WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 627: A Difference in Skill

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A whip is naturally faster than a sword. It is a weapon that uses wrist snap to generate centrifugal force.

When a whip builds proper momentum and crosses a certain speed, it tears through the air with a crack. That did not change just because the whip was larger.

Boom! Crash!

It was like thunder striking right beside them.

Ruagarne could crack a whip too and do something similar, but when she did, the sounds were a sharp snap and a pop. This was something else entirely.

'Monster.'

That was Fell's assessment. Ruagarne figured that taking a clean hit from that steel whip would be the end of it, Heart Armor or not.

While the two of them were taking stock of the situation, Enkrid's accelerated mind was tracking the whip's movements. Look away and he would get hit. Fail to predict it and he would be donating an arm or a leg.

'Fast.'

There had been a time when Rem's arm seemed to bend like a whip, and when that axe came down Enkrid had felt it move at the speed of light. This was worse.

The Giant smiled and pulled the whip back, then swung it around. The technique was fluid, practiced.

Crack! Boom! Snap! Crash!

Four more thunderclaps rolled out.

Anything caught in the path of that whip would have been shattered to pieces. A human body, for instance, would have been split into several chunks and scattered in every direction.

"Get into the forest!"

Ruagarne shouted. She meant for them to use the terrain. As she called out, she felt blood running from her ear.

'My eardrum is gone.'

Fell was the same. Just the swing of the whip had been enough to burst both their eardrums.

The two of them put more distance between themselves and the Giant. This was something that would not even allow them to approach.

Enkrid had not moved during those four cracks. After dodging the first strike, he simply stood there holding his sword. His eardrums had not burst.

Jaxon had told him that with enough practice you could learn to dull your senses at will, so Enkrid had trained that separately. Through repetition he had learned to protect his body with Will, and that had naturally led into Endure, a knight's technique. A knight could use that skill to endure strikes that would otherwise break them, and that was what he had used to protect his eardrums just now. In the meantime, he sorted through his thoughts.

'Their distance is in their favor.'

This was the right range for a whip.

'If I close the gap, the whip will come.'

What if he faked a dash to draw it out?

'Not a good option.'

That was his instinct talking. No approach he knew gave him a clear answer. The Numbers Game could not overpower an opponent like this. That whip was attack and defense in one, offense becoming defense simultaneously. In terms of speed alone, the whip could move twice while he swung a sword once.

What if he sacrificed an arm and grabbed it?

Could he win with his body damaged?

Even for a knight, losing an arm would throw off his balance in ways that were hard to predict. He would need time to adapt, and while he did, he would be fighting off-kilter.

Enkrid was breathing slowly, drawing long thin breaths by instinct.

'Can't see the answer with my head.'

Then his body would have to find the way.

Funny thing was, there had been a moment in training with Jaxon before they left that covered exactly this.

"What do you do when there's no time to think through the Numbers Game?"

Jaxon's words came back to him.

"You feel it and react with your body. You can do it. Sharpen your senses."

It was not about understanding with the mind and reason. It was about reading the fight through instinct and intuition and acting from there.

There was something in those words that matched Rem's teaching, and it was plain Jaxon intended it to help Enkrid's training, though he would never admit to helping Rem's methods. So he had taught it in secret, only at night.

Rem had caught on and started running his mouth about it, and the two of them had gotten into another fight over it.

As it happened, that was exactly the part Enkrid had wanted to share with Fell.

'When the Numbers Game is processed through the head, there is no answer. So react with the body in a way the opponent cannot predict.'

He held the slow breath he had been exhaling and stopped. Enkrid stopped tracking the whip with his eyes and read it through instinct instead.

Here too, he thought himself lucky.

Thanks to Ruagarne, he had accumulated enough experience facing a whip as a weapon.

A whip moves at high speed. More precisely, it delivers high-speed strikes using wrist snap and centrifugal force. Because of that, it naturally forms a consistent rhythm and flow.

The Giant swung the steel whip without a word. Monstrous strength channeled from thick forearms into the whip, and it tore through the air with a roar. The weapon, twisted from steel cord, ripped through the air and swept a diagonal arc that included Enkrid's body. Dodging it was not going to be easy.

Clang!

Right. It was not easy to dodge, so he thrust his sword out to meet the whip.

He could not block it perfectly, but he could hold a few times. All he did was read the falling arc through instinct and intercept it.

Clang! Clang! Bang!

Three more blocks. His grip was going slightly numb. Whether to call it fortunate or not, the silver-steel sword was durable enough to hold against the steel whip.

"How long do you think you can keep that up?"

The Giant bellowed. At that booming voice, Enkrid's eyes went half-lidded.

The whip came again. A messenger of death trailing noise, dropping toward him. Enkrid jumped to a place no one would have expected.

He dove straight forward. It looked like running headlong into death.

A graze would tear flesh open, and anything Iron Body built from Endure could throw up would clearly be smashed to pieces.

The Giant felt victory in his gut. Then that gut instinct betrayed him.

The whip passed over Enkrid's head.

Luck?

That was what the Giant thought.

Enkrid had slipped in between the whip's arcs. He was at sword range now, and he immediately swung.

The Giant blocked with the iron gauntlet fitted to his left wrist.

Clang.

Sparks flew, and the silver-steel sword left a notch carved into the inside of the gauntlet. A chip of metal sheared off and spun to the side.

'Blocked it.'

From the Giant's perspective, a lucky strike had gone wide.

The Giant's body was twice the size of an ordinary adult man, and his stride matched. He used that unusual reach to step back and open distance, then swung the whip through the air again and brought it crashing down without giving Enkrid a moment to breathe.

'Luck twice in a row? Doubt it.'

Keep blocking with the sword and the sword would break, then he would crush the arms and legs one by one.

'Crack him open piece by piece until he pisses himself.'

That was where the Giant's head was.

Enkrid dove into the Giant's chest again.

He had dropped into a low stance first and slipped below the whip's strike zone.

Crash!

The wind from the whip scattered his hair, a gust strong enough to tear it out by the roots. His hair whipped back and left his forehead and eyes fully exposed.

Through that clear forehead, the Giant looked into two blue eyes.

'Not luck.'

Of course it was not. Enkrid had read the rhythm of the whip. Between the two of them, there was a plain gap in skill. The kind of gap where, if the whip were not such a specialized weapon, there would have been nothing close to a fair contest at all.

"You said this would be different!"

the Giant shouted. A horse was twice the size of a human, but up close this Giant was overwhelming in a way no horse could be.

Enkrid swung his sword at the throat the same as before. The light, quick blade darted at the neck like a swallow.

The Giant tried once more to block with the iron gauntlet on his left hand, and Enkrid's sword curved around it and sliced across the upper arm of the Giant's right.

A wet sound of flesh parting and tearing. Compared to the sounds the whip had made, it was barely a whisper.

But the size of a sound said nothing about the force behind it.

For an ordinary person, a sharpened edge was enough to cut, and against a Giant, a sword stroke backed by Will was more than sufficient.

The Giant's thick skin opened and blood welled up fast. An unlucky vein had been caught.

No, Enkrid had cut exactly where he aimed. He had deliberately targeted the tendon and the blood vessel.

"The more thoroughly you understand the human body, the easier it is to fight them. That goes without saying."

That was Audin's teaching. Enkrid had drilled it into himself through endless repetition, day after day.

Experience and insight, lessons learned by listening, all of it woven together, that was what this moment was.

Two blue eyes saw the future, and the senses that had read the whip's rhythm now read the path of every weapon.

"You're not just some knight," the Giant said, his expression grim. Nobody wanted to die.

The Giant Hatun was no different. What he had heard was that Enkrid was some fool who got lucky becoming a knight, and that the people around him were what made the man hard to deal with. So Hatun had waited for the moment Enkrid would be alone.

Assassins sent to Border Guard before had all gone quiet, cut off without a word, which had been a problem. Then word came that the target was out on his own, and Hatun had come.

"He's above a Combat Apostle."

The Giant kept talking. Between those two sentences, Enkrid had cut through the back of his knee and sliced across his wrist. Blood poured freely from the wrist, which now hung on by half.

Swinging a whip with a wrist like that was out of the question.

The Cursed Ground Holy Sect had Combat Apostles who were skilled in battle, but Hatun rated this opponent higher than that.

"Should have sent the Evil Spirit Apostle," Hatun said again. Was there some intent to pass information to someone?

There was no way to know, so Enkrid let it go.

"Delivery would be difficult since I don't know where the Cursed Ground Holy Sect is," Enkrid said, then kicked the Giant's thigh, leaped upward, and swung the sword.

The silver-steel sword drew a half-arc and clipped the Giant's throat on the way through.

A dull thud.

The Giant raised his left hand a moment too late to shield his throat, but the sword had already passed. He pressed that same hand to the wound opening in his neck and asked, "How did you dodge the whip?"

Plenty of things to be curious about. Not hard to understand. When death is close, curiosity fills the space.

Eyes full of something unfinished.

"The rhythm is simple," Enkrid said.

"...You're insane."

The rhythm is simple? You crazy bastard, you think being able to see it means you can actually dodge it?

The fight had held a different meaning for the two men. It was no different from the time Enkrid had faced the Holy Knight who had joined the Grey Holy Army.

This time, the gap in overall trained technique and experience had simply been larger, Will aside entirely.

The dead Giant toppled backward. The body crashed to the ground with a heavy thud, raising dust, and the blood pouring out looked as though it could fill a lake on the spot.

Not that the Giant could drown in that lake, but someone already dead cannot die twice.

Enkrid stepped back to avoid the spreading blood.

"Looks like the Cursed Ground Holy Sect sent an assassin," he said.

"That Giant wasn't coming over to make friends," Fell answered.

Well. Enkrid was Enkrid. Even after killing the Giant, he walked on.

"Let's go."

"Won't they attack again later?" Fell asked, worried. This was a serious matter.

"Even the Cursed Ground Holy Sect can't send assassins like that in bulk," Ruagarne said, studying the Giant's corpse. She was examining the whip the Giant had used as she spoke.

Right. The Cursed Ground Holy Sect might have held influence across the entire continent and ranked among the greatest military forces on it, but they could not send killers like that in batches.

Ruagarne was correct. Hatun's failure had left the diocese in the central continent on the verge of a full withdrawal.

* * *

'Hatun failed.'

The Archbishop who received the news lamented. The existence of someone standing in the way, someone whose mental state was so thoroughly cracked that the man called himself a madman, was irritating enough to draw a sigh without meaning to.

'Then he cannot be left alive.'

Hatun's death gave a measure of the target's strength.

If the target's movements could be tracked once more...'He is rarely without people around him.'

The time to strike was when he was separated from the knight order.

"I will gather every remaining force in the diocese and go myself," the Archbishop, First Apostle, declared. There was another chance, as far as he could see.

'If he left, he will come back.'

The exact purpose was unclear, but the target would return to Border Guard, so holding the route would do it. That reasoning was sound.

What the First Apostle missed here was the assumption that Hatun had died at the end of a close fight.

No matter how much information you gathered, you could not know everything.

In truth, another Cultist watching the fight from a distance had heard Hatun's words, but from where that observer stood, it had initially looked as though Hatun was pushing forward. A misread born from poor judgment.

So many capable members had been lost, specifically, so many had died trying to catch Enkrid, that the available manpower had been stretched thin. The tragic result of those shortages.

* * *

Whether someone far away was aiming for him or not, Enkrid walked.

From the fourth day on, he kept moving alongside Ruagarne, teaching her things here and there while using those same moments to revisit his own foundations, until they crossed a river.

There was a noble's estate along the route that he knew, but he did not stop in.

He was not paying particular attention to the Boatman's dream, but it had seemed to show him Sinar.

'Doesn't look like she's having a good time.'

If what the Boatman showed was true, that was the picture.

Following the route Esther had planted in his head, he crossed a river to the south and moved east as well, climbing several mountain passes. After the Giant Hatun, he ran into a few Demon Creatures and some bandits, but nothing that needed Enkrid to step in.

"You're robbing people? Are you out of your minds?" Fell handled that, and Ruagarne took care of the rest.

That was how they arrived where they were going. Esther had called it the Ghost Forest.

Green mist hung before the trees, and looking at it, you could believe a ghost might actually step out.

It was a forest connected to a deserted mountain trail, with no sign of anyone having come or gone. Enkrid had just cracked open the skull of a wild boar Magic Beast.

He stepped two paces toward the forest, and his mind accelerated.

Sound, smell, the faintest shift of air against his skin.

Everything fell inside the range of the Sensory Technique, and Enkrid could see the projectile coming.

An arrow sliced through the air with a whistle.

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