WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 587: Do It Right

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Harrison Viscount raised a hand and rubbed his eyes. He was trying to figure out what kind of madness he was witnessing.

Rrrumble.

A sound like rolling thunder slammed into his ears, and the ground shook as though an earthquake had started.

The reason for that rumbling, like a thousand cavalry charging at once, was visible right in front of him.

Beyond the fields he had built up with his own hands, an unprecedented number of boar Magic Beasts had gathered and were kicking up a wall of dust.

Magic Beasts grouping like that, it almost looked as if they had formed a Colony. No spell had been cast, yet the dust alone created something like a Veil, as though the beasts were concealing themselves. Because of it, he could not even get a proper count of their numbers.

The one silver lining was that they were charging across open ground, which left at least a little time to prepare.

But right in front of that dust cloud teeming with boar Magic Beasts, the people who had come as reinforcements were walking forward on two feet to meet it head-on.

They had stepped out and declared this was their fight, for everyone else to stay out.

In other words, with no real grasp of how many boar Magic Beasts were out there, they had marched out to greet a dust cloud charging at them like an Evil Spirit.

If that was not madness, what was?

Rubbing his eyes did nothing to change reality. The Viscount watched the backs of men vaulting over the angled thorn Palisade or swinging around its side and pushing forward. There seemed to be no order at first glance, but the absence of drill did not mean they were in disarray. Each one took up a position at a consistent interval.

Well, that was not the important thing right now. The Viscount could barely register any of it.

"No!"

That was all he could manage. The ground kept shaking, that constant thudding underfoot. The hand that had been rubbing his eyes had, at some point, balled into a fist tight enough to raise veins across the back of his hand. The sight made his entire body tense on its own.

"These lunatics!"

The Viscount finally let out what he had been thinking.

Where did the danger of boar Magic Beasts lie? They charged with terrifying speed, which was exactly why no one short of a knight order should stand against them head-on.

Yet these people were stepping out without even the protection of the Palisade?

"What in the world do they think they're doing?"

Even the former mercenary who served as commander of the Self-Defense Force stood there with his mouth hanging open.

He knew his lord, Harrison Viscount, had sent requests for help in every direction, and he knew those letters had reached the royal palace. He had not actually expected reinforcements to come, though. And yet here they were. Not many, but enough to be useful, or so he had thought.

So what were they doing?

Why step out with nothing but a single axe at the hip and no spear?

The leather armor and cloaks they wore did at least look like coordinated, matching equipment.

There was a saying among mercenaries: a man's gear was his skill.

To elaborate on that saying, if you ever ran into a force with equipment that well-matched, the advice was to fall back first.

Anyone who had their gear coordinated to that degree had surely been through relentless training. That was wisdom earned from being sold for Krona and drifting from battlefield to battlefield. So these soldiers were not weak.

But charging straight into a herd of boar Magic Beasts was, how to put it, a fresh brand of madness.

In truth, if either the Viscount or the Self-Defense Force captain had had even a moment to breathe, it would not have been that hard to guess why these people were moving the way they were.

Neither of them was particularly quick-witted, though, and whatever thinking they were capable of, there had been no time for it.

The reinforcements had barely arrived when the boar Magic Beasts came charging, and before anyone could manage a proper word of welcome, let alone sit down for a meal, the newcomers had already gone out without asking anyone's permission.

A soldier from the Self-Defense Force guarding the Palisade had called out to ask who they were, but the newcomers walked forward without a glance. They crossed the Palisade, formed up, the boar Magic Beasts crashed into them, and before anyone could process any of it, there it was.

The Magic Beasts outnumbered the men who had stepped forward by more than double.

The skin beneath the Viscount's eyes twitched. Days without sleep had pushed his exhaustion to its absolute limit, and the pressure bearing down on him was immense.

If he had to watch those reinforcements get their bellies torn open and their guts spilled out in front of him, he thought he would pass out on the spot.

"Do it well!"

Someone shouted from among the reinforcements.

There was a commander after all? He had noticed a soldier strolling away at a leisurely pace earlier and wondered what kind of commander just wandered off like that.

The Viscount caught a brief glimpse of gray hair. Someone standing with arms folded, watching, no helmet. Oddly familiar, though he could not place it just now.

Time moves the way the sun rises and sets and rain falls, and so the boar beasts and the men who had come as reinforcements met in much the same way.

He should have stopped them. It was only then that Harrison Viscount arrived at that thought.

Everyone had been bracing for something terrible.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Sounds of flesh splitting rang out across the wide plain, tangled together with the stamp of hooves on dirt.

Blood sprayed. Black blood.

Pitch-black blood painted the air and soaked the ground in every direction.

"You die, you die by my hand!"

In the middle of the chaos, the commander's shout rang out again.

The charging boar Magic Beasts lunged with their razor tusks bared. A bite from those things would not just leave marks.

Every one of the Border Guard regulars who had come as reinforcements drew their axes and swung.

Thwack.

Boar Magic Beast heads began splitting and shattering under those axe blows.

From the moment of collision to right now, everything had happened in an instant.

What was this?

The twitching beneath Harrison Viscount's eyes settled.

"What is this?"

He asked in bewilderment, half to the Self-Defense Force captain and half to himself. The commander had no answer either.

The only thought that came to mind was that these bastards could really fight.

The reinforcements numbered fewer than fifty, and every single one of them fought like they were out of their minds.

* * *

When Rem gave his unit a loose name and called them the Assault Squad, everyone around them started calling them the Rem Assault Squad without exception.

It was probably better than being called the Madman Axe Squad, though honestly, none of them had time to care what anyone called them.

They had all been trained by Rem, and lately the Twins had been teaching them the basics of Sorcery on top of that.

"Wish there was a Sorcery that brought you back after you died. Then I could just kill all of you."

That was the kind of thing Rem kept on repeat.

The intensity of his training went without saying.

Even so, he did not take just anyone into the unit. Same as always, he only brought in people he found acceptable.

Some quit along the way. After all that culling, they settled at around fifty, and those were the core of the Assault Squad.

Three of them had shown a fragment of genuine talent. One had talent for nothing but fighting, so Rem left that one alone. The other two he made lieutenants.

The Assault Squad swung their axes around those two lieutenants as their anchor.

In practice, those two were the backbone of whatever formation the unit held.

Rem himself preferred to fight with raw force and skip the formations, but left to their own devices, there would have been casualties left and right. He did not have a deep grasp of tactics, but he had picked things up over time from watching and listening, and he had mixed in a piece of advice wrung out of Krais by twisting his leg. Internally, Rem decided they were finally getting to where he could put them to use.

"Better than monkey Magic Beasts hiding up in the trees!"

One of the lieutenants shouted, the one with the close-cropped hair. Everyone in the unit agreed.

Boar Magic Beasts charging at you in a straight line were several times better than monkey Magic Beasts that crept up at night and ate your brain while you slept.

That was just true.

Their training ground, which also served as their playground, was the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range. The Magic Beasts they faced here were far easier to handle than what came out of there.

Charge at anything that comes at you, slash it, beat it down, that was all there was to it. So they did.

They crossed the thorn Palisade and swung their axes.

The Magic Beasts came on at terrifying speed, but their movement was a straight line.

Watching, reacting, and stepping aside was not difficult.

Every last one of them carried the same bold calm as Heart of the Beast.

All of it was Rem's doing, naturally.

Heart of the Beast was something he had refined a few times while teaching Enkrid, and by now his own mastery had grown enough that he could pass it on far more easily than before.

Not to the point where you could stand still with a blade flying at your face and not blink, but enough to hold at least a sliver of calm in the moment.

He had picked naturally bold fighters to begin with, so even that much was plenty.

Rem's Assault Squad made the most of everything they had suffered through to get here.

"Wooh!"

One soldier read the path of a charging boar, calculated its speed, twisted sideways, and brought his axe down at a diagonal.

The charging boar ran itself straight into the blade.

Thwack.

He held his position after the swing and wrenched the angle of the axe head with both arms.

No matter how strong you were, you could not simply absorb a Magic Beast several times your own weight hitting you at full speed.

So the technique was to aim for the back of the neck, sink the axe blade into hide and flesh, then force it upward at an angle. The boar's hide and flesh tore with a wet, grinding sound and blood sprayed into the air.

What he had shown was a deflecting cut, and even that demanded tremendous strength. It was close to acrobatics, but the training they had been through made it possible.

The number of charging boar Magic Beasts dropped fast.

Several were killed with a lucky split through the neck or skull. More than ten were put down by targeting only the legs, tripping them so they tumbled on their own.

That was how the surroundings ended up soaked in black blood.

Harrison Viscount, the Self-Defense Force captain, and the Self-Defense Force soldiers watching all stood there with their mouths open, unable to find words. It was that kind of sight.

Even so, Rem was not fully satisfied.

"If you do well, I'm walking away as-is. But if I hear you caused trouble, or something annoying reaches my ears, I'll come back."

Rem's version of encouragement was unique.

At those words, every soldier in the Assault Squad looked up. Desperation filled their eyes and their posture.

They were splitting boar heads right in front of them and still listening to every word Rem said.

The two lieutenants leading the fighting were especially desperate.

"Yes, sir. We'll do it right!"

Rem nodded. He had come out here anyway, so he figured he would clean up the area a bit before heading back.

He had been hearing that bandits were causing trouble nearby.

Without a word of goodbye, Rem turned his back on the men still fighting. Everyone else was too busy watching boar Magic Beasts get slaughtered to pay attention to anything else. He slipped out from among them and headed back, looking for traces of the new bandit outfit along the way.

Tracking signs of where people had been was one of Rem's strong suits.

The bandits had their base about two days' travel from the city the Viscount governed.

The base had walls of wooden posts and crude huts for shelter. It looked sloppy no matter how you looked at it.

Without someone deliberately backing them up, it seemed like they would struggle to eat properly.

Rem noticed that, but did not dwell on it. Either way, today was the end for these people. Whether someone was backing them, or whether they had genuinely skilled people among them, was not his concern.

There was nothing resembling a watchtower, so the bandit standing on the far side of the wooden posts with a bow could not close his mouth.

What just happened?

He had clearly seen someone running at him and loosed an arrow, but the moment he released the string, the man he had aimed at was already at the base of the posts.

He had not even blinked, yet the figure had vanished without a blur and seemed to have crossed the space in an instant.

Rem had the Sorcery called Leopard's Paw active. Of course an ordinary eye could not track his movement.

Bang.

Rem kicked the wooden post wall and shouted.

"Hey. You're done here. Scatter now if you want to live. Understood?"

While the posts broke apart and wood chips flew, he was already cutting down the two bandits who had fired arrows. The rest of the group came pouring out.

"What are you talking about, you crazy son of a bitch! We're the Brotherhood of Blood!"

The leaders were five men who had sworn themselves as blood brothers, and every last one of them made loyalty the first thing out of their mouths.

"We die together!"

"We live together!"

They came at him shouting that, so Rem decided to grant their wish.

"Right. You can all die together today."

The strange thing was that they had a flute they used to control Magic Beasts, and they had been using it to handle the boar Magic Beasts.

When Rem approached, one of them blew the flute. From a pit dug in the middle of the camp, a Magic Beast twice the size of a normal one heaved itself out, two horns beside its snout, and came at him. Its eyes were red. Whatever they had been starving it on for days, it was absolutely vicious.

Piiiiiii!

The flute shrieked, and the Magic Beast exploded out of the pit as if launched into the air, then came charging straight at Rem the moment it laid eyes on him.

Rem had been idly fiddling with his axe handle, muttering to himself. He ripped the axe free in one motion and brought it straight down.

The path of Rem's swing felt, for just a moment, like it split the world in two.

That was how it looked to the Brotherhood's leaders.

Boom.

The Magic Beast's body split lengthwise and toppled to either side in front of Rem.

Viscera and blood poured out and soaked the ground.

Even after the swing, Rem kept fiddling with the handle and murmured to himself.

"Huh, not feeling it today? Ah, is that so."

From where the Brotherhood's leader stood, that man was definitely out of his mind. Who was he even talking to? Himself? Some other voice inside his head?

Madman Knights, Knights of Madness. The names had spread far and wide, and quite a few people knew Rem's name by now, but almost no one could recognize him by face alone.

After seeing that axe swing, though, everyone could tell that something had gone very wrong.

"I said run if you don't want to die."

Rem said it and slung the axe up onto his shoulder, casual as anything. At that, four of the Brotherhood leaders turned and bolted, leaving only one who looked too dim to read the room.

He had watched his four sworn brothers run and was so stunned he could barely swing the iron-banded club in his hands properly.

Rem flicked his axe lightly, split the club, and took off one of the man's arms.

"Aaargh!"

Then he went after the other four and split, smashed, and beat each of their heads in turn.

"You called yourselves brothers?"

The bandit outfit had numbered over a hundred, and several of them were skilled with bows, but when Rem caught arrows out of the air and threw them back to kill people, everyone went silent.

That was how one of the south's lingering troubles, a bandit outfit that commanded a herd of Magic Beasts, was wiped out.

Who could have imagined that a knight-level force would sweep in and tear through a bandit outfit like that?

Truly, no one had seen it coming.

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