WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 532: With a Crushing Sword

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"I always knew you'd make something of yourself, but were you really the Demon Slayer?"

Knight Jamal. In one-on-one combat, he was a knight who could hold his own against even Barnaas Hurrier.

And Jamal had history with the black-haired, blue-eyed man standing before him now. Once, he had tried to cut him down and failed.

He had moved on Abnaier's orders, but the encounter had left a deep impression on him.

Why wouldn't it?

'That was a heavy strike.'

He had parried it with a trembling blade, but the blow had been no small thing. Heavy enough to carve itself into memory.

At the time, Knight Jamal had not expected his opponent to deflect his sword.

No, unexpected was the more honest word.

The conversation that followed had been equally striking.

The man had called it an honor. He had spoken of glory, of chivalry, said that chances to receive a knight's sword were not something you came by often.

"What a shame."

Jamal clicked his tongue. He meant it, just a little. That it had come to this, meeting again in a place like this.

"Did you two have history?"

General Frog, standing at her side, asked. Jamal gave a small nod. She studied the man carefully.

Some things stayed with you for life, and she had a good memory for human faces, especially handsome ones.

The face looked familiar to her too.

"I knew I'd seen him somewhere."

General Frog muttered. She placed him then. He was the one who had killed one of her soldiers.

She had jumped into that battle for sport, gone after him, and let him slip away.

And now this man was the Demon Slayer? Frog had the talent to read talent, and General Frog was no different. When she had last seen him, he had barely registered to her eye.

The gray-haired one with the axe had been far more threatening.

She had pulled back because she could not guarantee a win on that battlefield.

It had been a brief moment, but in the chaos General Frog had sized up the man who killed her soldier, the one who had gone flying when she kicked him.

She had been certain right then. Left on that battlefield, this one would be dead in no time.

And yet here he stood, the man who had blocked Knight Jamal's sword. The man now said to be Azpen's most dangerous enemy.

"Something seems off."

General Frog muttered. Then she raised three blunt fingers with white-tipped ends.

Somewhere out there, another Frog reached for an impossible dream with those same fingers, trying to become an artisan. The one standing here turned her talents in a different direction entirely.

She was a Frog of the front line. Not quite a full knight, but she had reached junior knight level, and her gift for commanding troops had earned her recognition.

The soldiers who caught her signal opened grim eyes and spread out to either side.

Twenty soldiers raised crossbows and fanned into a semicircle around Enkrid, leveling loaded bolts at him.

It was a sight. Twenty crossbows trained on one man, and that one man watching them back like it was nothing.

A clearing of decent size. More accurately, a man-made clearing where trees had been deliberately felled.

General Frog believed that fighting on ground more familiar to the enemy than to her own side was a disadvantage, so after entering the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, she had cut down trees and seized favorable terrain.

The enemy had never set eyes on this place. Only her people knew it existed.

Which meant she had done something the enemy could not predict.

It was preparation she could only make because her forces had entered the mountain range ahead of them.

Had the other side come without any preparation at all?

General Frog had kept her reconnaissance teams running without rest. Five to a unit, patrolling the perimeter.

The conclusion she had reached: the enemy commander is a fool.

That was as close as it got to a verdict on Krais.

There were no hidden countermoves the enemy had prepared nearby.

Enkrid was alone.

He rested his right hand on his hip, let his left hang loose, and looked once to each side.

"You're serious about this?"

He asked it out of nowhere.

"Serious? What kind of question is that when you came here to fight?"

Frog was skilled at psychological warfare. She fielded Enkrid's words with practiced ease.

While that exchange went on, two squads moved behind Enkrid, assembled long spears, and leveled them.

Twenty crossbows in front. Twenty long spears at the back.

On top of that, another twenty soldiers armed with swords and shields waited at the front.

Every last one of them was elite, personally trained by her.

Crrk.

A few soldiers ground their molars.

These were soldiers who had volunteered knowing the operation carried risk.

Former members of the Graydog unit, carrying a grudge they had not let go.

A grudge aimed at a man named Enkrid of the Border Guard.

"I'm Enkrid of the Border Guard."

And then the man introduced himself.

"I know."

General Frog answered. As she spoke, she brought her hands to the two Loop Swords hanging at her hips.

Two blades with thick edges and unusual weight. Those were her weapons.

"Are you really serious?"

Enkrid asked again, and General Frog answered again.

"Is talking nonsense in the middle of a fight your specialty? Are you scared? That's understandable. I get it."

Her voice was perfectly calm. The voice of someone who had already decided she held the upper hand. The general knew exactly how that would sound to her soldiers.

"Fire."

At her word, the twenty crossbow soldiers aimed at Enkrid and went through the motion of loosing. Even so, Enkrid did not move.

"Really?"

He only asked it back.

"This bastard."

One of the crossbow soldiers ground his teeth at Enkrid, but none of them released.

Instead, from behind Enkrid, twenty long spears drove forward. Fast for their length, a thrust like those of the soldier he had first met on the day this loop began repeating.

General Frog had trained them in exactly that same way.

She predicted Enkrid would throw himself sideways to evade.

Anticipating that, the crossbow soldiers had already shifted their aim left and right in advance.

When facing someone at a knight's level, reacting to what you see puts you a step behind. They knew it, trained for it, and now acted on their training.

But Enkrid did not dive to the side.

From where he stood, he brought his sword down onto three of the twenty spear tips.

The strike was less about speed and more about weight, like hoisting a boulder and driving it into the earth.

It was slow enough that even General Frog could follow it with her eyes.

Enkrid pressed down on three shafts until the tips bit into the dirt. The remaining dozen or so he either slipped around or batted away with the leather bracer wrapped around his wrist.

Easy to say, but watching it happen right in front of you still made it impossible to believe.

Swing a sword and dodge and deflect spear tips flying at you?

Twenty spear tips driving in hard from every angle, and someone does that?

It was possible, if you could read every attack's timing and had power and speed overwhelmingly beyond theirs.

Even twenty four-year-olds swinging sticks could rattle a grown man.

Enkrid swatted aside the shower of incoming spear tips, dodged, and struck back like it was nothing remarkable.

Not a single person died.

General Frog's cheek puffed out.

Even the shafts that took Enkrid's sword did not break. Instead, the three soldiers who had been forced to drive their spears into the ground shook on their legs and dropped to their knees.

"Huh."

Jamal let out a sound of pure admiration.

He was the only one who understood exactly what had just happened.

"Again!"

General Frog shouted. Again, she called, but what came next was a different tactic entirely.

"Raaah!"

The sword-and-shield soldiers rushed in screaming while the crossbow troops on each flank began loosing.

Thudd-thud-thud-thud!

Neither Abnaier nor Barnaas Hurrier nor General Frog had expected this force to kill a knight or deal serious damage. They simply knew that even a scratch, anything that demanded even a sliver of attention, would help their own knight win. That was the move they had made.

In short, these soldiers were sacrificial pieces.

Even so, they had not expected nothing to get through at all.

'Was I arrogant?'

What is a knight?

A disaster, people said. The thing standing before her right now proved that true.

He brought his sword down three times, top to bottom. The arcs burned into the eye like afterimages.

The blade strokes clearly looked slower than the arrows flying at him, and yet the arrows aimed at him dropped one after another.

A rattling sound followed a beat later.

"How?"

The general muttered. It was beyond anything she could make sense of.

Then the spear unit drove in again, and this time four shafts snapped clean when his sword came down on them.

Birch shafts soaked in oil bent like reeds and broke.

The broken mid-sections jutted up like the fangs of some beast.

Enkrid swept them aside with a casual swing, and when another volley of bolts came in, he brought his sword down again and crushed them out of the air.

Then the sword-and-shield death squad, soldiers who had thrown away any care for their own lives, charged in.

Jaw muscles stood taut beneath their helmets.

These men had come ready to die if it meant tearing even a strip of cloth from his trousers.

Their goal was to force him to use a secondary weapon, burn through his resources, extract whatever scrap of cost they could.

His sword fell onto that death squad.

Every soldier within range of the strike raised their shields.

The blade dropped at a pace that almost seemed considerate, as though giving them a fair chance to block.

The result was the same as before. A sword like a great heavy stone hammered down onto the shields.

"Ugh!"

"Hk!"

Several soldiers buckled to their knees. The shields they held shattered, blood sprayed from their arms, and a few more could not absorb the impact and went sprawling across the ground.

"Aaagh."

One unlucky soldier whose arm had snapped let out a scream.

"Crushing Sword?"

Jamal said it almost to himself, and Enkrid gave a nod.

"Ha!"

Jamal let out a shout of sheer admiration.

That settled it.

He had said the man would go far, but he had not actually expected him to come back a real knight. And yet here he was, the man who had truly grown into something.

"You've become an interesting one."

Knights who had just crossed the threshold, those who had tasted their limits but still had rough edges, for them, a brute death-squad tactic like this might have worked.

Even a scratch was worth something.

More than that, a well-trained unit standing nearby could be a weight on the mind by itself.

If you gave everything in a fight and had nothing left, not even the strength to twitch a finger, then winning was not really winning.

A crossbow bolt flying in at that moment would be impossible to stop. Win, and death was still waiting.

And the instant that doubt crept in, the blade set firm in your heart would start to dull.

Against a knight, even something that trivial could decide the fight.

Abnaier was a thorough man, and he had aimed at exactly that. He had judged that even if Naurillia had knight-level forces, they would have become knights recently and would lack seasoning. His prediction was half right.

Enkrid had become a knight not long ago, but the seasoning was already there.

He was skilled enough at controlling a fight to provoke through action rather than words.

From the start, Enkrid had not bothered to pay General Frog any real attention.

Proof of that: when Frog swung both Loop Swords, one downward blow broke her weapons and a kick sent them clattering aside.

The death squad's charge, the spear unit's harassment, the bolts the crossbow troops kept firing, none of it mattered.

The opponent was a knight.

"Good. That's good."

Jamal said it before he realized he was speaking aloud. This man had a way of making your blood run hot.

Crushing Sword. That was the same strike that had met his own sword once before. He had asked back then what it was that had deflected a knight's blade.

"Crushing Sword."

That was the answer he had been given.

And why had Enkrid used that one technique against the entire unit?

To call him forward. Jamal made his decision and stepped out. That alone was enough for refined Will to pour from him, forming Pressure that bore down on Enkrid.

Enkrid naturally refused it.

"Abnaier's methods never sat right with me from the start."

Jamal said.

In a fight between knights, there are things more important than winning.

When honor and conviction are on the line, there must be no shame in your own heart.

Because an unclouded spirit is itself proof of the force a knight can bring.

"Sir Jamal?"

General Frog called to him as she bent to pick up her fallen swords.

"Stand clear. From here, being nearby could get you killed."

Jamal looked at his opponent. Enkrid showed something close to a smile.

He had found his enemy. He had found Jamal.

And with that, memories surfaced on their own.

There had been days when he died to that sword.

There had been days when Ragna died to that sword.

There had been a sword that called back the days he had longed to die.

That sword was before him now.

"Are you ready to die?"

Enkrid asked.

"Ha, you arrogant bastard."

Jamal smiled at him.

No, both of them smiled.

Were they evenly matched? Or perhaps not at all? Jamal had been a knight for years, his specialty honed deep. Was it ordinary and expected for him to win?

Enkrid had already forgotten about winning or losing.

In its place, a joy that burned like hot flame passed through his heart and warmed him to his fingertips.

"This'll be fun, right?"

The question, brimming with anticipation, was no different from something a madman might ask. But at the level of a knight, this much was only natural.

Jamal had once been wild like that too. The memory surfaced suddenly and sharply, Enkrid's fighting spirit was that stirring.

"It will."

Jamal confirmed it.

In an instant, the space between them collapsed and their swords met.

Wung.

Jamal swung with a vibrating blade. Enkrid brought up not the Valerian steel sword but the Gladius to meet it, catching the edge with an upward strike.

Clang!

Two pieces of iron with clear intent collided and rang out between them.

Enkrid and Jamal traded blows, crossed positions, and turned back to face each other.

Switched places, looking at each other again.

"Not working?"

Jamal said.

The Vibrating Sword had been stopped, yet he showed no surprise.

Of course not.

This was not his specialty.

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