WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 614: Profit and Fun

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Cut, cut again, and cut once more.

Ragna's blade sliced through the enemy ranks, hacking and crushing without pause.

He had wanted to build an Iron Wall.

Something more refined than what Enkrid had shown, at least.

It was effective, no question, but he was starting to wonder whether "refined" was quite the right word for it. From a certain angle, you could argue this was even more brutish than burning through Will, not less.

Ragna's swordsmanship was not blindingly fast. That was exactly why every soldier who shattered and crumpled under his blade was burned into every watching eye with painful clarity. Not burned so much as forced in, like someone ramming the images through with their fist.

"Get down. Or die."

He said it while moving, slipping the words between cuts like a warning mid-stroke. To the enemy soldiers, it landed as a death sentence.

"You wish!"

A Holy Warrior who had been confident he could block at least one blow from a knight died. Another, said to be the best shield-handler in the whole unit, died too. A junior knight who got caught in a passing cut went down with them.

This is terrifying. One soldier had that single thought.

Before anything about not wanting to die, before any thought of his mother, the raw biological refusal of death fired first, and pure fear walked straight into his chest.

And so Ragna drew a wall of fear across them all.

Fear became the wall, and the wall held the front.

Nobody could step forward into that. This was Ragna's Iron Wall.

"What in the..."

Muel stood there with his mouth hanging open.

Among those present with the ability to sense the Will, the force, and the meaning folded into Ragna's swordsmanship, one of them could not help but shout at the sheer exhilaration of it.

"Excellent, brother! Allow me to show you as well!"

What Ragna had shown was a blade honed across years. Audin saw it and his blood rose.

Ragna had answered with the sword the challenge Audin had laid out before leaving, the promise to measure Ragna's growth upon his return.

Are you still going to lecture me about training?

That was not quite what Ragna had intended, but that was how it reached Audin.

The returned member stepped forward and spoke.

"Audin of the Madman Knights."

His clothes were in tatters, but that registered on nobody. Simply stepping forward was enough to brand his presence and his weight into everyone around him.

"This unworthy servant is ashamed. Father, why did you send them down the path of corruption? I send them now to your side. Touch the heads of these lost sheep and guide them to where they were always meant to be."

Audin spoke the words and walked straight toward Azratic with long, deliberate strides. The distance between them was not great to begin with, so two steps brought them nearly within arm's reach.

Azratic watched the figure approach. It was not simply that the man grew larger, his presence swelled as he came closer.

For twenty years, Overdier had been his only true rival. Now there were one or two others beginning to rise to that level. The man in front of him was probably one of them.

The momentum rolling off him said as much. This was someone he never would have met had he stayed quietly inside the Order.

"If you wish to place something on one side of the scales, you must place something of equal weight on the other to find balance."

Azratic murmured as he watched Audin approach.

If what he was searching for was the passion he had long forgotten, what should he place on the other side of the scale?

Whatever you desire, place something of equal value opposite it.

Whether that be honor, or a life.

That was the teaching of the God of the Scales.

Apostasy had certainly crossed a line, yes, but if the longing was desperate enough, could a person not cross lines?

Or was all of this nothing more than self-justification?

Had Enkrid been able to read those thoughts, he would have nodded along, and told the man not to run from what he was doing behind excuses like that.

"Excited, are you? Aging brother with the rotting mind?"

Audin came close and asked. The man was wearing the expression of a child the evening before a school trip, which was precisely why he asked.

"I am."

Azratic admitted it plainly and felt the long-forgotten passion flare back to life inside him. Was this not exactly the kind of opponent he had come out here to fight?

What he had placed on the opposite side of the scales was his reputation, accumulated over decades, and his life. If he pushed further than that, add apostasy to the pile.

What he stood to gain was a life-risking bout that made his blood sing.

"Same here."

Audin smiled. The time had come to send this one to the side of the war god, where the man's sins would be answered. Smiling at a pitiable sinner before the end was, in Audin's view, proof that he still had compassion in him.

From the outside, Azratic looked to be roughly half Audin's size. Yet the presence radiating from him was every bit Audin's equal.

He rocked his fingers loosely up and down and took one step closer. Long, thick fingers. Those fingers were the very reason someone had given him the nickname "the Joint-Crushing Serpent."

They had already closed the distance. Now they were near enough to reach out and touch each other.

Thud.

Audin and Azratic pressed the backs of their right hands together.

An old habit from their days competing as Holy Warriors in unarmed combat.

Then the hands parted, and they were at each other, hands and feet flying, seizing and striking. The sounds at first were small.

Snap, crack.

Just the noise of hands and feet meeting.

Even that was blunted, each blow deflected and redirected, with no real impact landing.

Azratic used Sacred Penetration, but Audin pushed back with his own divine power rising from within. Each small movement of hand and foot contained whole exchanges of attack and defense layered inside it.

Every person at the scene with the ability to sense Will could feel the lethal edge hidden beneath what looked like almost casual movement.

"Yes!"

Azratic called out. He had just feinted a sweep at Audin's ankle with his left foot, then tried to hook and drag him down, and when he saw Audin slip it by stepping away rather than blocking, the shout came out on its own.

Azratic had concluded their technique was at the same level.

Actually, am I being pushed back slightly?

That only made it more enjoyable.

If technique was where he fell short, what was left?

WHOOSH.

Azratic blazed with light. Not the murky gray he had shown before, this was white brilliance.

Divine power built over decades. It did not well up endlessly the way some people's Will did, but the full depth of it was not easy to gauge.

"Yes!"

Audin called back. Azratic had read one of his moves, and he had read one of Azratic's in return.

Before the foot hook came, Audin had feinted a Hand Blade dropping onto the shoulder, then spread his fingers wide like a rake and tried to grab, only for Azratic to catch the hand and lock it instead.

They had even tested pure strength for a moment, and Audin found the man so dense and unyielding that no short burst of force could pin him down.

Light poured from Audin's body as well.

His was not pure white but a flash with yellow threaded through it.

The two lights intermingled, and it was impossible to say who had the upper hand. This would not be decided quickly.

Enkrid watched all of it and let his mind drift back to the conversation just before the fighting began. A stray thought.

* * *

"There is no guarantee of victory."

Before stepping forward, Enkrid had looked at the hand that stopped him. It was a hand made of words, and not one he could simply brush aside.

This was someone who had called himself a friend.

Noah had come to him with that.

He meant it. The concern was genuine.

It seemed like he was saying that if he truly intended to be a friend, he could not let this pass without a word.

In truth, none of it mattered all that much to Enkrid.

Even knowing the sincerity behind it, he was not going to listen to Noah.

"I have no eye for great tactics, but I know when a problem cannot be solved by tactics."

Noah said it again. His voice was even, neither hurried nor slow.

He was not wrong. The unnamed holy warrior was saying something similar.

Winning the fight among the elite few would be good. But even if they held on, the monastery could not be defended once the army pressed forward. If the Holy Knights tied up their small group of elites while the army struck directly, the people who were going to die would die. It was obvious. And had the enemy not already shown they would do exactly that and more?

Of course, that had already been stopped, first by Ropord, Fell, and Teresa, then by Ragna's swordsmanship.

There was no way Noah could have known that. And at the moment he spoke, none of it had happened yet.

"We might lose. I might die."

Enkrid granted Noah's point. What came out was shaped by the meaning behind what Noah had said, not just the surface of it.

No guarantee of victory meant the possibility of losing and the possibility of dying.

It might have been no different from dancing on the edge of an uncertain cliff.

"Then why go this far?"

He had only wanted to save the children, at heart. Noah's eyes were genuinely clear. There was a light inside them that you never saw in the eyes of worldly priests.

Enkrid thought for a moment at the question of why.

Was it the courage of someone who could show such a thing because dying only meant repeating today?

No. It was not that. In moments of crisis, Enkrid forgot the curse. That was what the Boatman found most remarkable about him.

A madman who walked only toward tomorrow.

"Why does a traveling merchant set out on the road when a bolt of lightning could kill him on the way? It's the same as that."

It was not something that needed much thought, so he answered simply and directly. To Noah it sounded almost like a koan, the kind of utterance the faithful used to seek truth in the scriptures.

But unlike a koan, the meaning was plain.

You cannot set out on the road if you are afraid of tomorrow.

So if losing frightened you, you could not grip a sword at all. If death had frightened him, he would never have dreamed of becoming a knight.

And naturally, if what lay beyond the dream frightened him too, he should have turned back.

It was too grueling a thing to achieve otherwise.

"What if I turned back here, and something like this came up again later?"

Enkrid said it in the same flat, easy tone as always, delivered so naturally that anyone listening would find themselves trusting, without quite deciding to, that he would never do otherwise.

Turn back once and you can turn back twice. Rationalize yourself with one excuse and you can do it again.

A single mistake does not determine everything. It was simply that he hated not acting when he could see a chance to set things right.

An uncertain tomorrow stood before Enkrid.

But things he had once been too weak to even attempt were now within his reach. He was genuinely glad about that. He meant it.

It was a thought that drifted up after watching Ropord fight, watching Ragna's swordsmanship, watching Audin step forward.

More precisely, it was a thought that rose from looking at the one now standing before him.

There are only two Holy Knights, aren't there?

The man with the halberd. He wore iron boots that clinked with each step.

Enkrid had closed the distance first rather than waiting for the man to come to him, and the man watched him approach, then removed his helmet and set it to one side.

An iron helmet with a visor. It could narrow your field of vision in a fight against a knight, which might put you at a disadvantage, but that was not why the man took it off.

"You don't wear a helmet? Then we should match conditions. Shall we call the armor roughly equal as well?"

He was trying to equalize things. He wanted to fight from a similar footing.

Watching that, Enkrid felt something discordant.

The man's manner, tone, and bearing fed themselves quietly into his instincts without being invited.

Despite everything he was saying about matching conditions, the man in front of him felt like someone who would do absolutely anything if it gave him an edge.

He seemed like a person whose outside and inside did not match.

"If you want to match conditions, shouldn't you start with the weapon?"

Enkrid said it. Half a joke. If they were really going for equal footing, the weapons ought to be comparable first.

That thing in the man's hands looked like an Inscribed Weapon from any angle, and it was not because he had dust in his eyes.

"Changing weapons is excessive. An Inscribed Weapon is another self. I cannot fight by setting myself aside."

The man refused without a beat. His tone said the idea was not worth considering.

He looked to be around Enkrid's age, outwardly, at least, which probably meant he was quite a bit younger in reality.

Enkrid had the fortune of being born with the goddess of fortune's bonus points in the looks department, so he appeared far younger than he was. His twenties had not been quite this extreme, but past thirty he regularly got mistaken for someone ten years younger.

Age aside, the man across from him was clearly no lightweight.

Talent and character were separate things. He had understood that well before becoming a knight, well before he started repeating today.

"Mind if I ask you something?"

The man's speech had an odd cadence, close to an old man's, or more accurately, a condescending manner that had simply become habit.

Enkrid didn't think much of it. They weren't going to win each other over with words anyway.

"Go ahead."

"Why did you step forward?"

Again, this question.

But listening to what followed, it was not coming from the same place as Noah's. Noah had asked about staking your life on an uncertain fight. This felt like pure curiosity.

"Isn't there nothing to gain?"

The God of the Scales taught that if you wished to place something on one side, you had to put something of equal weight on the other. So if a person was here staking their life in a fight, there had to be something on the opposite side of the scale too.

Financial reward, or something else entirely.

That was what the halberd's owner wanted to know.

Enkrid heard the question and nodded. There was a second reason he had not quite managed to say to Noah.

It was not as though he had come here calculating profit the way the halberd man put it, but it was not as though there was nothing at all, either.

Beyond saving people, there was something he might call the reward of this fight.

Minor gains, you could say, but the short version was that he could add to his experience. Since becoming a knight, Enkrid had come to understand that fighting opponents at his level or above, or facing Demon Creatures of that caliber, gave him the biggest gains in actual ability.

What he had picked up and learned while cutting through the Walking Fire was exactly that kind of thing.

But this was still just a minor gain. There was a reason that came before even that.

A reason that, if Noah heard it, would make him stare at Enkrid and think: this man is actually out of his mind.

Calculating profit meant you were adding things up, and honestly, adding things up was not how he was built.

"It sounded fun."

Enkrid answered. The man tilted his head slightly at that. The tilt said: what do you mean?

Fun? What does that matter? You're risking your life for that?

It came down to the fact that these two had walked entirely different roads.

Enkrid had felt something like the thrill of growth as he walked toward tomorrow.

That thrill was what kept him swinging a sword until the very edge of death, wasn't it?

For Enkrid, at least, it was.

So the appearance of a strong opponent was, to him, a reason to be glad.

Which meant that while he was stepping out for Noah's sake, while saving people and protecting the monastery were real reasons, there was also a personal interest pulling him forward.

That was also why a smile had found its way onto Enkrid's face even after an opponent he never could have predicted had shown up.

"Is that why you were smiling?"

the man asked.

"Yeah."

Enkrid nodded again.

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