WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 530: Anxiety and Certainty

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Barnaas Hurrier could run calculations, despite how he looked.

From the outside, watching him charge into a fight with his tongue practically hanging out, you might think of a dog gone mad at the scent of blood. He was a wolf Beastfolk, so the appearance came naturally enough. But inside, where another man might keep one wolf, he kept dozens of serpents coiled and ready.

He looked at the two knights who had come out against him and finished his calculations in an instant.

'I win.'

Why?

Because he already had a rough count of how many troops Naurillia had sent into the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, and at this point it no longer mattered if every last one of them turned out to be a knight.

Getting that number had not been difficult at all.

His side commanded an elf unit that moved freely through the mountains, and he had already run feints using them. On top of that, he had sent the elf unit forward earlier just to watch how the enemy responded.

If the enemy had swarmed after the bait in a single mass, he would have concluded that their knight strength was thin and their leader a coward.

Instead, they split up and came at him as though they had read his intention.

That had been proven right here, with two knights showing up at this location.

Even so, Barnaas had to face two of them. So why was he confident in victory?

Were fifty iron-bodied meat shields not enough when it was two against one in terms of headcount?

That was knowing one thing and missing the other.

Setting aside the efforts of Abnaier and Barnaas Hurrier, they had dangled bait through every diplomatic channel available, including the Ekins family of Azpen, with its tradition of statecraft, and had run themselves ragged chasing down every lead. All of it had been done to make sure a particular knight from Naurillia's Red Cloak Knights was not standing here today.

'Are all knights the same knight?'

People who knew one thing and missed the other tended to treat knights as interchangeable.

That was absurd.

Soldiers were not all the same soldier, and knights were no different. Those below that level might look similar from a distance, but once you reached the rank yourself, the gaps became visible. That was why the fake knights Count Molsen manufactured could never truly challenge the real thing.

Judgment in the moment, the breadth of one's vision, the way strength was applied, all of it ran on an entirely different track.

For that reason, Barnaas had only needed one thing: Cyprus not to show up.

If Cyprus stayed away, there would be no one here capable of stopping him.

Which meant that even if another opponent of similar caliber were added to the two already in front of him, Barnaas would still have called it his victory.

Knights were not all the same knight.

Anyway, two had come. With two knights here, the shape of the other battlefields became easy enough to sketch out in his head.

'So the board looks like this now?'

Three routes, three battlefields in total. That was the shape Abnaier had designed and Barnaas had personally moved to create.

Why divide it into three battlefields?

That was a separate question. Splitting the enemy was secondary. Mainly, it was done so their own side could fight well.

'Knights are not the type to perform better when you group them together.'

Barnaas knew that from experience.

Put knights side by side and instead of synergy, they tended to grate on each other. If the opposing side were pushing with sheer numbers, that might be different, but his side was the superior few.

Combining their strength would not double it.

'Well, if they had years of fighting together, that would be a different story.'

Like twin knights, for instance.

Beyond that, most would follow the same pattern.

Men who had overflowed with talent and climbed all the way above the rank of knight were not the type to sit down and drill joint techniques.

The eccentric junior under his command who recited poetry had announced that his goal was to surpass Barnaas within ten years, and that was simply how those people were.

Was that wrong? No.

Barnaas believed his judgment and choices were sound.

He had deliberately set those capable of reaching knighthood against one another in a competitive structure. That would push their ambition endlessly upward.

And above all of them, he sat firmly in place, and that was how Barnaas had always raised disciples and juniors.

Given all that, scattering to fight separately was of course the better call.

On top of everything, following Abnaier's recommendation, they had brought troops specifically to wear the enemy down. Full frontal engagement had been abandoned without hesitation and the strength concentrated here.

The other battlefields, the ones he was not personally handling? They would be fine.

'That bastard won't lose.'

Among those under him, one man's specialty was single combat. Set Barnaas aside, and that was the most reliable blade he had.

His head kept running the numbers.

What if the enemy broke off from one of the three battlefields, or fled, and the whole plan went sideways?

'Please. By all means, let them try.'

From the start, capturing the enemy's rear at even one of the three locations would end the fight entirely.

Even if the enemy's forces merged into a larger mass than they were now, that would still be fine.

Even if it happened somewhere other than here.

Either way, the enemy would not abandon any of the three routes. He would not, if the positions were reversed. Lose one route and the rear opened up. They had set aside full frontal combat, yes, but if your back was torn open, everything changed.

'And a strategist wouldn't take the enemy's word at face value anyway.'

So that left him with his assigned location.

One flashy subordinate and one he had recently been grooming.

The last location had a knight who had bound himself with an oath and made a mess of things because of it, yet whose single combat record Barnaas could not confidently predict, and General Frog was there alongside them as well.

If he were ranking difficulty, the third battlefield would be the hardest.

Because that Frog was one of the rare few who actually knew how to fight in step with a knight.

"This is genuinely fun."

Just before the fighting started, Barnaas murmured to himself.

* * *

"There will be more knights than we expect. That is my estimate. The number could reach five. Is it right to be greedy in a fight like that? And even if luck runs our way and we end up with comparable numbers to the enemy, what do we do about the variables that headcount alone cannot solve?"

Krais said it loudly and plainly.

It was right before Enkrid had been about to say he wanted to push further. His words were worth listening to. The assumption behind them was that things could go as badly as he was warning.

He put extra force behind his voice when the topic turned to numbers.

It went something like this.

Could a knight's combat power be reduced to a number?

Say a knight's strength was roughly ten. Did that mean every knight delivered exactly ten?

Of course, whether giant or human, everyone had two hands and two feet, so the limits of what one person could do were clear enough. But knights were not all equal in strength.

Aoara was a brilliant, exceptional, and beautiful knight, and yet the strongest in all of Naurillia was Cyprus. Knights were not all the same knight.

Krais knew that, and Enkrid knew it too.

Where Krais understood it through a sharp mind that read the world clearly, Enkrid understood it because he had lived it.

Through Rem and Ragna, through watching Sinar, through fighting the King of the East and the Demon Creatures of the Gray Forest, through Aker, trampling over his own limits again and again and pressing forward.

So there could be no guaranteed victory in any fight.

That was how things normally stood.

"I see."

And yet that was all Enkrid said. Even after having lived it himself.

That was why Krais was deeply uneasy.

Abnaier had concluded that the current board had been shaped through mutual agreement between himself and the opposing side.

But that was not right.

Krais had shaped the entire board. He had funneled the enemy onto a single path and let them use it as freely as they liked.

Use the road well, and we will meet head-on at the bottleneck, like old enemies on a narrow bridge.

Oh, you know how it works, right? Come with your elite few. How many knights do you have?

Three, was it? Then bring just three. We might struggle and hold the line with sheer numbers.

If Krais had put it that way.

Sure, let's do it.

See you there.

That was essentially what Abnaier had replied, clean and simple.

Why had Krais done it this way? Because it was the only way to let the enemy do exactly what they wanted to do.

It was said that a sage could sit in one place and predict what would happen on the other side of the continent.

Krais did not think of himself as a sage, so he made no such predictions.

"Honestly, what would be the point in predicting something like that?"

He would have said something like that and left it there.

He did not know how things moved at the far end of the world, but what Krais could predict was the board he had built himself, the shape the coming battlefield would take.

"Our side will need to spend troops too."

Would the enemy's strategist keep good faith and move as agreed?

Was this even an agreement to begin with?

The problem was not that there was no notary. It had been a wordless understanding, a deal read from the air between two people.

Nothing required anyone to honor it.

And so Krais believed losses had to be accepted as a necessity. But.

"Rejected."

The opinion was rejected. When the word was spoken, he looked at the commander's eyes, and it was plain that nothing he said was going to land.

The enemy would not come quietly.

Something was going to happen.

But he had to follow the greedy commander's lead. The stubbornness could not be broken, it was already a settled matter.

Even so, that did not change who had built this board, and so Krais's heart seized with unease every ten breaths.

What if everything fell apart and everyone died?

'At this rate, I won't die in bed at a ripe old age.'

If Krais had designed the board, Enkrid was the piece on it. The final choice and judgment were his, but that prior fact would not change.

Abnaier knew it too.

Two strategists watched the course of the battle from different positions, with different things in their hearts.

One wrapped in unease.

The other carrying the certainty that they would win.

Whether the piece each strategist had sent was a knight, a queen, a bishop, or a pawn, no one could say.

Only the outcome would judge whether the path each had chosen was right.

* * *

While Barnaas ran his calculations and Krais jittered with anxiety, naturally the people who needed to meet on the other battlefields were meeting.

"Why is it that people come to hate one another?"

Rem listened to what the figure blocking his path was saying, then turned his head left and right to sweep the surroundings.

Quite a crowd. Bloodlust pricked his skin from between thick undergrowth.

Well, a moderate amount of bloodlust. Not even enough to leave a scratch.

'Weaker than Arath when she's angry.'

The one who had stepped out to block the road was a knight of Azpen. Whatever the gray-haired, beast-like figure in front of him did, the knight kept his gaze cast slightly downward and continued speaking.

Melancholy eyes, a calm and deep voice, or at least that was clearly the intended impression.

He angled his chin up at just the right degree and let his gaze drift on a slant toward the sky.

Rem was wondering what the hell this idiot was staring at.

Was the sun not blinding?

"It is perhaps the trial this world has given us. And we must overcome that trial."

Rem rested a hand on the axe handle and shifted his weight to one leg. He felt like yawning, but he was not sleepy. He had run pretty hard after hearing Enkrid's words, and this was what he found at the end of it. Anyone watching who did not know them would have assumed neither side intended to fight.

"What are the ones hiding around us?"

Rem asked, posture still lopsided.

"Monterre's Swamp."

The answer came from behind. Two figures were blocking Rem's path, and the one standing at the back had eyes red as embedded rubies.

They did not look like ordinary human eyes. Slit vertically from top to bottom, they called to mind the eyes of a beast, and not just the color. The ferocity of a predator radiated from every part of that figure.

There was also the smell of Sorcery.

Rem had suspected for some time that someone in Azpen had been tampering with Sorcery. This confirmed it.

Tracing the roots of it, it did not seem to come from the western tradition. This looked like Sorcery that had traveled a different path.

Even back on the last battlefield, when the Fog of Annihilation was used, something about it had felt off, and sure enough, a strange figure like this had eventually turned up.

What kind of person was behind this Sorcery?

Scratch, scratch.

Rem scratched his head with his right thumb and thought.

'The immortal madman is dead.'

That one's specialty had always been fighting, not researching Sorcery. And yet he had chased after Sorcery to stop aging, which made no sense to begin with.

So what was coming off the red-eyed figure was probably not some legacy left behind by a fool who had died cheating his way through Sorcery he never truly understood.

Then what was it?

In the span of a few breaths, the short time the figure up front spent barking nonsense, Rem had scanned the situation and pieced together a decent picture of what the opponent had done.

'Divine manifestation?'

It was a way of channeling Sorcery with one's own body as the medium. Similar to what he himself did, but what happened when someone attempted that without the innate talent to support it?

Beyond simply burning through lifespan, they would have to suffer through it like a deep illness every single time they used it.

And that would only be if they were lucky.

Though perhaps some kind of safeguard had been put in place.

The aura coming off the figure was more controlled than expected. That meant this was not an unrefined technique.

They were using it with the side effects and recoil under control.

Watching it, Rem found himself genuinely curious about the source and origin of the technique.

Sorcery had always been something he found endlessly interesting.

'Still, more polished than whatever that Molsen idiot was doing.'

Anything was better than the chimera research trying to manufacture knights out of nothing.

That was the sum of Rem's assessment of the enemy's strength.

The one up front: a knight barking poetry at the sky.

The one in the back with red eyes: someone who had reached the level of a knight through Sorcery.

'Plus about a hundred bugs surrounding us.'

The ones circling them were the assassins of Monterre's Swamp.

Georg's Blade was an assassination guild with a reputation spanning the entire continent. Monterre's Swamp was a group that only wielded influence around Azpen.

From its founding, the guild had been built on support from Azpen's king and nobility, making it, in a sense, a bastard child raised by the crown and the noble houses.

Not a guild that had formed naturally, and not a unit that truly belonged to the kingdom either.

But just as a bastard could be brought into the household when circumstances demanded, these people had since been folded into the kingdom, reorganized, and had arrived at their present form.

Every single one of them stared at Rem with daggers coated in poison, darts, poisoned sand, nets, and harpoons attached to trailing ropes. They glared hard enough to sting.

Rem could not see each of them individually, but he felt it.

Assassins were not some class of being with their emotions carved out, and the tension they radiated heated the air.

Not that Rem cared whether the air heated up or not. He did as he liked.

"I grieve, and grieve again. That I must kill yet another man beloved by the gods, born gifted with rare talent."

The figure in front of him was also doing very much as he liked.

One look was enough to see it, the confidence, the contempt, and the rambling that poured out as though he had taken something and it had gone straight to his head. Lost in his own world, pouring out words like a private act of self-indulgence, and it grated.

When something grated, a word naturally followed.

"Did you share a table with a Ghoul or something? What the hell did you eat?"

Rem, sharpened by years of Enkrid's company, let the insult fly.

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