WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 560: The Old Man and the Question

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The dining hall reserved for the knights' order doubled as a reception room, and naturally it sat right beside the training ground.

The entire layout had been built for Enkrid, around Enkrid.

Every line of movement flowed outward from the training ground.

The old man stepped outside without bothering to hide anything. He gripped the handle of his cane and pulled. The blade slid free with a soft ring, catching the light.

Enkrid stood opposite him and drew the Valerian steel sword.

Srrring.

The sound of steel leaving its scabbard was clean and crisp.

He had shed the rest of his gear and held only the one sword. They stood facing each other without a word, both holding live blades.

A spar in name, but if things turned sour it could become something that cost a life.

No promises had been made. No agreement had been reached.

Then the old man clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Tak!

The sound spread outward like a ripple on water. The Sensory Technique, honed sharp through Jaxon, let Enkrid feel sound as waves rather than simply hear it. Some of those waves passed through without resistance, while others struck surfaces and bounced back.

The returning waves carried information straight to the old man.

Echolocation. A technique for reading distance and shape through reflected sound.

The old man brought the sword handle up beside his face, tip angled forward, eyes shut. The white cataracts clouding them were no longer visible. He spoke.

"Careful."

He moved with the word. This time there was no ripple, no sound. Only a blade dropping from above.

A knight's speed is fast enough that ordinary eyes can barely follow it, something almost out of legend.

That said, no one present lost track of the old man's movement. Everyone caught the slash.

Ruagarne puffed her cheeks out without realizing it and tracked the old man with her eyes.

She had been training her Dynamic Visual Acuity the way she once trained everything, from the very beginning, methodically and stubbornly. She was seeing the results now.

The old man's cut had crossed space as though folding it, a flash of speed that looked like a jump-cut rather than movement, and she caught it.

It was not the full measure of what the old man could do, but she had followed a knight's movement with her own eyes. That alone proved the training had been worth something.

A downward slash. A blade falling from above.

If Ruagarne had barely caught it, then Sinar and Jaxon, standing a step removed, read the old man's motion cleanly.

He had crossed his feet to build speed, and dirt scattered at his heels without a sound, a silent and unseen advance.

And the slash felt, at a glance, like it carried no Will at all.

With everyone watching, Enkrid moved. In a fraction of a second his instincts responded.

The tip of his sword, held in a middle guard, had already dropped slightly before he consciously chose to move it.

Trained muscle loaded force into the blade, and like an eagle snatching prey, blue light surged upward from below.

The moment the rising Valerian steel sword met the sword stick's blade, the old man's sword bent like a snake.

Ting!

The sound that rang out was lighter than a full clash of steel, a little hollow.

The thin blade sliding along Enkrid's steel sword looked exactly like the Snake Sword Enkrid himself used.

In that split instant, Enkrid made his call and moved.

The tip curving like a snake, it seemed like he ought to step back to avoid it, but his feet went forward instead.

The blade that had been coiling toward his arm disappeared. The old man had leapt backward to open the gap.

And.

Tak!

The tongue clicked again.

Blind, he should have fought defensively. He did not, not even close.

The old man's sword was deeply aggressive. Even as he retreated, he had already shifted his stance.

He crossed his feet, raised the sword beside his cheek, and held it there. That was his opening posture.

He mapped his position through echolocation, and the instant he had what he needed, he stepped off and moved laterally.

Shuffle, shuffle, the soles of his feet dragged along the ground, then he snapped into quick strides.

Then he moved as though memorizing the shape of the earth beneath him, pressing down deliberately with each step.

He was walking a circle with Enkrid at the center. As he moved, his silhouette seemed to multiply.

It was a technique that used tempo variation to fool the eye into seeing things that were not there.

"Shuffle drive," Jaxon murmured.

Among an assassin's techniques, this was high-grade craft.

Sinar knew it too. She had faced enough assassins to recognize it.

The moment the old man engaged the technique, both of them stopped blinking and watched.

Because almost anyone could learn the shuffle drive, but refining it to this level was not a common thing at all.

The afterimages multiplied, the old man's figure spreading around Enkrid.

The old man slashing downward. The old man stepping back into a defensive posture. The old man folding his sword to his side. The old man coiling into a thrust.

A blind old man threatening every part of Enkrid's body from dozens of different angles at once. Ordinary fighters might have panicked, but Enkrid was used to this kind of thing.

He had already learned and lived it through Aker, the specter trapped inside the sword.

A technique that stirred Will to show the opponent something false, Enkrid could do something similar.

Not just similar. He could go further.

The instant the old man engaged the technique, that sense of knowing arrived.

The sense that something more was here to be taken.

Enkrid's blue eyes seemed to shine in a way they never had before.

His eyes could not actually produce light, but that was how it looked.

At the very least, the old man perceived, through his own means, that Enkrid was doing something.

And he really did do it.

Enkrid was a madman who enjoyed training that bordered on self-destruction.

What does that mean?

When people grow, what do they actually need in that moment?

Talent? Effort?

Both matter, but what matters more is being ready when the moment arrives.

In this, Enkrid was ready every single day.

Aker's Web.

Will is intention. And applying Will directly against an opponent to crush them is Pressure.

Adjust that Pressure slightly, and it could be used in other ways too.

The time Enkrid had stood as an Iron Wall for an army, he had hammered that understanding into his body until it became reflex.

That was why this happened. A similar insight arrived again now.

It was a chance that came to someone who was prepared, and he seized it.

Toward the old man flickering through countless forms, Enkrid began shifting the position of his shoulder, his toes, his sword tip, each by a small degree.

Some movements were so subtle that an inattentive eye would miss them entirely. Others were bold enough to swing the sword tip through a wide arc.

Every one of those movements matched the old man's footwork. Tempo variation.

"Hm."

Jaxon let out a low sound. That was how surprised he was.

If someone were facing Enkrid's sword right now, what would they see?

Watching from the outside made it impossible to know fully, but..."That must be suffocating," Sinar said.

She had it right.

A mass of Will like the Iron Wall that had once held back an army, fractured into hundreds of motions and pressing in from all sides.

She and Jaxon saw it exactly as it was. The old man, for his part, saw a wave of blades crashing toward him.

He had truly been that man, the one who had stood against an army.

The old man stopped walking, stepped back again, and clicked his tongue.

Tak!

What else is there left to show?

He considered it, then drew the sword hand back beside his cheek.

Enkrid saw him retreat and followed. He had judged the momentum was his. No reason to fall back.

Dang!

For the first time, their swords met with real force.

Enkrid struck with the Heart of Superhuman Strength, and the old man's body flew sideways.

No, he flung himself that way on impact.

Enkrid felt it through his Sensory Technique, the deliberate redirect, and gave chase immediately. His ankle turned smoothly and his sword strokes chained like flowing water.

He slashed again, this time at the old man's neck.

Dang!

Sparks burst into the air from the second clash.

Blue veins rose and cracked across the back of the old man's hand. He was giving everything.

After that, Enkrid found himself surprised in three separate ways while fighting the old man.

First.

No presence. No Will.

He could not guess or even imagine what the old man was doing, but there was no trace of Will to be found. None at all.

And yet he was moving at a knight's speed. Which meant he was obviously using Will, somehow.

Second, his skill at silencing sound and presence was not ordinary.

Lose track of him for a single moment and it would be Enkrid who took the hit.

The old man kept trying exactly that. The strange footwork he had shown was part of it, and at certain moments he would suddenly accelerate, trying to slip beyond the edge of Enkrid's line of sight.

Enkrid did not let him.

Third, and last, the old man was weaker than expected.

He had reached the rank of knight, and Enkrid knew well enough by now that not all knights were equal, but this felt a little thin.

Enkrid picked his moment, drove the old man's sword aside with a horizontal Heavy Sword Style cut using pure force, and pressed his blade to the old man's neck.

He stopped.

"Is that your best?"

The old man smiled, even in defeat.

"I thought I might hold out at least one exchange against raw strength, but I lost."

"One more?"

"You mean to kill an old man."

Coming from someone at knight level, those words did not quite fit.

Still, the kind of strength Enkrid felt from the old man seemed different from his own. If anything, it reminded him of Jaxon.

"What is your name?"

He was only asking now.

"I have forgotten it."

It did not sound like an excuse. It sounded true.

Was crossing swords and spending strength the only thing that brought joy?

It was not. For Enkrid, everything done with a sword lived in the territory of pleasure.

"Curious. Very curious. Do you enjoy this?"

The old man said it without seeing, or perhaps because he could not see, the perception was sharper. He saw straight through what Enkrid was feeling.

Though anyone watching would have known.

Eyes shining, face lit up like he could not be happier, fighting like it was the best thing in the world. Who could miss that?

"Yes," Enkrid said, and raised his sword.

The second bout ended just as quickly.

Fighting through it, Enkrid thought to himself that this was someone he would beat ten times out of ten.

Jaxon, watching from the side, thought the opposite. He registered the danger the old man carried.

Frightening.

Every movement, every read of the situation, every direction the blade moved, Jaxon took it all in.

If the old man chose something other than a direct fight, there would not be many people who could survive it.

And compared to himself?

He would have to find out.

Tension rose in him for the first time in a long time, pushing his pulse faster.

When was the last time he had felt this?

Probably not since he had taken responsibility for Georg's Blade.

This old man was the same kind as himself.

* * *

Tak!

"Oh, so when you hear the sound, you can see the position and get a rough read on things?"

Rem asked, sitting across from the old man as he demonstrated echolocation.

"That is right."

"Really?"

"I knew you rolled the dice in secret just now, did I not?"

"Ha, that was a test, a test. So you really can see it."

After the spar with Enkrid, the old man lingered in the city without any fuss.

He was not sleeping in the barracks. He stayed at an inn in the city and dropped by the barracks every so often, the way a visitor would.

The soldiers had tried to turn him away at first, but once they understood Enkrid had given his permission, they let the old man come and go.

Nobody told him to leave. Nobody gave him grief.

Some of the Madman Squad members did not care who came and went anyway.

Others figured it was better to have someone like the old man within eyeshot.

"He is not a new member, is he?" Krais dropped by to ask, and the old man shook his head.

"I have forgotten my name, but I have work to attend to, and I cannot stay here long."

What that meant was that even if someone offered him a place in the order, he could not take it.

Knight-level ability, they said? So what did he actually do?

Krais studied him with mild suspicion.

Knight-level was just a word, but was someone like this common on the continent?

Absolutely not.

Shake out the entire continent and you would not find a hundred.

Neighboring Azpen probably had none left at all by now.

And yet someone like this had appeared out of nowhere and was lingering at Border Guard. Was that not strange?

Very strange, it was. The only reason he was still here was that Enkrid had allowed it.

Gielpin had looked into him and come up empty. Even with knight-level ability, someone like that should have had enough of a reputation that pooling information would surface a name, but there was no rumor attached to this old man at all.

A blind man with a sword cane had distinctive enough features to be talked about, and still nothing.

"Yes, I see," Krais said, keeping his answer vague. He had decided this was outside his ability to handle directly.

That said, he was not sitting still about it. He had people working to identify the old man through other channels.

The old man's eyes, clouded with white cataracts, found Krais and he smiled, and it looked as though he was saying that however hard they tried, they would not find out who he was.

"What kind of work?" Krais asked it directly.

If pushing with words could pull a secret loose, that was Krais's strength.

Back in his younger days, he had shown a remarkable knack for uncovering the hidden secrets of a certain lady, after all.

"I cannot tell you."

"Then what organization are you with?"

"That is a secret."

The old man winked. A man who could not see the world doing something like that.

Ask openly, and the old man refused openly.

Once someone decided not to talk, there was no way to dig it out.

"Leave it."

Enkrid stepped in at the right moment and waved Krais off.

It was as if Enkrid was saying the old man was his responsibility.

Krais nodded.

After that, the old man fit himself into the squad's rhythm in his own quiet way.

Ragna paid him no attention. Rem joked around with him and got into dice games, but the blind old man caught every attempt at cheating, which Rem found endlessly entertaining, so he spent the next several days playing with the old man.

Jaxon always stayed close to some fixed point near the old man. He kept the old man in his line of sight wherever he went.

Eating, sleeping, even using the latrine, it was always the same. Enkrid watched it and found it genuinely remarkable.

For Jaxon to do that, he had to build his entire schedule around the old man's patterns, but it did not look forced. It was perfectly natural.

So natural that no one would notice unless they were already looking.

"You have not left yet?" Sinar said every time she ran into the old man, prodding him with mild irritation, and the old man only smiled.

Going back and forth between the inn and the barracks was the old man's routine, and Enkrid did not give it much thought. He lived as he always had.

Which meant he poured himself into training and conditioning.

He knew well that each day not wasted was why today was possible, so he gave it everything.

Around ten days after the old man had arrived, there was a bright moonlit night.

Moonlight lay across the ground, and the temperature had started dropping, so by nightfall the air had a chill to it.

A cool wind came through, and the moonlight felt colder for it.

Enkrid was heading back to his quarters. On one side of the training ground, Jaxon stood alone, cleaning a dagger. On a log bench across from him sat the old man.

It was late, but he had not gone back to the inn yet.

Night and day probably made no difference to that old man.

All he could see either way was darkness.

Walking along the stone-paved path beside the training ground, Enkrid heard the old man's voice.

"May I ask what you intend to do from here?"

The question came out of nowhere, but the weight behind the words snagged his feet.

Moonlight fell behind the old man's back, casting a shadow forward in front of him.

He was sitting in shadow already, but something even darker was painted across the ground, as though the shadows had layers.

Darkness within darkness, a deeper and blacker shape.

The shadow's head had turned, and it was facing him.

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