WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 608: I Saved You, So Bow Down

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"Aaagh!"

"A monster!"

"Run!"

Almost everyone in the area fell back in a wave. All but a handful.

One solid rock held its ground in the middle of that retreating tide. A Holy Warrior radiating gray sacred light. He took stock of the people crashing through their lines.

'They can fight.'

These attackers had burst in out of nowhere and were cutting through the middle of a live battle. He had no idea who they were. Mercenaries? Had the monastery requested reinforcements from somewhere?

He could see the navy cloak, but the emblem stitched into it didn't register.

He only clocked that the wearer was dangerous. That was enough.

'Where did they roll in from?'

There was a reason Muel could strut around playing god and shout his proclamations, and it wasn't only because the true God was absent. Part of what gave that delusion its foundation was that genuinely powerful fighters had been gathering under his banner one after another.

Where there is strength, there is conviction, as they say. If someone strong enough pressed the claim, forging a new god wasn't impossible.

That was what this much collected force implied.

Half the Holy Knight Order had assembled here. That said everything. The one watching Enkrid now was himself a Holy Warrior of the Scales, one of those capable fighters.

'Could these be people Overdier quietly cultivated?'

Word had already spread that Prophet Overdier was marching at the head of his own troops.

So why strike now, by ambush? Was there a tactical advantage?

He couldn't see one.

Then why? The question ran its course and the Holy Warrior moved.

He decided finding the reason for their attack mattered less than breaking their momentum.

One of them did nothing but swing a blade in each hand, quietly, without even a battle cry, yet that single person had made an entire army buckle. No torch was being waved at insects, yet the army scattered all the same.

"Ha."

The Holy Warrior of the Scales drove his heels into his mount's belly. The warhorse surged forward with him in the saddle.

Similar scenes played out across the field. There were many Holy Warriors who had studied strategy and tactics from childhood.

Some of them peeled off to target the figures carving through the army. Rem and Ragna among others.

"That's far enough."

The Holy Warrior thrust his blade and spoke. He had taken a flanking position, crept in quietly, and the weapon in his hand was the slender sword his discipline favored. A damp, sneaking attack.

Enkrid had sensed the approach long before it arrived. He had taken far worse from Jaxon on this exact kind of strike.

By Jaxon's own word, belonging to Georg's Blade meant you could not die even if a master of the assassin's craft came for you.

He was not going to fall to something like this. He couldn't afford to.

Enkrid moved only as much as he needed to. He raised Spark and angled it diagonally into the path of the incoming blade.

Ting.

The edges crossed and the trajectory bent.

He blocked that? Surprise spread openly across the Holy Warrior's face. Even so, he pressed the flats together and shoved, trying to push Enkrid off balance. Noticing there was no saddle, he'd wanted to topple him. That was a fool's plan.

Odd-Eye gave a snort, shifted one hind leg back, and let Enkrid keep his center easily. Then the horse flexed its neck and headbutted the Holy Warrior's mount.

Thwack.

The warhorse screamed.

"What the--"

The Holy Warrior lurched in his seat as his warhorse stumbled beneath him.

Enkrid gave a silent thanks for the unexpected help and thrust with the true-silver blade. No saddle meant he couldn't brace with his legs, but Odd-Eye raised its back just naturally enough to do that work for him.

With Odd-Eye holding him steady, all Enkrid had to do was torque his hips and shoulder and drive the sword forward. His whole body aligned. The result was a thin flash of gold that split the air with a clean ring and punched a hole in the Holy Warrior's throat.

Precise force control and fine targeting, driving through the gap in the armor.

No armor can wrap a body completely.

Especially not plate.

Thunk.

The flash did its work and pulled back, the wet sound of entry folding into the motion. A hole opened in the throat, and blood fountained through it with a gurgling rush.

At nearly the same moment, Rem brought his axe down into his opponent's forehead.

Crack.

"Do I look like some stray ghoul to you?"

The one facing him had been swinging a hammer and radiating gray sacred light. Rem dropped the spear he'd been holding, hatcheted the man's skull, and punched the horse in the side of the head for good measure.

A Holy Warrior with an axe buried in his head had nothing more to say. The dead don't speak.

The warhorse was the same. Rem's fist wasn't in Audin's class, but it sat well within the range of a lethal weapon.

The one who took the axe had his eyes go wide before he folded onto the ground. His horse collapsed beside him, which was either a comfort to the dead man or simply the way things ended.

Ragna cut through both a man and a horse in one stroke. He drew a single line with his sword and split them clean. He had spotted the incoming attacker, gone straight at them at a dead run, and that was the slash that came out.

It was Will to cut, sharpened further by the technique he had watched Enkrid use the moment he arrived -- pouring everything into the Will at once.

The skill thief had stolen another skill.

The warhorse he rode buckled at the knee from the sheer force he had routed through his legs, but he distributed his weight and kept his sword moving.

Even with less power behind the blade, it was more than enough to cut.

Slice.

Plate armor, horse, and Holy Warrior all fell under the same arc. The Holy Warrior's torso separated top from bottom where the blade crossed it. The horse died with its skull split.

Three Holy Warriors had held this section of the line. All three went down without absorbing a single blow in return.

Enkrid had also been picking off the most spirited fighters throughout the enemy formation one after another, which made the collapse faster.

"Run!"

"Aaagh!"

"Those things aren't human! They're Demon Creatures!"

"Help me! Mama!"

"Lona! Lona!"

Screams soaked in terror filled the air on all sides, and the space around them emptied out fast. Enkrid looked at the opening in front of him. The path was clear.

Ragna and Rem had the same quiet clearing around them. Every member of the Madman Knights gathered in around Enkrid.

"Let's go."

He moved forward the way someone might step out for an evening stroll. The path was short, but he turned the moment over in his mind as he walked.

He had done it by reflex, but it really was cutting the enemy's momentum in the exact sense of the phrase.

He picked through the sequence of what he'd just done naturally. What was the root of it? How had it come together?

An ordinary genius probably wouldn't need to retrace something after it had already worked, but Enkrid was not that, so he went back through it one piece at a time. Doing that, something came into view.

'Thought acceleration.'

Cutting through the Walking Fire had not only taught him how to pour Will out in an explosive burst.

In those endlessly repeated days, Enkrid had kept pushing his own thinking faster. Desperately trying to find solutions inside a shrinking window of time.

That desperation, that relentless grinding experience, had condensed. A moment ago it had flared into instant judgment.

'Not bad at all.'

On top of that, the blade Aetri had made for him fit his hand exactly right.

The area in front of Noah's monastery was tangled with thornbushes, and the stumps of what had clearly been part of the palisade lay broken and scattered. The ragged, splintered cross-sections and the exposed wood grain told Enkrid a battle had already been fought here.

Blood stains too. A few archers with bandaged wounds, and in front of them a man in a plate cuirass standing guard.

The man in the plate cuirass spoke. His face was worn with exhaustion, but his eyes were clear.

"Who are you?"

The question was full of confusion, and fairly so. One moment they had all expected to die, and out of nowhere a small unit had cut straight through the enemy formation.

Not only that, but the three Holy Warriors who had formed the encirclement -- no small challenge by any measure -- had been cut down without any visible strain.

Even looking at the three corpses in the distance right now, it was hard to believe.

Who were these people.

He was honest enough with himself to admit he couldn't guarantee his own victory against them.

So he had asked out of pure shock, but underneath the question he was screaming inside that they had to be friendly.

His wish came true. He had held a vague, formless belief they must be on his side.

"I know Noah, the abbot. Mind if we come in?"

The owner of the black hair and blue eyes spoke. The gaze under that bare head, without so much as a helmet, carried quiet confidence.

The man in the armor wanted to nod, but he hesitated. A few days ago, a traitor inside had nearly gotten Noah killed, and he was the one who had stopped it.

As it happened, Noah was standing directly behind him. The man from the Cult Extermination Priest Corps looked back over his shoulder.

The good shepherd who had lost one eye, the abbot, opened his mouth with a startled look.

"How are you here?"

He had seen a face he never expected, so the words were really asking what in the world had brought this person here. With the Priest Corps watching, the other man replied.

"Came for a cup of tea."

A plain answer. Enkrid had remembered something he'd said before and used it as his excuse.

"Come by sometime and I'll give you a decent cup."

Right, he had said that. Noah remembered it too. He had even set aside some tea leaves to dry -- nothing expensive, but something worth drinking -- for the day this man might come. Things had been short on food and they'd gone two days without eating, but he hadn't touched the tea leaves. As if there would have been time to brew tea while all of this was happening.

"Do you have any?"

Enkrid asked.

"We do."

Noah answered, still slightly at a loss.

"Then let's go in."

There was no gate, just thornbushes and what remained of the palisade blocking the narrow entrance, but as the Cult Extermination Priest Corps members had gone over the wall earlier, the whole group went over now.

They couldn't bring all the horses over at once, so while some worked at widening a gap in the palisade, the horse carrying Enkrid simply jumped the wall on its own.

No running start. A few steps back, a quiet push off the ground, and over. Even the enemy soldiers standing there dazed after being routed found their mouths falling open at the sight.

"Oh."

"Whoa."

A small cheer rippled through the enemy troops. The people inside the wall were twice as shocked as the ones outside.

"Wah!"

"Ah!"

Among those who had grabbed improvised spears out of anxiety and sheer determination to hold on somehow, a few were so startled they stumbled backward and sat down hard.

"Won't bite."

Enkrid said it like it was nothing, slid off the horse, and walked on. Noah followed behind.

Sinar, who had been watching the whole thing from the side, turned to Ruagarne next to her.

"It looks to me like he's embarrassed and that's why he said it that way. Am I reading this right?"

Rem answered instead, with a snicker.

"You've got good eyes. That's exactly it. He can't bring himself to say he came to help, so he's saying he came for tea. That crazy man is more easily embarrassed than you'd think."

Since Enkrid wasn't around, Sinar didn't bother with any elf-style quips. She just nodded.

Ruagarne puffed her cheeks out and laughed.

"Now that I think about it, he's always been like that. He used to say it was just a bit of swordplay, nothing more."

He had saved an entire city and his summary was that it was just a bit of swordplay.

If you counted carefully, it hadn't even been one bit of swordplay. It had been many.

"Right? You think he could ever say, I saved you all, now bow? Not in a thousand years. But then people cheer for him and he's quietly thrilled about it. Did you not know that about him?"

Rem was chattering away with the two of them playing along. Ragna heard it and spoke.

"Did we need to loop around to get in? Why not come in from the front?"

The front was where Ragna had been positioned. He was wondering why everyone had moved toward the commander's side instead.

Rem responded with flat disbelief.

"Someone really ought to put a compass in that idiot's skull."

Jaxon walked a short distance behind them without a word. Standing with the rest would lower his standards. That was simply how it was.

From the outside, it was all the same picture. In a situation like this, the person maintaining a precise and deliberate interval from the group was not going to look ordinary either.

Fell, Ropord, and Teresa might not have joined in this kind of atmosphere back in the old days, but how many years had it been at the Border Guard now.

"Hey, welcome-to-the-place spar when we get settled?" Ropord threw it to Fell first.

"Count this sister in," Teresa cut in right behind that.

"With that level of talent, you'll never catch me," Fell answered.

Ropord scoffed at that.

At some point this one had moved past secretly training in the dark and started grinding so openly and so relentlessly that his tongue practically sweated -- yet every other sentence out of his mouth was still about talent.

Fell had by now become known as the hardest worker at the Border Guard, a fact only Fell himself refused to accept.

"No, I'm a person of exceptional natural gifts," he would say, right to your face.

The Madman Knights cut through the monastery like that, and naturally, everyone nearby watched and heard every word of it.

Two days without proper food. If you had eyes and ears and the ability to think, you had felt with certainty that death was coming. The way these people inside had been looking at life had already lost hope -- it felt like a story whose ending had been fixed. More than a few had considered taking their own lives, but for those who believed in God, that was the greatest sin of all.

So they had simply endured. And now these people walked in, and they were too calm. Far too calm.

The Cult Extermination Priest Corps member who had been guiding the group in Noah's place could not hold back any longer.

"Who exactly are you people?"

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