A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 574

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 574: The Prophet Overdier

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Kill them all and leave?

The words themselves were not impossible. That was simply the reality of the situation.

With Enkrid, Sinar, and Audin together, killing the five in front of them would not have been difficult at all.

Even if one of the five appeared to be a junior knight, none of them posed any real threat.

Enkrid alone could have cleanly disposed of every last one without letting a single person slip away.

At his question, Alma's eyebrows twitched.

Kill them all? Who? Me? Was he not keeping us alive out of deference to the Church?

"What?"

A startled Alma blurted out the single word but could not follow it up. Shilma was the same.

Bloodshot eyes burning with divine fervor, yes, but was this actually making any sense?

No one had expected him to say anything like that.

It was beyond anything they had anticipated, something that had never even crossed their minds.

That he would dare silence the Church's people by killing them.

Worse, if the man in front of them decided to act on it, all of them dying was already a foregone conclusion.

Enkrid had not shown any particular Pressure. He had spoken in a level, unhurried tone.

What was different was the weight behind those words.

The reputation of the Iron Wall Knight, and the attitude he was projecting right now.

If he said something, he would follow through. If he could not, he would never have opened his mouth in the first place.

The attitude Enkrid projected dominated the whole gathering. Sinar casually laid her right hand over the grip of Naidhl. Killing a few people, if it came to that, was not something she found difficult.

In the unsettled air passing between them, a distant cry rang out, something between a Magic Beast and a wild animal, a long, drawn-out wail.

Audin exhaled slowly and shook his head.

He was not about to fall for the devil's whisper.

Enkrid had not meant it entirely seriously either. It was a threat.

What do you think you're standing on?

Naturally, Shilma, Alma, and the other three stood on the Church.

In terms of influence across the continent, the Church outweighed even the banks.

The trading nation's banks existed only in major cities, but the Church's temples and monasteries were everywhere.

So what can the Church actually do right now?

That was the point, more or less.

Audin knew well that Enkrid was sharper than he looked.

And it had worked. Shilma with her bloodshot eyes went quiet, and Alma, who had been blustering on the strength of his fighting ability, shut his mouth too.

Just as that threat was on the verge of turning the atmosphere entirely, Sinar reacted first.

She shifted her pointed ears. Audin's ears had pricked up earlier, but that was only instinct on his part. Sinar's ears were actually moving now.

The twitching tip of one ear tilted to one side.

Enkrid's head turned in the direction her ear pointed. Audin's gaze followed a moment later, and soon everyone was looking back the way they had come.

Someone was approaching from that direction.

It was quite a distance away, but for a knight with Will at their disposal, it was not so far at all.

Plate Cuirass, a balanced stride, an iron rod at the waist.

Over the outer clothing, a pattern embroidered with seven grapes was visible. Anyone could have guessed without being told.

This person belonged to the temple of the god of abundance.

Not someone to take lightly, either. A faint, dizzying sensation that Enkrid had never felt when looking at Alma pricked at the back of his mind.

The figure descended the small rise that Enkrid's group had crossed earlier at a pace that was neither hurried nor slow.

He had watched perhaps five steps when Enkrid saw a strange vision.

The figure suddenly kicked off the ground, closed the distance in an instant, seized him by the throat, and drove him into the earth.

Was it only a vision?

In the briefest of moments, Enkrid decided this was something his Will had conjured, a glimpse of what was about to happen, a flash of insight cutting through to the truth. He reacted.

Bang!

Sound and moment were one. The white clothing of the approaching figure snapped and billowed as it rushed toward him.

The owner of the Plate Cuirass had closed to arm's reach in a single burst. A leg whipped out like a crack of a whip aimed at Enkrid's shin, a savage charge followed by a low attack.

Enkrid tracked every detail with Dynamic Visual Acuity pushed past its limit: the approach, the instant the leg swung. Focus Point activated on its own, stretching his thoughts out long. His mind accelerated and time seemed to slow.

Fast.

Dodge? No. Better to hold ground.

The snap decision came, and the body shaped by Will moved.

Enkrid bent his knees, braced his ankle, and raised his Will.

His reaction speed had grown far beyond what it once was. The kick landed with a sharp ring, but his center of gravity barely shifted.

And alongside the kick, a hand was already coming for his throat. Enkrid clenched his fist at an angle and drove it forward.

Valaf Martial Arts. In that fraction of a second, he twisted his waist and back foot and loaded the punch with weight and force.

Bang!

Hand met hand and the compressed air burst with a crack.

That sharp, clean sound, and the attacker retreated as quickly as he had come.

Whoosh!

Sinar's blade swept through the spot he had just vacated a half-beat too late. Naidhl cut vertically through the last slanting rays of the setting sun.

Light itself seemed to split. The strike was that fast and that sharp, but the attacker had already slipped away.

Insight, the eye that sees a step ahead, at a level that made such a feat possible.

Sinar did not stop there.

With Focus Point making time feel stretched, Enkrid kept his awareness on everything around him.

Attacks and defenses were trading at a pace where anyone who was not a knight would not have been able to follow what was happening.

Naidhl swept through empty air, then pivoted sharply and shot forward.

Like a swallow arcing freely through the sky.

He had killed a man once who went by the name Swallow Blade. By rights, that title belonged to Sinar now. Even so, the attacker stopped that too.

The blade was fast enough to match Enkrid's throwing daggers, but the iron rod from the figure's waist was already in hand and met the edge.

Clang!

Two weapons struck and the force of it spread outward in a shockwave.

A sound sharp enough to ring in the teeth.

From the moment of the first vision until now, every exchange had happened within a single breath.

The attacker was fast, bold, and utterly without hesitation.

"I was told only to stop you, and yet you stop me so well."

The attacker said it with what sounded like genuine admiration.

Being on the receiving end was not exactly Enkrid's preference, but a strange shock lingered in the leg that had been kicked. The muscle and skin were fine, but the tendons and ligaments deeper in were numb and tingling.

He had used Iron Body, and it had still come to this.

Even a Giant throwing a full kick would not have done this.

Which meant the attacker had used some kind of technique, one he could not even begin to guess at right now.

Maybe what had triggered the vision earlier was something similar?

Enkrid's leg was numb, but he lowered his hand as though nothing was wrong.

His hand came to rest near the grip.

Ready to draw and swing at any moment.

He had learned Valaf Martial Arts, but Enkrid's true strength only fully came out with a sword in hand.

Sinar let Naidhl hang at her side and asked, "What was that technique?"

She also possessed insight. If the attacker had done something, she should have sensed it just before it happened, perhaps a beat slower than Enkrid's, but it should have been there.

And she was sensitive enough to play hide-and-seek with assassins.

Yet when the attacker approached, kicked, and reached out, she had felt no sign at all.

What did that mean?

That the attacker outclassed and surpassed her?

No. That could not be it. Even then, she would have felt something.

Then?

The attacker had done something. With Will, obviously.

She had been able to tell from the exchange alone.

The attacker was a knight. And as if to confirm it, Holy Warrior Alma, who had been knocked down by Enkrid, cried out.

"Sir Overdier!"

An unfamiliar name, at least to Enkrid. Then Inquisitor Bert added by way of explanation:

"The Prophet!"

Prophet.

That name Enkrid had heard before.

Said to be the pillar of the Holy Knight Order.

Someone who had lived so long his age was impossible to guess.

From his appearance alone, a man in middle age, but in truth a monster who had lived over a hundred years, or so they said.

Blessed by the divine, his aging had slowed. His title was Prophet.

Prophet. Foreknowledge. Prophecy. Though his prophecy was limited to those who faced him in combat.

He wielded Will, or more precisely, divine power, to imprint upon his opponents the vision of their own defeat.

It was no different from raising his Will and forcing a future upon the other person.

Because that imposed future had never once been wrong, the name Prophet had stuck.

A single iron rod in his left hand, another at his waist.

His drooping outer corners gave his face a soft impression, but silver pupils made the mystique come first.

Those silver eyes opened, and he spoke.

"A dim revelation came to me, and I doubted whether I was right, but the will of the Lord never errs."

Prophet Overdier said it. As he spoke, he drew the second iron rod from his waist.

One rod in each hand: two rods, his Inscribed Weapons.

He crossed them diagonally and raised them forward. His intent to fight needed no words.

"These men oppress us and seek to take the Holy Maiden from us!"

Shilma cried out, not to be outdone.

"A revelation?"

Out of nowhere, Enkrid latched onto Overdier's words.

Overdier heard Shilma but did not react to her, keeping his eyes on Enkrid.

Perhaps this was more interesting than exchanging words with Shilma right now. Or perhaps he simply could not look away.

Even as he spoke, Enkrid's presence was swelling steadily. His Will pressed at Overdier in the shape of Pressure. It did not weigh Overdier down, of course, but it would be a lie to say he did not notice. His gaze stayed on Enkrid.

"Yes. I received a revelation."

Overdier answered. His posture did not change and his voice was calm.

At those words, Enkrid thought of the Boatman who had been appearing in his dreams night after night lately.

"Before you lies only hardship and trial."

"Could you say something more useful about swordsmanship?"

"You will come to wish you were trapped in this single day."

"What about something like this, instead of the wave block?"

"You will become an immortal."

"When the opponent swings down at you like this, you receive it on the flat of the blade and close the distance, like this."

Around the time the word immortal came up, Enkrid had been balancing on the rocking boat and demonstrating.

He had been sharing something he had recently worked out, piecing together and refining things he had paid Krona to learn while wandering the continent.

The Boatman turned out to have a surprising depth of knowledge about swordsmanship. The offhand advice he occasionally threw out had been more useful than Enkrid expected.

"I will not curse."

The last Boatman he had met had said only what he had to say, and Enkrid had done the same, so there was no pointing fingers at either of them.

Thinking about that Boatman now, a pointless question rose in him.

Enkrid looked directly into the silver pupils of the Prophet standing before him and asked, "Was the one who gave you that revelation perhaps sitting on a boat? Gray skin, cracked and worn? Maybe carrying a purple lamp?"

An utterly random question. Close to nonsense. No one could make sense of what he was getting at. Audin and Sinar were no different.

Enkrid paid that no mind. He did not care what any of them thought about it.

In a way, he had no preconceptions.

He did not curse them as fanatics, and if someone professed faith in a god while taking bribes on the side, seemingly walking a road of corruption, he let it go.

As long as they did not cross the line he had set for himself, that was fine.

It was along those same lines of thought that he had simply wondered whether something else might have a voice in the beliefs these people held.

In truth, the question might have been denying the very existence of the god at the root of their faith, though he had not thought quite that deeply about it.

Still, if god truly existed and was as righteous as these people believed, no one could explain why one child had to be locked away under the name Holy Maiden, and why corrupt priests and followers went unpunished. That was why Enkrid did not believe in god.

Because he did not believe, he could say such things.

If Overdier had known his thinking, even the composure built over more than a hundred years might have cracked a little.

But Overdier had no way of knowing Enkrid's thoughts, and what a long life had taught him was that there was no point in answering useless questions.

Overdier acted accordingly.

"Revelations come only from my Lord."

In other words: I will not listen to your nonsense.

It was not as though Enkrid had been expecting an answer. He had asked it half as a joke.

The Boatman only appeared in dreams and visions, so there were no real grounds to press the matter here and now.

He had asked on the off chance the Boatman might have been meddling, but after asking, he thought it was probably not possible anyway.

And honestly, this was not what mattered.

The Boatman had said that only hardship and trials awaited him, that it was already his fate.

That he would become an immortal, reliving today without end.

That walls would come for him without stopping.

Enkrid genuinely, not even for a moment, let any of that concern him.

Life had hardship and trials in it from the start, and whatever wall came, he would get over it. That was the whole of it. Same as now.

A man calling himself a Prophet or a Holy Knight had appeared.

Whether the Boatman had drawn him here, or he had truly come by divine revelation, or it was simply coincidence, none of that mattered. His heart was beating.

Strong.

One exchange of hands was enough to feel it.

That bold aggression and that powerful body.

A different style of fighting entirely from Audin.

The two iron rods in the Prophet's hands caught Enkrid's eye.

Ting.

He brought the two rods together and crossed them.

Sinar raised Naidhl and angled it toward the opponent.

"Holy Warrior Alma reports. That man over there is a heretic and a fugitive!"

Alma's finger pointed at Audin. Audin glanced casually to his side. Nobody there, of course. He tilted his head and pointed at his own chest.

"Me?"

He played it as smoothly as Enkrid ever had.

He had learned a thing or two over the years.

Admirable acting.

Skilled enough to walk into any monastery, pick up a puppet show on his own, and run the whole performance solo with five or more puppets without breaking a sweat.

An honest abbot who looked after orphans would have thought exactly that, watching him.

To Alma, who had started this and was now watching it play out, it only brought the urge to curse.

"Obviously you, who else would it be!"

Alma bellowed, unable to hold back. He was fortunate he had not added profanity.

Alma was seething.

Like a volcano one breath from eruption, burning white-hot.

His chest blazed as though someone had set it on fire.

Extreme fury climbing through him.

He had been shoved and kicked and hit since earlier, his dignity stripped away piece by piece, and then Enkrid's threat of killing them all had shut him up without a shred of resistance.

What? And then silence. That was all he had managed.

Shame compounded by wounded pride made the anger even sharper.

Naturally, he was furious at how thoroughly everything had gone wrong.

And it was in that moment he had heard what Bert told him about Audin.

A heretic. A fugitive. A criminal.

Prophet Overdier's gaze moved across Enkrid, Audin, and the fallen Holy Maiden.

"Hm."

Overdier let out only a short, dry sound. His face gave nothing away.

Enkrid watched the little farce play out and then quietly shifted his position. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and moving slightly to the side put him at an angle where the dying light trailing down the mountain range would strike the opponent's eyes.

Whether it was the influence of the Gigant Mountain Range or something else, today's sunset ran more toward violet than orange, a purple tinged with pink.

Even with the light hitting his eyes, Overdier did not change his position. His gaze only tracked Enkrid where he moved.

"I will not kill you. This cannot be called your fault."

Overdier said it.

Is that so.

Enkrid answered with his blade.

He kicked off the ground with one foot, closed the distance in a single rush, and brought his sword down hard at the crown of Overdier's head.

A fast, heavy cut, as though copied from Ragna.

Clang!

A thunderous crack burst out.

Rod meeting blade, that was the sound.

Sinar did not join in.

This was a duel. Winning by stepping in to stab someone in the back was not how it worked. That cut against honor and conviction.