A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 636

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 636: That's Right. Enkrid Had No Intention of Listening.

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A chair carved from bone glowed faint blue in the darkness. It was an eerie light, nothing like sunlight or moonlight.

Sinar's golden hair looked dull against that unsettling glow as she sat atop it.

"Welcome. Allow me to introduce you. My companions."

She spoke and spread her hand toward the space behind her.

The smell reached them before anything came into view. Rotting flesh, secretions, excrement, every foul thing that could produce a stench seemed gathered in one place.

An ordinary person could not have held out without clamping their nose shut. Enkrid chose to simply block his sense of smell.

The sharper you honed your senses, the more you also learned to dull and deaden them in turn.

With his sense of smell cut off, he craned his neck and took in what she was presenting with her open palm. Behind him, Brisa raised the glow stone a little higher.

The light source climbed and the visible range widened. It still could not illuminate everything, but it was enough.

One troll, one ogre, one ghoul. The troll was mounted on a two-headed human-faced dog. None of them roared, and none drooled. They simply waited, waiting for Sinar's command, and there was no denying it.

"Companions was a joke."

Sinar said it. Her voice resonated like tuned keys on an instrument.

"Instead, I have decided to become their queen."

That was a lie.

Elves do not know the word falsehood. They only learn to lie after drifting across the continent and being ground down by the world. Sinar had learned that way.

Which meant she was terrible at it.

If Krais, a born liar who enjoyed weaving deceit with a sharp mind, could see Sinar right now, what would he say?

"What exactly have you thought of me all this time?"

That was probably it.

It was not a moment for laughter, yet the absurd thought came first anyway.

Facing a lie that clumsy, it just turned out that way.

There was no need to hold back a laugh. But he could not laugh.

Why was that.

It was probably because of the elf, who made emotional restraint her specialty.

His habit of absorbing everything around him and making it his own had naturally taken on some part of her manner. It must have happened somewhere beneath conscious thought.

This was absolutely not anger.

"Now then, will you fight my children?"

The troll, ogre, and ghoul, each an unusual specimen, stepped forward from in front of the bone chair where she sat.

"Who exactly are whose children?"

Arcoiris, listening from behind, spoke up. The elf who adored Sinar could not hide his feelings, and they showed plainly on his face.

The subtle shifts in his expression spoke for where he stood right now. The crinkle at the corners of his eyes, his narrowed brow, his trembling lips, all of it said the same thing: pain. Though it did not twist into the kind of expression a human would make.

"This is not necessary."

Arcoiris murmured it. His voice was very quiet, but no one present was dull enough to miss it.

"I cannot leave you as the demon's bride."

He said it again. His resolve was clear. Only this time there was something different in his eyes compared to when he had said those words before.

A light called hope.

Who had put that light there needed no deliberation.

The owner of those blue eyes, shining in the dark, drew his weapon.

Chiring.

The silver-steel sword drank in the glow stone's light and shed a white radiance like moonlight. They said sometimes, looking at true silver, people called it the metal that resembles the moon.

That was how mysterious its shine was.

Seeing the light coming off Enkrid's sword right now, everyone there would have nodded in agreement.

"You should not have come here."

Sinar said it. Enkrid raised his sword with unhurried ease. He set the blade between his eyes. He sharpened his focus. He tracked the Demon Creatures advancing toward him. Thought accelerated inside his mind, the eye of insight opened, and the near future became visible.

"Fell. Take the ghoul."

Something like soot was visible behind the bodies of the Demon Creatures. Evil Spirits had nested in them, boosting their natural abilities, though of course Enkrid and his companions had no way of knowing that.

Even knowing would not have changed much.

Enkrid mapped out his path with his racing thoughts. A route that would take him straight to Sinar.

Grrrr.

A sound like boiling water rose from the maws of all three Demon Creatures.

Thud.

The human-faced dog kicked off the floor with its hind legs and lunged. The troll riding it came with it, naturally. It stretched its long claws wide and swung.

Fast. But it moved in a straight line, which made it easy to read.

The raw speed and power were not fiercer than the elf knight's sword they had encountered earlier.

Enkrid opened his left foot outward and at the same time poured a savage amount of Will into his sword.

The blade of the silver-steel sword rang out with a high keen. Through his palm, it felt like the sword was speaking.

Saying it was about to burst apart.

Then Enkrid swept the sword, loaded with every drop of his Will, in a diagonal slash.

As pure swordsmanship it was a simple diagonal cut. Within the framework of the Five Sword Styles it could be called a Heavy Sword Style downward slash.

What rode that sword, though, was the entirety of the Will Enkrid possessed.

Before every eye in the room, including Sinar's, the blade he swung vanished for an instant.

Past a certain speed, the blade tore the air itself.

Bang.

The sound burst from the space where the blade had passed. And before that sound could reach anyone's ears, Enkrid's sword had already split through the troll and the human-faced dog and come out the other side.

With Enkrid at the center, troll and human-faced dog split vertically and flew to either side. A wet thud sounded in between. Black blood from the dead Demon Creatures flooded the floor.

The lower level had been dry underfoot, but Enkrid had just made it as wet as the floor above, soaked now in Demon Creature blood.

Enkrid cut off his breath and exhaled, then swept the sword in a wide arc.

The blade curved up through the air in a half-circle and settled into a high guard position.

The ogre had no weapon. It raised its forearms like a shield and held them up in front of itself. Eyes peered at him from the gap between those forearms as it charged.

The sight of it guarding with its own arms while barreling forward was almost funny.

Enkrid felt new willpower surging up to replace what he had spent.

Yes, right now he had more force behind him than at any point since entering the Labyrinth.

He could see a gap between the ogre's forearms. If he needed to, he could thrust into that gap. But there was no need to pick at a gap. He could simply cleave through the whole thing.

Enkrid felt the weight of the air like he had stepped into a swamp of crushed rock. It pressed down on his shoulders and dragged at his ankles.

'Heavy.'

The weight bore down on shoulders and limbs, pressed against his veins as though it would rupture them. But it was bearable.

Had he not borne it just a moment ago? Some portion of Will, moving without his awareness, ran through his entire body as though to shield it.

He pushed through it and swung, and the roar burst again.

Bang.

That was how Enkrid finished his second cut.

Thwack.

The blade sheared through the ogre's head and body and drove out the other side.

Cleaved from the top of its skull down to one side of its chest, the ogre poured out brain matter and organs and black blood in a torrent, and still reached out toward the empty air with a grasping hand, the last motion of a dying thing. Then it toppled sideways. The crash it made hitting the floor was loud.

In that time, Fell had killed the ghoul too. One of the ghoul's arms was burned to charred pulp, which meant Ruagarne had not simply been watching.

A brief silence followed. Then Sinar offered her critique. It was something no one had expected.

"You have grown dull, Enki."

She said dull, but she did not mean his sword work. Every blow he had shown just now surpassed anything he had demonstrated before.

His understanding of swordsmanship, his way of wielding Will, all of it had grown enormously.

He had also drawn on what Sinar had shown him: that swordsmanship shaped into the four seasons.

"You have grown dull."

Even so, that was her judgment. She did not wait for a reply and kept talking.

"If you had become a knight and then meant to move forward, you should have looked away. You are dull. So dull you will not be able to cut anything."

Enkrid flicked the blood from his sword and pushed his hair back with his left hand.

Blood from killing two Demon Creatures had splattered onto his hand. It was sticky.

Did elves have a bathing culture? Or did they wash themselves in clean lake water?

Demon Creature blood smelled foul and felt even worse against the skin. He wanted to get cleaned up once all of this was done.

"Sinar Kirhaise."

Enkrid called her name.

Everyone present listened for what would follow.

Was it an answer to being called dull?

If not that, would he ask what all of this was supposed to be?

Enkrid was a man who always overturned expectations, and this was no different.

At least it was not what the watching elves, Bran included, had anticipated.

"Why did you leave?"

It was what he had come to ask from the beginning, so he asked it.

"......"

Sinar's voice, that instrument that had moved with such flowing grace, went quiet for a moment.

Darkness and silence are fitting companions. The silence seeped into the dark cave.

The elf Brisa raised the glow stone a little higher. Light spread and the visible range widened again.

No change showed on Sinar's face. But Enkrid saw that she was slightly surprised, and then she opened her mouth again.

"You do not seem to have heard a single thing I said just now."

"You did not write the reason in your letter, so I came to ask."

Something close to a smile rose on Sinar's face. What followed was high praise.

"......You absolute lunatic."

"She's smiling?"

The one who said it in surprise at Sinar's smile was Arcoiris. And he was not the only one. Everyone was surprised, Bran included.

"So you know how to smile. You do not have to anymore. Sinar, let us go back."

Bran said.

Sinar let the faint smile fade and shook her head.

"I am cursed."

Esther, who had pressed herself against Enkrid trying to break an actual curse, would have snorted at that.

"So go back. Enki. This is not a place you should be."

Enkrid looked at Sinar's eyes. They were dim. It looked as if someone had poured a paint called despair into them.

"Please. Go back."

The paint looked ready to drip down but stayed in her eyes at the last moment.

"Tell me why I should. I came to hear a reason."

Another unexpected thing came out of Enkrid's mouth. Fell, listening, thought there was no one in the world who could beat that stubbornness.

Ruagarne simply thought: typical Enkrid.

Sinar looked at the man standing before her. Blue eyes, black hair, a man with many scars earned rolling through battlefields.

His looks being what they were, unless you examined each scar one by one, it was hard to guess what kind of life he had lived.

She had thought exactly that once, long ago, when she had seen his body while he was washing.

Those scars, those gouged traces in his flesh, spoke of what this man's life had been.

I will become a knight.

"What a foolish dream."

He must have been scorned for it.

I will protect those who stand behind me.

"You can barely protect your own life."

Everyone must have mocked him.

A flower that bloomed in contempt was looking at her now. Sinar did not want that flower to wilt because of her.

And so she wanted to pour out every argument she had. She wanted to line up reasons one after another to convince him.

She wanted to say everything, all of it, about why she had ended up here.

That long and painful journey through life, she wanted to lay it bare, nothing hidden, nothing held back.

She had not wanted to do that before. Everyone has parts of themselves they do not want anyone else to see.

But right now she wanted to send him away, even if it meant that. No, she had to send him away.

"I must become the demon's bride. It has to be this way."

Sinar said it again, but the one standing before her was a stubborn man who had climbed to the rank of knight on talent that barely deserved the name.

Yes. Enkrid had no intention of listening.

"The reason."

He simply repeated the same word once more.

"If I go through with the wedding, you will be the price. That is why you cannot be here."

The force behind Sinar's words faltered.

On the surface, Enkrid's expression was indifferent.

"Was it your dream to become a demon's bride?"

Is this truly what you want?

Sinar knew it in her gut. This man would not retreat without seeing things through to the end.

Had her own conclusion been too clumsy?

Or had some part of her, somewhere inside, wanted things to turn out this way.

She had said on the outside that she wanted this man to leave her behind, yet had she been waiting for him to come for her like this, waiting for exactly this moment.

Had her weak soul pushed things toward this outcome.

'Then is this the moment to curse my own soul.'

Sinar's eyes closed. She felt a pressure she could not resist. It pulled her toward the abyss and cast her deep into her own soul.

Memories she did not want to surface rose from that abyss.

* * *

Clang.

As everyone has a childhood, so did Sinar.

Clang.

The first memory after she became aware of the world around her was the sound of a hammer.

And.

"Sinar."

Parents who looked indifferent on the surface, their emotions held in careful check, but who were endlessly warm within.