WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 640: Just the First Letter

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The same day, but a different mindset.

Cut the throat and get out.

That was the first goal. Sever the throat and escape. Simple enough to say, and nowhere near simple to do.

Enkrid, as always, did not waste a single version of today.

He did not die to gather information, and he did not die to sharpen his judgment. Every repeated today, without ever growing tired of it, he searched for a way to win and pushed toward an end.

That seemed to have left quite an impression on the Boatman.

Maybe so.

"Can't even walk, and you're trying to run."

The Boatman bit his tongue. A person could bite their tongue, but the Boatman was no person. He conveyed meaning through Will. He had no actual vocal cords to use. And this place was somewhere inside the mind, or a dream. So speaking while biting one's tongue was impossible.

Yet the Boatman Enkrid faced on the second today spoke exactly like a man who had bitten his tongue. It was deeply strange, but Enkrid did not press the issue.

His head was too full of the demon One-Killer.

Both blades at the same strength, huh.

The demon could adjust how much force it loaded into each swing. When it shattered the blade in his left arm, it had pulled back the force. Because of that, the right arm's sword slipped through and scored his shoulder.

The sly little bastard grazed his shoulder and stepped back.

Could've just blocked and taken the throat if I'd been a hair faster. Damn thing.

Enkrid cursed the demon's cunning without much heat.

Using tricks this often, was this what it meant to be demonic? Or should he just curse it for being filthy?

Not exactly the kind of thought a man who used Vallen's mercenary sword style should be having.

Then again, a technique that felt perfectly valid when you used it always seemed crueler and more underhanded when the enemy turned it around on you.

It's a demon. What did I expect.

Was that cause for suffering? For struggle? For exhaustion? For collapse? For lying face-down and just breathing?

A pitch-dark night, not a sliver of moonlight.

A wall darker than that night blocked the way ahead. Even so, there was no need to speak of despair or defeat.

If you could not see, you felt along with your hands and climbed anyway.

That was what Enkrid did.

When he used the Vallen-style feigned-defeat technique, he had taken the throat first, but then his instep got stabbed.

When he tried Vallen-style Feigned Breath again, he was the one who got fooled, failed to cut the throat, and took a thrust to the thigh instead.

His forearms, fingers, legs, shins, he got cut across all of them evenly.

He could not be the one to open the decisive moment every time, either. He had said the skill gap was razor-thin, but honestly, there was a sense he was being pushed back a little. So wins and losses kept alternating.

Of course, as the todays repeated, Enkrid started reading and memorizing the enemy's patterns.

A fight that had once taken over a hundred and eighty rounds he finished in just three exchanges.

More than three hundred times he danced with sparks as backdrop, blade against blade.

"Soft as silver. Too soft."

In between, the Boatman kept throwing out words that bordered on insults.

"You need wood and tinder to make fire."

Other times he imitated a sage.

"Too greedy. Save everyone? Guard their backs? Excessive. Utterly excessive."

Between the Boatman's words, Enkrid repeated today dozens of times.

"Will you save me?"

He exchanged the same lines with Sinar. Though of course the words were not identical every time.

The future was variable. A today you had already lived through was never guaranteed to be the same today again.

"Will you swing that sword for my sake?"

"Was it all right for me to stand at your back as well?"

"You've finished your wedding preparations, haven't you? If you make it back alive, the ceremony happens right away."

Words like these passed between them.

When that last line came up, he gave a firm answer.

"Should I just go back?"

"No. Help me."

Sinar's words cut to the bone every single time. As sharply as the pleasure of fighting and clashing with the demon One-Killer.

Like rain you had no way to dodge, her words brought pain. The concentrated suffering she had held inside herself for a long, long time.

The Boatman spoke again.

"Fool. You think you don't know how to give up? That's laughable. Change your thinking. Repeating the same today will drive you mad. That is the path you're walking."

Enkrid kept his thoughts focused in one direction. Because of that, he did not really take in what the Boatman was saying.

This was not the first time.

He simply used the Boatman's words as a daily marker, roughly speaking, he counted which today he was on by what the Boatman said. That was why he had naturally memorized every line.

On the second today, the Boatman had bitten his tongue and said he couldn't even walk, let alone run.

What came next? He combed through memory and carved it in. Using the Boatman's words as a reference point was something he had done across previous todays as well.

"Answer me. Do you not need advice? I'll tell you whether you answer or not. That is my generosity. Now. Here is how to escape today."

Then came a today like this.

Through repetition and fighting, Enkrid had just concluded that the demon One-Killer showing nothing but bloodlust was itself a deceptive technique.

Hidden blades even in its toes?

Its human-shaped form was a deception too. Blades could emerge from anywhere on the thing's body.

It had no helmet, so he had assumed it was avoiding the head and focusing only on leaving wounds across the body. But it had been hiding a blow capable of splitting a skull as well.

It's strong.

Not just strong. Among all the enemies he had faced, it ranked among the most troublesome by a clear margin.

Muscle, speed, judgment, weapon handling, everything.

No particular form or style. It simply stabbed, cut, and struck.

That's exactly why it's so hard to deal with.

He was mid-thought. He had not bothered to reply, but the Boatman eventually brought out his purpose anyway.

"Let it go in one ear and out the other, and you will stay here forever. So listen. Prisoner."

Enkrid was concentrated, reading the current situation, hunting for a method.

The Boatman's voice drove into him as though piercing his entire body. He had no idea how it worked, but there was simply no way not to hear it.

If he had to describe it, it was like someone grabbing your ears and speaking directly into them from an inch away.

The content itself was no different from a human-faced dog barking, but there it was.

"Raise a shield."

"A shield?"

When he responded, what the Boatman said was something to behold.

"Put Frog in front. Put a human in front. Use the elf to absorb a blow. Then you can kill it."

They say a demon's whisper is sweet. So was the Boatman a demon?

Probably not. Those words were not sweet to Enkrid in the least.

"Right. Sure."

So he ignored it.

Looked at from a certain angle, it was a rational and reasonable suggestion. Use the people around him as meat shields and sword-catchers, and he would win.

That said, he did take part of the Boatman's advice and put it to use.

He kicked the Demon Creature corpses rolling across the floor, lifted them on his sword, and used them as shields.

The resulting scene looked fairly absurd, to be honest.

One of those many todays. He had been deliberately drawing the fight out when something Ruagarne said reached his ears, and he could not disagree.

"The demon acts rationally, even if it's treacherous."

The demon was underhanded, yes, but its responses were always logical.

Enkrid was not. He pulled mad stunts to crack the demon's wall of logic. He held a dagger in his teeth while swinging, used Demon Creature corpses, broke up the stone floor and turned it into weapons.

Anyone watching all of it would have said the contrast was something else entirely.

Enkrid repeated those todays.

He walked the irrational path.

He drew the enemy's attention with a False Slash, clashed again, and died. He tried pushing back what he had mistaken for poison using the Will of Refusal.

It pushed back. He thought he could probably eliminate it entirely.

The problem is my body seizes up in the process.

In the middle of a fight where even one blink was not permitted, he had no time to leisurely expel whatever had gotten inside him.

No matter how brief, gaps would open, and in a gap like that One-Killer could carve Enkrid into pieces and gift-wrap them.

So overcoming what had bored inward from inside was not realistic.

Dark. No path in sight. And still he pushed forward. The flailing continued, and with it came more understanding.

His synesthetic sense developed, his field of vision opened, and things he had not been able to see before came into view.

The origin is the same.

The thought surfaced right after Esther's words came to mind. The demon also wielded a formless power. Its origin was magical power, something drawn from the air itself.

It refines magical power and uses it.

That seemed to be the method. Information obtained by feeling around in the dark at the edges of his sixth sense. And then he learned something he would rather not have known.

It had killed everyone, and it had planned to kill Sinar too.

That was Sinar's resolve. Words that came out when he probed with the information gathered across repeated todays.

"If everyone returned and waited, I would have finished it."

Whether it took a hundred years or a thousand, she had intended to stay at the demon's side until they died together. The elf clan felt the same. They had been willing to sacrifice their own people to kill the demon.

Elves do not act on vengeance, or so it was said. Yet why were they fighting this desperately?

"The choice was wrong. Instead of avoiding the Demon Creatures, we should have been finding ways to fight and kill them."

He had heard that from Bran partway through. Thinking from that basis, the elf clan had turned the wheel and changed course on the ship they had been sailing toward stability and peace.

Not patience for the sake of peace. A resolve to fight instead.

The preparations for that had been progressing in stages too.

Sending some elves out and establishing trade, that would be part of those preparations.

Enkrid sorted the information, interpreted it, absorbed it, kept what was useful and discarded what was not.

Through all of it, he still had no idea how to kill the demon.

That did not mean he sat doing nothing. There was not a single day he spent carelessly.

If he did not know, he had no choice but to keep rolling until he did. So that was what he did.

In any case, from fighting One-Killer he had learned the demon refined magical power and used it as its source. It produced effects similar to Will.

Demon Creatures are born with the ability to refine magical power.

When that refined magical power took root in a beast, that was what made a Magic Beast.

Separate from combat thinking, things seeped through the gaps of high-speed thought.

Enkrid did not bother refusing them.

What was the boundary separating Will, divine power, Sorcery, and magical power? Where did you draw that line?

The boundary isn't what's needed. A definition is.

That was where his thinking landed.

Will was built through an individual's own effort in a trained body.

Magic aimed to transform everything.

You could see that from what Esther had shown over time. She changed her clothes, transformed magical power into fire or cold. In visible terms, she had made things like icicle spears.

Magical power had transformation at its essence.

Divine power? Durability. Like a stone that would not budge under ordinary pressure.

Faith as a shield, that's why.

When a fragment of a true god's power was present within it, it could bring change to another person's body. Healing was part of that.

That's why the gray idiots can't scatter healing light.

Understanding followed from watching and experiencing the phenomenon firsthand.

The so-called gray divine unit could not scatter healing light, but it retained its aggression.

Corrupted divine power. No longer something that could be called divine at all.

The distinction of Sorcery also entered his range of understanding. If Will made use of what had been trained, Sorcery reached beyond training, drawing on future assets.

Heart of the Beast, Heart of Superhuman Strength.

Both drew out what had not yet been achieved.

The price had to be paid in return. Extreme muscle pain, or years off a lifespan.

None of this was strictly necessary right now, but it stacked up neatly and served as a marker pointing toward what he needed to do.

He repeated today again. Hope bloomed across the faces of the elf group. As One-Killer appeared and the fighting unfolded, the emotion on their faces shifted.

From hope to despair.

Enkrid watched and observed everything calmly and held on.

Condensed muscle.

The demon One-Killer had muscle of a different density, outside the ordinary range. Something close to a chimera.

Is this Cursed Ground's purpose to create exceptional Demon Creatures?

Was One-Killer born at the extreme end of that purpose? Possibly.

With luck and skill combined, there were times he managed to take the throat.

Thanks to that, he learned that cutting One-Killer's throat did not kill it.

Heartless has no heart.

So stabbing it through the heart would not kill it either, and it would come back swinging.

Like the undying drowned corpse Fell had cut. The same kind of thing.

Then how do you win?

He searched for an answer. He searched endlessly, and then craved one.

And then he had a dream. Completely unrelated to the Boatman, a dream that could only be called out of nowhere.

It came after enduring and dying as he had on any other today. He had used the Will of Refusal, put every technique he had to work, and still died in the end because of a single shallow cut.

It was a short dream.

A person with blond hair and blue eyes, thick forearms, and a kite shield that covered half their body with its pointed bottom appeared and said something.

"First letters only."

He had no idea what that meant. After the dream passed, the Boatman met him as usual.

"In the end, this is where you will stay. Trapped in a today full of suffering."

It was after he had lived through more than two hundred todays.

"Give up now."

In the Boatman's words, Enkrid felt a dissonance.

He had felt that dissonance before.

There were specific words where that dissonance had been exactly that sharp.

The Boatman could not bite his tongue. He communicated by forming Will into meaning.

So in the line "Can't even walk, and you're trying to run," stumbling on the word "walk" was not something the Boatman would do.

High-speed thought skipped over the process, grasped the situation, and reached for an answer.

He combed through memory. Remembering things said months ago was hard. But not impossible.

He had let the Boatman's words go in one ear while using them as markers to count the todays. That was why he could do it.

"Can't even walk, and you're trying to run."

"Soft as silver. Too soft."

"You need wood and tinder to make fire."

"Too greedy. Save everyone? Guard their backs? Excessive. Utterly excessive."

"Fool. You think you don't know how to give up? That's laughable. Change your thinking. Repeating the same today will drive you mad. That is the path you're walking."

"Answer me. Do you not need advice? I'll tell you whether you answer or not. That is my generosity. Now. Here is how to escape today."

Take only the first letters.

Walk. Silver. Fire. Excess. Fool. Answer.

Walking Fire and the opposite? Opposite of what? Just before the fight with the demon One-Killer, even when he had taken the shock of elf society head-on, there had been a receptivity that saw light. That same receptivity received the Boatman's hint.

He did not refuse everything the Boatman said outright.

Walking Fire, and its opposite.

When he woke to that day again, Enkrid saw a small light.

It might be the Boatman's trick to deceive him, but instinct said this was light.

A crack split open in the dark, solid wall, and the light that shone through touched his hand.

He knew why facing an unscalable wall brought joy. Because he knew what it felt like when you finally went over one.

Elation swept through his whole body again. More than twice as good as the last time he had faced a wall like this.

"Hey, demon. Want to really go at it this time?"

That joy turned toward the demon.

To those who had not lived through the repeated todays, he was just the same crazy Enkrid as always.

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