WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 540: The End of the War

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Clemen, a light infantryman of the Border Guard, saw a man's back.

That back grew wider and wider until it filled her entire field of vision. Then it became a wall, blocking the path ahead of her.

A wall standing between enemy and ally appeared before her eyes like a vision.

She knew it was an illusion, a trick of the mind. Even so, Clemen recognized the wall.

The wall held fast against every blow, becoming a rampart for her side.

Beyond that vision-built fortress wall, she could see the enemy facing her allies dropping to their knees, one by one.

Had they seen the same thing she had?

She did not know.

There was no need to know.

What was happening around her, let alone where exactly she was standing right now, felt utterly unimportant.

The vision faded, and only a man remained, standing there alone.

Clemen knew the nickname of the person who had appeared out of nowhere and thrown himself between allies and enemies.

Demon Slayer.

She knew his name too.

Enkrid.

And his rank.

Lord and General of the surrounding territory known as the Border Guard domain.

He had said: that's enough. Stop.

And with that, the battle ended.

The sun still hung in the sky, casting its light down across the ground. That light made everything around her unbearably vivid.

The fact that the fighting was over was seared into everyone's awareness, as clear as the sunlight illuminating the world.

This was the end.

"War's End."

Clemen murmured it. Why? The old song traveling bards often sang came to mind, the one about the Knight of War's End.

She knew that song.

Among its lyrics were lines about those who could stop a battle without ever drawing a sword.

What had just unfolded before her eyes was the kind of thing you only heard in a bard's verse.

At some point a shudder had begun moving through Clemen's entire body.

Her fine hairs stood on end. Her eyes fixed on one man alone.

Even after the vision had vanished, she could not look away.

'Knight of War's End?'

The murmur never quite became words.

No one around her made a sound.

Even the wind moved carefully around him. The sunlight seemed to hold him up. That was all anyone could do, just watch.

Without realizing it, Clemen had broken from formation and started walking forward. Then she stumbled and fell.

It was the kind of mistake she would never ordinarily make, but she went down with a thud, twisted her ankle, and her knee bled.

She should have cried out, but she felt no pain. The trembling was still running through her.

Clemen felt something boiling over inside her chest, her heart burning hot.

She was on one knee, head raised. What was this feeling?

She did not know. It did not matter.

"En-krid!"

She only called out the name of her hero.

And she was not alone.

Her entire side was shouting the name of the man who had stood in front of them.

Enkrid!

The name of the man who had stopped everything on a field where only death upon death, steel and blood, remained.

* * *

It was not only Clemen. Among the enemy ranks as well, many had been struck by a similar moment.

One of them was a commander, one of the few who had realized partway through that something had gone wrong.

'Idiots.'

He cursed the leadership that had let things come to this, but the damage was already done.

Even if he defied orders now, there was no going back.

Looking at the Border Guard's well-organized army up close, one certainty settled over him.

'We lose.'

Not just a loss. A crushing rout. Of the bodies that would pile up, seven or eight out of ten would be Azpen soldiers, his own men.

Even so, the arrow had already been loosed. Water spilled, a leaf fallen from its branch.

Most of the commanders and soldiers who had been charging toward the enemy line as though possessed came back to their senses.

More precisely, fear beat their reason back awake by force.

Step forward and die, so be quiet and get your head straight. Right?

That was roughly how you might put this moment in plain terms.

Maybe that was how Rem would have said it.

Either way, the commanders who had initially counted on a rear assault from their own knights to turn the battle all stopped moving.

At the moment they had no choice but to fight, the Azpen forces looked at an enemy and saw a man worth respecting.

They might not have felt it right then, but once they turned the moment over in their minds later, that respect would settle in undeniably.

That man had stepped forward to block the road so needless blood would not be shed.

If they had fought, this would have been nothing but a catastrophic defeat for Azpen.

Once a slaughter began, whose blood would fill that field?

A question that needed no answer.

"Wow."

One of Azpen's vanguard soldiers let his mouth fall open and breathed out.

"Hey. It's over."

A sharp-eyed assault captain said it plainly. The momentum was broken. Charging now meant getting wiped out without dealing a scratch in return.

No matter how foolish a commander was, no one could throw themselves forward in a moment like this.

And so Azpen's commanders and soldiers alike all looked at the same person.

The one who had stood alone and blocked the battlefield.

A knight, they say, cuts down a thousand.

Then what do you call someone who stands alone and holds off an army of more than a thousand?

"A hero is born."

One commander spoke what instinct had already told him and quietly set down his weapon.

The battle was over, but what came after a surrender still remained.

Somewhere in the rear, watching the fighting from a distance, there was a man who had done nothing but stand and watch as his own superior died, and who was now the ranking commander.

The moment he saw that single man appear and block a whole army alone, something inside him came crashing down in a heap. Whatever trembling he might have felt, all of it gone.

'Not killing them. Stopping them?'

It was like grabbing a galloping horse by the reins and hauling it to a halt through sheer force.

Just stopping a horse like that would be remarkable enough, but normally, if you forced it to stop that way, the horse would go down, break a leg, snap its neck.

'What the hell, is this even possible?'

Yet the horse was fine. The rider was fine.

Watching from a distance, it looked for all the world like one man stopping an entire army on his own.

He saw sunlight fall on that man standing alone in the middle of the battlefield, and terror came crashing through him.

What was crashing down inside him?

His future. Everything he had managed to scrape together until now.

It would have been better to fight and lose.

Even if the dead piled up into a mountain.

He could have said they fought to the end, that their commander fell in battle, that he had done everything in his power to carry out the knight's orders.

There would have been consequences, but it would not have been a hanging offense.

But if things stopped here, what then?

If the battle ended this way, who bore the blame?

Even if the whole truth came out, it would be a problem. The knight was a problem, yes, but so was he himself for quietly going along with it.

He had simply been seized by fear until his mind went blank.

He scrambled to run. Cutting his losses and fleeing seemed like the only option.

All that was left for his remaining army was slaughter, and there was no guarantee he would survive that aftermath anyway.

Was there anything more important in this world than his own neck?

'Stay alive first, figure it out later.'

For every person who talks about duty and responsibility, there is always someone standing at the opposite end.

He grabbed a horse and galloped away, but midway he ran straight into a friendly unit riding toward him.

There was no way around them, so he pulled up, and right then Abnaier stepped out from among them to meet him.

"What happened?"

The fleeing man blinked. He was gasping too hard to answer, just staring back and wheezing.

Why was Abnaier here?

Abnaier had come because the commander had stopped sending regular reports, and some gut feeling kept pricking at the back of his neck.

Even trusting Barnas, a thread of unease he could not shake had sent him toward the battlefield.

He had told himself as he went that nothing should have gone wrong, but the situation had twisted in a direction no one had predicted.

"Er, well, that is..."

The man rattled off excuses. They were thin.

Abnaier watched the man's eyes dart and knew he was hiding something.

"From this moment on, if you lie in answer to any question I ask, I will cut off one of your wrists."

Not said roughly, not while grabbing him by the collar. Calm. Flat.

Even so, the effect was immediate. Abnaier was the kind of man who kept his word.

That much about Abnaier, the man who had abandoned his entire unit still knew.

"What happened to your direct superior?"

"He-he's dead."

The man steadied his breathing as he answered, cold sweat running down his back even as he spoke.

The truth came spilling out after that. Abnaier listened to the whole account and closed both eyes.

'We lost.'

He had not grasped every detail, but the loss was certain.

If that were not the case, why would an enemy knight appear at the front where the full battle had broken out, while Barnas had still not returned to their camp?

'Ah.'

Held back not by the Red Cloak Knights but by the Border Guard standing army.

What did that mean?

It was proof that the military power of the Border Guard standing army exceeded that of the entire Azpen Duchy.

Tallying up troop numbers or any other factor one by one, that should not have been possible.

'A knight.'

A force people called a disaster had been stopped.

Abnaier looked up at the sky for a moment. The blue sky, the white clouds caught between. Light falling through those clouds.

The wind blew and his hair moved.

Helmet off, Abnaier nodded.

"Kill him."

"Why!"

The commander tried to run.

A foolish thing to do. Run where, at this point?

Defeat? Forgivable. Losing a commander to a rampaging knight's blade? That too, forgivable.

But abandoning the remaining army and fleeing alone was unforgivable.

With the ranking officer gone, a massacre could unfold.

Thwack!

One of the guard soldiers drove a spear forward. As the man wheeled and tried to bolt, the spearhead punched through his back.

"Gakh!"

He pitched forward and hit the ground face first.

Without sparing the dead man a glance, Abnaier and the escort moved on.

"Have we lost?"

the escort captain asked. Instead of answering, Abnaier stated what needed to be done.

"We bring back as many as we can."

Would the enemy stand by and watch a retreating army simply march home?

And someone had stepped out and stopped the battle outright, let silence fall over the whole field. What was that about?

Time to see it with his own eyes and do what had to be done.

Abnaier reached the battlefield and took in the full picture.

He saw a man who had stopped the enemy alone. Abnaier knew his face and his name.

This was someone he had once wanted to grind through soldiers to kill. He could not have forgotten.

Blue hair, black eyes, a man holding the sunlight alone. By now it was right to call him a knight.

Abnaier had no eye for judging skill directly, but the situation itself had made the man's power undeniable.

"Demon Slayer."

Abnaier's lips moved. That was his most famous nickname.

So what now?

Abnaier was prepared to stake his own neck if it meant saving the unit.

"All of you, fall back."

"We started this together. We'll see it through to the end."

The escort captain would not listen. Abnaier had no time to waste on persuasion. The moment the Border Guard standing army decided to fight, his side would be wiped out.

And on that side, there was a knight.

He was about to step forward when the enemy spoke first.

"Fall back. Return home."

"Just letting us go?"

Too far to carry. Abnaier muttered it to himself.

Unbelievable. And yet it was true.

That man had stopped the battle, let silence fall over the entire field, and then turned the Azpen army around.

No promise not to pursue was needed.

His word was its own proof.

And then he turned his back first.

Abnaier watched Enkrid turn away and considered everything he had come to understand.

That was how he knew, more or less, why Enkrid was walking away.

'Unnecessary blood.'

You could fight. You could measure victory and loss. You could kill and be killed. A battlefield was that kind of place, and drawing a sword and stepping onto one meant that understanding had already been reached.

Even so, if it seemed unnecessary, he would stop it.

Enkrid's words seemed to reach him without being spoken.

Watching it, Abnaier felt a trembling move through him too.

A greater trembling than what those who had seen the wall of Will and Pressure had felt.

'Can a person like that actually exist?'

Abnaier had seen many people.

Not those called once-in-an-era heroes, but he had seen kings, imperial knights, even knights from the southern great power.

They said the King of the East in the far distance was not unworthy of being called a hero, but set against the man standing there now, what would you see?

At least in the domain where Abnaier could pass judgment, all of them lay beyond his reach.

He had no right to evaluate them.

Their ideals soared high, their convictions were firm, and their Will was harder than anything he had ever known.

"Let's go back."

Go back and face the reckoning for this war.

General Frog had tried to die so her soldiers could live, yet she was the one who returned alive.

The commander who abandoned his soldiers and fled had died midway by the blade of his own side's knight.

The new commander who had blundered into ordering an all-out charge had looked after no one but himself and died for it.

Abnaier intended to go back, accept whatever came, imprisonment for life or death, and face that responsibility.

That was the end of this battle. The War's End that Azpen had met, or rather, would meet.

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