A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 576

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 576: You'll Be Hunted for Life

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Audin listened as Enkrid threw out those words while slashing his sword through empty air.

They were, in swordsmanship terms, a thrust without hesitation.

When he finished speaking, Enkrid swung his blade through the air a few more times.

His body had stopped obeying him partway through the fight, so he was checking himself over.

Audin himself had taught him that.

Whatever happened, always check whether your body is moving properly.

Fighting without knowing your own condition was foolishness, he had said.

Staying in peak condition at all times was simply expected.

Eat well, sleep well, fight well, train hard, and know your body's limits exactly.

Enkrid had done all of that until now.

'You are my finest pupil.'

Audin said it to himself and raised his head. It was time to speak.

To say that he would return to the Order and accept punishment, that he would offer his remaining life as the price.

That they should stop fighting now.

That they should let the Holy Maiden go. Wasn't that possible?

He would take the place of all of it.

'I will offer you the rest of my days.'

Audin murmured it inwardly and lifted his gaze. His eyes found the Holy Warrior radiating sacred light.

That man stood in the place Audin himself had once wanted to reach.

Looking at his divinity, he could tell. The sacred light was a clear, pure white. It was not the light of someone who had fallen.

When God watches over them, a corrupt priest's sacred light grows dim, that was the very reason so many priests could not use genuine divinity at all.

And it was why something like a Ragged Holy Man could come to exist.

There had been someone who earned that name by healing people while wearing rags.

A true Holy Man who carried God's shrine in his heart and wandered the continent.

The Order called him the abandoned Holy Man.

Audin had wanted to meet the Ragged Holy Man. He knew him personally, in fact.

He had apparently become quite the operator, hiding his identity even under the Order's pursuit.

Stray thoughts. Just things that surfaced while he looked back at his past for a brief moment.

While Audin was settling his resolve, Overdier asked again.

"Who says that?"

"I hear they know but pretend otherwise."

Enkrid answered without missing a beat. He had stopped swinging his sword and was now rotating one ankle in slow circles.

He still had no intention of giving up. His posture alone made that clear.

"Can you prove that?"

Overdier asked. His speech was clipped, emotion held in check. It sounded a little odd, as though he were deliberately keeping his tone fixed.

"Hmm. Probably?"

Enkrid tilted his head.

"You are slandering the Order on a guess?"

Still in that slightly sharp, grating tone, Overdier broke off mid-sentence and raised a finger. Still gripping his staff, he pointed at Audin and asked, "Holy Warrior Alma, speak. Is that man a heretic?"

Alma glanced around nervously and nudged Bert. Inquisitor Bert spoke in her place.

"Prophet Overdier, the man's name is Audin Pumray. He is charged with causing the death of someone of my father's standing, and with abandoning his duties as an Inquisitor. Though he was once noted for exceptional talent and said to have received God's favor, he even betrayed the priest who raised him."

"And why has he not been caught until now?"

"His whereabouts only became visible recently. He appeared in the capital of the Kingdom of Naurillia, and there happened to be a priest there who recognized the heretic's face."

Bert chose each word with desperate care.

On the surface, an Inquisitor's work looked like chasing people down and beating them to death, but at its core the real job was constructing logic.

No matter how much power the Order held, they could not ignore outside eyes entirely when it came to naming and punishing a heretic.

Naturally, burning or imprisonment came only after the majority recognized it as justified.

Though of course, none of that applied to those without power.

Once, a priest with a twisted heart who had glimpsed Audin's talent and divinity had driven him into exactly that position, a role built for oppressing the powerless and hunting them down to their deaths.

The Archbishop's hatred had also played its part, since Audin had killed the bishop's child.

In the end, Audin had left the Order because he could no longer endure it.

That was the truth, but no one here could contest it.

"Is that so."

That was all. Overdier raised his staff again. Enkrid raised his sword to meet it.

The fight between them had never stopped, regardless of the words exchanged.

With a whoosh, the staff shot out like a line of light.

A flash of white split the violet dusk, and a blue blade rose up to meet it.

Clang, clang-clang-clang-clang!

Knight against knight. The shockwave where sword and staff collided sent a shiver through the air.

An invisible tide of force rolled outward in all directions, pushing back the wind and seeming to push back even the light.

Sparks flew between them, and so did blood.

Crackle.

Enkrid felt it again. His eyes and senses had reacted, his insight had seen it, but his arm moved just a beat too slow.

No, it moved the way he wanted, only slightly late. His earlobe tore a little.

A nicked earlobe was no reason to fall back, so he ignored the wound and brought his sword up again into stance.

If his muscles, ligaments, and tendons were grinding and stiff, making him slower than his opponent, the answer was to cut down his range of motion.

So he did.

Aker's Web, Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, Audin.

He drew on everything he had learned from all of them and trimmed his movements down, made each motion more compact.

All the while he kept triggering the Will of Refusal over and over, pushing the divinity that had crept into his body back out.

It just took time, because it did not happen instantly.

During that time, Overdier's staff came down without pause, stabbing, swinging, hammering.

And with each exchange, Enkrid saw countless visions.

Not ones from the past. Ones from moments away.

It was Overdier's specialty. He wove images into his opponent's mind using Will formed from divinity, letting one person alone glimpse his intentions.

What made it truly frightening was that the opponent's own insight became a tool in service of the technique.

Enkrid had sharp eyes, more than most.

The insight he had honed through Aker's Web now felt like shackles.

He saw such a future even now, in the gap where his sword and Overdier's staff crossed, his own thigh taking a hit.

And the scene became real exactly as he had seen it.

Clang! Thud!

Overdier deflected the sword and kicked Enkrid's thigh. The leg extended without disturbing his center line; it did not carry much weight, but it was fast.

Enkrid took the hit because he could not avoid it.

If this kept repeating, most people would despair quickly.

It would feel as though every turn of the fight was being dragged along by Overdier's will alone.

That was exactly why he was called a Prophet.

But Enkrid was not most people.

If he were the kind to talk about despair or surrender over something like this, he would have long since settled into that immortal life, trapped in a single day while the Boatman sang endlessly.

An eternity where only one day was ever given.

"Hmph."

Sharp pain shot out from where he had been hit.

The blow had not been heavy, but it carried enough force to let divinity seep through.

Even so, Enkrid did not fall back.

"Ha!"

He let out a sharp cry instead and brought his sword down with concentrated Will.

He twisted his ankle to add speed to the blade. The arc bent as it came down, then accelerated harder through the midpoint. Double acceleration, one of Ragna's specialties.

Clang! Crack!

Overdier took it with raw force.

A crack ran through the middle of the Valerian Steel sword. Not enough to snap it right away.

The sword in his hand had been worked on once by Aetri.

It was not an Inscribed Weapon, but the will in it was vivid. Not something that would break easily.

That was Enkrid's conviction, and naturally that same will settled into the blade. He swung again.

Overdier could tell the other man was not going to yield anytime soon.

Which left him without an easy answer.

He had said with his own mouth he would not kill him, and he would keep that word.

A knight's word had to carry that kind of weight.

But in place of killing him.

He felt the need to break an arm or a leg.

"We will see how long you can hold out."

"There is no need to hold out."

Overdier said it, and over his voice the Boatman's tone layered in and said the same.

He knew. There was no need to endure.

But doing only what was necessary would never get him where he wanted to go.

For the sake of what he wanted, for that one thing alone.

Enkrid chose to keep fighting a fight that made no sense to anyone else.

He had wandered the continent, seen and met many people, gone through many things, and come to understand something from all of it.

'Becoming a knight alone is not enough. It cannot be.'

Being a knight could not be the end.

So he had decided it would not be. He would make becoming a knight a beginning, not a finish line.

"A knight? That is genuinely hilarious."

Among people who laughed at him like that, he could not even voice the idea that it was just a start.

And yet he had climbed above the very thing they had mocked.

So he would live by what he believed.

"Thick-headed."

The Boatman's voice overlapped with Overdier's staff coming down on his shoulder.

Enkrid twisted using the technique Audin had taught him, the proper way to take a hit.

He tightened his core, turned his waist, shifted the angle of his shoulder. A method for deflecting and scattering the point of impact.

Crack!

The sound was clearly something gone wrong in the bone, though nothing had snapped.

He swung his sword and held on, burning the pain away with the heat that surged up through him.

Enkrid repeated that.

Overdier's staff kept striking his body.

Several times Enkrid held on with only the Valerian Steel sword, then at one moment turned his body and drew Spark, driving it forward in a thrust. The hidden left-hand strike he had kept in reserve.

"Yes!"

Sinar shouted, watching Enkrid's move.

But before the word finished leaving her mouth, Overdier blocked Spark with his staff. Spark slid along the angled staff, and the two weapons met with a high ringing sound and scattered sparks into the air. After that they went at each other again, and again.

The blade grazed Overdier's cheek and arm. Blood scattered.

It meant the blade Enkrid swung had cut through the divine armor.

Part of the reason was that Overdier's defenses had worn thinner.

Overdier stared squarely at the opponent whose eyes now burned with blue flame, going beyond simply holding on.

He did not know what the other man was thinking. Only that he could not afford to ignore the person in front of him.

The divinity loaded into his Inscribed Weapon, the staff, grew heavier.

Their forces clashed, and it felt as though a storm was howling in every direction.

Through the blur of weapons crossing, Audin watching from the side felt his heart being torn in two.

'Why are you holding on? What for?'

Why? What reason?

Audin felt the pain of it. It was as if God the Father were scolding him directly. If that were the punishment, he thought, he would gladly bear it and endure it.

But this was different. This was too hard to watch with both eyes open.

His head swam and it felt as though his insides were shaking.

And yet he kept watching.

A question surged up, what was it that kept that man from retreating? The question came, and with it Audin understood. He had already known the answer.

Was that not the very reason he had decided to step forward himself?

Then why was he standing here now, hesitating, only watching the fight?

"Stop."

Audin murmured it. Neither of them listened. More accurately, neither of them could hear.

In that same moment, Enkrid took a hit to the chest he had not managed to block, and the sound that rang out was ugly.

Even so, Overdier's staff did not stop.

And neither did Enkrid.

Boom!

Divinity and Will locked together, and with a thunderclap Enkrid's body rolled backward.

The cloak, clothes, and leather armor wrapped around him were torn like rags, and the inner layer wound underneath was visible too.

The sword in his hand had somehow still not broken.

Audin felt pain beyond anguish-a physical pain in his own body.

An image, pain felt through the mind, had taken shape as suffering in the flesh.

That last blow: if his usual training had slipped even a little, it might have burst his heart and killed him outright. Or left him crippled.

"Still standing?"

Overdier's voice came again.

Enkrid had already risen from his backward roll. He had used the momentum of the tumble to right himself before it finished.

Blood ran from his forehead, from a cut that had appeared at some point.

Overdier spoke again.

"I said I will not kill you. But I will be taking a leg."

The subtle, grating wrongness in Prophet Overdier's tone had bothered him until now. Now it did not bother him at all. He had no spare attention to spend on it.

Without any great insight, Audin knew Enkrid was being pushed back. He would not die. But he would lose a leg or an arm.

"Sinar, that side."

In the middle of it, Enkrid spoke. Had he been watching this way even now?

Behind Audin, Alma had been edging closer.

Vivid killing intent burned in the eyes of the man holding the hammer.

A vicious killing intent reached Audin from that direction. The eyes of someone who had fallen.

Sinar stepped in front of him and raised her leaf sword. A gesture that said: come closer and I cut you.

Audin's face twisted for the first time since the day Enkrid had walked into the barracks as squad leader and they had met.

Even when he had first resolved to leave the Order his expression had not broken like this, but right now he could not hide what he felt.

"Do nothing. Let him die. Like you did for me."

The vision of Fildin spoke. Audin watched the fight through clouded eyes.

Even after that, Enkrid kept taking hits.

Crack, thud, clang!

Sometimes he blocked. Then took another hit.

Through all of it, Enkrid had not given a single step of ground.

Why? How?

If he fell back, Overdier would not give chase.

"Stop. Leave me and go, Captain-hyung."

Audin said it, but no one was listening. No, it seemed Enkrid had heard after all.

He wiped the blood running into his eyes. Overdier seemed to be catching his breath as well and stopped swinging his staff for a moment.

Even his face showed a trace of fatigue.

Enkrid's voice was quiet and low, but clear enough for everyone to hear.

"I do not accept a future made by someone else. And if I know that what another person has forced is wrong, I will not look away from it just because I lack the strength."

By voicing his belief as a knight, he would damage his Will if he failed to uphold it.

Enkrid had declared it now not only through action but through words.

There would be no retreat.

'Ah.'

Audin understood fully what Enkrid had just said.

Overdier was speaking through force.

Stay out of the Order's affairs.

Do not dare involve yourself again after this.

And there was no way Enkrid would accept that.

Following his sword and his actions, the words Enkrid had spoken drove into Audin's chest.

Utterly his own will, and yet that will shone like the sun.

Right then, above the violet dusk, it was as though the sacred light given by God shone down on him.