WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 533: Robbery

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Knight Jamal channeled his Will and made the sword in his right hand sing.

Hmmm!

The blade vibrated again.

Enkrid watched the trembling sword leave afterimages in the air. It looked as though the blade had multiplied into dozens, hundreds of copies all at once. Like watching a bee's wings beat.

If the sword was the talker here rather than the Duchy of Azpen, then that humming had to be Jamal's swordsmanship.

"Take another one."

Jamal said it and swung. No sound of feet pushing off the ground, no sound of a blade cutting air.

A sword swung in earnest by someone who had reached the knight's level moved outside the perception of ordinary people.

Speed that broke through limits killed its own sound as it flew in.

This level of mastery was called the moment when sound dies.

A name coined by the traveling bard after someone explained it to them.

In reality, it was nothing more than swinging a sword faster than sound traveled. To an ordinary observer, the sound and the motion simply arrived out of order.

To those who moved within that space where sound was said to die, it felt no different from anything else.

Enkrid read the attack one step ahead with Future Sight and simultaneously judged that dodging would be difficult.

The trajectory was awkward to avoid. No, this was a swing meant to be blocked.

It did not look like the start of a chain. It looked like an intention to end things with a single strike.

Dodging meant surrendering the initiative.

Enkrid lifted his sword into the path of Jamal's swing and poured everything he had into that instant.

The moment intention took root it became Will, turning into a solid mass that drove strength into both legs, his lower abdomen, his right arm. The Heart of Superhuman Strength activated, naturally.

Clang!

The two weapons met and the impact exploded between them. This time their positions did not cross. They each swung and struck, then stepped back two paces apiece.

"Crude."

Jamal said.

Enkrid just dipped his chin.

A gesture that said the other side was cruder.

Hmmmmm.

Jamal's sword kept singing. The vibration produced a steady wave, and that wave became the force loaded into each strike.

Knights were those who used Will to output strength beyond their physical limits. When a vibration was added on top of a knight's sword strike, the blade could shear cleanly through tempered iron.

That was the structure of the strength built into Jamal's sword.

Enkrid, by contrast, had met it with raw force.

The Isolation Technique had honed his body to an entirely new level, and the Heart of Superhuman Strength doubled the power housed in that body. So the force of the exchanged strikes had been roughly equal.

That was why Jamal called it crude. He had mixed technique into his swing, yet his opponent appeared to have stopped it with nothing but a raw lump of Will.

Was this wasteful by habit, or was the man simply born with that kind of strength?

He took that on pure force?

Watching, Jamal saw Enkrid switch the sword to his other hand and shake out the right. He appeared to be working off the impact.

Jamal saw it and thrust immediately.

A ray-of-light thrust, completely separate from his casual tone, drove straight for Enkrid's heart.

A slashing blade he could meet with force, fine. But what would he do about a thrust?

Clang, tak-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tang!

Enkrid caught the thrust on the sword in his left hand, deflecting and redirecting it. Not just redirecting, though. The blade did not stop after the deflection. It curved, looping toward Jamal's neck like a snare.

Jamal braced his core, yanked the extended sword back, and leaned away.

The edge grazed the tip of his chin with a faint sound.

No time for a drop of blood to fly. The grazing blade fell from top to bottom and aimed at the belly, and Jamal, ducking back almost horizontal, pulled his sword harder.

His weapon was longer. So rather than dodge, he could draw a line across and take the advantage.

It was a split-second call, and it paid off, so Enkrid had to fling himself sideways.

He could not trade his neck for a stab at the belly.

Jamal's sword swept through the air where Enkrid had just been, as if dragging at something. By then Enkrid had already shifted a step and a half to the side.

Jamal straightened at once and smiled.

"So you're not just strong, huh?"

The technique was something to reckon with too.

For a moment Jamal almost envied the man's talent.

Think about it.

How many years had he been a knight?

Even if the person in front of him had reached the knight's level the moment he survived that first exchange, that was what, a year or two at most.

And yet the man was not far behind him in either strength or skill.

Would Cowin fall apart if he saw this?

That kid had been drunk on his own talent since childhood. That arrogance, that enjoyment of his own gifts, was itself a kind of talent in Cowin, but the man in front of him looked every bit his equal in raw ability.

A refined blade. The man standing before him looked like a sword hammered and struck countless times until the steel held nothing but its own sharpness.

He does not rest on talent. He lights his path with effort.

This was the kind of mistake anyone could make. It was not Jamal's fault.

The reality was that Enkrid had carved through on effort alone, without talent, but Jamal had no way to know that.

Enkrid had reached the knight's level. Who would look at the Enkrid standing here now and speak of modest talent?

Mistake or not, nothing changed. Jamal watched his opponent and brought his blade up.

The vibration technique isn't getting through.

So what should he try next.

Jamal moved to the next step. The vibration technique was useful, but it was not his specialty.

Against any opponent, Jamal never spent everything at once. He enjoyed unfolding what he had piece by piece. Barnaas did not like this side of him, but it meshed best with his own particular gifts.

So this was Jamal at his best.

In any case, next came the Correct Sword.

Because an unparalleled genius named Cowin, who possessed Future Sight, existed within the brigade, Jamal had naturally been forced to drill the Correct Sword without pause.

To land a blow on someone who read every move, you had to hide your intent and twist it, then twist it again.

He tried the same approach this time.

Clang, thud, crack!

Jamal swung the blade wide for a downward crown strike and Enkrid switched hands and hammered back.

A Valerian steel sword that reflected a blue sheen.

The idea had been to redirect or loosely block the crown strike, then immediately step the right foot forward and bend the blade downward to make the attack angle unpredictable, but that opening was cut off from the start.

No, that was not the end of it.

Next he drove a diagonal angled thrust and shifted into half-swording with a Ricasso grip, and that too was handled with ease; then Enkrid immediately drove his forehead forward in a headbutt.

Jamal's Correct Sword was a method of twisting, then twisting again. The opponent was supposed to lose their footing watching the swing and the footwork.

Disrupting the opponent with irregular technique was the core of it.

He even tried pretending to cut, then swung his leg out to aim a low kick at Enkrid's calf. A common technique from mercenary swordplay.

Even a dirty trick like that was lethal when a knight used it.

Same now.

But Enkrid cut off every one of those actions, snapping the thread at the very first step into each irregular Numbers Game entry.

He's reading all of it?

Or was he just reacting on pure instinct?

Jamal did not know, but Enkrid had drilled the Correct Sword, the swordsmanship Aker called Aker's Web, down to the bone through the thought-self trapped in the sword.

Honestly, the Numbers Game Jamal was throwing at him looked almost sloppy by comparison.

Aker had been a master of the Numbers Game who had fought knight after knight in a frenzy. If the Numbers Game taught by the Demon Sword Tutor was a wooden sword held by a child, then Aker's was a blade in a Master's hand, one that cut with a graze.

Jamal was mid-Numbers Game when he felt the pressure reverse on him. Where Jamal tried to tangle the mind through motion, Enkrid layered intention over it through Will.

In an instant Jamal saw Enkrid's sword aiming at the head, the chest, the legs, the back of the hand, the neck, then back to the shoulder.

A split second of the near future seen through insight. And at the same time, an impossible future.

A sword that carved his whole body at once?

Enkrid's Will at work.

What Aker had taught was coming to light.

"You do strange things."

Holding still would have meant worse than a graze on the chin, so Jamal jumped cleanly back.

That move right there was proof of how seasoned he was.

In that moment, the decision to step back at all had not been easy.

When you see a future where you take the blade, the usual instinct is to scramble to block whatever is coming.

But jump back, and Will-driven intangible attacks become meaningless.

What if he stretched the Will further and pressed in a striking form? Could an opponent who had gained distance once not manage it a second time?

If Jamal was not in the mood for a chase, pushing it further was pointless.

He stepped back and only then understood what his opponent had done.

With Will?

Jamal had arrived here on overflowing talent. So he also had the eye to recognize at a glance what the other man had done.

He could not replicate what Enkrid had just pulled off, but he grasped the rough principle.

That did not mean he would not get caught by it again.

Tricky.

So what to do.

Cold sweat was the kind of thing that ought to have been running down his spine just then.

And because the situation was exactly that, Jamal felt a swell of pleasure.

How long had it been since something like this came along?

From the time Jamal first picked up a sword, there had never been many who could match him.

The first time he ever felt his life genuinely threatened had been against the monster called Barnaas Hurrier.

That Beastfolk had been a monster in every sense.

Among everyone else, the number who had given him real tension was small.

And lately, chances like this had been even rarer.

Knights were not the kind of people who could wander freely, so opportunities to face real enemies and fight were scarce.

And for a knight to give him this kind of tension on top of that.

Jamal let it show outwardly, that rush of elation, but Enkrid, the very opponent giving him that tension, looked calm.

"From here on I'm serious."

Jamal said it and swung his sword again. An honest attack, none of the fumbling Correct Sword attempts.

He showed a speed that left no room to think.

Fast. Faster still.

The moment Enkrid registered that Jamal's sword had moved, he had to react.

The sword that had mimicked a hummingbird's wings shed its vibration and committed fully to speed. It was nothing short of a ray of light.

Enkrid responded to Jamal's sword. If he failed to respond he would die, so of course he did.

Jamal's blade rose vertically and came crashing down. Enkrid wound around it and thrust, and Jamal dodged and swept his sword horizontally.

Clang, ting, tang.

Sparks flew continuously between them.

Anyone capable of watching a fight clearly would not have dared name a favorite.

Jamal seemed to press, then to give ground, yet always found a way to extend his sword. Thrusting, slashing, meeting blade with blade no matter what.

The trajectory and speed alone were enough to show that Jamal's sword was far more dangerous than the Ghouls met in the gray forest.

A sword that could not be dodged without reaching the knight's level.

Those kinds of blows rained down in waves. And Enkrid caught every last one.

He adapted to the speed, just a little, and at the point where Enkrid began mixing offense into his defense, Jamal opened his mouth.

"Let me tell you my specialty."

Jamal steadied his breathing and continued.

"Better to know and die than to stare at me with resentful eyes and understand nothing."

Clang!

Their swords met again and sparks burst wide between them.

Blue and red flame scattered light between the two of them without pause.

Heat pushed back against the falling sunlight.

Inside that heat, boiling Will turned into invisible pressure and shoved at everything around it.

The soldiers watching stood open-mouthed, eyes vacant.

A stone sent flying by the clash hit one soldier in the head and drew a sharp cry.

From outside it looked like nothing more than a storm tearing through.

The watchers could not even make out how the blades were moving or in what pattern.

And from within that storm, a voice spoke.

"My sword's name is 'Plunder.'"

Jamal's Inscribed Weapon was not strong like Aoara's sword, nor infinitely light like some other person's weapon. It was close to a plain longsword.

In its place, the Will loaded into his sword absorbed and scattered his opponent's Will.

In other words.

"Because I have Plunder, I never tire."

When you grasped Will and rose above the knight's level, the first thing you learned was limits.

Jamal had learned and understood those limits, and in doing so a thought had come to him.

What if I just took what others had?

Why had this ability manifested? Perhaps because from childhood, taking what was around him had simply been his life.

Jamal had taken his brother's position, taken his father's family name. He had been born a bastard but was now the head of his own house.

One misstep and he might have become nothing more than a skilled robber.

A knight accustomed to taking. That was Jamal.

To go deeper, the weapon Plunder was in truth designed to scatter Will. The Will drained from it did not become Jamal's own.

Will did not move as a force that could be transferred that way.

But he could make his opponent believe it did.

The Vibration Sword, the Correct Sword, the fast sword, all of it had been setup for this one thing.

Clash against it and you feel your strength stolen. If the base Will loaded into a strike was one, fighting him meant spending three for every one.

How far will you last?

Jamal smiled with confidence.

And Enkrid had not been listening to him for a while now.

What he had gained inside the mindscape with Aker he had drilled through training until his body knew it in the real world. He was only pulling all of it out through actual combat and showing it again and again.

The reason?

This is insane.

It was too much fun.

Should he call it the first kind of fun Enkrid had ever felt like this?

That pleasure was heating him up.

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