A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 536

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 536: What Is Barnaas's Dream?

= = =

Barnaas Hurrier never claimed to be the greatest on the continent, or the strongest.

But he never thought he would fall to some knight whose name he did not even know.

'How is this possible?'

He lay on the ground. His opponent had driven the greatsword's tip into the earth and was staring down at him.

The thick black blade had less than half its length left, and only one side of the guard remained.

All of it had been sheared away by Barnaas's own Vibration Sword.

Just as Jamal had studied Correct Sword after watching Cowin and honed it into his own, Barnaas's Vibration Sword also had an origin.

The Vibration Sword was Barnaas's specialty.

He was unusual in that he had never created an Inscribed Weapon. He used his own claws as weapons until Cyprus broke them, and only then did he have the Claw made. He had come to Inscribed Weapons late.

Even so, he believed he had grown stronger than before.

The principle of vibration is trembling.

Force is amplified through oscillation. Channeling Will into the Claw was harder than channeling it into his own claws, but in exchange he could pour in more Will than ever before.

To embed vibration in his own claws and flesh, he had needed to use Iron Body at the same time, which meant wasting that much Will on defense.

Without Iron Body, he could now pour Will into the weapon beyond what his claws ever allowed, so in terms of raw output alone, he was stronger.

In other words, the current version of himself fought better than the old one.

In truth, the weapon was just an excuse. After getting beaten by Cyprus, the humiliation had driven him to grind his fangs and train without rest. That was probably the real reason.

Either way, his technique had advanced another step from where it had been.

'I thought I would have had a real shot against Cyprus if we met again.'

Barnaas felt the strength drain from the muscles cinching shut the stump of his severed left arm.

He had lost a leg too, not just the arm.

A cut above his left eye socket left him unable to see out of that side.

'Is the eye itself damaged?'

If he survived, living as a one-eyed man was fine. He could accept that.

As long as he survived.

The problem was that the situation could not promise him that.

"What a monster."

Barnaas turned the battle over in his mind.

"All units, charge."

At those words from the lieutenant under his command, fifty Iron Body spearmen tightened their formation and applied pressure, and at the same moment Barnaas himself had charged.

Crack.

Transforming into Beastfolk form was only natural.

He was not like Dunbakel, who was born with a special constitution and actually resembled a lion. Still, his fangs had grown sharper, his ears had pricked higher, and the hair across his body had stiffened like wire.

The blood of the Beastfolk surged in him, and with it the hunting instinct woke.

Barnaas used that instinct, but he did not let it drag him along.

So he had not been the first to charge.

Instead, he had let one of the Iron Body spearmen drive a thrust in deep.

He had jumped left and right to leave afterimages and draw attention onto himself, then yielded the first strike to his own soldier.

It was a fine thrust. Not vicious, not especially fast, but a spear tip with physical mass behind it.

One could say all you had to do was dodge, but the moment you dodged, a gap would open.

Barnaas could exploit that gap without effort. More than exploit it, he could stab and tear through it.

But even with the spear tip coming for him, the man with the greatsword never took his eyes off Barnaas.

Barnaas sprinted left and right, trailing afterimage after afterimage, and that gaze never lost him once.

'Good eyes.'

The thought and the action both lived in the same instant.

Within that sliver of a moment, the man's greatsword moved.

The sound of air splitting, gone before it could even register, and the black line traced a short arc like a dagger's swing, not a greatsword's, struck the spear tip and shattered it.

Clang.

The blade hit the spear's head, not the shaft. The tip burst into metal fragments that scattered and rained to one side.

"Guh!"

The tough leather glove on the spearman's gripping hand split apart, and the palm it protected tore open and flung blood.

Before those drops hit the ground, Barnaas abandoned his lateral movement and lunged forward.

He stamped his left foot to brake for one instant, then drove straight in.

His body seemed to blur and spread sideways, an illusion born from the sudden stop. Without a Beastfolk's physical capabilities, that motion was not something anyone could imitate.

His opponent did not halt the blade that had just smashed the spear tip. The swing continued straight down.

As if the spear tip had simply been in the way of where the sword was already going, there was not a moment's hesitation in the strike.

'Brilliant.'

Anyone could deflect a closing spear tip while keeping an eye on a charging enemy.

A knight could do even more, dodge and still track and meet you at the same time. But this opponent had gone further than that.

'Using the recoil from hitting the spear tip?'

He had used the bounce from striking the spear to add speed to the blade's descent. When Barnaas measured the incoming sword's velocity, the reading confirmed it.

"Ha!"

The move was more entertaining than expected, and Barnaas let out a shout.

Screeech.

Barnaas's claws trembled and swept the black greatsword.

Rattle, clang, clang, clang.

The greatsword was ground aside and flung sideways.

The vibration wave born from the oscillation burdened the opponent's grip and carried its effect all the way through the body's muscle groups. This time was no different.

And every man who had taken that kind of hit invariably stepped back, trying to reset, trying to steady the balance shaken loose from them.

But this lunatic killer just swung the sword back down again, shaken or not, off-balance or not.

"Huff."

Barnaas watched the face, lips pursed, breath pushed out.

Clang.

One more collision, and when Barnaas pulled back, a spear point filled the space he left.

The wheel tactic he had arranged with the lieutenant beforehand.

Every timing still ran through Barnaas, of course.

How could common soldiers wedge themselves into a fight between knights who were out to kill?

But Barnaas's specialty was vibration, and a knight who had taken that hit could not move at their usual speed or force.

"That would shake someone's organs loose if they kept taking it."

The elf said so while watching, yet made no move to protect the lunatic killer.

Instead, she shifted toward the rear of the Iron Body cavalry swinging their spears.

'She can think.'

Staying together would have been safer, yet they split apart. Barnaas broke toward the elf.

Three or four exchanges at most and he could cut her down.

"She's mine."

The lunatic blond cut in. A spear tip from his own side had grazed the man's cheek and drawn blood, and he paid it no attention as he charged at Barnaas from behind.

"Bold of you."

Barnaas frowned. The man's body should still be shaking from the vibration. What did he think he was doing?

Clang.

The third collision.

Barnaas felt something strange in the next instant. Instead of the wave spreading to rattle an enemy's organs and brain, it felt as though the vibration met a similar trembling and was cancelled out.

"I think I have the general idea."

What is this guy saying?

Barnaas's frown deepened.

Jamal, whose specialty was stealing techniques, had needed four months just to grasp part of the Vibration Sword.

From that point on, the fight went much further from what Barnaas had planned.

The man with the greatsword stood opposite him, and the woman who appeared to be an elf knight began to dance against the Iron Body spearmen.

Clatter, clatter.

The lieutenant's command was something to see.

He spread the formation wide to deal with the greatsword, then collapsed it back into a tight line.

Still, soldiers died and were cut down one by one, as was inevitable.

The elf was not trying to kill everyone at once. She struck when she chose and held back the rest, nothing more.

And even so, casualties were piling up.

The original plan had been for Barnaas to handle both opponents while the Iron Body cavalry applied pressure.

The opening looked like it was going that way, but the moment the man with the greatsword absorbed his claws without giving ground, everything shifted.

'These two know tactics.'

Barnaas was not rattled. The enemy were knights too. Something like this was within what they could do.

Countering the vibration in three exchanges was still remarkable, but what could be done about it now. It had already happened.

And battle never flowed the way you planned it.

He was experienced enough not to be thrown off by something like this.

And he had the tools to win from right here.

A genius who picks up the trick to riding out vibration after three hits?

Let's see how they handle this.

It was just as the elf punched a hole through the skull of the third Iron Body spearman, barely any time into the fight at all.

Barnaas brought out a hidden technique a little earlier than he would have liked.

Hmmm.

The Claw's blades trembled like a hummingbird's wings, then the vibration cut off dead. The sound vanished with it.

Ragna held the greatsword at an angle and watched the tips of the enemy's Claw. To his eye, the vibration in the claw-like blades appeared to simply stop. That was the apex of the Vibration Sword.

A trembling invisible even to a knight's eye, and the cutting force that came from it.

A similar trembling ran through Barnaas's entire body as he seemed to disappear.

The vibration set his body shaking and let him move faster and hit harder than before.

The Claw dropped from above Ragna's head.

Ragna bent his left knee halfway and caught it with the sword.

Claw and greatsword met. To any ordinary eye it was a moment sliced and sliced again beyond measure, but to the two of them it was a meeting they had both agreed to.

Through insight, one had chosen to cut and the other to block, calling it an agreement was not wrong.

Two pieces of iron came together.

Iron struck iron, and the sound that came out was a deep, tearing rip, like leather being split open.

Ragna watched the middle of his blade tear apart. The Claw had torn through steel, and those beast-claw blades trembled and delivered a cutting force unlike anything before. A mystery born from a precise vibration frequency.

Barnaas was certain of his victory at that moment.

And Ragna, in that same instant, saw what he could do.

His talent, which had carried him all the way to becoming a knight, with omnipotence at its head, responded more keenly than it ever had.

What had woken the talent was not Barnaas.

Ragna knew that even without taking risks, he could eventually overcome a trembling Beastfolk standing before him.

So it had come from the shock that monster named Enkrid had given him before the war began.

He had seen the mass of Will packed into the body of a man with modest talent who had built everything he was through effort alone.

It was too large to be worn down no matter how hard you tried.

'What would it take to beat that?'

It was the first time in Ragna's life he had ever genuinely puzzled over something.

A massive Will does not tire. Add technique to that and take it into a war of attrition?

'I lose.'

Ragna's talent had already read that outcome.

Ten years of refining technique, twenty, the result would be the same.

Holding to pure defense and enduring meant Enkrid's advantage. The way things were going would not do.

"Is that your limit? Is that what you've decided?"

Long ago, when he first picked up a sword, someone had said those words to him.

"So your mind has already decided that's as far as your potential goes. Then that's where it'll stop."

Young Ragna had seen the path ahead of him, and the destination at its end.

A fixed road. Something fixed.

And then again.

A shock like cold water thrown on a slack mind, and because someone named Enkrid existed, Ragna was now drawing out his talent and putting it to use.

These were the steps of a man who had forgotten the word limit.

'Vibration. Trembling.'

The destructive force born from it.

Claws that cut through anything.

What made that possible was vibration.

What made a sword tremble?

Will. And how do you move Will?

You feel your way through it until it becomes instinct.

Ragna moved his Will and created a trembling.

'Tremble.'

Move it with intent, and that is Will.

The half-remaining greatsword carrying Ragna's intent let out a low, resonant hum.

"What are you doing right now?"

After that, Barnaas felt a sense of deprivation, and alongside it he blamed his own arrogance.

'I thought I was standing at the center that would lead this continent.'

He had seen himself as the starting spark that would not end the chaos but set the continent ablaze.

A knight who would lead change, Barnaas Hurrier.

That was what he had believed.

Was he wrong?

What Barnaas had wanted was a knighthood built on a concept that had never existed before, one that would raise and cultivate new knights.

He had believed this would drive a shift in the balance of the continent.

That ambition had been broken even before he ever encountered Cyprus.

But would he fold quietly, just like this?

Barnaas poured out everything he had.

At the man copying his technique in real time, he flung dirt he had hidden away, spat in his face, and bit down.

The lunatic blond's blade did not perfectly replicate his vibration.

But it was enough to hold against it.

'Without an Inscribed Weapon, and you pull this off?'

Still, he had managed to break one of the opponent's legs and collapse a shoulder. One of the man's eyes had gone as red as his own, and three fingers on the left hand were broken.

What remained of the greatsword would never be used again.

But the opponent had survived. And Barnaas would not.

"Sir Barnaas!"

He could hear the surviving lieutenant calling out toward his fallen body.

Barnaas lay still and looked up at the sky.

He was in an open clearing. The sky through the gap in the trees was high and blue.

'Having a brigade of more than ten knights was not just a dream.'

It had been close enough to reality to reach out and touch.

He could have shattered the idea that knights were few by nature.

A knighthood born from a new framework, one that went beyond every knighthood that had come before.

Ten knights moving as one in group combat.

That had been the dream.

A dream that would now die inside the chest of one Beastfolk.

"I learned well."

The killer said it.

Had the goddess of fortune raised her hand for the other side?

Or had the belief that he stood at the very front of change simply been wrong?

"What's your name?"

"Ragna."

"That all?"

The lunatic blond looked at the Beastfolk for a moment, then finished.

"Ragna Zaun."

"The Zaun family?"

"You know it?"

"Only heard of it."

Barnaas said nothing more after that and closed his eyes, face still turned toward the sky.

His last thought was that it was not the worst thing, hearing a name close to legend as the final word his opponent spoke.

There could have been regrets, but thinking it over, what he had called a dream perhaps had never been something he truly meant.

'If I had really meant it, wouldn't I have passed something on to someone?'

But he had not.

He had wanted to accomplish it with his own hands. Anything less was meaningless, that was what he had thought.

So it was not a dream. It had been greed.

A realization that arrived just before death.

For that reason, there was no need to die with his eyes wide open.

Barnaas exhaled his last breath with his eyes closed.

"We die here."

The lieutenant confirmed Barnaas's death and wrestled with himself for a moment, then settled on what had to be done. He ordered the fifty Iron Body spearmen to charge.

The way he saw it, the knight who looked half-dead could still be killed if things went right.

If their side had lost Barnaas, the enemy owed them one knight. That was the only calculation that mattered.

Even if everyone here died in the attempt, it had to be done.

"I think about this sometimes, but you people underestimate me too much."

The elf stepped in front of them and spoke.

The lieutenant's eyes stayed fixed past her, on what lay behind.

One clean spear thrust was all it would take to finish that knight off.

But the one standing guard in the way was also a knight, the same as Ragna.

Sinar spoke without a trace of a smile and raised the blade that resembled a leaf.

She would have preferred to give them a chance to turn back rather than kill without purpose, but if the enemy refused, she had only one choice left.

The Leaf Blade swept forward and struck the throat of one Iron Body spearman three steps away.

Clang, clang, clang.