A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 575

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 575: Between an Imperfect Tomorrow and a Perfect Today

= = =

Sinar stepped forward next, and she lost too.

Not that either of them had been fighting with their lives on the line.

It was a matter of matchup, you could say, or simply a difference in skill. Either reading fit.

Enkrid did not think of himself as exceptional among knights, but running into someone this clearly superior still caught him off guard.

On top of that, the opponent had no intention of killing him. He had no choice but to accept the loss. Overdier had beaten them both, and no one had come out badly hurt.

After the exchanges, Overdier's gaze drifted to Audin.

Those eyes were like an elf's — no emotion showed through them, flat and colorless, as if painted gray.

"Heretic Audin. I have heard the name," Overdier said.

Apostle of the God of War, and divine talent on top of that — a name impossible to leave unknown. Famous enough that even Overdier, who had inherited one of the Seven Names of the Martyrs of Abundance and stood as a Holy Knight representing the order, knew it well.

A brief silence fell, blending into the dying sunset and swallowing all sound.

The Magic Beasts that had been crying somewhere in the distance had gone quiet too. Only the chirp of insects and the brush of wind remained.

* * *

Caw.

For whatever reason, Rem, Ragna, and Jaxon had all ended up at the training ground in front of the barracks, and a crow swept over their heads.

Caw!

A magpie followed close behind, as if in pursuit.

The birds seemed to be running some kind of group drill today, noisy and constant overhead.

The crow's call had sounded at least several times already.

"How many times is that now?"

Rem muttered, eyes on the sky. The twins from the west bent their fingers to count. "Three times?"

"Black birds showing up a lot today."

Rem muttered again. An uneasy feeling settled in his gut.

Crows were clever enough to be used as message carriers, but training them was difficult and they were rare for it. They had a habit of wandering off to handle their own business mid-route. Smart as they were, without a proper trainer or someone like a druid, they would eat the food and vanish.

The crow that had just passed overhead was probably not the trained sort. There was no urgent message that needed delivering to the Border Guard right now.

"Tch."

Rem clicked his tongue for no particular reason.

In the west, there was a rumor that a crow flying at sunset meant bad luck.

Rem knew the origin well enough that he did not truly believe it. Long ago, a sorcerer who had scattered curses used crows to rain plague down on the western tribespeople. That was all there was to it. Still, having heard the story so many times since childhood left a nagging residue he could not quite shake.

That residue aside, glancing at the lot gathered here gave him a question worth asking.

It would not happen, but there was a chance these bastards did not know, or knew and were pretending not to. And on the slimmest of odds, one of them might know something he had not thought of.

The chance of that was about as low as the directionally-impaired bastard heading out alone and making it back on time without incident — but still, that was the angle he was working from.

"You all know the captain's weakness, right?"

Rem said it flatly.

Jaxon, whittling a piece of wood with a knife off to one side, glanced at him but said nothing.

Should he be grateful for even that much? Normally Jaxon would have ignored him completely, whatever he said.

"Where did you get your tongue cut off? Hey, wildcat."

Rem threw the jab at the wildcat and called to someone else.

Naturally, Ragna paid no attention whatsoever. He may have genuinely not known he was being addressed — the nickname was wrong to begin with, so his ears filtered Rem out automatically, and right now he had just gotten into a proper training session for the first time in a while.

To be precise about his state of mind: he had been teaching Ropord recently — or more accurately, beating him around — and had stumbled onto something new in the process. He was turning it over in his head now.

Hng. Hng.

Ragna drew his sword up and down, blank-faced. A vein rose on Rem's forehead.

"This bastard, I swear."

Did he need to chop off an arm with his axe before the man would listen? Or put a curse on him?

He was seriously considering it when Jaxon finally opened his mouth, half to himself.

"Lacks the knack for loading force into a single strike."

Short and blunt, but a clear opinion. Accurate, too.

Still, the delivery was irritating, and so was the attitude.

"Want me to find you a rhetoric teacher? Did you forget how to talk like a person?"

Making it to knight-level had not changed Rem or Jaxon. Same went for Ragna.

"It will take time. Again."

Ragna finally stopped swinging his sword and spoke, having filtered out what he did not need and absorbed only what mattered.

What he said was plain fact. They had all watched Enkrid long enough to know.

Slow or roundabout, he kept closing in on where he was headed. That was just how it would go. Fast or slow, he was not the kind to stop walking when he wanted something.

Awakening his Will, rising to the rank of knight.

It was not as though Enkrid had not changed.

Picking up techniques, working out his own swordsmanship — everything had developed to a dazzling degree. Enough to make watching him a genuine pleasure.

Ruagarne had said she was afraid that if she stayed near him, she would end up watching instead of training herself, and had deliberately not followed along on this trip.

That was how much Enkrid's skill had been climbing day by day — beyond any comparison to when he first arrived as squad leader.

Not that it was satisfying, exactly.

Why? Because of what he already had.

The Will sleeping inside him, vast and deep, was a powerful force that could make exhaustion irrelevant. But no matter how fine the steel, if you do not sharpen the edge, you end up with a blunt club. And if you cannot shape it into a proper length, you cannot even hold it and swing it.

To Rem, Jaxon, and Ragna, Enkrid's weakness was plain.

Thanks to that absurd mass of Will, he would never run dry — but the amount of Will he could load into any single strike was not all that much. That was something only practice and feel could fix.

Rem already knew all of it. He had asked just to confirm, and at least there was no brilliant solution he had missed.

Not that that was surprising. Either way, they were all in the same position.

"I'd sooner teach a Ghoul to talk than have another conversation with you two."

Rem flung the parting words at them and turned away.

They had happened to gather, and he had brought it up once. Nothing more.

Everyone knew it, nobody had been saying it out loud, and none of them thought Enkrid was ignorant of it either.

A man who spent all his time swinging his sword and reviewing what he had done — not knowing something like that? Of course he knew.

* * *

Audin knelt on one knee before the Holy Maiden and looked straight ahead.

He had watched the fight between the Prophet Overdier and Enkrid, and had predicted the outcome before it began.

Not good.

There was a fact that not just he but Rem, Ragna, and Jaxon all understood.

Enkrid had a well that never ran dry, but the bucket he used to draw from it was small. How much water you could pull up at once depended on the size of the bucket. That was where Enkrid stood right now.

Overdier's staff suddenly blazed with light, and Enkrid blocked it again and again before being pushed back.

It had to have been disorienting — a frustrating experience to endure.

Among the techniques a monk, a martial ascetic, learned after reaching a certain level was something called Sacred Penetration, which bypassed Iron Body and struck the interior directly.

Holy Warriors and Holy Knights learned Iron Body before they became knights. Since everyone poured effort into mastering and refining that technique, it was only natural that methods to break it would be studied as well.

Martial ascetics were exactly those kinds of people — the ones who researched and trained in such counters. So for them to reach the stage of finding and honing a way to shatter or ignore Iron Body was a natural progression.

He has not been taught that yet.

Audin said it only in his mind. Sacred Penetration made limbs creak and stiffen — not devastating, but enough to make things uncomfortable.

In a fight between knights, when one side's body started moving unnaturally, victory and defeat sorted themselves out quickly.

Rem or Ragna would probably have pushed a burst of Will or sorcery through their whole body in a single instant and driven the sacred force back.

Enkrid did something similar. The difference was that the opponent kept repeating the same thing — making something irritating accumulate in the body, gradually impairing its movement. The more they clashed, the more disadvantage built up. Will bound into sacred force, wearing away at the body's movement.

Even so, Enkrid did not give ground easily.

"Interesting."

"It would be."

In the middle of it all, they were talking, and Enkrid was smiling as he swung his sword. That sword was fierce, tenacious, fast — a speed that even Audin, without sacred power, would have struggled to track. The precision was there too, the kind where missing even a single moment across the movement from ankle to full body would lose the point of impact entirely.

But that was as far as it went.

The balance between a trained body and the Will being poured out was off. Force increased, but the concentrated Will riding it was not all that much.

In ordinary terms it was substantial, but the opponent was badly mismatched.

Overdier could be called a complete warrior in every sense. Speed, strength, technique — none of it fell short, and his sacred force kept striking at Enkrid's body over and over.

He could hold out longer, but he could not win.

That was Audin's conclusion, and the result had matched it.

Neither of them had looked like they were fighting with everything they had.

Sinar stepped forward after, but her matchup was far worse to begin with.

Her strike could have been fatal to Overdier — if she could find an opening and drive into it. But making that opening was the problem.

An attack that would not work against someone clad in sacred force.

Her signature move, the vital-energy blade, was the natural enemy of sacred armor. When sacred force wrapped the whole body like Iron Body, that became sacred armor outright, and it was hard enough to shrug off most attacks.

The faint light clinging to Overdier's body confirmed it.

The vital-energy blade landed, but the blade Sinar had shaped from gathered energy rang out and shattered. The light wrapped around Overdier's body flickered briefly from the impact, but the blade was gone, broken apart, and the light returned as before.

Whichever side held the denser concentration of that power would hold the advantage, and right now Overdier's sacred force was far denser — not even a comparison.

So Sinar had to be pushed back.

Not that she pulled out her true trump card. Even if she had, it probably would not have guaranteed an easy win.

That was how they both ended up losing.

"You came to rescue the Holy Maiden?"

Overdier asked.

The violet sunset had not yet fully faded. Wind stirred his hair.

Churned earth and gouged ground told the story plainly. Shattered stone and broken fragments were scattered all around. There had been no intent to kill, but a battle between knights had taken place here — for the surroundings to be undamaged would have been strange.

The ones who had originally been pursuing the Holy Maiden had long since backed away. Among them, the one called Alma had been watching for some time now.

Would Enkrid and Sinar join forces to fight? Or would they call Audin in too, and go three on one?

If it came to that, the odds would not be hopeless. No — if one of the three was willing to be sacrificed, they could win. If killing the opponent at any cost was the goal, that path existed.

But would he take it? That captain?

He would not.

And would he retreat? Not that either.

So what would happen.

By this point, Audin had already half made up his mind.

If it comes to it, I will take the Holy Maiden's place.

Even if it wore down his years and meant enduring a beating for the rest of his life, he would do it. It was something only he could do. So he would.

No matter what anyone said, Enkrid would not retreat — even if it meant his death. That was the kind of person he was. So he could not be left to that.

"Step back now."

Overdier spoke again. The interesting thing was that Enkrid was not the sort to hear that and quietly comply, not after losing once.

"One more round?"

He said it plainly — whether spar or fight, he was not leaving like this.

Will surged and lit his blue eyes. Like a flame catching.

In that moment, Overdier felt it — a flash of intuition.

The man in front of him was not someone who would give up no matter what was done to him.

* * *

Not easy at all.

Of course, Enkrid knew his own weakness.

When he used Iron Body, there had been time — time to prepare. And if he had time to prepare, he could draw out more Will than usual.

The Iron Body technique proved that.

But this was different. In the brief, razor-thin moment of a sword strike, he had to push that much Will through.

He had been trying, again and again, but it was not going well.

Hmm.

Enkrid sorted through his thoughts and adjusted his grip.

So. Was this a crisis?

It seemed like it. Probably the worst crisis since he started looping this day.

If death were approaching — if the opponent had that intent — he could die and loop again. But if the opponent had no such desire at all?

What was he supposed to do then?

That was the problem right now.

Overdier, that Holy Knight, had no intention of killing him.

Thwack.

He dodged the sword swing, but the staff came down on his body — bruising, not breaking. So he would simply endure to the end.

There was no room in Enkrid's head for joining forces with Sinar or Audin to kill the man. Not because it would require someone else's sacrifice — it was that the opponent had stepped forward alone, openly, and so he would do the same.

Combining strength to kill the opponent was a path he would not take, even if it cost him his own life.

Then what was left?

"Throw your head in."

The Boatman's voice rang in his ears — a hallucination.

"Go in and take a hit to the head and die."

The Boatman's words kept coming, endless. What he offered was the easy path. The simplest path imaginable.

"Die like that. Die and start over."

"That works. Get yourself another today to repeat. This one is also a wall — you will be able to get over it."

To Enkrid, those words sounded like being told to throw away today for tomorrow. To choose the second-best today instead of living the best one possible.

Every night in dreams for the past several days, and now this hallucination.

If Overdier would not kill him, move on his own and open the door to repeat today. That way, he would get the chance to surpass Overdier. In exchange, he would be living an eternal today.

"Ah, I really do not want that."

He muttered it, knocked back another step by the staff catching his shoulder.

"What are you saying?"

Overdier asked, but Enkrid shook his head.

"Talking to myself."

If someone who knew the whole situation asked why he insisted on taking the harder road, Enkrid would have answered like this:

If there was an imperfect tomorrow and a perfect today, he would always choose the imperfect tomorrow.

"Stubbornness changes nothing."

The Boatman's voice.

"Stubbornness will not change anything here."

Overdier's voice layered over it.

No. That was not something anyone could know.