WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 639: That's Why There Were Two Swords

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The demon One-Killer put distance between them. Exactly two steps, neither long nor short. Half a breath's worth, if he had to put it some way.

Not that there would be any breathing room once the clash actually started, so even "half a breath" was not quite right.

Enkrid made no effort to close that gap. He did not chase.

Instead, he used the time it had given him.

Questions and answers. Reinterpreting what his intuition had already grasped. Pulling from the library of experience whatever the situation demanded.

That sounded like a lot, and it did genuinely take time, but accelerated thought was the tool that handled all of it at once.

First things first.

'Do I need rest right now?'

A question for taking stock of his condition. Useful when he needed an objective look at himself.

'Rest would be better.'

He had not slept properly, so he could not call himself at peak condition. That did not mean he had to rest right this moment, though.

'Good enough.'

Assessment done. What next?

"Look at the situation before you fight. Don't just throw yourself at it like a lunatic."

Krais's words. Enkrid had taken from them only what he wanted and needed.

'Check your surroundings properly before engaging.'

Not exactly what Krais had meant, but as long as the spirit landed, did it matter?

If it helped, that was all that counted.

Do not ignore environmental factors. Something Ruagarne had always emphasized. He had already handled that before One-Killer appeared.

'Hard stone floor, heavy air, the pressure that comes with being inside the Cursed Ground, the Demon Creature corpses from before, pooled black blood along one side, open space with no other structures. A massive stone hall carved from rock, that was the shape of it. The only complications are.'

Sinar and the elf group, Frog, and one human.

He could not use them as projectiles, and if One-Killer decided to target them, they fell into the category of things he had to protect.

'Not a single advantage to speak of.'

Right. All disadvantages. Which might be exactly why this was so enjoyable.

Enkrid laughed without meaning to, a small smile that slipped out on its own.

Anyone watching would have called him a lunatic, but to Enkrid himself, looking at his own state of mind, it felt completely natural.

When an opportunity arrived for someone obsessed with fighting and getting stronger, of course it was going to be fun.

"Don't fight a battle you can't win until you've built the conditions to win it."

Abnaier's words.

'Secure an advantage before you fight.'

The idea was to create favorable conditions. That was not feasible right now. So at minimum, he had to reduce the disadvantages.

Abnaier had added something to that.

"Yes, if that's not possible, then you do what you can. Whatever edge you can scrape together, pull all of it in and fight."

That had come out after Enkrid kept pressing him with extreme hypotheticals.

His thoughts kept moving. Bold moves, cautious moves.

He pulled from the library of experience what he needed now.

'Provoking the enemy to shake their composure would be ideal, but.'

There was nothing emotionally reactive to work with. The demon seemed even more devoid of feeling than the Boatman. Provocation would be useless.

The demon started to move. That orange-glowing body glided low, feet shifting across the ground, blade-arms hanging loose.

Anyone who did not know better would have called it meaningless motion, but Enkrid saw the purpose behind it.

If you wanted to give shape to a killing wind that existed to snuff out the candle of a life, it would look like this.

Look deeper. Study the enemy more closely. See it in fewer, cleaner words.

'A well-sharpened blade.'

Why did it look that way? Because of what the demon carried.

What it carried was blind killing intent. Blind, meaning without purpose. Nothing existed for it beyond the act of killing.

A mass of killing intent. A self-moving tool filled with nothing but the desire to kill.

Enkrid defined the enemy. In defining it, he predicted what it would do.

'It will cut and stab and kill anything in its path.'

Regardless of who stood before it.

Defining it let him read its intention, and recalling the right experience made clear what he had to do.

Thud.

Enkrid did something that looked pointless. He lifted his foot and stamped the floor. The impact cracked the stone outward from the point of contact, a spiderweb fracture, and dust puffed up like powder.

"Look at me. You wretched thing."

He said it and showed the False Slash. He pushed out Will and projected a false killing intent, compressed fighting spirit that even a demon could not ignore.

He did it by lowering the tip of his silver-steel sword slightly to point at the enemy.

Through words, through action, through momentum, the message was the same.

Look at me. Send your killing intent my way. Focus on me.

The demon did. It was caught in that intention.

The killing intent sharpened to a needle and fixed Enkrid as its only target. He perceived it beyond the ordinary five senses, in the territory of a sixth.

It felt like an arrow drawn taut on a bowstring, aimed directly between his eyes.

The corner of Enkrid's mouth twitched upward. A smile born of pure pleasure running through his whole body, without a trace of darkness in it.

'A favorable advantage.'

Making the enemy target only him.

That alone was enough to offset the disadvantages.

He could fight while protecting what needed protecting.

It was satisfying that the gambit worked, but equally satisfying that the demon recognized him as a worthy opponent.

An enemy that strong could not afford to ignore him. It felt like all the time and effort he had put in were finally paying a dividend.

Joy surged through him.

It surged past the point of joy. His mind was close to drowning in it.

Bang.

The sound came the moment the demon's knees bent. It kicked off the ground and swung its blade. Through the heavy air, the edge fell toward his head. He sensed it and struck back.

Clang.

He seemed to hear the sound before blade even met blade. Will ran through his whole body, and an insight he had not possessed before glimpsed a half-second into the future.

The demon's first sword swung from the right. Then the left came fast, collapsing to a single point as it drove in.

Enkrid rotated his left ankle outward half a turn, a contortion no ordinary person could manage. The joint moved past its normal range, making the motion look slightly wrong, but Enkrid held his balance inside it.

The result was that his body bent sideways, swayed, and cleared the blade. Like a flag caught in the wind.

He did not only dodge. As he moved, he extended his left hand. Spark rose and drove toward the demon's throat.

Clang.

Blocked.

Between them, swords burned with killing intent and hostility. Attack and defense traded back and forth without pause.

Clatter, clatter, clatter, clang.

Blades met in the air and struck sparks. The silver-steel sword and Spark, together against One-Killer's two orange-glowing swords, met and parted and met again like lovers with too much history between them.

Accelerated thought kept hammering at Enkrid's mind.

'No opening.'

He could not easily read what the demon was aiming at. It was not thinking then moving, it was moving on pure instant judgment, which made it hard to read. He could gain ground through the Numbers Game, but even leaving a scratch was proving difficult.

That went both ways. He had not taken a wound yet either.

From the outside, what was happening between them would have looked like acrobatics. From inside, there was no room even to breathe.

The joints moving past their natural range of motion, the lunging thrusts driven by arm strength alone while everything else pulled back, all of it happened without pause.

'Ah.'

The demon was not a knight. But it fought like one.

How could anyone not enjoy this.

Clatter, clang.

After one hundred and eighty-seven exchanges. That sounds long written out, but the actual time elapsed was not much.

Enkrid made his play. It came when One-Killer crossed its feet, swept the left sword horizontally, and drove the right sword in off-beat.

The same dual rhythm as Vallen-style. He knew that combination.

Enkrid feinted like he would meet it head-on, then crushed the beat the demon had set.

It started with the left hand. He acted like he would parry with Spark, then let it go, stalling the demon's judgment for just an instant.

A mad thing to do. Reasonableness thrown straight out the window.

Why would anyone drop their sword and try to catch a blade with their bare hand?

A demon concentrated entirely on killing would keep making rational choices. That was how its mind worked.

Which was exactly why madness like this might land.

That was the answer accelerated thought had produced.

Not a perfect answer, but not a wrong one either.

It was not perfect because the demon's thinking did not actually stall.

Enkrid grabbed the blade with his hand and held on, but the cloth gauntlet ground against the edge with a ragged tearing sound, and the demon, pushing through with force, drove the blade into his stomach.

He twisted his waist at the last moment, though, and kept it from piercing any organs.

Then the silver-steel sword hit the demon's horizontally swinging blade, redirected past it, and struck the demon across the throat.

Clang, thwick, crunch.

All of it happened in an instant.

'Roughly even.'

A rematch could go either way. Which was exactly why he had decided that whoever forced the decisive play first had the edge.

'A favorable advantage.'

Again, he had taken it.

By choosing when to force the play, he had projected his intention first.

He had known that at roughly equal strength, if the demon had to divide its force between both arms, it could not stop the silver-steel sword with everything behind it.

Strangely, even as his stomach opened and the demon's throat came apart, it occurred to him that fighting with a sword in each hand against a truly powerful enemy was something he should never do.

The demon in front of him was proof of that.

'What if only one arm had been a blade instead of both?'

He would have lost. Looking at it that way, calling them roughly equal was generous. The demon was probably a cut above him.

Either way, a win was a win.

"It's not over."

Sinar said it like a shout. Her voice did not get louder, but it was sharp enough to cut through, carrying exactly the right urgency.

One-Killer, throat cut, pulled back the deflected sword and brought it down. Enkrid jumped backward on instinct.

The blade that had dug into the skin and muscle across his stomach slid out. Blood welled up from his gut.

'Not fatal.'

The bleeding meant he could not fight long, but if he forced another decisive exchange inside that window, it would be fine.

Clenching the muscles to slow the blood was possible too.

The muscle-tightening technique Audin had taught him. He could keep fighting. He had to.

That was when something he had not expected came up.

What is this.

Enkrid felt something spreading from where the blade had entered his stomach. He could not even tell if it was poison, but something was spreading and taking over his whole body.

Fast. Very fast.

Like drinking cold water on an empty stomach and feeling it trace a line all the way down to your gut, something was racing through him and killing him from the inside.

From outside, the change in Enkrid was clear enough to see. His eyes began to churn and the color shifted, bleeding red.

"Enki!"

Ruagarne's voice.

He could hear Fell drawing a sword, and the sound of elves rushing in, but Enkrid's field of vision had gone dark and his sight was sinking under black water.

'Why?'

"Ah. You only needed to wound him, didn't you, demon."

Sinar's voice.

He replayed everything One-Killer had done up to this point. Accelerated thought handed him the answer quickly.

One-Killer had only ever needed to draw blood. From the very beginning.

Its own throat being cut did not matter. It would not die from that.

Now Enkrid understood what the demon One-Killer's ability was.

'Killing anyone it touched.'

The thing seeping into his body felt like poison, but it probably was not poison.

If it were ordinary poison, his body would not be dying this helplessly without even a flicker of resistance.

'So that was why there were two swords.'

There had never been any need for just one blade. More accurately, it made sense to assume the demon had other weapons hidden on its body as well.

The thought did not finish. He felt something running down from his eye, and then an agony that made him wonder if this was what having your skull crushed felt like tore through him from the top of his head to the tips of his feet.

Then the darkness began. Death was coming. It felt like being shoved headfirst into black, stagnant water and drowning in it.

The River of Death welcomed him.

Slosh.

Its keeper too.

The keeper did not smile, but looked as though he did. That was how it appeared to Enkrid. The keeper spoke.

"Welcome back, prisoner. This cage will be quite entertaining too, will it not?"

That it would.

Enkrid nodded, almost reflexively.

Right now there was no answer in sight. The wall blocking him was pitch black and tall and dark and thick. But that was exactly why he could agree it was going to be entertaining.

The higher the wall, the greater the joy when you climbed over it.

"Goes without saying."

Enkrid answered. The Boatman was not surprised. He had expected as much.

"Right. Go do it one more time."

No long conversation was needed. The Boatman waved a hand. It meant get out.

Enkrid left the world lit by the purple lamp and returned to reality.

Today would repeat. Time to be locked back into the prison where a demon served as the warden.

He opened his eyes at the moment before the dark corridor where the group had been waiting, just before meeting Sinar, the brief doze in which he had met the Boatman.

Looking at it now, it seemed like something the Boatman had arranged. He appeared to have deliberately set that moment as the starting point for today.

Whether the Boatman had intended it or not made no difference to Enkrid.

Anyone who would give up because the situation looked bleak would never have made it this far.

Whatever trap the Boatman had laid was none of his concern. Even less so for something he had no power to change.

So even now, it was the same as always.

"Let's go."

Enkrid met the new version of today with much the same attitude as the last.

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