WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 541: The Iron Wall Knight

= = =

"You must be the lord."

Graham turned to look at the man who had appeared out of nowhere.

Lunatic?

The state of him suggested drooling would not have been out of place. Torn gambeson, battered scabbard, a dented helmet shoved on his head.

On the surface, just a man who had lost his mind. Still, Graham gripped his sword and shield and took his stance.

The wretch exhaled slowly, blinked his bloodshot eyes a few times, and spoke.

"I'm busy. Let me finish you quickly."

The tone was casual. The killing intent behind it was not.

Before the last word left his mouth, a roar erupted from the front.

Waaaah!

The battlefield. Someone's name seemed to be woven into the shouts, but the distance swallowed the words before they arrived clearly.

Graham had been moving to gather every available soldier, rear units included, for a full defensive formation once the pitched battle broke out. One more fighter meant one fewer casualty on their side, advantage or not.

Then this man had stepped out of the brush beside the camp and blocked his path.

Almost no soldiers nearby. Supply unit or otherwise, every eye was fixed on the front right now.

Shhring.

The bloodshot lunatic drew his sword and rolled his head from side to side, the tip of the blade swaying with it. Whatever he had been through, his mind and body were clearly not right. His center line was off, his balance twisted in some subtle, wrong way.

The muttering made it worse.

"A lord's head would be the finest achievement, wouldn't it?"

What sort of nonsense was this?

He was the lord of Border Guard, yes. But any child on the street knew who truly represented this land.

Demon Slayer. The king's close friend. Enkrid.

His own title was little more than decoration. Graham himself did not quite see it that way, of course.

The old warrior knew all too well what a fortune it was simply to stand beside Enkrid and sharpen himself watching the man.

Staggering, sword barely drawn, and still the man blocking Graham's path was clearly no ordinary threat. A plain lunatic never would have made it this far.

Graham could see the danger in the man's skill. Beside him, Frog, whose eye for fighters far surpassed any human's, whispered to confirm it.

Ruagarne and Krais had posted her here as Graham's guard.

"He's a knight."

Three words. That was enough.

An instant before Frog spoke, one of the guards had furrowed a brow and started to step forward. Graham caught the guard by the arm.

"Stay back."

"Sir?"

"Fall back."

Graham was not a calculating man. But he was not the kind to look away from what was plainly in front of him either.

The guard would die stepping in. He could not stand and watch that happen.

Risk someone he knew by name and face, someone he had eaten with, slept near, trained beside, just to see if they could take a hit?

By Graham's measure, any commander who did that deserved a blade across the throat on the spot. So he would not be that man. He pushed the guard back behind him.

Is today the day I die?

He had no idea how an enemy knight had ended up here in this state, but if this man was truly what they called a calamity, blocking even a single blow might be beyond him.

Lucky to stop two?

Even so, Graham kept his sword in hand.

Any soldier who stepped onto a battlefield had to do their part.

Standing here and quietly offering his neck was not the lord's part to play.

"I am the lord of Border Guard."

Graham gripped his sword and looked straight ahead, and the opponent's blade vanished.

Before he finished speaking. No time to shout a war cry. What saved him was nothing more than blunt, repeated drilling.

Graham had seen Enkrid at the point when he believed his age and skill had both hit their ceiling. Watching Enkrid had reminded him that an ending was not an ending but a beginning, and from that day he had not spared a drop of sweat.

That was what kept him alive.

By habit, he drove his sword out on a diagonal, planted both legs as his foundation, applied force, and tried to redirect the incoming blade.

The habit had grown from sparring with Enkrid. The result of desperate clawing to survive even one hit.

In practice, the sword angled out with force behind it, and then something far beyond manageable came crashing down like a blade of pure violence.

Clang! Ka-ka-ka-kang!

He could not call it a clean deflection. Half at best.

But he held.

Graham was a lord, so he carried a fine sword. A Valerian steel blade. One edge of that steel came away half-serrated, ground like a saw.

Even with the strike half deflected, his sword hand felt ready to burst. His grip may have actually torn slightly.

He had held.

Half luck, maybe, but the result was the result. A Knight's Strike, no less.

Of course, Cowin's condition was far from normal. The combined mess of battle, blood, and flight had broken something in his head, leaving only a single clear purpose.

Killing the lord and leaving. Pointless, sure to earn nothing but resentment, but that was what his broken stream of consciousness had settled on.

He had followed through on it. He had hidden his Inscribed Weapon in the wrong scabbard so no one would spot it, stolen a gambeson and pulled it on, then crawled through the underbrush all the way here because he lacked Jamal's storybook gift for concealment.

Even then, he had only found a gap because Azpen's forces launched a frontal assault up front, creating the opening to slip through.

Without that, he would have been caught.

"Damn frog."

Cowin's bloodshot eyes gleamed. Killing intent saturated them.

The other reason that first strike had missed the lord's throat was wrapped around his ankle.

Ruagarne's whip had saved Graham's life. And Ruagarne, who owned that whip, had drawn one conclusion watching the strike.

Half-rate.

No doubt he was a knight. But not all knights were the same.

The craft on display was embarrassingly rough compared to Enkrid, Rem, or Ragna.

Which meant,

She could hold him off.

Held off only, of course. This could not end well.

Ruagarne was here as Graham's guard because Krais had been gripped by the worry that Azpen might loop around and send a strike force from the flank. No one had expected a knight to come alone.

So calling for help was not really an option.

This would not end well. At best, she would hold out until she died from it.

Do I give up then?

She asked herself. She did not need the answer.

Glurp.

Ruagarne puffed her cheeks.

There are moments that leave no room for defeat or despair. Moments that demand you do something right now. Just like the man she had watched all this time. She tightened her grip on the loop of the whip.

"I'll kill you all."

Cowin said it and yanked his leg. Ruagarne was pulled forward despite bracing with everything she had.

Wham!

She raised the Loop Sword in her right hand overhead and blocked, and his blade came crashing down across it.

Not because she had read the strike, but because she had guessed.

Right after that, Graham snapped a short kiai and drove his sword down from beside her.

Beyond the guards, soldiers had heard the noise and come running, but Cowin's eyes were already somewhere else entirely.

He believed he could kill them and get out no matter who tried to stop him.

That was already madness talking.

Yes, a knight could cut down a thousand alone. But surrounded on all sides by arrows and soldiers pressing in, how does anyone walk away from that alive?

Knights still got tired.

If he had been thinking that clearly, he never would have come this far.

Cowin's eyes grew redder. Burst capillaries turned them crimson, and blood-tears ran from the corners, making him look less like a man and more like a Magic Beast or Demon Creature.

A blade soaked in killing intent cut savagely through the air.

Wiiing!

The knight whose weapon was insight had started throwing raw speed and force at them.

Under normal circumstances someone should have been cut down long before now, but Graham endured even as his armor was shredded and the flesh of his forearm opened up.

He had watched Enkrid all this time and trained relentlessly. Every piece of work as lord he had shoved onto Krais's shoulders, and this was what that time had built.

He had climbed to something that could be called a junior knight.

Junior knights, by rights, should not have been able to keep deflecting strikes like these one after another. That was how it should have been. But it was happening.

The reasons: first, Cowin's Will had frayed from the punishment he had ignored while fleeing, leaving it ragged. Second, Ruagarne's whip kept catching his ankle and throwing him off balance. Third, Cowin was not pressing his strength but leading with the part of himself that had always been his weakness.

He was hacking with raw force instead of the insight that was his edge.

"Aaaargh!"

Cowin's cry, his equanimity fully gone, carried nothing but darkness and bile. It was unpleasant just to hear.

Most of the surrounding soldiers were grimacing.

That did not mean any of them could step in.

Shwt.

Cowin's sword split the air again. Damaged Will or not, a knight was still a knight.

This blow could have taken Graham's head and no one would have had grounds to argue.

What was more, Graham had already sent his own escort soldiers to the rear so they would not die.

Thunk!

And still Cowin did not get what he wanted.

His sword did cut something. Just not the lord's neck.

Flap. Flap.

The arm he had severed, belonging to Frog, fell to the ground and flopped there in a spreading pool of blood, like a fish pulled from water.

"How many more times do you think you can block?"

Cowin let the words out with something cold and dark behind them.

At this point, a thin edge of calm had found its way back into him. Something close to lucidity.

It was almost wishful thinking on his own part, but had things stretched on, even this darkness might have tempered itself into Will and opened some path forward for Cowin.

A mad knight's path, soaked in blood. But a path.

If he had survived, that is.

Cowin had shattered Graham's shield and broken his fingers. He had taken Ruagarne's leg. But he had not killed either of them.

The important thing was that time had passed, and Cowin in his broken state had not properly registered it.

"Well, well. This bastard actually made it all the way here. What are you doing here?"

A voice stopped the fighting cold. Light, almost breezy. Even so, Cowin made one last lunge for the lord, but his body would not follow his intent.

Something came whistling through the air with that voice and crossed the space between Graham and Cowin.

Cowin stepped back by reflex. Graham's reaction came a beat too late and he just flinched.

Whatever it was moved several times faster than Cowin's blade had a moment ago.

Boom!

A thundering impact as the object buried itself in the earth, and a cloud of dust bloomed and scattered. Looking closer, it was a hand axe. Even Graham's eyes had barely caught it moving, so to the soldiers around them it must have looked like a lightning strike.

The thrown hand axe hit the ground and kicked up a spray of dirt, and something about the moment made the eye believe light itself had been shattered into fragments.

It was a throwing hatchet, so the blade was slightly smaller, but the entire edge had driven completely into the earth. Monstrous force.

Cowin's head snapped around. His eyes went wide, tearing open at the edges. Some of the burst capillaries in them gave way, and the blood ran down his face.

"Why are you here?"

The death god had returned. A gray-haired monster.

Behind him stood a black-haired man with blue eyes, and to one side a rust-haired figure with an expressionless face.

Right beside them, a female soldier was breathing hard. Her name was Finn.

Finn had returned to make her report and, catching what was happening as she arrived, had moved fast and brought Enkrid back with her.

Graham owed her more thanks than he could easily put into words.

The moment Cowin's reflexes fired and he tried to run, something came slicing through the space he meant to escape into.

He twisted his body and dodged, and recognized a leaf-shaped blade. The elf holding it, a golden-haired figure no one could forget once they had seen her face, opened her mouth.

"I will not let you run, you diminished thing."

What kind of babbling was that?

Cowin thought it and swept his gaze across everyone now surrounding him.

"Brother, it is time to go see the gods."

That came from a large, bear-like figure standing to one side.

Those words turned out to be accurate.

"Waaaaah!"

What came out of Cowin was half-scream and half-battle cry as he looked for any way out. His insight, close to a supernatural gift, read the future.

Having read every future available to him, Cowin saw the unavoidable attack that would open his throat.

"No!"

That was his last word.

Crack.

Knight Cowin's head left his shoulders and spun through the air.

Rem, who had swung the axe, started to split Cowin's head as it hit the ground, then let it go.

What was the point of chopping up a dead man's skull.

"Crazy bastard."

Rem spat on the ground. The whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth, one way or another.

Graham and Ruagarne, her limbs severed, finally let out long, shuddering exhales.

Enkrid helped them both up.

"The limbs grow back," Ruagarne said. Soldiers had come rushing to press the cut surfaces together and wrap them in bandages, and that was what she told them.

"How did it go at the front?" Graham asked.

"Sent them home."

Enkrid had always shown Graham respect, and this answer satisfied him too.

It meant no one had died in this battle.

Enkrid said it plainly, and some of the soldiers crowding the area took it all in: the Madman Squad cutting down the knight called a calamity, clean and quick.

Not many eyes had been on it.

Their own units had to hold their positions even while watching Azpen retreat.

But there were those who had seen directly what Enkrid had done.

"Iron wall."

Someone said it, and just like that, the most famous nickname Enkrid had carried was replaced. The epithet Iron Wall Swordsman was born.

"We came late," said Big Eyes Krais, stepping out from among the watching soldiers, and beside him Esther in panther form watched Enkrid with blue eyes.

If Azpen's War's End spoke of collapse and despair, then Naurillia's War's End spoke of a hero's birth.

Many eyes had watched the battlefield, so the rumors would spread fast.

That was how the evening went, after saving Graham and tending to Ruagarne with her severed limbs.

Toasts and leisure would have to wait. The first order of business for the next few days was cleaning up after the battle. They needed to keep watch in case Azpen decided to do something reckless again, so there was no falling into a drink just yet.

The soldiers washed, ate, made repairs, and spent the evening talking over the excitement still running through them.

Only then did Enkrid feel a certain emptiness, and it surfaced fully in the dead of night.

"We found him by luck."

"He was using his greatsword as a walking stick and heading toward the Azpen side!"

Ragna, brought in by the Reconnaissance Team sentries on perimeter duty.

"Ah."

Enkrid let out a short sound of surprise.

He had completely forgotten about Ragna.

"Ha. Found properly after all."

Ragna muttered something incoherent, walked into the barracks, and collapsed with his eyes rolling back.

Straight to the medical tent, naturally.

= = =

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