WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 642: Coexistence

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How many times had he faced that ugly mug now.

He had practically memorized every marking carved into the creature's body. Not that he had any leisure to sit and study them.

If you were not a genius, you had to claw and thrash just to see what they saw.

Enkrid knew that better than anyone.

And in the previous today, despite not being a genius, he had caught a glimpse of it himself.

He took in the creature's feet and the blades serving as its arms as it stepped out from behind Sinar's chair. He missed nothing, not a single small movement, and the moment he registered it all, his sense of time began to slow.

Acceleration of thought.

The stale air of the Labyrinth pressed down heavier, and the discomfort hit his skin with sharper clarity.

He would have liked to dull some of his senses, but that would make it impossible to fight the One-Killer. He needed his sixth sense, so it simply was not an option.

That was why he had to bear the pressure and the discomfort as they were.

Enkrid did. He endured, without fuss.

He had been through this enough times by now that it barely registered.

Inside slowed time, the orange body drew a long line and closed in. It almost looked like a bladed creature glowing orange, legs and all, charging forward.

Not wrong, considering every part of the Demon One-Killer was a weapon.

The orange form split into several afterimage shapes as it approached, then fused back into one as it drew near.

The moment the orange body came fully into view, the corners of Enkrid's mouth lifted. A smile spread across his face.

"A greeting."

His voice was clear, bright enough that calling it crisp would not do it justice. The black-haired, blue-eyed lunatic moved.

Ruagarne and Fell missed Enkrid's movement entirely and had no chance to be surprised. The elves even less so.

Only Sinar startled, just for a moment.

Enkrid closed in on the One-Killer and drove his sword straight down in a vertical strike.

A blade that traced a semicircle overhead.

On the surface it looked blunt and honest, but.

Different.

Sinar had seen it right. This was no ordinary slash.

The silver-steel sword's blade seemed to scatter light in all directions as it curved through the motion.

At the same time, that blade fanned out like a flower spreading its petals, splitting into dozens.

Not that it actually split. The days of today had not only sharpened his thinking.

It had never been just about sitting and puzzling out answers, either.

The time had always been training time. Each day's desperate effort had pushed his skill forward by a real measure.

It was an expanded, evolved form of the false blade. He swung the sword while simultaneously dividing his killing intent to strike from multiple angles.

If it could shake an opponent's composure even a little, it would be worth something.

Against a normal opponent, it would have been. Against the One-Killer, it was not.

A Demon born with its reason stripped away, carrying only killing intent, made sharper and more decisive judgments in combat than anyone else. It was not easily fooled.

The creature extended its blade along the most rational arc it could draw, spontaneous as it was.

Clang!

The silver-steel sword struck across the orange blade in a sharp cutting motion.

If the One-Killer's body counted as metal, then two hunks of iron had met, and the shockwave rumbled through the ground in a deep rolling vibration. Dust bloomed in every direction.

The invisible shockwave radiating from the two of them drove the foul air of the Labyrinth back for one brief moment.

"Fun, isn't it?"

Enkrid stepped back after the strike and shook his sword in the air. That single blow had sent a deep shudder through his internal organs.

He had put that much force behind it. Circulating Will through his entire body was something he had done so many times across five hundred-plus todays that he could probably do it in his sleep.

The strike had carried techniques absorbed from things like the Heart of Superhuman Strength and Giant-Splitting, though he had not deliberately reached for any of them.

Repeating the todays had made blending techniques feel natural, embedding itself in his body.

That was why Sinar had seen it as different. She was right.

If the false blades of killing intent that cut through an enemy's mind were the flourish, then the physical strike that caused real damage was the blow with actual weight behind it.

Breaking it down into primary and secondary: the false blades were secondary. The primary was the sword driven straight down. On the surface the false blades looked like the main event, but the truth was the opposite.

Shaking composure was only an added purpose.

It could fairly be called an attack that wove the false and the real together.

Sinar had not been the only one startled by that blow.

Crack. Crunch. Snap.

Bones shifted inside the One-Killer's body, its leg shape changing. Its arms stretched long at the same time.

Well, at least the greeting landed.

This thing was serious about reshaping its limbs.

"Not fun for you, then?"

Enkrid asked again. The One-Killer did not answer. A Demon with no mouth, naturally it could not.

"It has no vocal organs and no will," Sinar said.

"I know."

He probably knew that better than Sinar did. But no mouth or not, it communicated its intentions well enough through action.

Like right now. Reshaping its limbs was a declaration of intent, a statement that it was ready to fight in earnest.

Enkrid took it that way. Watching it change, he shifted the angle of his feet and lowered his sword tip slightly.

Not a threat, but a signal that he meant to take the upper hand in the Numbers Game. The One-Killer responded immediately.

Boom!

It kicked off the ground and rushed in. Even with time stretched out, it was at his face before he could blink.

A charge driven by legs that bent the wrong way.

The spray of stone fragments it kicked up had not even reached the air before the body was already at Enkrid's nose.

With it came orange lines curling through the air. The blades the envoy brought crashing down split into dozens, targeting everything from his head down to every part of his body.

Enkrid gripped a sword in each hand and met them one by one.

Clang clang clang clang clang clang clang clang!

From here, it required splitting thought, dividing his mind.

At first he had tried to divide it into dozens of streams, matching the creature's approach.

He fought and calculated, calculated and fought. His nose bled faster than his high-speed thinking could catch up.

The creature moved with more dynamism, as if it sensed he was pushing to break his own limits. Trying to calculate everything at once was naturally enough to spin his eyes in their sockets. He did it anyway.

He endured because he did not know how to quit. The ending, though, did not change.

Understanding came out of failure. Not that any single today had done it alone.

No need to divide it into dozens.

It did not happen in one leap, but he grew more capable with each today that stacked up.

Big picture, see the flow. Up close, see the moment. That's all it is.

He knew he should not name techniques, and yet here he was, stupidly slapping labels like high-speed thinking and split thinking onto them again.

What matters isn't the definition. What matters is using it.

That was the answer he had arrived at.

The Wave-Blocking Sword assumes a prolonged fight.

It had to lean on endurance, not explosiveness. Not a sword that finished things in one burst, but one that received and held on.

He had been building the habit of regulating his breathing and distributing his effort to fight long. Then the One-Killer had decided to accelerate and he had failed to keep up, and he had died.

The eye for the whole picture isn't there yet.

That was where the eye for flow opened. The domain of insight. Seeing far, seeing long. Strategy for sustained combat took shape.

At the same time, he could not take so much as a scratch from the creature's blade.

Up close, see the moment.

If there was strategic and tactical thinking, there had to be combat thinking too.

Thinking focused purely on the present, this instant, to receive attacks and hold on. From there, another realization surfaced.

Endurance or explosiveness alone isn't the answer. Leaning one way won't work. What matters is coexistence.

Coexistence could also be called balance. Maintaining appropriate explosiveness.

Yes, this process had been genuinely hard. Even Enkrid, who treated not knowing how to quit as a strength, had spent the length of two breaths wondering if he had it right, somewhere in the middle of it all.

The training condition for the Wave-Blocking Sword was complete.

Maintain appropriate explosiveness.

This was not a sword art for grinding down the Basics.

It was a sword art that accelerated and divided thought to make use of everything already possessed.

The meaning and method of implementation had been understood long before. Merging that understanding with a way to train it, then executing, those were the results.

A meteor shower came down. The orange blades at the ends of its arms scattered light in every direction. The scattered light thrashed about as though it would burn out the optic nerves.

Enkrid half-lowered his eyes, gripped the silver-steel sword in both hands, and answered.

Trying to amplify all five senses and perceive everything would set his skull on fire, but if he regulated that and filtered selectively for only what was actually threatening his body right now, it did not have to push him that hard.

Will running through his entire body protected his organs and his flesh while lending force to the sword.

Clang clang clang clang clang clang clang clang clang!

The orange meteors failed to reach their target and scattered into the air.

Using his sixth sense meant he could afford to blink. Enkrid did, easing the fatigue and strain gathering in his eyes.

The One-Killer changed its attack pattern.

A tactical shift following the change in its limbs.

Not simply relying on raw physical capability, but widening how it applied itself.

It started kicking off in all directions on both legs. Like a grasshopper, it launched off the ground with a boom, treating walls and ceiling as ground.

It began three-dimensional movement at terrifying speed, arms swinging.

What had filled only the front became a rain of strikes targeting everything from his head to his neck, arms, legs, back, thighs, every part of him.

Not just the front. Every direction, up and down and to both sides, everything fell within range of attack.

Legs won't be enough to keep up.

Move only as much as needed, only when needed. The high-speed thinking found the answer and passed it to combat thinking. There was not even a real handoff. All of it happened at once.

Then, out of nowhere, a thought drifted in from one corner of his mind.

The Cursed Ground's particular pressure bore down on his shoulders, and everything, the density of the air, the smell, all of it, was unpleasant.

Sunlight.

Enkrid blocked and blocked again, and thought about how he wanted to see sunlight. He wanted a cool breeze on his face.

The elf city had smelled of grass everywhere, and flowers had drifted thick in the air.

Good place.

He had only pictured sunlight and a breeze, something gentle, and for a moment Enkrid forgot the pressure crushing him down.

The split in his thought was what gave him that breathing room.

Will was resolve, a desire rising from within and reaching into the body. His arms and legs moved lighter.

One stream of thought understood it; another immediately performed and executed it.

Split thought, each piece doing its part. The One-Killer's attacks were fierce and sharp. From the outside, it might have looked like Enkrid was barely holding on. That made it a feat.

"What an absurd thing to do," Sinar muttered. That was how surprised she was. Was she the only one.

He deflected the blades again and again. The death-touch the Demon One-Killer delivered swept uselessly through the air.

Time passed.

Enkrid neither lost himself nor turned away from the present. He kept the present.

The Wave-Blocking Sword, the sword that blocked the waves, held off every single attack the One-Killer made.

At one point the creature turned on Fell, but it came to nothing. Enkrid had been waiting for it and knocked the blade-arm aside.

Blocking did not simply mean standing in one spot and holding a sword up like a shield.

Attack was part of defense. He had learned that basic truth before he ever became a squad leader of any kind. He had learned it and internalized it, so using it came naturally.

A today passed.

Clang! Clang clang clang clang clang!

More precisely, he spent a full day blocking. The coexistence of explosiveness and endurance, a sword sustained, could not kill the One-Killer, but he had not died either.

Ah.

Enkrid had been seized by elation more than once in that time.

"Completing a single sword art is like opening a single world."

Someone had said that to him once. Back then it had just been something that passed through his ears.

The one who said it and the Enkrid who heard it, both of them had been too far from that kind of thing.

To make it even more so, the man who said it had only been a sword instructor in a small city. The kind who would be doing well to make it as a low-rank mercenary.

So the sword art he had meant was probably not the sort of thing a knight used.

All the same, those words came back to Enkrid now, and they landed clearly.

After holding on for exactly one full day.

Enkrid began mixing meaningless gestures into the Wave-Blocking Sword.

Lifting and shaking his left foot out of nowhere. Sticking out his tongue. Suddenly spinning a full circle in place.

Blocking alone would not end the fight. This was the method he had found.

The Demon One-Killer was a creature that had lost its reason and yet continuously ran rational combat calculations.

Which meant it would try to assign meaning even to meaningless actions. That would burden its calculation processes.

A method he had already tried enough times to know it worked.

An opening.

Enkrid swung his sword into the gap he saw.

Pfft!

Part of the creature's forearm tore. Not a deep wound. A little black blood flew. At best he had cut a sliver of flesh the size of a pinky fingernail.

The wound closed quickly as orange light pooled and spread across the forearm.

That was the start. To take the neck or the forearm would require releasing the Wave-Blocking Sword.

That would make it hard to stop the One-Killer's strikes.

If the Wave-Blocking Sword was a shield, he expanded the range of that shield just a little. Split his thinking and wove in other tricks.

If he had to put it in words, it was the Wave-Blocking Sword as a formalized technique with Enkrid-style mixed in.

From completing a sword art to applying it.

All of it happened within a single day.

"You were a genius," Fell muttered, having caught a glimpse of part of that process with his innate talent.

"Not just any genius, either."

He sighed again. Of course it was a misunderstanding. It was the product of countless todays stacked and layered on top of each other.

The Demon's arms were being carved apart, flesh laid bare, the orange-infused sections spreading.

The Demon was dying. Or rather, being cut to pieces was the more accurate way to put it.

He had held on for a full day. Time that would have had an ordinary person dozing on their feet had passed.

The second day came. Without sleep, without rest, the fierce fight continued.

Splitting thought reduced the burden on the body. With split thinking alongside high-speed thought, there was no longer any need to push the body past its limits by circulating Will to extremes.

The result. A creature with no mouth and no vocal organs could not speak, naturally.

Instead, the carved flesh revealed severed wrists, arms, legs, then ankles and toes, fingers, all separated, and it conceded its defeat in pieces.

It was not a dramatic victory won in one decisive stroke. Enkrid knew that.

From the outside, though, it would not have looked that way.

Fell thought that if someone asked him to explain it, he would not even know where to begin.

Enkrid had simply endured and endured, peeling away one layer of flesh at a time, until he had carved the Demon apart, sliced it to pieces, and killed it.

That was all. The One-Killer lay on the ground. Enkrid had won.

"Now we just need the wedding ceremony," Sinar said.

"I keep telling you, that's not happening."

Enkrid answered her joke immediately, then fixed his gaze on her.

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