A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 643

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 643: The Devil, Tobacco, and a Duel

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"Stay still."

After cutting the One-Killer to pieces, Enkrid let his sword hang loose, exhaled a couple of times, steadied his breathing, and spoke.

At that, everyone seemed to breathe with extra care. Not that it mattered much, they would all have been struck speechless regardless.

Once he said it, Enkrid took a brief look inward.

The Load pressing on his limbs left them trembling faintly. Every muscle in his body was protesting its exhaustion.

Even accounting for how fully he had devoted himself to maintaining throughout.

Hard going.

There was no fighting the fatigue crushing down on him from head to toe. The fight had demanded that much.

And only now did the parts of Aoara's style he had glossed over during combat come apart and settle into comprehension. Nothing she had shown him in dreams was lost to him anymore. Joy and something close to elation struck his chest like a wave.

Wave-Blocking Sword.

Not simply a technique, but a complete system of swordsmanship, from its meaning and method of execution all the way through to how it was to be tempered into the body.

He could not help feeling as though he had stepped into a new world.

A few theories, things he already knew, blended together, and something else began to surface.

Not now.

He knew by instinct. This was something to sit with and work through over time, not something that called for a flash of immediate inspiration.

Put differently, the inspiration was already there in abundance. Which was precisely why now was not the moment for it.

Rest was needed too. Not just for his body. Accelerating his thoughts, splitting them to fight on multiple tracks at once, whatever words he draped over it, had been an act of grinding his mind raw.

Whatever his body required, this was not yet the moment to talk about rest.

The One-Killer is dead, but the Cursed Ground remains.

Sinar kept her expression composed on the surface, but put plainly, she was restless. She had started to rise from her chair, then stopped. Enkrid had said to stay still.

The dark-haired, blue-eyed man who had said it walked toward her now. He looked nothing like a madman.

Like those he had pulled from the edge, Sinar saw light in Enkrid. The demon that had blazed orange was dead, its source extinguished. Even in the dull darkness that had settled in its place, the light she saw in him did not go out.

Crumble.

The silver-steel sword, which had held for two days, gave out, the blade crumbling and scattering apart until only the handle remained.

Enkrid set the bare handle on top of its scabbard, tore a strip of cloth, and wound it tight.

While he did that, the elf Brisa raised a fresh glow stone and spoke.

"We won."

Two days she had watched this fight. Just watching had left her spent.

The cold sweat running down her back had been as chilling as the sight of blood, and she had lived through too many moments feeling certain the man now standing before her might simply drop dead on the spot.

Her mouth had refused to open, and this was why she only managed to say it now. For two straight days she had felt at any second the man before her might keel over and die.

And if he died, hope would have been about as findable as charm on a human-faced dog.

Even with a Kiaos, killing the One-Killer would have been a distant dream.

"That's right. We won."

The words came from Bran, who was probably the most surprised person there. Enkrid did not react much to the large Woodguard's words.

Having sorted out his sword, he walked toward Sinar. The elf raised her head from where she sat.

She lifted her chin and looked up at her rescuer with those green eyes that the word mysteriously beautiful did not begin to cover.

Her rescuer spoke. Or rather, asked.

"Are you truly four hundred and forty-eight years old?"

After a brief silence, Sinar laughed. It was the first time a full smile had spread across her face since the days when she had played with her sisters and spent time with Aden.

"You absolute bastard," she said.

The words were a curse, but affection ran through them.

He had paid her back for the usual elf-style jokes at his expense, and Enkrid felt satisfied.

Fell, listening from behind, clicked his tongue and muttered.

"That guy is actually insane."

Hearing that, Ruagarne puffed out her cheeks. By human standards it was something like stifled laughter.

"That is so like you," she said.

Enkrid drew Spark in place of the broken silver-steel sword and slashed, stabbed, and worked at the back of the chair. Spark already had a crack through the middle and looked ready to snap at any moment.

Thud. Crack.

He had spent more than a few days in here. He knew well enough that the chair was something alive.

Stay still had meant: wait while I deal with the chair.

While Sinar sat quietly, Enkrid's Spark cut and tore at the stone chair without mercy. The vein-like things hidden inside snapped and sprayed fluid. Dark greenish blood, somewhere between black and green, ran out.

"It is a chair that drinks vital energy," Sinar said.

The vein-like threads remained on her back, but the connection to whatever had been feeding from her was severed.

"So the Courtship Demon was not stealing your purity after all. It seems you have lost your chance to escape spinsterhood."

"I am grateful to be rescued, but I will say it again: whether the one mocking a woman's age is human or elf or dwarf or Dragonkin, it is a truly shabby thing to do."

"I am a fairly shabby person by nature."

Under the shallow exchange ran a strange current of feeling.

Once he had cut away all the vein-like threads from the chair, Enkrid extended his hand.

Sinar took it. One pulled, the other rose.

Having gotten to her feet, Sinar seemed to feel a rush of dizziness and fell against Enkrid's chest.

The elf who fell into him with a soft thud was tiny. Enkrid caught her with one arm.

"What are you doing?" he asked, still holding her.

"Esther had me in her arms the whole day. This much is enough for me."

The elf said that and stepped back. Even inside the Labyrinth, a faint smell of grass and flowers drifted from Sinar. Even after she pulled away, her scent lingered softly and reached him.

If Esther had been like the night sky, Sinar's scent made him feel as though he had stepped into the heart of a forest.

Enkrid shook his hand off without making much of it and spoke.

"This probably is not the end. Is it?"

The Labyrinth's demon had split its body in two, he had been told.

One part became something to guard this place.

Then what had the other become?

Sinar knew the answer.

"Is that intuition? Or are you saying it because you know something?"

Of course it was information he had picked up and pieced together across all those days.

"I just guessed."

"If it is only a guess, then the goddess of fortune has clearly chosen you. Yes. It cannot be over."

Sinar confirmed as much.

"What else is left?"

Bran stepped forward to ask. To his eyes, this felt like some day that had slipped outside of ordinary reality. He had been too stunned to even think about lighting his tobacco.

The other elves were the same.

In the middle of it all, Arcoiris came over and carefully began removing the things clinging to Sinar's back.

It should have been enough to sting, but Sinar was unmoved. An elf who had spent long ages living with restrained feeling was simply unpracticed at showing it.

Still, all of them were briefly on a high right now.

They had killed a demon. That fact made it feel as though every fluid running through their bodies was boiling.

Enough to make them forget for a moment the exhaustion that came from watching a fight in a half-awake state for two days.

"The Labyrinth's demon split in two."

Sinar explained and pointed toward the back. A straight corridor had ended where they now stood.

From this point, three more tunnels led further inside.

"One became a combat form to guard this place. The other must be understood as a production form that was working all along to swallow the city whole."

Could a demon that birthed Demon Creatures exist? Yes.

Places worth calling a Cursed Ground usually had something like that at their core. And there were things guarding it too.

The demon One-Killer had been exactly that.

This place the elves called the Labyrinth was the same kind of thing as the Cursed Ground that had been in the City of Aoara.

That place had held a Balrok Fragment. This one held a demon that craved the flesh and blood of elves alongside their souls.

Where Sinar led them, the main body came into view.

A mass of flesh. There was no other way to describe it. Large enough that if it had a mouth, it could swallow a person whole.

The gap splitting through the center of the mass kept moving, opening slightly, then closing again, showing what lay inside.

Chunks of flesh, clotted black blood, splinters of bone, all jumbled together into something that defied any clear reading.

"It is a demon that births Demon Creatures. It is weak to fire."

The elf clan were not fools. Neither was Sinar.

Even without Enkrid, the elves had the means to kill this thing, if not for the One-Killer. He had not needed to step in at all.

Arcoiris reached into a pocket and produced a green stone.

"A Kiaos is a stone made from condensed vital energy. That is a Kiaos worked and processed further," Bran said. The explanation was for Enkrid's benefit.

"What does it do?"

"It holds all the forest vital energy we have gathered up to now. Set it off, and boom."

Bran said it, then flicked a flint and lit his tobacco. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. Sinar, watching him, spoke.

"You can stop smoking now, Bran."

Bran had been Sinar's teacher, and the teacher of her sisters as well.

The demon had come in the guise of warmth, then burned the city with fire, and had planted in Sinar a deep sense that fire meant fear and suffering.

Bran had started smoking then. It was one of his efforts to erase the terror the demon had put in her.

Cases of a Woodguard working with fire were extraordinarily rare.

In fact, outside of Bran there would be none.

It had been his effort, his stubborn refusal to give up, toward freeing her from a world where fire and dread had become the same thing.

Even with bark strong enough to resist flame, a Woodguard's greatest enemy was fire.

"Now I can barely get through a single day without it," Bran said, without any particular weight to the words.

Signals of feeling passed through that restrained expression.

Long ages pledged to a demon were approaching their end.

"I will stay behind," Arcoiris said, his face steady. For a human, this would have been the moment for a grave tone and solemn bearing.

The long version: a stone condensed from the vital energy of the forest. The short version: a processed Kiaos. Either way, someone needed to set it off.

Ruagarne puffed out her cheeks and stepped forward.

"Could we not hit it from a distance and run?"

"Each Cursed Ground is structured differently, but the master of this Labyrinth is that demon. When it dies, the Labyrinth will collapse."

Arcoiris was steady, but made it clear he would not back down. It was rare, but when an elf showed feeling, it also meant they had made up their mind absolutely.

The Manticore and the drowned dead inside, they had all been made in there too.

While they spoke, the mass of flesh squirmed and seemed to be trying to push something out. A hand slipped through the gap with a thud and pressed against the floor. A Demon Creature's hand, blue-black and long-nailed.

"God, that's disgusting."

Fell darted over and cut it off. The blade of the Idol Slayer severed the arm that had emerged.

No scream. The vocal apparatus had not yet been formed.

The demon had surely registered its own crisis.

Could it really not have anticipated at all that the thing it had split off, leaving only combat instinct, would lose?

It seemed so. If that were not the case, some other Demon Creature should have come lunging out at them by now, but nothing blocked their path.

Just a repulsive mass of flesh frantically trying to make something.

Black blood crept sluggishly along the veins bulging across its surface.

The thing had sensed the danger and was trying to build something, but in the end, destruction had always been easier than creation.

Two days of fighting had fatigue dragging at his feet.

But not so much that he could not run.

As for the rest of them, they had not been fighting. They had been watching. Every one of them should have more than enough left to run.

"Rua?"

Enkrid glanced at the gemstone and called out. The name carried meaning. Frog caught on at once.

If she wrapped it with the whip and threw, the distance would be greater.

"I think it is possible. It should be the kind that goes off on impact."

She could also channel a spell-form impact through it.

Ruagarne took out her whip and coiled it around her arm. The whip was a magic weapon.

She could wrap the stone from a distance, throw, and set off the explosion.

"I still have one trick left myself. Arcoiris. There is no need to throw your life away for nothing."

Bran pressed him again.

"We need to make absolutely certain of it," Arcoiris said, shaking his head. Unyielding. His attitude made sense. It was the compulsion that came from years of suffering.

If there was even a small chance the demon might survive, he could not let that stand.

"If it doesn't work, we come back and kill it again. Something like the One-Killer won't be easy for it to recreate."

Enkrid stepped in. Just because staying behind and sacrificing himself was the certain method did not make it the best one.

"Then let's do that."

Arcoiris shifted his position immediately. Enkrid had opened his mouth to make a proper argument and stopped.

Why does he fold that easily.

A four-year-old would not be this agreeable.

Though, come to think of it, was a four-year-old ever agreeable at all?

"Then let's move."

Bran turned. Sinar fell in behind him.

Ruagarne was measuring the range of her whip when Arcoiris hesitated as she reached for the Kiaos.

This was concentrated vital energy that the elf clan had spent decades building up in secret, right under the demon's notice.

If it failed, making something like this again would be no small thing.

Enkrid had been thinking that he could probably kill the demon himself if he shaped his Will into his sword and cut. The feeling had come from facing the One-Killer. But it would probably take a few months of hacking at it before it died.

The One-Killer had been cut to pieces too, but it had kept twitching, never quite dying.

Either way, right now, with his body and mind exhausted, that was beyond him.

"Hand it over. If this fails, I'll just suffer for a few months."

He said it to Arcoiris, who had been hesitating. This time too, the elf became an obedient child.

Arcoiris worked the green crystal and passed it over. He had already set it to trigger.

"Here."

Ruagarne took it, wound it around the tip of her whip, and swung it in wide circles.

"Looks like Rem," Enkrid said, watching.

The sight of Ruagarne spinning the whip overhead reminded him of Rem throwing his Sling.

"Is that a duel challenge?"

Ruagarne asked, genuinely puzzled. Was this lunatic obsessed with sparring even now?

"No. I just think it looks like him."

"Ah. Not an insult, then."

Ruagarne activated the whip's spell. Red light swirled at its tip and a tongue of flame rose.

Whoosh.

Fire aimed at the demon that had come in the guise of warmth and burned the elves with its blaze.

To put it poetically: a demon that lived by fire, dying by fire.

As the flame wrapped around the Kiaos, the stone's surface cracked with a sharp snap. Ruagarne flung it.

The whip snapped taut and launched the green crystal forward.

The ball of vital energy shot through the air and buried itself in the mass of flesh.

Thud.

"We have to run," Sinar said.

She had looked as though she had simply been sitting in the chair all day doing nothing, but in truth her vital energy had been drained from her the entire time. Inside the Labyrinth she could not use her vital energy either.

Her steps fell behind. Enkrid naturally scooped Sinar up and carried her.

Bran moved surprisingly well for his size. He thundered forward and his pace was faster than his frame suggested.

The rest needed no comment.

Enkrid threw a glance back once.

A green flash detonated, and from behind, light surged forward like a wave. The condensed vital energy was erasing the demon.

A deep rumble.

Then the Labyrinth began to collapse.

Enkrid had lived through hundreds of these days, and the paths had blurred together. No matter how good his memory, he had not had the presence of mind to memorize the routes through the Labyrinth. So he had been leading the way, then briefly hesitated, and from behind, Fell passed him and said:

"This way. Are you suddenly trying to impersonate Ragna?"

Enkrid let his inner voice slip out before he could stop it.

"When we're out, we're dueling."

A chunk of broken stone crashed down overhead.

Fell gave a short laugh and picked up his pace. That was how they reached the entrance.

No light seeped in from outside. The entrance itself had been part of the spell. The Cursed Ground itself too.

That changed nothing. They ran through and came out.

Fell and Zero went first, then Enkrid followed.

Leave my bride behind!

A remnant of the demon, a last ember, came crashing down on him.

Right at the entrance, a burning blade no longer than a hand's span dropped straight down.

No killing intent, no presence to sense, so recognition came late. Mental fatigue played into it too.

This final measure the demon had prepared was aimed at the top of Sinar's head.

Enkrid's sense of time slowed. High-speed thought cut everything into distinct scenes, frame by frame. His insight showed him what would happen next.

Too late.

He was carrying Sinar. There was no way to block. But was that the end of it? No. It was not.

He did not hesitate for a moment. Enkrid drew the dagger from behind his hip and threw it upward without aiming.

Throwing was the limit. Aiming was not possible. It had been barely more than a flick of the fingers to draw the dagger and send it up.

On the way here he had been thinking that he had never ended up using the dagger Aetri gave him, and wondering if Aetri would be disappointed.

That thought had called up this action.

The blade flipped off his fingertips, struck his own shoulder, and changed course. The dagger Fortune blocked the path of the blade the demon had sent flying.

A sharp ring of metal.

The blades crossed, and what the demon had prepared went off course. Instead of Sinar, the blade grazed Enkrid's cheek.

A small cut opened.

The moment the blade touched his skin, Enkrid knew it was the same as what had been on the One-Killer's body.

Pain rolled up from his cheek and a wave of helplessness spread through his entire body. Then everything went dark.

Darkness came.

How long had passed?

The first thing he sensed was motion.

A slow, gentle rocking.

Then he knew where he was.

A river, its surface rolling with black waves. Water that looked like it led somewhere it had no business going.

Above that river stood a figure holding a purple lamp.