WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 613: Ragna's Iron Wall
= = =
Ropord's specialty was the accumulative, calculated style of fighting, and from it he had gained a particular gift.
A broad view, like watching a battlefield from above.
From the moment the fight began, he had been using that wide perspective to observe the enemy. He had spotted gaps in the Holy Warrior formation long ago. He simply lacked the blade to tear through them.
Until now.
He started running numbers. Fell's explosive single strike, what was needed to fill the opening it would create, the required force and speed, the available time for each motion.
All of that calculated, Ropord jumped sideways from atop a blood-spattered dirt mound and shouted. It looked sudden, like pure impulse.
"I'll definitely kill you!"
It read as a charge aimed at the one with the goatee. The impulsive movement naturally opened a gap in Ropord's guard, and the enemy saw it and lunged.
Clang! Clang! Screeech!
The curving blade he deflected off his flat, then twisted his waist to dodge the spiked blunt weapon that followed. Either the dodge came a half-beat late or a metal spike on the mace caught his cape, because a strip of it tore away.
Right now.
Ropord shook the torn strip loose and flung it at a Holy Warrior's eyes. The flapping cloth blocked one of them for a moment.
The goatee was never the target. He was going for a Holy Warrior of junior knight caliber who had been threading his blade through every gap he could find, fishing for a killing blow.
"You!"
He roared at the goatee with Will packed into his voice, something between a battle cry and a show of Pressure. For a junior knight, it was an impressive display of momentum, though it carried little real weight. More than anything, it was about raising the fighting spirit.
But it had one very clear use.
The thrown strip and the shout together made his intent unmistakable. It said, plainly: I'm going for the goatee Holy Warrior.
All of it happened in the span of a single breath.
At junior knight level, all five senses had sharpened well past ordinary limits, so losing your line of sight for a moment wasn't fatal. But the difference between seeing and not seeing was real. The Grey Holy Army's junior knight felt Ropord's momentum and trained attention and weapon toward it, already beginning the next motion.
On the outside it looked like nothing more than a slight adjustment of arm and leg angles, but insight rose on its own and read what was coming, so the next move had already begun.
A razor-thin gap. That was all.
Just before shouting to display momentum at the goatee, Ropord spoke inwardly, a beat ahead.
Now.
And as though he had read that thought, Fell moved. He caught the moment Ropord had made, purely by feel.
Everything is decided in an instant. The swing of a blade and the decision to swing it.
Fell focused on that instant.
"The stance of finding gaps and driving into them is fine, but what do you do when there are no gaps to find? You need to learn the calculated style."
That was the advice Enkrid had given him. In hindsight, it was probably the most important thing anyone had ever told him, but the line tacked onto the end had stuck in his craw.
"That said, do things the way you want. Nobody's stopping you."
Honestly, that second part appealed to him twice as much as the first.
The path with a clear direction was easier to walk. He just didn't want to walk it.
Fell never scrambled to look for a gap.
If there's no gap, can't I just build a strike that turns anywhere into one?
Everyone's road was different. His was too. Enkrid had respected that.
This was the moment to show what that road had given him, shown to an enemy.
He stamped his left foot and dropped his stance, pushing forward low, nearly scraping the ground. From there, Fell drew his sword upward in one cut.
He wrung every muscle in his body into tension, generating spring, then layered Will on top of it.
You can't dodge this.
He fixed the target in his mind's eye. That sharpened his Will further and added explosive speed to the strike.
A single clear intention becomes force in the blade. That was what Will was. Shapeless strength built from willpower.
The upward cut Fell released drew a silver curtain through the air, rising from floor to sky. It looked like a curtain, and it also looked like an underground spring bursting upward.
Slash! Thud!
Fell's sword opened a Holy Warrior from the groin to the chin. Between the split jaw, a tongue cleaved lengthwise was visible.
The speed of the strike left the cuts clean and visible before blood even had the chance to fall.
The Holy Warrior who took the cut could have blocked it, if only Ropord hadn't stolen his sight for that one moment.
Even with a fatal wound, death might not have been certain.
None of that mattered anymore.
Whatever the process, dead is dead.
Fell stepped back at less than a quarter of his charging speed, drained.
Splurt.
Only then did blood pour from the split body.
Several Holy Warriors flinched at the sight and reflexively swung their weapons. A spear-shaped blunt weapon with a round iron ball at the tip came down at Fell's head.
Clang!
Ropord stopped it.
Swinging blades, chunks of iron, hammers, spearheads, all of it. Ropord blocked every one.
His leather pauldrons were shredded and hanging in strips. Part of the chainmail had cracked too. He had cuts and scrapes. Blood ran along his forearm, but not a single wound was fatal.
Exactly four and a half breaths. That was the time Ropord bought. Within those breaths, Fell regulated his breathing and recovered.
"Going in again."
Ropord said it without looking back. A surge of exhilaration from the last exchange had lit his whole body up.
Fell felt the same. Instead of answering, he tapped Ropord on the back.
They might look like they were always one step from tearing into each other, but at the end of it, these two were both under the roof of a certain lunatic named Enkrid. Pulling together at a moment like this was only natural.
A single cut had shut the Holy Warriors' mouths.
"These crazy bastards."
Only their leader managed to say anything, and even that came out sounding like a compliment.
The way he saw it, if almost anything had gone slightly differently in that exchange, the one who struck first would be dead.
Right, impressive, but that was the kind of lunacy where being off by a hair meant dying on the spot.
When you fight as a group, you could see it clearly.
You couldn't just stake your own life on something like that.
People normally kept some defensive reserve even in the middle of attacking, just in case.
And these two just did that? Past bold, straight into madness.
It left him genuinely baffled.
"Wheel formation!"
The leader called out. Fell just regulated his breathing. Ropord started calculating again.
The two of them pooled their strength for a moment, working as one.
The fight's outcome didn't tip in a single instant, but it slowly began to lean.
And during that same stretch, Enkrid and the Grey Holy Army faced each other across the field. A standoff.
A cold wind cut between the two groups with a soft whistle.
If the wind had a self, it would have been watching, unable to look away.
Just before Ropord, Fell, and Teresa sealed off one flank, Enkrid had said something to the enemy facing him, and the result was that Muel's round, well-fed face had gone a little red.
* * *
"All your prosperity seems to have settled in the belly and the chin."
That was the first thing Enkrid said the moment they came down the slope and stood face to face.
"What?"
Muel was the center of power within the order, one of the Seven Apostles of Plenty. He had never heard anything like this.
You could fairly say it was the most abusive thing anyone had said to him in close to ten years.
Even when the Holy Warriors and Priests under him got rough with their words, Muel had never been their target.
Who would dare face him and say something like this?
"You're fat," Enkrid said again.
It was blunt enough that ignoring it should have been easy, but the attitude of the man saying it was grating.
He had been a thorn in the side from the start, so maybe that was inevitable.
To make it worse, the one in the insulated leather standing beside him was snickering, and the languid one with the greatsword was laughing along too.
"A foul mind calls foul flesh to itself," Frog added.
That made Muel genuinely unpleasant.
"I hope the heart grows rich first. Brother," said the one who looked like a big bear.
Muel wasn't sure what to make of that either.
Above all else, Muel had not lived a life known for patience.
He wanted to smash that head with a Flail right now. And he knew he had no reason to endure this.
"Right, what's the use of talking. What those tainted by Evil Spirits need is a Mace, nothing more."
Muel was, in his own way, declaring them demons and the corrupt vessels of evil spirits. Nobody paid it any attention.
"I'd prefer not to let a single one through. Who wants to handle it?"
Enkrid said it, and Ragna, skipping a reply, shifted his feet to one side.
He walked about five steps to the left away from the group, and from behind, Rem said, "That's left. Not straight ahead."
"What?"
Ragna stopped and turned to look back.
"You can't even tell straight ahead from left and right? Barbarian?"
Rem was trying to say he couldn't find his way, but the message wasn't getting through at all, which was enough to make Rem furious.
"Can I at least hit him once before we start?" Rem asked, dead serious.
"No," Enkrid said, shaking his head.
No tension whatsoever. That only deepened Muel's irritation.
"Are you just planning to watch?" Muel said. Anyone could hear the anger packed into his voice.
Naturally, several figures stepped out from within the Grey Holy Army.
They were easy to recognize at a glance. Everything about them-the way they walked, the eyes quietly measuring angles, the hands hanging loose and apparently idle, the halberds raised skyward that somehow gave the impression they were aimed at their own foreheads.
They had no intention of hiding themselves.
"No wonder Sir Overdier laments," Audin said, watching them.
Enkrid asked with his eyes what he meant.
"Precious combat strength being pulled away like this when even combining all forces together would barely be enough, that kind of lament. Brother."
"Where did the wandering bear just crawl in from?" Rem said as he drew his axe.
The number of apparent Holy Knights was four. The intangible pressure they radiated had settled over the whole group, but the single motion of drawing an axe cut that pressure away.
Hadn't someone said that in invisible battles of momentum, Sorcery held an edge over Will?
It seemed that was right.
Rem had just proved it.
He looked like he could take on all of them alone, and the force of that wrapped around the group like a wall.
"Discussion comes later. Brother, trusting only that axe and causing trouble," Audin said.
"Discussion, my ass."
Rem laughed it off.
Audin had said before leaving that he would educate Rem when he returned, and Rem was jabbing at exactly that.
"You all seem awfully relaxed, pilgrims."
The one with something wound tightly around both wrists spoke. The Holy Knight Azratic, bearer of the epithet Joint-Crushing Serpent, child of the God of the Scales.
"So you're predicting your own victory?" Azratic asked again.
Enkrid had heard that question before he even came out here.
Well, it wasn't worth answering for this crowd.
He had already answered it before coming here, in words and in his own heart, so there was nothing left to shake. Even standing here with a vicious Holy Knight raising killing intent in front of him, the Grey Holy Army spread out behind.
"This one is mine."
Audin stepped toward Azratic, wearing a pair of silver metal gauntlets Enkrid hadn't seen before.
Whatever anyone said here, one person had already started on his own task.
"Nobody passes through from here."
That was Ragna. He had stepped to the side, and the Will behind those words was so vivid and clear that eyes turned toward him without thinking.
Every last one of them looked, Enkrid included.
Audin and Azratic had begun their staring contest. Enkrid had come face to face with some halberd-wielder. Rem was waggling his axe at the supposed Apostle of Plenty. Meanwhile, Ragna thought taking on a Holy Knight would probably be interesting enough, but he had been far more curious about the iron wall Enkrid had once raised.
Enkrid had poured in Will with brute force and spread a massive display of Pressure.
So what about him?
What can I do, and how?
Make the same thing Enkrid made? That was built on a foundation of endless, brute-force Will. The Pressure they called an iron wall had to be sustained by pouring Will into it continuously.
It wasn't exactly to his taste.
Setting aside whether his own Will could even sustain it, wasn't that approach the opposite of elegant?
Saying a single line had drawn everyone's attention meant it had also drawn the enemy's eyes.
Several commanders clenched their back teeth hard enough for the jaw muscles to visibly bulge.
"Fire."
Thud, thud, thud, thud!
Dozens of bolts flew at close range, aimed at Ragna.
Hf.
Ragna swung his sword. No windup visible. Of course that was how it looked to ordinary eyes. In reality, he had gripped the handle, opened his chest, and shifted his body's angle to swing. But still, he laid the flat of the blade sideways so it passed first through the space the bolts were already claiming.
Boom!
The sound the swinging sword dragged out of the air was close to an explosion. That explosion worked like a wall, stopping the bolts that followed.
He had twisted the trajectory of the bolts with the wind his sword created.
Easy to say. An entirely different matter to actually do.
Azratic, watching, decided this was something he himself simply could not manage.
"Get down. Stand up and you die."
He had done something that looked like magic, deflecting bolts with a sword-made wind, and then he said that.
As he spoke, Ragna gripped the sword handle in both hands and turned his waist and shoulder to the left.
What that stance announced was obvious. A horizontal sweep.
"I said it."
The warning was over. He gave the enemy no room. Even if he had, they didn't look like they would listen.
Ragna kicked off the ground and moved, sword swinging. One cut, but not just a cut.
It was the genius called Ragna putting everything he had seen and absorbed to use.
This genius swordsman who couldn't find his way anywhere swung his sword and ran from left to right.
His speed was that of a horse at full gallop, and the blade in his hand was a guillotine that severed whatever lay before it.
The cut that traced a long line using his feet as its foundation was the technique Aoara had shown.
What Enkrid had seen and learned, Ragna now absorbed in turn and folded in naturally.
Crack! Thud! Thwack! Crunch! Drag-drag-drag!
All of it lumped together into a single crashing roar.
Aoara's flowing sword technique, blended with the vibration he had observed from Azpen's Barnaas, not a single person dared stop that one strike.
The problem was that one strike wasn't the end. Left to right, and about when it seemed he had run far enough to the right, Ragna turned and ran left again.
Making the same cut as before.
= = =
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