WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 622: Words Spoken Through the Sword

= = =

"Funny thing, that."

Rem said it while retrieving his axe.

"What is?"

Enkrid rotated his ankle in a slow circle. The Load had caught it, leaving a dull ache, but nothing was broken and the pain was manageable.

Not bad.

During the spar just now, he had pushed through one reckless motion after another until his ankle bent at a wrong angle. It had not snapped or twisted out.

An ordinary person would have been left with a limp without immediate treatment. Enkrid was not ordinary.

All those flexibility drills with Audin had paid off.

The knight's technique called Endure, which fed into Iron Body and hardened his skin and muscle, had helped too. So had a skill he had learned and put to use called Grasping Will.

Grasping Will was something Audin had taught him. Audin said it was a discipline every Holy Knight trained without rest.

"When you take an impact, or when a joint twists under strain, you pour Will into it and hold it in place. Holy Knights protect themselves from harm through divine power and can heal at the same time, but Will alone cannot do that, so you can only hold."

That was how Audin explained it. Learning it had not been easy, of course.

To put it plainly, he had nearly killed himself in the process. Not literally. Dying in training and then running into the Boatman would have been awkward.

"Hey, you're only supposed to die inside the wall I make. What am I supposed to do if you go and die on your own, you little punk?"

Something like that, maybe.

He was not sure. The Boatman he had met in dreams lately did not seem like someone who would say anything of the sort.

"Enjoy it. When the moment of Despair comes for you, I will be there at your side to watch."

That was all the Boatman had said. It did not sound like a blessing. Enkrid did not take it for a curse either. It was simply what it was.

There was no point thinking further about the Boatman.

The training Audin had proposed and carried out for Grasping Will was simple to the point of being blunt.

"Now then. I am going to break your arm. Hold it together and bear it."

He gripped Enkrid's forearm with one hand, pulled, and raised the other in a Hand Blade, poised to strike. That was what he said before doing it.

"The bear has finally lost his mind."

Rem watched and delivered his verdict.

"If it breaks, Seiki will help with the healing. I also see this as a good opportunity to teach Seiki how to use her divine power."

Audin ignored Rem without even glancing at him. Enkrid, listening, felt cold sweat coming on.

There was no mistaking the intent in Audin's words. The arm was getting broken.

"If you have nothing to do, go sleep."

Ragna added his own commentary.

"Useful," Ruagarne said, with exactly the kind of observation you would expect from someone who was, at the end of the day, a Frog. Ropord and Fell went pale.

"Does it really have to go that far?"

Fell muttered that, and as it turned out, Fell and Ropord ended up going through much the same training alongside him.

Either way, Enkrid took the hits and the twists and woke up to Grasping Will. If he ever wrote an autobiography and tried to describe that process, it would run ten thousand characters without breaking a sweat, he sometimes thought. That was how brutal it had been.

After that, he had taken the inspiration he got from watching the elves' native swordwork, poured everything he currently had into it, and sparred with Rem.

The spar was over. The first thing out of Rem's mouth was that it was funny.

Enkrid's thoughts had run long but moved fast. All that flashed through him was the memory of those training days, nothing more. By now, recalling it to that level of detail took almost no time at all.

The short gap while he asked what was funny was plenty.

Rem answered.

"Sometimes you look like you've got about as much talent as a polite Ghoul. And then I watch you right now and you feel like you almost belong in the genius bracket."

He scratched his head with the haft of his axe as he said it. Enkrid listened without interrupting, then replied.

"It's not talent. It's experience built up over time. A few things that weren't yet settled in my head got compressed, and I found a direction from there."

"Which, the way I see it, is usually not something that happens without talent in the first place."

"You just need to rack up enough experience."

"What? You die and come back to life and do it over, or something?"

"How did you know?"

"...Let's drop it."

Rem had no idea he had hit the mark.

Enkrid did not try to convince him either way. He just turned his attention back to what he had gotten out of the spar.

He gathered everything he had realized recently and sorted through it again. It was what he did every day now. That was why his meditation time had been growing longer.

The biggest realization was this:

'Focus Point doesn't actually exist.'

In extreme moments, concentration spiked and time seemed to slow. A surge of the mind. Reviewing that, Enkrid had noticed, separate from the name of the technique, that every member of his knight company did something similar.

Not just Ragna. Rem, Audin, Jaxon, all of them. Yet none of them had ever learned a technique called Focus Point.

And still they did it. Why? He had asked, and the only answer he got was that they did it because they could.

He set aside his irritation at their smug attitudes. It genuinely did not bother him.

Right now he was too busy turning over what he had realized.

'So why do techniques get names?'

Because without making them explicit and organized, they were hard to build into the body. That was what he finally understood.

"You don't actually use Focus Point, do you?"

He had grabbed Ragna and asked again, looking for the answer he needed. The reply from the man who had once taught him Focus Point was something to behold.

"No, I do not."

He did not ask why. There was no need to verify it.

After that, he reviewed and confirmed what he had, and understood that when you swung a sword you did not need to pin a name to what you were doing.

'Let it come out naturally.'

Up to the point of condensing and gathering Will, focused training was the right approach. After that, the goal was to repeat it so many times that it came as reflex before thought.

Right, he had known that. It could be called the foundation of swordsmanship.

He had just happened to realize it now.

He had first known it in his head, then his body had responded, and now he understood it from somewhere deep inside.

"How many times do I have to tell you to do it naturally, like breathing?"

Rem's irritation, which kept slipping out whenever he said exactly that, made sense now. Said out loud, it sounded easy.

But easy to say was different from carrying it through with the body and understanding it in your bones. That could not be helped.

For someone not born with talent, doing something "naturally, like breathing" was an almost impossibly hard thing.

That was also why the Wave-Blocking Sword, the new swordsmanship he had been building, had stalled.

A wave is water. Which meant constructing, through the sword, a wall that perfectly blocked formless incoming attacks of any shape.

That was the meaning embedded in the technique. Then what was the method of realizing it?

Good swordsmanship had to have meaning, a method of realization, and a method of training.

Meaning, method of realization, method of training.

Those were the three things needed when learning a sword technique.

Until now, the Wave-Blocking Sword inside Enkrid had only the meaning.

'A sword that blocks even waves.'

Now his thinking had reached as far as method of realization, and from there it reached method of training naturally. It was not perfectly settled yet, but it felt like a wall he had been staring at had suddenly swung open all at once.

That was the result of today's spar with Rem.

Beyond that, as he had experienced several times before, the process of realizing and mastering something had brought all the experience he had stacked until now dissolving together and expressing itself without effort.

Could any of this be explained in words?

'Hard. So this is why it's difficult to pass something on once you've understood it.'

Still, somewhere beneath that, Enkrid had a vague sense that he could, in some form, lay down a map of the path he had walked.

He did not know the method yet, but he had a feeling it would come together.

And following naturally from that came another thought.

'So that's why Sinar passed her words through the sword.'

Because words alone could not carry it.

Only then did Enkrid understand that showing him the elves' native swordwork, one form after another, had been Sinar's farewell. And right behind that, he caught the hidden meaning in the letter she had left, the part about waiting for him to come and propose.

'She was telling me not to look for her.'

Then why mention a proposal at all?

He had always declined whenever she joked about being engaged. The fact that she used the word proposal was itself the message not to come looking.

Of course, Enkrid could not know Sinar's heart perfectly. It was only what he believed inside.

It was also a fairly accurate guess.

Because that was what Sinar had meant when she wrote that letter.

* * *

Winter was at its peak, but the air inside Border Guard was warm with motion.

The Rem Company along with the standing garrison had cleared up almost every mess the Cultists had caused. It was around this time that Krais, taking Abnaier's advice, decided to overhaul the force structure.

Reorganizing meant restructuring the military. They had done something like it once before, but last time they had only sketched the outline. This time they went in fine enough to draw the pupils.

They started with Enkrid's unit and built what came to be called, informally, the Mad Escort.

Commander of the unit was Fell, of the knight company.

"Why does it have to be me?"

"I thought it was the seat for the most talented person. Was I wrong?"

That was roughly the exchange Enkrid heard had taken place between Fell and Krais.

There would have been a longer conversation and several different kinds of persuasion when the actual convincing happened, but that was the heart of it.

And so Fell became commander of the Mad Escort.

"Anyone with less talent than me, start rolling."

Fell then drove the unit harder than even Enkrid would have. Ruagarne helped with that as well.

When it came to individual combat using the surrounding environment, there were few fighters who matched her.

It was a field that required experience and study, no matter if you were a knight or anything else.

Not that it mattered much. Everyone who watched Ruagarne picked up what they needed on their own.

The Rem Company, Rem's assault unit, was announced to remain in its current form. That announcement earned Krais a letter threatening his life.

It demanded the immediate dissolution of the Rem Company.

Krais promptly carried the letter to Rem, which was his way of securing his own safety.

Rem gathered every member of his unit at once.

"Right, I'm not going after whoever wrote the letter. You're one body. One person screws up, you all roll together."

"Isn't that unreasonable?"

One member who had earned a name back where they came from, someone who had honed their skills through sheer stubbornness, pushed back.

Learning here had been good. That much they would grant. But they had not written any letter and had known nothing about it, so why should they be treated this way?

"That's my standard. If you don't like it, take me down and be commander yourself."

Ah, Rem.

Rem did not persuade his people with words. He simply had no need to. He ruled through force.

"You crazy son of a..."

He did let their curses go in one ear and out the other, at least. Profanity during training was routine.

Rem ground them down with ten-day sparring.

Ten-day sparring meant rotating through fights with Rem over ten days. Rem was not gentle with any of them.

"You think I'll hold back from killing you? You're different from my commander. A few dead among you wouldn't matter to me."

Sorcery was suited to wielding intangible force. The fear Rem gave off seeped into his unit members' bones.

Fighting with everything they had just to survive was the only answer. They did it, and they survived.

Naturally, Rem pulled his strikes more than his words let on, but those on the receiving end genuinely experienced something close to dying and coming back.

If any one of them had let their guard down even slightly, they might actually have died.

Around this time, Rem had watched Enkrid and half-fallen into a theory that half-killing someone without talent still shook something loose in them.

The theory was not entirely wrong. The results were real enough.

Of course, at that level of grinding, anyone who survived would naturally become a born fighter.

Even after all that, members of the Rem Company who glared at Krais or came at him angry kept showing up.

"Rem!"

Krais always put them down with a single word.

To any observer, it looked like they were determined to make Krais's life miserable. Their mouths were rough, too.

Still, discipline had been properly set.

Insubordination was not even a dream. They were faithful to their duties and followed orders well.

"A unit whose discipline has collapsed is a rotten apple. And a rotten apple spoils the ones around it."

Abnaier's help mattered here as well.

When trouble stirred in Rem's unit, Krais did what needed doing. He also handed Ragna a unit to command.

Naturally, you could not expect a lazy madman like this to fulfill a commander's duties in any conventional sense. But that did not mean there was no way forward.

= = =

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried