WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 595: That's Just How It Was

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"Who are you?"

The man lifted his head and asked. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow, the look of someone who hadn't eaten properly in days.

Only one person was locked inside this wide stone chamber.

"Gielpin Guild?"

Enkrid asked. A draft from somewhere made the torch gutter and flare. Shadows rippled across the stone walls, swelling large and shrinking small.

"Aaagh!"

The man screamed without warning.

"They're watching me wherever I go! Always watching! They know everything I do!"

Half out of his mind, he shouted with bloodshot eyes. Then he pressed both hands over his head and began slamming it against the floor.

"Nnngh."

Saliva pooled on the stone beneath him.

"They're watching, no matter what I do. Stop looking at me, stop it!"

Enkrid watched without alarm and checked the man's eyes and breathing.

There were no signs of poison, but the man's breath grew faint, then stopped. He was dead, hands clutching his own head, face pressed to the ground.

"Rua."

Enkrid passed the torch to Ruagarne and pried the dead man's eyes open.

Between the bloodshot whites, he could see small dots. Fragments flaked away from the corners of the eyes and fell against his hand. The texture felt like powdered stone, not something that should come out of a dead man's eyes. The corpse looked similar to the one who had attacked them in the night and tumbled down the stairs to his death.

Most people would have been rattled, unsure where to even begin with something like this. Enkrid was not most people.

Deal with the problems in front of you, and whoever was behind this would show themselves eventually.

Sometimes thinking things through the way Krais would was the right call. Other times, acting the way Rem would was better. This was one of those times.

Put another way, doing something was faster than turning it over in his head.

Enkrid made up his mind and started up the stairs, but the other side moved first.

Living by Rem's brand of action meant your enemy could live by it too.

Was that a bad thing?

He didn't think so. Whoever he needed to find had come to him on their own. Saved him the trouble.

From above the stairs, he felt far more presences than just those claiming to be the castellan.

He climbed at an easy pace. At the top, the castellan and two spear bearers were already bound and on their knees. Beside them, five guild members were bleeding from at least one wound each.

Arms, legs, shoulders, all stabbed through. No need to ask who had done the stabbing, given the soldiers gathered here.

"It's a shame you had to stir up trouble the moment you arrived."

The one at the center of it all spoke. The administrator. The one behind everything.

"His eyes never sat right with me," Ruagarne muttered.

Enkrid came up with a flat expression and looked around.

He could see the soldiers and others carrying different arms, the ones who had fled during the earlier fight.

Men holding spears, crossbows, and shortswords formed a ring around them, with the administrator at the center.

Enkrid stared at the administrator as he stepped onto the landing. The man's eyes twitched, then he smiled and said, "Why make such a fuss? I invited you to rest at the estate for a while."

He took it all in, the surrounding troops, the people they had captured. Everything else too: the blue sky above, and a tree on one side blooming with winter flowers.

Flowers grew even in filth.

That thought crossed him. He still didn't know the castellan's character, but instinct told him the five who had held this place were decent people. The Innkeeper who wanted to protect his child came to mind as well.

Beyond them, there were other flowers in this city he hadn't yet seen.

And that filth would dirty them, uproot them, and rot them. The longer it went unchecked, the worse it would get.

This city would stop being somewhere fit for people to live.

You didn't need foresight, deep thought, or wisdom to see it. It was just the way it was.

Setting those thoughts aside, Enkrid looked at what the administrator had done and felt a genuine question rise.

"What are you counting on?"

It was an honest question. The numbers, the distances, the positions, the force, none of it meant anything.

"That's what I'd like to know," Ruagarne said.

Crossbows or not, they didn't have nearly enough to hold Enkrid.

"You dare!"

The bound castellan screamed at the administrator as though spitting blood. His eyes were red.

"You were the one pulling the strings?"

What the castellan had believed was that three criminal guilds controlled the city while the administrator was just a fool who leeched off them. It was the other way around.

The administrator was the one who had arranged for those three guilds to run free inside the city. He had been doing it long before the current castellan was pushed out.

And all of it was entertainment to him.

Watching the fool castellan rage. Watching the three guild bosses preen and strut around, each convinced they were the one in charge.

It was fun. There was pleasure in the watching.

He had put real effort into holding the whole city in his hands, and then this Iron Wall knight had arrived and started unraveling all of it.

He couldn't handle a knight without stepping in himself, so he had stepped in. This was a fight about who moved first.

Thinking that, the administrator spoke.

"Stay quiet. Keeping you alive has already been more trouble than it's worth."

Enkrid watched how things were unfolding and figured the three criminal guilds had been answering to the administrator all along.

Was this meant to be a threat? No. He knew it by instinct.

No one in this space could stop a single swing of his sword.

Even if the goddess of fortune decided not just to bless but to personally favor one of these soldiers, it would still be nearly impossible.

And one blocked swing wouldn't be the end of it.

His Will never ran dry. That let Enkrid do things at his current level that other knights simply couldn't, he could cut and cut again without tiring.

Very few people could honestly claim to be better than him at that.

Cutting through a thousand was usually just a figure of speech. Enkrid could actually do it.

"Fire!"

A commander suddenly shouted, and every crossbow operator pulled their trigger at once.

Thwang!

Strings of beast sinew snapped and sent dozens of bolts pouring out.

Enkrid drew his sword and swung at a speed no ordinary eye could follow.

Clang, clang, clang!

Every bolt caught the blade's arc and clattered to the ground.

The afterimage left behind by the sword's path, silver steel threaded through with black, looked like dark thread being embroidered across a silver surface.

Ruagarne's specialty was using her surroundings. She did exactly that, slipping quietly behind Enkrid while he deflected the bolts. With him in front, not a single bolt reached her.

Every mouth in the room fell open. The administrator was the only person here who knew who Enkrid actually was.

Clap, clap, clap.

The administrator applauded. It was genuine.

"Remarkable!"

He meant it. Watching someone bat away dozens of bolts with a single sword right in front of him, there was no way not to be impressed.

The castellan, who had been glaring at the administrator, found his own jaw dropping.

He had seen them fight earlier and knew this person was absurdly skilled, but this was beyond any category he had. Then again, this was the Iron Wall knight, so maybe it made sense.

The castellan had never once watched a knight fight. The gap between knowing it in his head and seeing it with his eyes was enormous, and all he could do was stare.

He had already witnessed it once before, and still found himself shocked all over again.

Enkrid moved straight to cut the administrator down.

Push off the ground, launch the body forward, bring the sword down. The line that followed was unbroken, the flowing sword he had learned from Aoara.

Slow-seeming, never pausing, and therefore faster for it.

Enkrid felt everything around him fall away behind him.

He felt it every time he stepped into the gap between sliced instants.

A speed that nothing short of a knight could react to.

The enemy had shown himself plainly. All there was to do was cut him down, no room for hesitation. Enkrid brought the sword down.

Thud. Crack.

Two sounds rang out. He had swung and pulled back as though drawing the blade out, feeding both the downward force and the pulling force directly into the target's skull.

He stepped back, and noticed the feeling in his hand was wrong.

Hard and tough. He had cut through something, but it didn't feel like cutting a person.

"Fall back!"

And then the thing whose skull had just been split open screamed at him, the lips spread wide to either side, head cleaved in two.

With that cry came an invisible force that shoved at Enkrid.

Any ordinary person would have been thrown backward. Enkrid redirected it, the deflection technique Audin had taught him. The Invisible Force flowed right off him, spent for nothing.

What felt natural to him probably looked impossible to anyone watching.

"Truly remarkable!"

The administrator cried out again. Enkrid let his sword hang and looked. A new head was growing inside the split one.

Of course the administrator had something to count on. He wouldn't have made his move otherwise.

He drew out the power he had kept hidden inside his own body.

The newly growing head had no mouth, only eyes. Then the administrator's human body began to melt like dripping wax, collapsing into a brownish mass.

Sinew and tendons showed through on the surface. One horizontal line split through the entire body. It rose and floated in the air.

In truth he had transformed through a grafted Demon Creature power, but to every eye in the room he simply looked like a monster. A moment ago he had been human, and now he was this. There was no way not to stare.

"A Demon Creature?"

"Evil Eye?"

The castellan and one of the spear bearers each said a word. An Evil Eye was a rare Demon Creature even within the Cursed Ground, one that carried telekinesis and the petrification curse.

The thing was nothing but an enormous eye. It had lost the vocal organs it possessed until moments ago, so it could no longer speak as it had before.

Born from some manner of experiment, it was also losing its reason gradually by this point.

What remained? The power of the Demon Creature.

The Evil Eye used telekinesis, pressing against the threat standing before it.

An invisible mass like a boulder came flying at Enkrid again. He held his ground by sheer force. Something was pushing at him, but it had nowhere near the force of Audin's shoves or Rem's hits.

The Evil Eye was a rare monster, yes, but its telekinesis was half-formed, the product of an experiment.

What a true Evil Eye from the Cursed Ground might do was one thing. What this one put out was unremarkable.

About as much as Fell, he figured, after gauging it. Fell wasn't neglecting his physical training, but compared to the others, he came up short.

So holding his ground was enough. The Evil Eye seemed to realize this and ripped the spears from the surrounding soldiers' hands.

Twenty spears rose into the air and aimed at Enkrid, targeting his head, the back of his skull, his shins, and every part of him at once.

Driving spear tips through telekinesis meant twenty could attack simultaneously in a way twenty spear bearers could never manage. Even the best-positioned soldiers were limited by the space their own bodies occupied.

Telekinesis had no such constraint.

Twenty spears aimed at everything from his head down to his calves.

All coming in with the strength of Fell behind them.

Enkrid gripped his hardest iron sword in his right hand and wrapped his left around Spark without drawing it. He held both and waited. When the blades were exactly within reach, he drew.

Clang, clang, crash, crunch!

The arc of hardest iron shattered spear tips, and Spark lightly sliced through the shafts.

Both weapons carried cutting power well above ordinary, and the hands holding them had the skill to match. This was the result.

"Wow."

A soldier let out a dumb sound of awe.

Hard to blame them. It was one extraordinary thing after another.

If telekinesis was the Evil Eye's first trick, there was another left. The monster gathered the last scraps of reason buried inside its instincts and pushed its intent out as a mental wave.

"Can you really fight without looking?"

The Evil Eye opened. The horizontal line split apart and poured out gray light. The petrification curse.

"Everyone keep your heads down!"

Ruagarne called out from where she was watching. Everyone dropped their heads at once.

The man the others called a fool grabbed his companions' heads and shoved them down. The castellan ducked quickly too.

"Wha, ugh."

A few soldiers and guild members who reacted too slowly and stared blankly turned to stone.

With a grinding crack, gray statues stood where they had been, frozen from the eyes to every inch of their bodies.

Enkrid dropped his gaze as well.

In truth, something far worse than the petrification curse had already taken root in him, so he probably could have looked without harm. But Enkrid didn't know that.

Did it put him at a disadvantage?

No. Fighting without looking wasn't especially difficult for him.

"Cover your eyes and block what comes."

It was one of Jaxon's training methods, fighting on presence alone, with no sight at all.

Even with eyes open, Jaxon sometimes vanished entirely in his movements. Training blind meant detecting someone like that from scratch, which was its own ordeal.

There had been days like that. Many days training alongside Jaxon.

Enkrid had enjoyed them, kept going through the slow progress, never resting, doing it every single day without burning out.

Compared to those days, the conditions now were far easier.

The floating thing cast a shadow below it, carried a smell, and made sounds he could track.

The Evil Eye's petrification curse was an inescapable dead end for most. Not for Enkrid.

None of the Madman Knights would fall to something like this, he thought. Krais aside.

Letting something like this land after all that training would be a waste of every day that had gone into it.

Enkrid read the shadow's movement and tracked the position.

The Evil Eye's gaze scattered its petrifying curse, but against someone who wasn't looking, it was useless.

So it turned to telekinesis, hurling fallen sword fragments and bolts at him.

Enkrid swung his sword without urgency and knocked them all away.

He walked toward the monster at an unhurried pace. When he reached it, he raised his sword.

Head angled down, both hands gripping the hardest iron sword, blade raised straight up toward the sky.

The shadows stretched the shapes of the Evil Eye and Enkrid into a long line that fell across the castellan's field of vision.

Unable to close his eyes, he stared only at the floor. The shadow looked like the blade of a guillotine. Then the blade came down.

Whoosh. Thud. Crack.

The eye, roughly the size of a grown man, split in two. Black blood sprayed in every direction.

Thud.

The body that had been floating in the air dropped to the ground. Some of the blood hit the back of the castellan's head, the tops of his hands, and his face.

Warm, with a sharp iron stench. A few drops ran down his back. He might have flinched at the smell and the unpleasantness, but the castellan only kept his head down.

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