A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 529

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 529: Because the Peace Lasted So Long

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"The Moonlight Fae Unit is actually a decent fighting force."

Barnaas Hurrier said it out of nowhere.

The lieutenant turned to look at him, wondering where that had come from.

"I just think it's a bit of a waste to use them like this."

The man called Azpen's last weapon clicked his tongue.

"In exchange, we were able to show the enemy's reconnaissance team only what we wanted them to see."

That meant they had maneuvered the enemy's movements to their own intentions from the start.

"Yeah. A waste, but you use what you have to use. Hoard anything long enough and it turns to garbage."

Why bring this up? Nobody knew.

The lieutenant stared blankly. Barnaas twisted that wide mouth of his into a grin, then chopped a sharp-leafed branch blocking his path with a Hand Blade strike. The branch was live wood, solid, and it snapped clean off.

Impressive, no matter how many times you saw it. The lieutenant himself could never replicate that.

He had not even reached the level of a junior knight, so that was only natural.

His talent lay not in showing off raw power. It was in commanding units that dealt with forces outside anyone's calculations.

In other words, how to handle knights.

Not kill them outright, or do anything decisive against them. That was power called a calamity. So the more honest word was not "handling" but "enduring."

"I hope they make it back alive."

Barnaas muttered it again. By his calculations, the Moonlight Fae Unit had a high chance of dying. Either they would run into the enemy and fall that way, or they would loop around and come charging straight at the enemy's knights.

He had known that and sent them anyway. Of course, the commander leading the Moonlight Fae Unit did not know. Not everyone here was driven by a sense of mission.

All the more so since those people were closer to allies than subordinates.

So there had been a degree of using them callously. That much was true.

The lieutenant checked the ground underfoot as he answered.

"I'm not sure what you mean."

They would come back alive, naturally. The Moonlight Fae Unit was not some force you could dismiss as a mere recon party.

If they all died here, it would cause Azpen problems too. Of course it would. They were a force borrowed through the bond with the Moonlight Fae clan.

All of them dying? The relationship with the Moonlight Fae would be the first thing to crack.

The lieutenant thought it through as he walked, pushing off the ground with each step.

Untouched land was never easy to walk across.

Same here. Naurillia had cleared out the Demon Creatures and turned it into a passable path, but that was a temporary measure, no one had properly paved it.

Hunters did not come and go through the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range either, so there were no small trails worn by their feet, only the occasional track left by Magic Beasts or wild animals.

Which meant nothing but rough terrain, with jagged stones jutting up everywhere.

Flat stretches mixed with frequent slopes, the kind of march that bled stamina before any fight began.

The lieutenant was grateful it was still daytime.

Even the best-trained unit would have been in serious trouble on a road like this at night.

If someone twisted an ankle, you could not just leave them behind.

The rough ground was slowly improving, at least. The treacherous jutting stones grew fewer, and the slopes leveled out. A sign they were nearly at their destination.

"Just saying."

Barnaas's voice came again. The lieutenant had been watching the path; he looked up.

Sometimes cruel, sometimes cold, and yet from another angle, there was warmth to him too.

How could anyone be made of only one side? It shifted depending on where you stood.

Barnaas Hurrier was that kind of person. And Abnaier was the same.

Abnaier was someone who looked after refugees, and sent silver coins to orphanages for children who had lost their parents to war.

For children who had lost their fathers, he played the role of father himself. He respected monks and prayed with sincere devotion.

He burned through nights working for the kingdom, spending his own years like fuel.

And the means Abnaier had offered for this war was a victory built on sacrifice.

Azpen had not moved with a small elite force alone.

"Originally these were troops prepared to push all the way to the Empire, weren't they?"

Barnaas had sent what could be called Azpen's core knight strength to where it needed to be.

So now only the lieutenant, more precisely, the commander leading the unit that would fight alongside him, and a portion of their allied troops remained at his side.

"That's my understanding."

The lieutenant answered like a man without feelings. He had been that way from the start. Barnaas did not like it and clicked his tongue, but had no desire to say anything about it.

This was something Abnaier had proposed and he himself had agreed to. These soldiers would serve as sacrificial pawns.

They would charge in to leave a single wound on the enemy.

Who knew how many knights Naurillia would send, but Abnaier wanted a certain victory.

What he had prepared for that was sheer numbers. He had attached an army to the knights.

These soldiers would die, and Barnaas would write the word victory on top of their deaths. That was Abnaier's strategy.

"You don't trust me?"

When Barnaas had asked that..."I only wanted you to put my unease to rest."

Abnaier had shaken his head and answered. Because he had laid out a board like this, Abnaier was certain of victory. He believed they could not lose.

Ordinarily he would have saved that strength for after swallowing Greenfield, but he had pulled it all out now. A trump card prepared since before the earlier defeat.

This time there were none of the various traps that had been used to corner Enkrid in the past.

Strength against strength. But we will tire yours out first. That was the posture.

A fight staking their very fate on the line, and a bold gamble to match.

Deceiving people you knew would die and sending them to the battlefield? That was flat-out madness.

Most strategists would never dare attempt it. They would not even think it. And even if they did, they could not carry it through. But Abnaier was not most people.

A celebrated hero and a defeated fool cursed by every passing child had always been separated by a single thread.

If he won, no one would denounce his boldness.

And even if they did, it would not matter. By then, the power to ignore such words would be in his hands.

"Nice weather."

Barnaas said it and arrived at the position Abnaier had calculated.

With him were the commander and fifty heavily armored infantry.

Every one of them carried a heavy, solid-steel spear.

"Anything to eat?"

The enemy had not yet arrived. Barnaas helped himself to some bread, picked up a few pieces of salted meat, and started filling his stomach.

Meanwhile the allied troops readied their equipment.

Clink, clink, iron armor was buckled on and helmets settled into place. Each soldier's kit was slightly different, but they had matched their gear to a similar pattern.

Arming doublets with chain reinforcement at the joints, worn beneath the armor, then steel plates layered on top, or another layer of chainmail over that.

Hit them with Will behind each strike, how many blows would they last?

Barnaas was confident he could finish one per strike.

Going all-out, cutting them all down in sequence was probably possible.

But if he were eliminating them one by one, and the wolf Beastfolk who had been a knight since long ago came at his back, what then?

'Huh. I'm being pretty sneaky about this.'

Was that dishonorable? No. Barnaas was thick-skinned, and that thickness held his will firm at his core.

He took this as one piece of his tactics. So he stood tall about it.

"Aren't you curious how we ended up fighting like this?"

Out of boredom, Barnaas pulled the lieutenant back into conversation. The lieutenant was no fool; he understood what was unfolding.

What he did not know was how cold Abnaier could truly be.

No, he might have known that too, in some private corner of himself, and followed anyway. Barnaas did not bother asking.

Knowing or not knowing changed nothing, and it would do no good for the troops ready at the back to overhear.

Barnaas asked the reason for the fight, and the commander opened his mouth for the sake of this unpredictable, obstinate knight he respected.

"Border Guard grew too large."

Anyone from Border Guard hearing that would call it insane, but it was not wrong. Of course Border Guard was a city and had no mouth to speak with, so the one who would actually call it insane would be Krais.

Conflict on the continent had never stopped, but actual large-scale war had not broken out easily.

Quite a few years had passed that way.

While only local skirmishes erupted in place of major war, Naurillia had undermined itself.

Thanks to Count Molsen's activities, a nation that had historically shown considerable national strength was on track to tear itself apart without anyone lifting a finger.

So everyone sat back and watched.

If Naurillia shredded itself into chaos, not just Azpen but every nation would have pushed in hard.

The lull had stretched on for decades.

Had everyone just been twiddling their thumbs? Among them, the outstanding figures had all been preparing.

For the coming age of war.

For the storm-like era that would surely arrive.

For the moment of war that would burn the whole continent.

Whether it would start with the Cursed Ground or some nation, or whether nothing would happen at all, no one knew, but they prepared regardless.

"Each nation stored up power. When I say power..."

"Right, I wasn't the only one raising knights. That's it, isn't it?"

Barnaas made a fine listener and chimed in. The lieutenant nodded. Hanging at his side was a helmet fitted with an iron visor designed to cover the face.

"The southern great power goes without saying, but Kairos and the Holy State would have pushed toward the center too if Naurillia had collapsed."

That was the commander's read.

Neither Barnaas nor the commander were prophets who could see the future.

They simply recognized the facts clearly.

And yet Naurillia, which had looked on the verge of being stripped bare by Count Molsen, which should have been split apart and ruined outright, had reversed itself again and again.

The start of that reversal was Border Guard.

The end of it was the Demon Slayer.

They had displayed their strength without reservation, and through that, a remarkable king was born in Naurillia.

Political maneuvering had happened in between, and other nations had reached in, but either way Naurillia had survived by overcoming everything.

Those who had been hoping for Molsen's success swallowed their disappointment and made their next move.

Staying put meant losing Greenfield to Border Guard and losing momentum, so there was bound to be a nation whose strength would weaken as a result.

Who else but Azpen. So it was the most natural thing in the world for them to move now.

Those at the back who had prayed together for Naurillia's ruin, through Sorcery or faith or whatever else, were still of one mind.

So around this time the south would probably kick off its annual fighting too.

To keep the Red Cloak Knights pinned down.

Kairos, up in Naurillia's northwest, would show similar movement, and the Holy State would lodge at least a protest or two.

Among these were genuine threats and some merely annoying noise, but Barnaas judged that even that much gave his side another edge.

And on top of that, their full strength is already exposed.

Those who had worked to bring the situation to what it was now. The strength Naurillia had kept hidden, or what it looked like from outside, had performed, and that performance had allowed others to measure their capability.

Right, they fight well. That much was understood.

But they had shown themselves too clearly.

From Azpen's perspective, the enemy did not know them, while they now knew the enemy.

That was the reason the strategy had shifted from grinding them down bit by bit to committing everything.

Part of it was also that Azpen had taken a beating before Greenfield was taken from them.

Here was the question.

So what happens after Border Guard falls?

Only then would Naurillia scramble to send the Red Cloak Knights.

By that time, Azpen would have swallowed all of Greenfield and be sitting back fat and satisfied.

It would be the start of strife, war, upheaval.

"Things have been too peaceful for too long."

Barnaas said it without a care in the world, the kind of thing that would make anyone who had lost family, friends, or a lover to war feel entirely within their rights to curse his parents.

Well, looking at the continental situation, it was not wrong.

Even the actual fighting between Azpen and Border Guard was not a large-scale war when viewed from a broad enough angle.

While they talked and his stomach grew comfortably full, slicing sounds cut through the air from the brush across the way, and branches and sharp leaves rained to the ground.

It left what looked like a split running through the middle of the forest. Light bled through the gap. That light seeped into the corneas of those watching, entered their pupils, bent as it struck the lenses, and resolved into focus, letting them recognize what stood there.

"Only two of you?"

Barnaas recognized them and asked.

A destination meant a place for fighting.

Not quite a clearing, but the surrounding grass had been cut back enough to make room. Two silhouettes stepped into that space.

One elf and one human.

The human was a blond man holding a black greatsword.

A description he had heard somewhere before.

"So it's you? That crazy murderer?"

The human tilted his head sideways. His gaze went to the elf.

"What have I been killing?"

"That wasn't directed at you. At me. Dull creature. A barbarian's insults are well-earned."

"Me?"

Sinar ignored Ragna's words without effort and turned her gaze forward.

She saw a middle-aged Beastfolk who resembled a dog, someone she had never laid eyes on before. She had heard that Beastfolk had quite a long youth, so middle-aged might have been wrong; old might have been more accurate.

"Old dog?"

"Got a bit of a mouth on you."

Barnaas dusted off his backside and rose, drew his weapon, and slipped it onto his hand.

The Claw with its three sharp talons settled naturally onto the back of his hand. It was a single piece of equipment, wrist strap, iron arm guard running up to the elbow, all one unit.

"Got my nails pretty roughed up fighting when I was young."

He had originally fought bare-handed, but ten years ago he had lost two fingers to that Cyprus bastard from the Red Cloak Knights.

From that point on, Barnaas's weapon had been the Claw.

Using a Claw instead of his own nails was quietly embarrassing, so Barnaas offered something that sounded like an excuse, but no one in that place was aware of his awkwardness.

Not that it mattered.

"All units, advance!"

Barnaas's lieutenant called out.

The human and the elf both snapped their gazes forward at the same moment.

Heads turned, and whatever ease or humor had been in their eyes vanished as those eyes fixed on Barnaas.

The enemy unit raising heavy spearheads as if to skewer the sky, and one Beastfolk who looked like a knight.

"Are you a knight?"

Barnaas asked, thinking how lucky this was.

If there were only two of them on this side, the ones on the other end would have an easy fight.

The crazy murderer raised his sword instead of answering.

Now that he thought about it, had that bastard answered a single one of his questions?

Not once.