WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 547: Clemen Falls

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Among the nobles in distant places, roughly as far away as Nauril, there were those who did not quite believe in Enkrid's reputation.

Well, not that they disbelieved it, exactly. More that they figured the stories had to have a bit of hot air mixed in.

Listening to traveling bards sing the Song of the Iron Wall, the song of a knight who stood alone against a thousand, none of it really added up.

He drew his burnt sword across the ground, and a wall of flame rose before him.

There were people who had written more detailed and accurate accounts of what Enkrid actually did, but stories like this spread best when they were exaggerated, when they made no sense.

They needed what people usually call a touch of fantasy.

In an era where watching a public hanging counted as entertainment, a tale like this was a genuinely thrilling diversion. Some among the distant crowd half-believed it, or believed even less. Only the naive were convinced Enkrid really swung a blazing fire sword. But inside the Border Guard, his reputation climbed without end.

Soldiers had gone out to that battlefield themselves. Their families were here too.

Every single one of them talked up Enkrid's name.

It felt like they had witnessed the birth of a hero with their own eyes.

Cutting down a thousand alone made you a monster. Standing against a thousand so the ground ran with sweat instead of blood, and ending the battle that way, that was something else entirely.

Not one person who had been there failed to chant his name.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be the Iron Wall Knight!"

Children shouting this sort of thing were everywhere you looked on the streets.

Given all that, what could the soldiers think of Enkrid but that he was extraordinary?

Just being near him should have felt like an honor.

And now that hero said he wanted to join their training.

A knight, one bearing the name Iron Wall, holding supreme authority over an entire territory, was going to join the troops for a jog. Even the ones people called the Madman Squad were coming along.

Every soldier went tense with excitement.

A few had trained alongside Enkrid in the past, but even they briefly forgot who he used to be.

The ones who ground their back teeth at the name Audin did not expect Enkrid to drive people with that same ferocity.

A great reputation has a way of putting blinders on people's eyes.

So what happened next was something no one had seen coming.

Clemen, for her part, was a soldier who had decided to enlist after Enkrid had already left for the west.

Even without a full-scale battle, she had sprained her ankle on her own. It was not something she was particularly ashamed of.

At the time, the excitement had been so overwhelming that she had seen nothing except Enkrid's back, the wall, and the halted enemy.

That was how things stood, right up until the moment that great knight came over to her and said:

"I heard there was a soldier who got hurt falling down by herself."

"Yes? Ah, I'm Clemen, infantry division!"

"Oh, is this her? The one who scraped her knee falling over in a battle where nobody else got hurt?"

"I heard it was a sprained ankle."

Rem said it, and Jaxon jumped in. What Audin added next with a smile was something else entirely.

"You got hurt from falling, you say? Sister, is something wrong with your ankle?"

"Does that even make sense?"

A man named Fell threw in his own line, and then Ropord said he could not take her side on this one, all while looking straight at her, and Clemen's head started to spin.

What was this? Were they giving her grief for falling by herself? Nobody had said a word about it before.

Enkrid picked it up as casually as if it were nothing.

"It means your stamina is lacking. Starting today, we run mountain trails."

The soldiers around him changed color. The veterans among them dug up old memories.

Come to think of it, that bastard Enkrid had always been obsessed with training.

Not just brutal with himself, brutal with everyone around him too.

And just like that, the jogging route that should have gone through the drill yard or the fields just behind the city shifted to the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range.

Not cutting straight through the middle of the range, of course, but going into a mountain that was half Demon Creatures and half trees under the pretense of training still seemed like madness.

Had the Border Guard army not been killing Demon Creatures in those mountains so relentlessly that the creatures had banded together and formed a Colony?

That had actually happened.

Packs of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts inside the mountain range forming Colonies was nothing unusual. The groups Enkrid had hunted down on his patrols before were that sort.

"Nobody running? Does everyone have ankle problems like Clemen?"

One word from Enkrid and they all started running.

It was the kind of run where rest had been thrown to the dogs, the kind where you kept going until you were one step from death, with Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts popping up as an added bonus along the way.

"Don't stop. Stop and you're dead."

The knight-level fighters handled those extras. Not fought them. Handled them.

"Let us send you to the Lord's side!"

Audin's fists showed a destructive power that no one dared challenge. Even without that, anyone who had been to war would have known better than to pick a fight with these people.

Some soldiers thought watching a knight fight up close was educational, but that thought did not last long.

They had started running before sunrise and were coming back watching the sunset, and more than a few were starting to wonder if this was really the right approach.

Clemen, especially, was drained in every sense.

Either Enkrid would shout:

"Does everyone want to fall down like Clemen?"

Or, just when she was starting to forget, that man Audin would open his mouth, loud as a bell:

"Do you wish to be injured like Sister Clemen? I will be happy to temporarily separate your ankle for you. Brother. Just say the word."

Ropord, who had been a training instructor before, was not going to be left out.

"You can get hurt without fighting, but let's not get hurt from lacking stamina! Clemen, run!"

The last one was the man called Fell, and Clemen hated that bastard the most.

"Why do you think this Clemen person fell? My read is that she lacks talent."

He said it without even a trace of a smile, and she genuinely wanted to kill him.

"No talent for running. Or rather, no talent for standing upright. If you're lacking, you put in the effort. The eeeeffort."

Clemen held on.

This was not, of course, about tormenting a single soldier. The soldier was just a trigger, a reason to push harder, to run more.

Most of the commanders understood that, which was why they treated Clemen well. Ropord had quietly told them to from behind the scenes.

Ropord knew how to look after his unit members in his own way. He had been clumsy about it at the start, but the time spent in the Madman Squad had made this kind of thing second nature.

If nobody else was going to look out for them, someone had to.

Audin was one thing, but the others were the kind who just ran people into the ground.

They were not only running drills, either. There was still time before the trip to the royal palace, and individual training was training, but there was also a clear intent to raise the whole unit's capability.

Krais had said the fastest way to improve a military force was this:

"Separation by role. Divide the unit by specialty. That part is already underway, but picking out soldiers with exceptional ability takes quite a bit of work. Pulling them aside, building a unit around them, getting them to mesh well together, it all takes effort."

Mixed in among the soldiers were many who exceeded any ordinary standard, when it came to ability alone.

The Border Guard's name had spread across the entire continent, and nearby its fame had gone past renowned and was on its way to piercing the sky.

Even corrupt priests who tried to set up shop here found that religion could not easily take root. In the Border Guard, Enkrid was as good as a religion in himself.

That meant priests who wielded genuine faith as their weapon could hold on well enough, while those after side profits could not.

With the reputation soaring, people naturally flocked in. And just as the priests were filtered out, so were the swordsmen.

Plenty came chasing the high pay, but surviving on wages alone was another matter when the Border Guard standing army's training intensity had crossed brutal and entered the territory of is this hell.

So naturally all kinds of people gathered.

Giant-blooded soldiers were numerous even setting Teresa aside, and there were a few Frogs to be seen, along with elves, dwarves, and a fair number of Beastfolk.

Enkrid believed that just looking at someone was not enough to judge their ability. Broadly speaking, there were people who gave off a certain feeling, and to break that down precisely, you had to look at their stamina, swordsmanship, posture, and even their attitude.

That was what he was doing now.

Pushing them to their limits, making them run, watching their attitude.

Honestly, part of it was just the entertainment of teasing the injured soldier.

If she had wilted, he would have stopped. But she was gritting her teeth and pushing back.

Each time her name came up, a few soldiers would scowl.

The ones with short tempers and aggressive personalities had decided the current training was Clemen's fault.

Rem picked out some of those.

"You. Fall out. Go join that group over there."

Enkrid had told his squad members to sort out soldiers who caught their eye, who gave them a feeling, and train them separately. Rem used his own standard: he picked the ornery ones, the ones he wanted to beat up, the ones who looked like they would still be throwing attitude even after a good thrashing.

It was personal preference. He was more comfortable teaching by hitting.

Audin picked out the devout ones, the people who were calling on the Father and the Lord even while running.

Physical condition could be overcome through training, but faith was not something he could force on anyone.

Both of them naturally looked at the Basics, but they had that difference.

Teresa also pulled a few aside. She only picked ones built like her.

Giant-blooded soldiers, ones born with extraordinary strength, or ones who were simply large by nature. Soldiers who had grown up in their home regions being called champions.

Ropord looked at technique alone.

While they ran and dealt with Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts, everyone let their habits show. When you are exhausted, what is most ingrained in your body is the first thing to come out.

Fell was not comfortable with group training. He was a shepherd, not a soldier. So he declined to take his own squad, and Enkrid did not push him on it.

Why force something on someone who did not want it?

That outlook had not changed from when Enkrid first became a Madman Squad leader, and it had not changed now.

Maybe that was why people around him naturally looked at him with admiration.

Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, Audin, they all knew what Enkrid had been like when he first started, desperate and hopeless. They had seen him from the very beginning.

Had that Enkrid changed?

Some things had, of course, but the core was the same. Even now, after becoming a knight, after the war with Azpen, after his skill had caught up to roughly theirs.

Jaxon figured he had enough on his hands managing his own subordinates and excused himself. Sinar had always had the Reconnaissance Team under her, so making them her direct squad was the natural move.

The most unusual detail among all of this was something not present here: Esther had already assembled her own direct unit. She had picked out a handful of soldiers with a talent for magic and taught them herself, and Krais had gone ahead and named them the Magic Infantry. Esther, for whatever reason, had been teaching them with real dedication, and the count had apparently grown to nearly twenty.

"Run."

Enkrid said it while taking stock of several people with his eyes.

The ones clenching their teeth, refusing to show even a hint that it was hard.

Skill and talent were set aside entirely. He was looking at attitude alone.

Everyone had their own standard.

One day. Two. Three. Four.

Some among the Border Guard standing army gave up on the march.

There was nothing to be done about it.

"This is insane."

Why endure training like this?

What was surprising was that among the soldiers selected by the Madman Squad members as their direct units, not one person quit.

Maybe they all just had a genuine eye for people.

Well, the ones Rem had taken could not quit even if they wanted to, but that was a different matter.

"You lot are the Axe Squad from today. Everyone uses an axe."

Rem started like that from the very beginning.

"Why axes? Hell, I've handled spears my whole life."

"A guy who fights like garbage is talking back?"

Rem was blunt and demanding. But he showed them through action. An axe is a short weapon, shorter than a sword, and far shorter than a spear.

In exchange, the destructive power it showed at the range he preferred was in a different class.

The people Rem had brought in all had nasty tempers without exception, and these bastards tended to charge straight in regardless of what they were holding.

So if they were going to grip a spear, which bent under pressure, and bull-rush with raw force anyway, why hold the spear?

Rem was not the type to explain it so kindly.

He hit them.

"Just do what I say."

Someone trying to run? Rem was not going to let that slide.

"Run and I'll kill you."

He said it with genuine killing intent, and everyone shut their mouths.

There was nowhere to complain about harsh training anyway.

Truth be told, most of them privately agreed with Rem's methods.

Once they picked up the axe and did what they were told, their ability went up.

"Hey, you lot want to learn some Sorcery too?"

Rem got a little greedy there.

Teach them a few Sorcery tricks and they might turn out solid.

The problem was that none of them were like Enkrid.

People who threw themselves at something regardless of whether it worked or not, until they dropped, were not exactly common.

"You just do it like this, right? How come it's not working?"

Rem was also not particularly gifted at teaching.

Looking at the overall picture, Krais wished there were more capable people around.

Ropord is doing well.

The others were closer to tormenting the soldiers than training them.

The most effective among them was Ropord.

Even so, from the outside, he was still running excessively hard training. Some soldiers grumbled that they were not even fighting right now, so why did they have to push this hard? Krais, almost as if he had predicted it, funneled them into the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range.

There is a live training ground right in the backyard. Why not use it?

There was no reason not to.

He had been busy with the treaty negotiations following the war with Azpen, but Krais understood too well that nothing came out right unless you prepared in advance. Military training especially.

All the equipment in the world meant nothing if the spirit was too soft, or if the legs gave out and someone fell like Clemen.

Drills and basic training were one thing, but when real fighting came, victory and defeat would be decided by the unit's training and the individual soldier's capability.

By this point, Clemen had become a kind of proper noun.

"Fall behind and you're the next Clemen who fell!"

That sort of line started getting thrown around.

And Clemen, teeth clenched, kept pushing through it all and was selected to join Enkrid's personal escort.

"Ha. Once I get promoted, I'm going to beat every last one of them senseless."

She had grown into someone with grit and edge.

A month flew past in an instant.

Honestly, they had spent it doing nothing but training.

After the war ended there had been a few festival-like days, but those were truly brief.

"Take care of things while I'm gone."

Before leaving, Enkrid handed his personal escort over to Fell. Fell had naturally fallen into the role of lieutenant during training, so it felt right.

One way or another, it was time to head to the royal palace.

"Safe travels."

With Graham and Krais seeing them off, Enkrid, Rem, and Audin set out together.

Ragna was out with an injury. Jaxon shook his head-he had no intention of coming along.

Sinar had seemed lately to be completely absorbed in training with her unit, and Esther, whatever was going through her mind, was unknowable.

The three of them walked toward the royal palace.

The atmosphere of the journey was completely different from when Enkrid had gone to the capital before.

That was the work of the safe road that Crang and Krais had built in the time since.

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