A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 603

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 603: Did You Sleep Well?

= = =

"I'll cut the Walking Fire."

Enkrid said it from inside the mirror, and the moment Esther heard those words she shifted into a panther and ran.

A real panther wouldn't have had the endurance for a full day's sprint.

But she was a witch, so she could run all day. And Cross Guard was no great distance at a panther's speed.

She was lucky to have been walking along the Pen-Hanil riverbank rather than staying near Border Guard, which put her even closer. She ran flat out toward Cross Guard.

A river was nothing. She crossed it with "Del Grecher's Promenade."

Thin ice formed beneath each running step, and she used it as her footing.

She had to shift back to human form to cast the spell, but her physical strength didn't change with the form, so she was still far faster than any ordinary person.

She kept running that way, shifting back and forth between panther and human as needed, spending magical power alongside stamina. It cost her in both, but it was fast.

'Am I already too late?'

The thought crossed her mind, but it didn't make her hesitate.

If she stopped just because she might be too late, that would be the end of it.

Esther ran. The traces Apostle Anella had left behind from manifesting the Walking Fire were vivid in the air, easy to follow.

Midway across the river, still heading for Cross Guard, she changed direction on instinct.

A skilled witch knew how to read the trail of a spell.

This couldn't be a coincidence. It was connected to Enkrid. If something was heading that way, the right move was to intercept it before it became a problem.

The judgment and the action came as one.

No need to wait for stars and read their positions. The scent of magical power was thick.

She ran on, and the ground where the spell had taken form came into view almost immediately. A hundred dead bodies. More precisely, she saw pits where everything had been swallowed by flame and reduced to ash.

'Forbidden spell. A spell of annihilation.'

So it really had been the Walking Fire.

The traces of an annihilation spell, one that had to consume everything around it before it could end, one of the forbidden spells among forbidden spells.

As she drew close to the pit, a twin-headed human-faced dog came charging at her.

She had already sensed it, so there was no hesitation.

"Dmyuler's Scythe."

Esther flicked her hand. The seemingly meaningless gesture pulled the wind into a mass that formed into a blade and flew.

Thunk.

Two heavy wind blades split apart and carved through both heads of the Demon Creature from crown to trunk. The human-faced dog cracked apart, split not just at the two heads but into three pieces, and collapsed, spilling black blood and entrails.

The momentum from its charge carried the halves a short distance further before they stopped.

Her hand still raised, Esther's gaze shifted to one side. Someone had spread a perception-interference spell there.

She had detected it through sense alone. And if you detected something, the obvious next step was to attack.

She wove a hand seal, channeled her magical power, murmured the rune words, and called forth the being she had kept stored in her World of Spells.

"Come out, Bon Head."

It was an improved version of the Flash Golem the sorcerer Enkrid had dealt with before.

At her gesture, a circle of light drew itself on the ground, and flesh and blood wove together within it as the Flash Golem stepped out.

The golem charged the moment it was summoned, without ceremony.

The most effective way to break a perception-interference spell was blunt physical force.

The answer, the most reliable one.

The golem kicked off the ground with a thud and lunged, and the faint dark Veil rippled and scattered. A voice came through.

"How dare you."

A woman burst out from within it. Esther looked at her face, then cheerfully ignored her and kept weaving hand seals.

'Not ordinary.'

Ignoring her wasn't the same as looking down on her. She simply judged that speed mattered more right now.

The magical power radiating from the woman who had just emerged was dizzying.

Proof that she currently held denser power than Esther herself. That was because Esther was still rebuilding her reserves. Violet spiritual energy surged above the woman's shoulders.

"A mere witch."

That was the kind of thing someone who called herself a divine apostle would say.

Esther kept weaving hand seals and took stock of her own condition.

Thanks to Enkrid, she had cleared away almost all the curse.

Now she was building her World of Spells back up from nothing. She hadn't yet recovered her former strength.

Was that a disadvantage? Maybe. But it wasn't a reason to stop.

Among the countless days that had piled up, there were days Enkrid had contacted her through the mirror. Every one of those times, Esther had run all the way here.

"O demon god, here stand a son and daughter who wish to become your own."

Apostle Anella called out. She had already recognized that Esther was no ordinary witch. She reflexively drew the weapon she had prepared for after the Walking Fire.

Modified Ghouls that had lost their minds burst from among the corpses.

Every one of them could fairly be called a monster, with physical abilities developed to a dangerous extreme.

There were also skeleton soldiers assembling themselves from recombined bones, Necromancy woven together with spells the Apostle had built into her own technique.

Their bodies caught fire. A pack of burning monsters.

She couldn't have used them alongside the Walking Fire, since they would have burned each other and accomplished nothing. But against people already exhausted from stopping the Walking Fire, they were a deadly weapon.

Esther didn't let a single spark through.

She didn't use Bon Head here. Meeting physical force with physical force had its place, but this wasn't the moment.

She recalled the golem first to recover a small amount of magical power.

"Del Grecher's Territory Mark."

A Borrowed Spell borrows the existence of another being. Dmyuler, for instance, was a wind spirit that had fallen for the pleasure of cutting, a being that loved slaughter. Del Grecher was different, a four-legged creature that had transformed and now lived among glaciers, a being that loved to take walks.

And Esther was the kind of genius who could blend Borrowed Spells with Creation Spells.

"Burn to ash."

Anella was an apostle who handled calamities, and her talent with fire in particular was extraordinary.

The flames on the Ghouls grew.

Over them, Esther brought out a spell she hadn't yet refined again but had already completed long before.

"Permafrost."

Crackle.

From beneath Esther's feet, ice crystals bloomed outward as though being born. The temperature dropped sharply even without a blizzard.

It was said that if you traveled through the glaciers all the way to the far north, you would find a sky painted in colors beyond description and a land where your very breath froze solid.

That land's name was permafrost. Eternal frozen ground.

Spells were shaped by words. Esther's spell was no different.

The radius was only about twenty steps, but everything within that space froze. The surroundings locked in ice, and the fire died.

The burning Ghouls and skeletons lost the foundation their bodies depended on and began to falter.

"You're casting a spell like that without preparation? Without a sacrifice?"

Anella was genuinely stunned. There was a spell called Calamity Snowstorm, one of the forbidden spells. It couldn't be used without a frozen sacrifice, and it required offering a frozen piece of the caster's own body.

And now a spell of similar power was bearing down on her.

The range wasn't wide, true, but even so there was no way not to be shaken.

She had no intention of taking it lying down, so even as she spoke she was moving her magical power, weaving hand seals, chanting.

"Maelak's Flame Dancer."

She cast her own spell. Apostle Anella's body burst into flame and fire spread in every direction.

On one side, fire rose. On the other, breath froze.

The wind itself seemed to freeze, cutting like a blade.

"Biting Wind Scythe."

Esther pushed out another spell, a reworking of Dmyuler's Scythe.

Anella's eyes went wide. Another spell, in a different form, on top of this? After manifesting Permafrost, a spell the world had never seen?

To give only the conclusion: several more spells were exchanged after that, but Esther won and Anella died.

The gap in their strength was not large. In a fight between sorcerers, when the difference isn't overwhelming, the outcome often comes down to how much preparation each side has made, and neither of them had been able to prepare specifically against the other.

If anything, Esther had been running to get here and was tired, which put her at a slight disadvantage.

But the feel she had for spells, and the creative spells she had built from that instinct, closed the gap.

Put more plainly, the difference in raw genius was stark.

It was early winter, and naturally, spells that dropped the temperature were more useful than flames.

A true witch turned even the environment into her ally.

That was why there was a saying that no one could beat a witch in a witch's cottage.

'I pushed too hard.'

Even so, her body had clearly taken the strain. Esther shook all over. She needed something to add warmth, eat a seed that gave off heat, or wrap herself in a similar kind of energy.

At the very least she could have used Rem's insulated leather cloak.

She couldn't go far, so she headed for Cross Guard.

Finding Enkrid wasn't difficult. There was a reason she had given him the Spell Object she made.

She arrived by tracing the trail of her own handiwork. Even wearing a robe that maintained body heat, she was shaking from head to toe. The early-winter wind felt like it was reaching her bones.

She was cold. Cold enough that it felt like nothing she had ever experienced in her life.

"Esther?"

Standing before her was that man, Enkrid.

He hadn't changed. His two blue eyes cut through the pre-dawn dark, and even before sunrise there was a fire in him that hadn't gone out.

"Hold me."

Esther said it as she lost consciousness.

* * *

Enkrid caught her on reflex. Her skin was as cold as an icicle. Her face had gone blue, and frost had formed in her hair.

"Rua."

"I'm up."

"Get the castellan and bring every warming stone you can find."

"I'll do it."

Ruagarne jumped to her feet and ran, and Enkrid lifted Esther in his arms.

He didn't know exactly what had happened.

'Feels like it might have something to do with me, though.'

That was his gut feeling.

He started by laying her in a bed. He had seen a few people with frostbite before.

It was when some lunatic noble had decided to go gathering medicinal herbs from polar lands.

A truly insane undertaking, but money had been tight then, and he had taken the job as a guide. Three companions died from frostbite.

The ones who survived had to have their toes cut off.

If a passing Priest hadn't helped them out, they would probably all have died.

"You carry a sun inside your chest," the Priest had said. Everyone else was freezing to death, but Enkrid had held on tolerably well, and that was what prompted the remark.

"If I leave her like this she'll freeze to death."

Enkrid muttered to himself and lay down in the bed beside Esther. He pulled the blanket over both of them, held her close, and said, "Get hot water ready. Delma."

"Hmm? Oh. Yes."

The inn worker had been up early that morning and had watched some woman arrive out of nowhere, and then his hero holding that woman.

'A lover?'

Maybe.

He had been about to step forward, but the mood seemed strange, and somehow he ended up watching from the shadows instead, and Enkrid had noticed and called for him.

"Not too hot."

"Yes."

Enkrid removed Esther's robe and took off his own shirt before wrapping his arms around her.

The body heat beneath the robe was still ice cold.

He deliberately kept his eyes off her. He had no interest in having them pulled out.

He held her like that for a full day and night, had Ruagarne soak her in lukewarm water, take her out, dry her off, then lifted her and held her again.

"My body temperature is too low to be much help," Ruagarne said. Frog body heat ran cooler than a human's, so all she could do was worry.

"I scraped together everything the city had."

The castellan brought several warming stones. This wretched poor city had no shortage of drugs and gamblers, yet the moment you needed something specific there was never enough of it.

That would change eventually.

Enkrid held Esther for two days. Only then did her body temperature slowly begin to return. Color crept back into her face as well.

He kept sleeping and waking with Esther in his arms as the early mornings repeated. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself looking into a pair of blue eyes that matched his own.

"Did you sleep well?"

Enkrid asked.

"Why? The two of us? In the same bed?"

Esther asked back. Her memory had gone blank for a stretch.

"There's no better way to bring a body temperature back up."

He wasn't literally carrying a sun inside him, but at least he was the only one who could hold her and keep her stable.

Just by breathing, she had been pulling the temperature of the air around her down. As though she had brought back some curse with her.

Enkrid had held out fine, but not everyone could have. Delma had said it felt cold just being nearby and refused to come close.

Even holding her, Enkrid had felt his Will rise up on its own and stir through his body at times.

Proof that the artificial chill coming off her wasn't natural.

She had clearly done something involving magic, but there was no one to ask. What else was there to do but hold her and endure.

There wasn't much point running through all of that out loud.