WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 641: Meaning, Realization, Forging.

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The Boatman stuttered and bit his tongue?

At first Enkrid wondered if it was some new kind of joke. There were no elf-style jokes, so maybe Boatman-style jokes were possible.

Of course, that was not it.

His thoughts accelerated and sprinted toward a conclusion.

The opposite of Walking Fire.

When he cut down the Walking Fire spell, what had mattered was pouring everything into a single strike.

So that was not the answer here.

It was also a method he had already tried across the many todays he had lived through.

Cutting with full force and a surge of Will did not work.

Then what was the opposite?

Enkrid's instincts were sharper than at any point in his life. On top of that, the repeated todays had filled him with understanding, things he had sorted out and pressed into his mind one by one.

The ripple of all that let him glimpse something beyond the edge of what he understood.

The way you can guess a word's meaning from its context, knowledge earned through repeated experience looked at a cause and reasoned out the result.

He had said he saw light because the conclusion had flickered into view, a shape made by inference and deduction.

The Boatman's words were not complete.

He spoke only in first syllables, which made them even less so.

So.

Was it meant to tease him? Maybe.

A small anxiety sat in the back of his mind. But if there was a method worth trying, not trying it would be its own kind of foolishness.

So all he had to do was focus on the present.

The Boatman's advice was broad.

Enkrid took it in his own way.

Remember the time you faced the Walking Fire.

After that came review. Not the moment he had learned the technique, but the situation itself. He pulled out the todays spent repeating the fight against the Walking Fire, the mindset he had carried then, the way his thoughts had moved, one piece at a time.

A graze was enough to kill.

A scratch was enough to kill.

Then just don't get hit.

There had been a fight where he endured by stripping away the fire layer by layer, like peeling skin.

Endurance.

A memory surfaced. Someone had once made this kind of fighting their specialty. Liervart. The chimera knight Count Molsen had put forward.

He had made stamina his defining strength.

He had also been someone who, despite remaking his own body, never reached the place he was trying to go.

Fighting him had helped. Enduring against the Walking Fire naturally came to mind too. The library of experience opened. He reviewed what he had learned. Reviewing it let him embody it. He had carved theory into the practice too.

The meaning was:

A sword that blocks even waves.

The form was blocking every attack that came at him. The training methods numbered in the dozens.

Once meaning, form, and method were settled, it could become a sword style in its own right.

He had grasped it. Now it was time to make his body do it. Preparation was complete.

The One-Killer's attacks were all lethal. Each swing went beyond threatening, it turned the blood cold.

To block that enemy's sword, Enkrid would need to pull off dozens, hundreds of precise cuts himself.

Pick the wrong answer and die.

A sharp thrill, excitement, and a fierce joy raced up his spine.

A new today. The One-Killer swung as if it had been waiting. The blades mounted on both arms moved like independent creatures. It resembled the Vallen's mercenary sword style duet, two blades on different rhythms.

Enkrid raised only the silver-steel sword to meet them.

Calculate.

He split the incoming attacks into pieces, processed them in sequence, filed them in order of time. This was the domain of insight. High-speed thought helped him do it.

His heart pounded. Blood rushed hard through his entire body. With it, Will, that formless force, raced through him too, lending strength to what he wanted.

Clang.

He raised the silver-steel sword and knocked aside a blade coming in at an angle. He did not stop there. He followed through with a continuous arc. He had to. That same arc caught another blade pressing into a gap, but there was no room to breathe, no room to blink. He immediately pulled the sword back and blocked in front of his face.

A blade jutting from the One-Killer's kick, about the length of a Shortsword, came right up to his jaw. The silver-steel sword stopped it there.

Skreeaak.

Blade met blade, grinding, each insisting on itself.

The intent was clear.

After the kick would come a chain, an unbroken string of follow-up strikes.

Enkrid decided he needed to attack. He drew Spark and stole a fraction of the One-Killer's freedom.

The One-Killer's compressed muscles could explode into a charge. And when it pulled back, it moved at nearly the same speed.

That was possible because its leg shape changed during a fight.

Once pushed past a certain point, its legs shifted to something like an animal's. They had already done so now.

Judged by a human frame, it looked like the joints bent backwards, but that was not actually the case.

Anyone who understood animal leg structure would recognize it was not a reverse joint but an optical illusion.

In truth, what a humanoid would identify as the knee of an animal's leg is the heel.

An animal's legs are not inverted. They are standing correctly.

It was an evolution for escaping predators. For a human it would be like standing on the tips of your toes, a posture always ready to launch. And when the legs changed like that, the One-Killer's leg strength more than doubled.

Boom. Boom.

The rock floor cracked and split open. Through the gaps, countless orange lines tore in.

The creature that had pulled back came rushing in twice as fast. It swung both arms as it came, and from the other side of that charge, this was what it looked like:

A downpour of meteors falling from the sky.

The orange streaks that looked like meteors did not only fall from above. They came in straight lines, in curves, parallel to the ground.

Didn't Sinar say that among the Four Seasons Sword techniques, a shower of rain, pushed far enough, becomes a meteor shower?

It resembled the Rain Sword Sinar had shown him. And it was faster, and heavier. Blocking each one was brutal.

Enkrid had to break through his own limits. So he did. A body refined by training, a mind heated like a blade in the forge, both shattered through the ceiling and kept going.

If he could not do that, he would get stabbed or cut or beaten to death. There was no other option.

Eyes that had broken through their limits caught the shifts in speed. Dynamic Visual Acuity beyond human range.

Will surged. First it reinforced his muscles. Then it circled through his body, protecting his organs, and rose toward his brain.

Will supported every sense and made what was ordinary into something beyond ordinary. That was why feats that seemed like tricks became possible.

The One-Killer's body kept changing. First the legs, then the arms. Its arms loosened like a mollusk's. Arms with no bones, only taut muscle, bent and flexed and added speed to the blades.

Enkrid saw all of it. He dodged and blocked and hit back.

Blood ran freely from the hand gripping the silver-steel sword.

He wore cloth gauntlets, but they did not absorb all the impact. New wounds opened over old calluses built from skin torn and healed so many times it had gone hard as iron.

Brutal.

But he had no intention of stopping, so he blocked one blade and then another.

He lost count of how many times. Time had stopped meaning anything.

At some point his eyes burned as if someone had dripped candle wax into them.

It was obvious enough, a mind making countless judgments in rapid succession was bound to make mistakes.

Fatigue accumulated. Blind spots formed from the relentless calculation.

A blade from the One-Killer nicked his cheek. The arm, all muscle and no bone, lengthened and left an orange afterimage.

Thwack.

Enkrid earned a scratch on his cheek in exchange for cutting through both the One-Killer's arms, but.

A graze is enough to kill.

That had not changed. He had failed. Pain tore through his whole body, as if someone had slid a blade into his blood and let it travel through him.

When he was young, a bad-tempered old woman had warned him that a needle prick in the wrong place would travel through the veins and kill you. Right now it genuinely felt like that.

Thud.

While he staggered, a blade that had risen from the One-Killer's foot drove into the top of his skull.

Pain that started in his head crashed through the rest of him like lightning.

It hurt.

From the pain came the blackout, and blackout meant death. This today was over.

"Will that be the answer?"

On the rolling black river, the Boatman holding the purple lamp asked without any particular interest. Enkrid did not answer.

The opposite of Walking Fire.

There was a distance between the Boatman who had said that and the one standing before him now, a distance that made them look like different people entirely.

"I don't know either."

"Amusing."

The Boatman said it with not a trace of laughter. Today began again. The same start as yesterday, as every today that had passed.

He took up his sword with enthusiasm as the blade and will as the shield.

"Today will be more interesting than yesterday."

Enkrid said something no one around him could understand.

"What are you on about?"

Sinar asked, but he could not answer. The One-Killer had sensed his killing intent and came charging straight at him.

Clang.

The blades found their rhythm. The fight started again. He calculated variables. Derived reasonable answers from them.

Within a single today, Enkrid felt his own growth for real.

He had figured that if the One-Killer's legs and arms did not change, the fight was roughly even or slightly against him. If they did change, the gap in strength and speed should have been obvious.

But he could keep up.

So he did.

He clenched his back teeth and held on and kept fighting. His body showed the cost.

First came the bloody tears. Overheated Will burst the fine vessels in his eyes.

Then a nosebleed. The more variables there were to track, the harder his mind had to spin.

His brain ran hot, and blood poured from his nose. After that his lungs cramped. His muscles went red with heat. For a moment his whole body was blotched a deep raw red, as though bruised all at once.

"Hell."

That was what Ruagarne said when she saw it.

Clang.

Fell, watching Enkrid, drew the Idol Slayer and readied to fight.

Looks like he's held on about as long as he can.

The One-Killer did not look tired. Or rather, it did not look like the kind of thing that would get tired.

A knight swinging with ordinary cuts, or cuts where Will only flared at the instant of impact, could cut down a thousand enemies in a day.

Right now Enkrid had Will circulating through his entire body the whole time. What he had done was not cut a thousand enemies but far more, and not over a full day but in a fraction of that time, compressed, grinding his body down into nothing.

So a nosebleed opening up like a broken dam was not strange at all.

Not good.

Enkrid judged that there was a flaw in his training method. High-speed thought let him complete hundreds of calculations at once. He had believed it was the only way to block a sword that changed moment to moment.

But the limits of accelerated thought are clear.

Then what? Did the wall block him again?

No. The nosebleed was heavy enough that blood loss should have killed him, but Enkrid pressed the silver-steel sword into the ground and held himself upright. He watched the One-Killer pull back.

You bastard.

He had assumed it targeted only him because he was the greatest threat. But.

At least in a fight, I have to treat its tactical thinking as equal to mine.

That seemed right.

Yes, it targeted him because he was dangerous. But beyond that, it was calculating tactical efficiency.

The moment it judged that his combat capacity had dropped, it moved on to the next target.

It fought in an extremely efficient, rational way.

If it can kill me, the rest of them won't need much effort.

But if it went after Ruagarne, Fell, or the others instead, they would combine to fight back.

The outcome might not change even then, yet it had not done that.

It took whatever small advantage it could. The same thing Enkrid had done. The creature had done it too.

Demons are rational. How fitting.

"We're not done yet."

Enkrid said it. The One-Killer did not respond. It raised its blade toward the next target.

Not Ruagarne. Not Fell. It turned toward Bran, the Woodguard.

"I didn't expect otherwise."

And Sinar pulled herself to her feet. A heavy, grinding sound came from her.

As she rose from the stone chair, something like veins fell away beneath her in scattered drops.

Blood ran down Sinar's back. That had not been just a chair.

Enkrid looked at a companion dying, and he saw the elves combining to fight. He watched Sinar rise to resist but unable to fight the way she once had.

And then he died.

Clenching his back teeth, pushing through the pain of ruptured muscles, he threw himself at the One-Killer, and it punched a hole through his heart in an instant.

That was how he died.

After the blackout where even the Boatman did not appear, he woke shaking, the memory of pain still in his body.

"If accelerated thought isn't enough..."

His mind worked fine regardless of the pain. The words came out on their own.

Theory and imagination, training and experience merged in his head and opened a new path.

Wave-Blocking Sword.

The meaning: a sword that blocks even waves.

The form: blocking attacks.

The training method:

Tempering thought.

How do you temper thought?

Until now Enkrid had known two ways.

One was thinking at high speed.

The other he had learned since coming to the elf city.

Divide it.

Split the thought.

The enemy used both arms separately. It fought by dividing its thinking. It fought using its whole body too. The branches of thought probably split into more than just two.

What it had absorbed was an elf knight's way of fighting.

Natural combat instinct, with combat reasoning replaced by an elf's.

What it possessed were weapons that killed on a graze. Its form had grown around that fact.

And its thinking had developed the same way.

They say demons are the natural enemy of knights.

This one fit that description all too well.

"Just have to divide it."

Enkrid's eyes lit up. The explorer who, when failing, found a new path instead of learning despair stepped forward, as always.

Enkrid kept repeating the day after that. He died and died again.

Five hundred sixty-six todays passed. Somewhere along the way, the Boatman stopped appearing.

Even when he did show up, his manner was that of a third-rate actor reciting scripted lines.

"Give up. You are trapped in today."

"Do you need something to hate? Just hate yourself. That will be enough."

In one of those repeated todays, Enkrid spoke to Sinar again and received the same answer.

By chance, it was the same thing she had said in the very first today.

That kind of thing was rare across repeated todays.

The future is variable.

But life always changes, and maybe that is why coincidence sometimes becomes a miracle.

"Then Enki, will you save me?"

Sinar said it.

"Yes, I will."

Enkrid answered.

Had he not said that was why he had come?

After more than five hundred todays, his heart had not wavered once. The blade of his will had been struck countless times and still showed an edge sharp and bright.

What he needed to do was clear, and that was what he had been doing all along.

High-speed thought, and beyond it, the division of thought.

He had no certainty.

As always, Enkrid simply challenged it.

The One-Killer stepped forward. Enkrid looked at it and murmured to himself.

I've seen your face so many times I'm starting to feel something for you. You son of a bitch.

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