devoted herself to killing them. There was nothing sentimental about it.

'Was she bait?'

The moment the archer was dead, Jaxon felt eyes on him.

His senses told him this was not over.

Beyond the treeline, a presence similar to the one he had just killed made itself felt.

Three times the number of the group he had faced before. Dozens of elf swordsmen.

'She probably was not simple bait.'

When their side fell, whoever commanded had shifted tactics, and that shift was what had turned the dead archer into bait.

Jaxon had repositioned and shown part of his ability in order to kill the archer.

He rolled his wrist and worked out the joints. The last exchange had been a warm-up. Now it was time to use real strength.

The elf swordsmen did not charge. Instead, they began spreading out in clusters, and to Jaxon's eye, what they were forming was a coordinated formation.

The archer had never been intended as bait, and yet someone had made her into one in an instant. Whose hand was that?

The movement of the elf swordsmen made it happen, which meant there was a proper commander behind this.

Jaxon had already identified that commander and located the position, but he judged that going straight at them was not feasible.

The elf swordsmen were stacked in layers between him and the commander.

In other words, the moment to use genuine force had arrived.

The enemy seemed to have read Jaxon as a skilled man who hid and dealt cuts from the shadows.

That was, of course, a serious miscalculation.

= = =

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried