WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 650: Even If Talent Speaks of Limits, the Heart Doesn't

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The road back was smooth.

No bandits, naturally, and Demon Creatures or Magic Beasts appeared only in scattered glimpses. Behind Enkrid's group, a migrating band of elves followed at a long remove.

The two groups kept half a day's distance between them, and after crossing a few rolling hills, they could no longer see each other.

Even if it was only the advance party, only a fraction of the whole, it was still a city on the move. A fraction could still mean a considerable crowd, and a considerable crowd always walks slowly. That much was only natural.

The second day of travel brought an evening camp, and Ruagarne got to see yet another glimpse of what Enkrid was made of. A spar with Fell.

"Bride-stealer!"

Fell tried a clumsy taunt. It landed on nothing.

Instead, the moment Fell opened his mouth to goad him, Enkrid was already moving, turning an opponent he would have beaten cleanly anyway into someone whose hands got thoroughly knotted up.

'His tactical reading has gotten sharper.'

It looked as though someone had grabbed him and spent years hammering him into shape, but every now and then there were moments like this that still felt genuinely strange.

Talent aside, sudden and obvious improvement like that just kept happening with him.

This time, though, there was something else to be surprised about, entirely separate from that.

'Hmm.'

The exchange was fast, back and forth without a breath. Fell never found a gap to say a word, so he was left moving hands and feet in silence. Enkrid did not use Pressure.

Neither spoke, but somewhere in the middle the whole thing became a pure contest of strength and technique. All of it was Enkrid's intention.

'No, past the midpoint there was no technique either.'

Just strength and speed. He pressed with those alone. When raw force was overwhelming enough, clumsy technique had no room to slip through.

They say softness deflects hardness.

A heavy sword that swings straight is easy to redirect, so a flowing sword catches a heavy one.

But what if the strength behind it was so superior that the flow itself was irrelevant?

Enkrid was showing the answer right now.

Fell had just had the blade graze his throat, and there was no room to say anything about it. One bad breath and he was dead.

A chill completely unlike the threat of a False Slash ran the length of his spine.

Like a lizard dragging a cold tongue across skin.

Fell put everything he had into each swing. He had to.

Every casual slash Enkrid threw came in on a lethal angle with lethal weight behind it.

It was one crisis after another, like a beast dropping its jaw open just before clamping onto his throat.

He held Will consciously and loaded it onto the blade. One wrong step and he was off the cliff. He had to keep his fingertips hooked on the edge. Lose the grip and he dies.

Between exchanges, hard gusts came through. He had to tighten his core. Let the center of his body waver and he dies.

The sun stabbed at his eyes. One bad blink, one crack in concentration, and it felt like he would die from that too.

'I'm going to die.'

Fell sensed it. Enkrid swung without much thought.

Clang.

Fell did not let go of his sword. His arm was simply shoved aside in the direction Enkrid knocked it. Enkrid closed in through that gap and nudged Fell's chest with his free hand.

"I win."

It was obvious, if anything.

"...Hff."

Only then did Fell breathe out. No technique, just force grinding him down. The clumsy taunt not working was one thing, he had expected that much, but.

'This freak.'

Whatever he had done, both the way he handled Will and the way he swung a sword were different from when they had first arrived.

That made him a freak. A freak packed solid with talent.

That he had broken through another wall in such a short span of time, no one needed to tell Fell. He just knew.

Fell let out a breath and looked over his bruised pride. If something like this was going to break him, he would never have lasted this long.

'I'll catch up somehow.'

He even had a viciousness now that had not been there before. Fell's eyes burned.

Ruagarne turned over what she had just watched Enkrid do and sank into thought.

'He was pacing himself for Fell.'

Which meant Enkrid had been comfortable throughout.

So what was different from before?

Frog's Talent-Reading Eyes worked by watching an opponent's movements and posture and reading talent through direct intuition, literally.

That intuition struck sparks in Ruagarne's mind, again and again.

Each burst of Spark, grounded in several things she knew, let her see what Enkrid now possessed.

'He swung a sword that was heavy and fast, and he did it without straining.'

Not once or twice either. He had kept pace with Fell the whole way and adjusted his intensity while fighting.

Put simply, it was like a woodcutter calling on every technique he had ever mastered and swinging the axe in an unbroken chain, without pause.

All of it happening in an instant, with no moment to steady the breath or collect the mind.

'That was only possible because he was in a state of deep concentration.'

Sharpen concentration, load full force behind each swing. He had likely drawn on what he had understood when he caught the Walking Fire.

So what could the current Enkrid do if he poured out everything he had?

'Long-duration high-speed combat.'

When Enkrid stopped the demon One-Killer, he had said he understood swordsmanship and rebuilt it from the ground up.

'That was not the end of it.'

Creating a swordsmanship meant having a perfect grasp of the meaning inside it and how to make it real.

Naturally, it would also affect the person wielding it.

'Beginner, intermediate, advanced, he had called them.'

By the system Enkrid had built, she could say that man had now climbed past the middle tier. His individuality had become distinct.

'Urkhe.'

A swordsmanship built on a Will that does not run dry.

Ruagarne's eye was accurate. From the elf city onward, Enkrid had known clearly what he was capable of.

Long-duration high-speed combat, with endurance up front.

The reason it came to this? Everything up to now had shaped the present.

Liervart and knight Jamal had both taken endurance as their specialty.

'He was shaped by them.'

Enkrid admitted it without reluctance. Nothing wrong with that.

There was also a feeling that something which had already been inside him was now complete.

A sense of omnipotence, that with this, he could beat anyone he faced right now.

Naturally, it also felt as though there was nothing further to climb toward, that he had simply run into a wall. He had reached the limit. He could not see what was above or ahead. An end where neither climbing nor advancing was possible.

And yet there was a part of him that insisted this was not the end.

Talent always spoke of limits, but the will the heart carried did not know them. That was why.

'Funny how things come back.'

As he put Fell down, Enkrid sorted through a few thoughts.

Reviewing what he had and putting it in order made him realize more than before. Without anyone telling him, he simply knew.

Things like this.

A knight's techniques and mindset are the life already lived. So will is Will.

That was also why the Will of the man he had met in the Holy State had been so poor.

Talent alone could make someone a knight, but a blade forged from the Will of someone who rose that way would be no better than a piece of cheese riddled with holes.

'A knight without a vow does not exist.'

That was why vow and conviction mattered to a knight. They were the foundation that sustained Will. Probably the same reason Aoara's Will shone.

Even without a grand dream, moving forward for what you yourself believed in mattered more.

'Just as no dream is too humble, every vow deserves to be respected.'

It fit well with how Enkrid already thought. That was natural enough. He had come to understand the principle of becoming a knight in a way that matched how he already understood things, so of course it felt like it clicked.

Walking and letting his thoughts settle, the world grew bright around him. A night where two moons poured down full, clear light. Two such nights passed. The moonlight was starting to lose its sharpness. There was not a cloud in the sky, and yet.

The moonlight began showing hints of a different color. The Twin Red Moons were about to rise. No one in the group paid it particular attention. Everyone was busy.

Fell and Zero had much to absorb after being beaten by Enkrid, and spent their time turning it over and letting it settle. Ruagarne was in a similar place, though she also needed to teach Enkrid the system she had built with the Talent-Reading Eyes.

"Frog saw the limits of talent and considered dividing people into tiers meaningless. Not when it had no bearing on an actual fight to the death."

What mattered in a kill-or-be-killed fight?

Better control of Will made for better fighting, perhaps, but it did not translate immediately to actual combat. That was what Ruagarne was saying.

Someone with disciplined Will still died if they caught a blade in the neck while sleeping. Short of being a Frog, a person with a severed head had no way to live.

Even a Frog died when the heart was pierced. Skill shaped a fight, but it was not absolute. Were there other factors? There were.

"Are people's talents the same color? They are all different. We see the limits of talent, but we cannot see the color. So it had to be experienced directly, and that was one of the great pleasures."

Of course, it did not match the pleasure of watching someone like Enkrid break those limits outright.

Exploring the unknown, wanting to understand it, among the Frogs, Ruagarne was especially faithful to that drive. Naturally she had built up a great deal of knowledge along the way.

The desire to learn what you do not know made studying its own kind of pleasure.

"Depending on a talent's color, someone like him loads everything into a single strike, or an elf carries the influence of their race's nature and swings in their own peculiar way."

Right then, Fell and Zero were on one side of the path, swinging at empty air, deep in practice.

The lines their swords drew were visible. The outcome was the same, cut and thrust. But the process was clearly different.

Fell cut a phantom enemy with one stroke. Zero cut six times.

Enkrid turned Ruagarne's words over several times.

Thinking about it now brought back the conversation he had with Fell a few days ago, the jokes about bride-stealing and the like.

'Fell is easy to read.'

He did not think he needed to conceal what he had. Why? That was Fell's disposition.

The business in the elf city crossed his mind too.

'Ermen completes a lie through what is left unsaid.'

Enkrid had felt a precision in that. Why? He got a similar feeling from all the elves, but Ermen seemed particularly exceptional.

Something like what he felt from Krais, he might say.

Then again, Fell liked improvised moves. So did Rem. Ragna, despite appearances, also enjoyed the Numbers Game, though he could move past it and end things with raw force when he needed to.

Each of them had their own disposition.

Enkrid rebuilt and organized everything he had seen, felt, and lived through, and sorted out things beyond a knight's level in the process.

'Form divides according to individual disposition.'

The way Frogs saw the color of talent was exactly that.

"Long ago there was a Frog who gave the types of talent arbitrary names and sorted them however they liked. Mole crickets, mayflies, pupae, caterpillars, and so on."

Ruagarne's words made sense. Enkrid had just added a few concepts to his own thinking.

The way a weapon was used, and how a system was absorbed, would differ according to disposition.

Then teaching would need to change, and how one learned would need to change too.

Each person knowing their own disposition would only help when training and refining what fit them.

'Decisive, Endurance, All-Rounder.'

Three broad categories would cover the types. As he had learned before, completion mattered more than perfection.

Fell was Decisive. Ropord was Endurance.

The two were completely opposite.

There were also those who carried both from the start. The All-Rounder type.

'It looks like having both would be an advantage over specializing in one, but in practice it is less efficient.'

Being an all-rounder was not simply a good thing. Chasing two at once demanded a proportionate investment of time and effort, and by what Frog had said, a talent with clear limits was like a well with a fixed amount of water, draw from it to fill two containers at once and the total did not change, only divide. That would become a reason to lose against those who were exceptional in one.

Within this there would also be those who threw themselves into hardening the body, a conditioning type, and those who burrowed into technique, a craft type.

'The conditioning type would suit the Heavy and Fierce Sword or a speed-focused style.'

The craft type would suit the Soft and Flowing Sword or the Illusionary Sword.

He took swordsmanship as he had compiled and organized it, and layered his own onto it. That was what Enkrid had done. He also understood that knowing yourself well was important, and confirmed that too.

'I am Endurance type.'

At least for now.

Having Urkhe let him specialize in drawn-out fighting, and by chance, both Liervart and the knight of Azpen had also specialized in drawn-out fighting, so he had been able to watch and learn.

'Ultimately, Decisive and Endurance would both need to mix, wouldn't they?'

Not yet visible, but faintly sensed, that was what was ahead and above.

And thinking from that foundation, there was one person in the Brigade who stood out unmistakably.

Jaxon. He was Decisive type and craft type. Decisive-Craft, one might call it.

Not common. Decisive usually went with the conditioning type.

'No, there is no answer.'

Fix an answer in advance and you only produce fakes. That was probably how the fakes the Holy State put out had been created. You could not set an answer and make someone run a single predetermined road.

"Ah."

Enkrid felt a rush of exhilaration, intoxicated by the act of creating rather than simply learning and mastering. Pleasure ran from the tips of his feet to the crown of his head.

Looking up at the sky, he saw the two moons had turned red. The Twin Red Moons. It was already night.

He had been walking, lost in thought, and had for a moment forgotten even that he was walking. He had been aware of his surroundings and had been stepping around stones, but only now did he truly register it. He raised his head, and spotted uninvited guests.

"We have been waiting, Enkrid of the Border Guard."

Beneath red moonlight, only a voice reached him, with no presence attached. Enkrid watched a black Veil appear before him, then vanish.

'A perception-disrupting spell.'

A spell that kept you from registering the Veil's existence until it disappeared.

But he had seen it enough times now that he had caught a faint sense of wrongness even through its rough concealment.

That was what made his thoughts stop and brought his surroundings sharply back into focus.

Either way, a group that had shed its perception-disrupting Veil now stepped into view.

One in pitch-black armor.

Two in cloth robes instead of armor.

And at the center stood one gripping what looked like a long staff. At the top of the staff was a circular iron ring, with jagged spike-like protrusions jutting upward. It looked like a symbol of something.

"We come from the Cursed Ground Sacred Ground, the Second Coming Sect."

The faces emerging under the red moonlight all looked equally dangerous.

"We have brought the remaining Apostles."

The moment those words ended, Enkrid's sixth sense fired. Beneath his feet. Dirt sprayed upward as sharp iron spikes shot toward Enkrid's stomach, Ruagarne's heart, Zero's head, and Fell's throat.

Enkrid's mind accelerated. For an instant, everything around him seemed to stop.

Like sinking into a mass of hard clay, time slowed under the pressure, and Enkrid did what he had to do.

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