WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 535: If It Seems Doable, Do It

= = =

"......Everyone, fall back!"

General Frog forced the words out, pushing through the Pressure with considerable effort.

Knight Jamal was dead. Could the remaining troops kill that monster?

The reason knights were called calamities had been carved plainly into General Frog's gut, into that thing inside her Heart Armor that thrashed about like something gone mad.

"Why? Want to keep going?"

Enkrid reined in the Pressure he had unknowingly released as he spoke. He had gotten swept up in the heat of it.

Before him, Frog stood rigid, weapon raised and gripped tight.

She would strike if provoked. But she did not look like she was about to.

That was what his senses told him, sharpened past the usual five, the sixth sense and raw instinct speaking together.

Enkrid had enjoyed this. He thought he had grown a little through Jamal. That joy was considerable right now.

The fight with Knight Jamal had been a duel, and its result was stark. There was no need to kill the rest of them.

A knight being able to kill a thousand men alone did not mean chasing down soldiers one by one and cutting them apart was the right thing to do.

That was not a knight. That was just someone drunk on blood.

"The blood-drinking knight will come and take you away."

It was the kind of thing parents said to disobedient children. Like saying a Magic Beast will carry you off, or a Ghoul will drag you away.

Aker had mentioned offhandedly once that blood-drinking knights had actually existed.

There had been madmen who wallowed in blood, slaughter, and the act of killing.

"Giants have that satisfying chewiness when you cut them, humans are soft and nice, and Frogs are tough so they're fun."

That was supposedly what one had said.

Enkrid had no intention of becoming that. Was it a fight born of necessity, or blood spilled for satisfaction? The line mattered.

He left Frog behind, sweating from sheer tension, sheathed his sword, and picked up Jamal's blade along with it.

He grabbed the throwing spear he had set aside at the edge of the clearing when he first walked in.

Not bad.

Training with Aker had let him handle Will more comfortably than before.

Plunder had not been able to do its work.

Jamal had every right to feel cheated.

The volume of Will inside Enkrid was on par with Ousque, who was counted among legends. An undraining lake, a well that never stopped filling.

Trying to gnaw away at something like that with Plunder and win from it, that was madness.

Of course, had Jamal known what Enkrid was, he would never have fought this way. He would have shifted his tactics, looking for a gap to land one clean cut.

Was the enemy's defeat a failure of information?

Enkrid fell into review out of habit.

"If you grow stronger and faster, shouldn't you also know how to use that more efficiently?"

Those had been Ruagarne's words.

Rem and Ragna were not his only sparring partners.

There had been a moment, despite Enkrid having far superior strength and sight, when she had poked him in the stomach for just an instant.

Was it because Ruagarne's Numbers Game was that refined? Or had he dropped his guard because she was not a knight?

Neither.

She knew how to fight. She knew how to use what she had. Frog bodies regenerated. That meant she could give up an arm if it came to it, and she had shown him the Frog way of battle.

Give bone to take flesh.

It had not been a killing blow. Even charitably, it would have been little more than a scratch.

But it had landed. That was what mattered.

What was efficient combat?

Thinking. Using terrain. Returning to what a fight really was. The domain of personal tactics.

Enkrid had not stopped learning just because he became a knight.

Now was no different.

He thought that what was running through his head right now resembled the unit-level tactics that force had just thrown at him.

It was Frog's strategy, most likely.

The kind of resolve where you give up bone, give up flesh, but commit to taking even one of the enemy's fingernails.

"You can go now."

Enkrid said it to Frog, who was still watching him with wariness packed behind her eyes.

"......Just go?"

"Is there a reason you should die here?"

If not, shouldn't she leave?

Frog rolled her eyes with suspicion, then stepped back. Whether she really could just go was written plainly all over her face.

Enkrid let her go.

Killing one Frog here would not change who won and who lost.

If this was a board Krais had laid out, then the ones with a working head were better left alive.

There was a plan that had Crang joining too. Come to think of it, Krais, that Big Eyes character, was a strange one. He had been anxious and yet had gone ahead and mapped out what came next anyway. From that angle, was killing this Frog the right call?

He did not want to.

He had also liked that she had sent all her subordinates away and stood there alone. Watching her now, she did not seem like someone suited for a fight to the last.

So he let her go.

Half of it was impulse, and half was the judgment that it would help whatever Krais had planned.

Honestly, the truer thing was probably this: once she had sent everyone away and stood there alone, he simply had not wanted to kill her.

Azpen had already taken a heavy blow with a knight dead. Letting one Frog walk would not lead to her suddenly rallying an army and charging back. A full frontal war under these circumstances would be nothing but meaningless sacrifice.

It was a short window, but instinct had driven the call.

If Krais had been watching from beside him, Enkrid could not have argued back if Krais asked, "Aren't you just doing whatever you feel like?"

Frog had kicked him in the side once, but Enkrid had completely forgotten that.

So there was no grudge either.

Enkrid gathered his weapons and moved out. He was heading toward the other members of his unit.

But someone had moved before him.

From the shadow in a corner of the clearing, a gloomy man with reddish-brown hair stepped out. In Rem's view he was sly and sinister, but by any purely aesthetic standard he was a man you could fairly call handsome.

"Is it done?"

the man asked.

"My side is."

"Mm."

The next line should have been something about heading to Rem or Ragna, but Jaxon said nothing more as he wiped the blood from his short blade and cleaned it.

Enkrid said something agreeable to Jaxon.

"Let's go see how badly Rem and Ragna are getting beaten up."

"Sure."

On the way, Enkrid heard about the enemy that had come for Jaxon.

"Moonlight elves?"

"Ambush specialists. The Ranger Unit is unharmed."

As they walked forward, Finn and the Ranger Unit came toward them.

"Barely made it out alive," Finn said.

Her eyes kept flicking toward Jaxon.

The fight that man had put on was still fresh in her eyes.

Moonlight elves specialized in sliding a blade into your back without a sound. On top of that, whatever training they had undergone, they were nimble even by elf standards.

When those quick-bodied elf swordsmen came swarming in, Jaxon simply vanished for a moment.

"What the!"

She had cried out in surprise at first, thinking she would have to hold the line herself.

Then, in an instant, three or four elves crumpled.

"Hss!"

One of the elves reacted and swept a crescent-shaped blade through the air toward where they had fallen, but there was already nothing there.

From that point on, Jaxon became a death-bringer slipping between shadow and shadow.

The short blade in his hand cut throats, stabbed lungs, split hearts, and opened thighs in a steady rhythm.

Blood sprayed, but no bone fragments flew. Only blood, spraying constantly.

His blade never lodged in the wooden armor the elves wore. There was no need for it to. Just find the gaps and push through.

The small matter of the targets being elves nimble enough to spring up into the trees like forest birds remained, but that was a very small matter indeed.

Finn had seen junior knights fight and had her share of experience, but she had never seen anything like this.

Should she call it impressive?

She did not know.

Enemies just kept folding and dying.

Finn and the Ranger Unit had done nothing but step back and watch.

At some point, what appeared to be the elven commander took a thrown blade to the forehead and fell back. That spot became his coffin, as it naturally would.

A death-bringer who vanished without a sound and reappeared to strike again.

No matter how fearless an elf pack was, wrong was wrong.

Especially after losing their commander. The fight ended sooner than expected. The elves scattered and disappeared.

And the man reappeared.

Finn, if she was being honest, had been a little afraid.

Should she feel relief because he was an ally? He looked like someone who might cut her throat without a moment's warning.

This dangerous man had offered no reassurance.

"Moving out," he said, and walked on immediately.

"He is on our side, right?" one of her soldiers asked from behind.

Finn nodded. Only then did she realize that she and every member of the Ranger Unit had each drifted several steps back without knowing it.

Why had she felt fear instead of relief watching enemies die? Partly because of the overwhelming force Jaxon had shown, but also because there had been nothing behind those cuts. No feeling at all.

His bladework had a dry blankness to it, the kind that said this is a thing I have to do, so I do it.

That was what had frightened Finn.

"Ah, um."

She had been turning the earlier moment over in her mind, and now she fumbled for how to begin.

Enkrid casually poked Jaxon in the side.

"You got blood on you here too."

"......What was that?"

Jaxon narrowed his eyes and looked back. Fair question. Enkrid had used the sharpened senses still humming from the fight with Knight Jamal to slip past Jaxon's awareness and poke him in the side.

It was something like mixing noise into a signal. Layer enough static and interference, and the real message you are sending gets buried.

More precisely, before the poke he had raised his intent toward the throat and faked a foot sweep, just to draw the eye.

Of course Jaxon could have blocked it if he had tried. He had let it through knowing full well.

So this was a kind of joke disguised as a complaint, where both men knew exactly what the other had done.

"Won't your lover back in the city hate that you smell like blood?"

"Unlike some people, I wash regularly."

"That some people might have a grave waiting for them in the east."

"That Beastfolk is not the type to die so easily."

"You think more highly of Dunbakel than I expected."

"Not just anyone can drag themselves through living under a savage."

Was his respect for Dunbakel tied to her surviving under Rem?

Did that mean everyone under Rem ought to be dead?

Enkrid pushed aside the pointless thought and looked at Finn.

She was a Ranger, one who had practically lived in the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range in preparation for this battle. She would know the paths better than he did.

So why was she just standing there?

Finn's mind was complicated.

Watching a man who could become death itself for anyone trade trivial jokes did that to her, and it got worse knowing it was Enkrid who had sent him here.

With a combat asset like that, should he have been guarding her and the Ranger Unit at all? Would it not have been better to use him somewhere else?

Somewhere like fighting alongside Enkrid.

A good result did not make everything good.

War came with sacrifice. Finn knew that in her bones. She had thought this time would be her turn.

Glad to be alive? She was, but fear and joy and relief tangled together, that was more accurate.

That tangle moved her mouth.

"Why did you do it?"

Everything knotted up inside her, and the question came out before she could stop it.

"Do what?"

"This is like sending a hundred infantry to kill one Ghoul. Nobody calls a knight order to deal with a single Magic Beast."

There would be others fighting at a disadvantage on different parts of the field so that their lives could be saved here.

That was what Finn meant.

She was right. Normally, that would be how it went.

Krais had said there was no battlefield without sacrifice.

Right, he had said that.

Enkrid thought through several things and answered plainly. It was something he had not even said to Krais.

"Because it seemed like I could."

"......What?"

"I thought we could win without losing a single person on our side."

Anyone who did not know him would be right to write that off as nonsense.

But Enkrid had come from killing a knight. Finn did not know that, but she had seen the traces of the fight, and she had seen what Jaxon did.

So.

"You could do that?"

Finn asked, half dazed.

"Yeah, I could."

Not omnipotence. Confidence.

Not recklessness. A calculated fight.

After his training with Aker, Enkrid had pushed Rem and Ragna hard.

"Barbarian. Stay where you are and you'll fall behind."

"Me? Fall behind who? The captain?"

"No."

"Then?"

"Ragna's sword has gotten heavier."

"......Damn it, pick up your sword and get up. That was a good provocation."

He had said that to Rem.

Then to Ragna: "You can lose your way, Ragna. But I don't think I'd enjoy watching you cry after Rem beats you to a pulp."

"Who exactly is getting beaten by whom?"

He had said Rem, but Ragna had not heard it.

Instead, what had been a slightly loose edge in his bearing sharpened into something like a whetted blade.

"You want to go?"

"Do block it properly. You might get hurt."

Stirring up motivation was simple enough. Enkrid had always found it rising on its own around him just from training, but this time he had gone and done it deliberately.

Why?

"Fight more, spar more."

That was Aker's advice.

From all that fighting with him, from the ceaseless back and forth, something had come.

This was not something Aker had arranged. Enkrid had taken it for himself.

The first thing was how to handle Will.

The trick of nudging a massive boulder that would not move no matter how hard you pushed, of receiving water that kept welling up endlessly and cupping it in both hands.

Pure strength was not enough.

It genuinely required a knack.

The kind of knack you needed to use a lever to roll a stone, to tilt your palms and catch flowing water. That kind.

Since he was likely the only one with Will like his, there was no one to learn it from anyway.

Enkrid had known that by instinct.

This was where he had to dig.

So he did.

That was how he mastered the knack of handling Will.

The other thing was the experience that came from dueling a knight.

Aker had told him to fight knights more, not as a student but as an equal, eye to eye.

"One fight against someone close to your level is worth more than cutting down a hundred who are weaker."

Enkrid had followed that. He had felt it in his body.

Right up until setting out for the war with Azpen, Enkrid had practiced Valaf Martial Arts with Audin, the Vallen mercenary sword alone, sparring against Rem and Ragna, and something with Jaxon that called itself a game of catching tails but was really more like burying a short blade in someone's back.

That was where the confidence came from. That was how he had sized up his own side's strength.

It seemed like it would work.

There would be times when allies had to serve as a foundation for sacrifice, but maybe not this time.

More than anything, they were all people with a remarkable talent for pulling themselves clear when things went wrong.

Would Rem stake his life to kill Azpen's knight and die with him?

Not a chance.

Hold here, hit here. It seemed like it could be done, so he would do it.

If it could not be done, sacrifice was a conversation for then.

"Which plan are we going with?"

"The first one."

That was how he had answered Krais's question.

He had watched Krais mutter that dealing with someone who wanted a battlefield without sacrifice was going to drive him mad, but what could be done.

Words could not buy trust in something like this. Only action could show it.

Enkrid was proving his word and his intent right now.

The will to make it a war where no one died. From the very beginning, unwavering, a light that shone clear and bright, the kind that might sound absurd to some.

But those who followed Enkrid, those who had watched him, simply believed him without thinking about it.

This was the result of that.

= = =

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