WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 653: So He Held the Sword, So He Sang

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In the elven tongue, Penna was a shortened form. Its full name was Kiis Seko Pedna, meaning a feather that cuts through all things.

Enkrid swung with just enough Will to avoid exhausting himself, and a pale blue light bloomed along the blade. At the same time, the sword seemed to settle more firmly into his grip.

How to put it.

'A feeling of becoming one with the sword?'

Well, something like that. Rem had always said his axe was like a second self, and now Enkrid thought he might finally understand what that meant.

Penna's blade swept out and grazed the vampire first, then caught the fighter Mormon across the bridge of his nose.

A light sound, and the man's face was painted in blood. The sound itself was small, but Penna's edge was razor-sharp, and the gash it left was deep.

As blood ran freely, the fighter clenched his facial muscles to slow the bleeding.

That was something taught in Valaf Martial Arts too. The newcomer was no ordinary fighter. Even so, Enkrid could handle him.

He blocked, dodged, and struck with ease.

High-speed thought and split thinking drove the Wave-Blocking Sword, shutting down every approach. It was twice as easy as holding off the One-Killer.

He tensed his muscles, gave himself over to the spring in his knees, twisted at the waist, and flung the blade in a wide arc.

Clang!

He caught the rebound off the Black Serpent's weapon and drove his elbow back.

Thwack!

Mormon's fist was waiting right there. The fighter spun his whole body into a kick.

The leg bent like a whip. It was sharp enough to be called a slash.

Moving through stretched time, Enkrid watched that fast leg coming and leaned back, raising his knee and pointing his toes. The One-Killer had attacked from any position imaginable.

The whole body is a weapon. That was the logic. But.

'Couldn't I do something similar?'

The thought took shape at once. His body had been tempered by Valaf Martial Arts, so mixing in grappling when needed was no problem. His hands didn't get tangled up at all.

Wave-Blocking Sword was not simply a technique for moving a sword. It was closer to a craft for training thought itself, so all of this could fall under the Wave-Blocking Sword.

And beyond that, Enkrid had just endured more than five hundred days of fighting like this.

He could keep it up for three days straight. Push a little harder and he might hold out for a week. Exhausting, sure, but possible.

The spells interrupting from the side? He couldn't call them cute, but compared to Walking Fire, they were manageable enough.

To put it plainly: this was a very workable fight.

'Wait.'

Were these people fakes?

That thought crossed his mind as he aimed a kick at the Black Serpent Elle's chest. Spikes shot out from the breastplate.

Fitting for someone whose specialty was deceptive swordplay, to have hidden tricks built into the armor.

Enkrid had been going for the sole of his foot, but he shifted at the last moment and kicked upward with his toes, catching Elle under the chin. Elle tried to dodge and caught the edge of the helmet instead.

Thud.

Not a powerful blow, but enough to rattle the head.

'This monstrous bastard.'

Elle bit down on that thought. Enkrid kept second-guessing himself.

'They've got to be fakes, right?'

If this was truly a trap laid by the Cult, it couldn't amount to only this much.

Of course they weren't fakes. These people were real. And they were far from ordinary.

Still, this was how it went. Enkrid simply hadn't known how far he had come. So he had the leisure to wonder about things like this.

'The Black Serpent and the vampire were unconventional.'

The fighter who joined later relied on raw strength and speed rather than unorthodox tricks. Orthodox, if anything.

By the framework he had recently worked out, the Black Serpent and the vampire were Sustained Craft types, while the fighter was a Trained Decisive type.

Though all three had apparently reached the knight level, which meant they should be classified as All-Rounder types as well.

As skill climbed, weak spots tended to fill in.

Just because someone was a Trained Decisive type didn't mean they lacked endurance or craft.

'The ideal is a perfect circle.'

Rising to the point where your sharpest edges no longer stick out.

Seen that way, even Rem, Ragna, and Audin still had room left to train.

'Past Decisive, Sustained, and All-Rounder... should that be called Complete?'

There was no such thing as perfection. Still, once someone reached a certain level, calling them Complete was fair enough.

The vampire had been cut into three pieces and was still twitching. It was as good as dead.

The fighter was next. An opening appeared, and Penna traced across his throat. The Adam's apple split and blood gushed out.

What his life had been like, what he had hoped for, what he had wanted when he chose to stand here, none of that would ever be known now.

The dead cannot speak.

Dark liquid rolled and pooled across the floor in the red moonlight, soaking the ground black.

The man's knees hit first with a thud, then his head dropped.

The way he curved and fell looked slow to everyone watching, as though time had stretched thin.

What begins must end, and the slowly tilting head finally reached the ground.

Liquid kept flowing from beneath the fallen body. Does deep red eventually look black? Like the blood of everyone here? Hard to say.

"My wish will be fulfilled in the end."

The Black Serpent, Elle, spat out words no one could make sense of and charged. Enkrid could hold out against all three, but fighting someone throwing their life away wasn't something he could do loosely.

Saying it was workable didn't mean he could afford carelessness. A mistake, a lapse in focus, and it would be him dying.

Still, having fought the One-Killer through something like walking a tightrope, he had grown far too comfortable with that kind of edge. Fighting three felt manageable by comparison.

So there would be no mistakes. And there was certainly no room for complacency.

Knights themselves were monsters. Others saw them as beings who made no errors and pulled off feats that defied reason, and even by that standard, Enkrid's technique was refined to a high degree.

Not a gap to be found. Was the title Iron Wall Knight born from exactly this?

Elle found it entirely reasonable to think so.

Clang! Clang clang!

The extended blade came flying and Enkrid knocked it aside with Penna, then jumped left. The sword, now shaped like a black serpent, chased after him.

The deflected Black Serpent whipped its head around and aimed for the back of Enkrid's skull. It looked exactly like a real snake lunging.

Enkrid was retreating, then pressed his right thumb into the ground and reversed direction. The sharp reversal made it look as though his body was still moving the other way.

But Enkrid had already turned, pressing Penna against the middle of the extended blade and running straight forward.

Scraaaaape!

Sparks from Spark scattered a trail of light behind him. His legs were faster than the enemy's sword.

A pale blue meteor rode up the length of the Black Serpent. The Black Serpent never reached its mark, and Penna cut through Elle's throat.

Fshhk!

A clean sound parted the neck. The strike was fast enough that only a single line was drawn across the throat, but the head didn't go flying.

Penna's edge was sharp enough to leave only a hairline across the neck and pass clean through, a feat that was almost a conjurer's trick in itself.

"Damn you all to hell."

Elle cursed even as he died. Blood ran in thin drops from the cut, like tears.

Then his neck slipped, and what had been a trickle became a spray. If it had been a fountain in the middle of a city, water instead of blood, a severed stone head instead of a man's, it might have been called spectacular.

No one could have known this, but a man who had met his wife at nineteen, gained a daughter at twenty-two, and lost them both at twenty-nine, a man who had come to hate the entire human race, was dead. Apostle of the Black Serpent, Elle, that was his name.

Elle felt himself sinking into a black pit as he died.

His wife and daughter were not there. He had willingly drunk the blood of a demon to take revenge on the world.

So the place he was bound for was the demon's side.

"Truly remarkable."

The man holding the staff stopped his incantation and spoke. Now that the outcome of the fight was clear, the Reincarnation Apostle sounded calm, as though nothing could surprise him anymore.

"Did I underestimate you? Or was my calculation wrong? Or is this some god's joke? Nothing makes sense, but arguing about it won't change anything."

"Are you coming at me?"

"Only I'm left now, but I suppose I have to."

The Apostle was a collector of spells, and his physical abilities were formidable too. By Enkrid's framework, though, he was an incomplete circle.

'A round circle can still be pierced by a sharp spike.'

That was Enkrid's thought. Once a framework was established, it led to inspiration for the next sword technique.

Enkrid was mapping out a new form while still in the middle of fighting.

Only the meaning had come to him so far, but it was a beginning. It might fade to nothing before that ever changed.

The Apostle had wanted to be their misfortune, but that wish went unfulfilled.

Tap, tap-tap!

He used more than half his remaining spells, and not one of them landed.

Even the black sphere spell that crumbled anything it touched was cut down by Enkrid's sword.

"We will win in the end."

The Apostle said it. Thrust, slash.

Enkrid half-listened and drove the blade through his throat with a clean cut.

Blood from the wound caught the moonlight. Deep red. Cultist or not, this one had been human too.

Serving the god of the Cursed Ground didn't make a person something other than human.

The head severed by the blade hit the ground with a dull thud and rolled.

The ominous red moonlight still bathed the earth, but there were no more enemies.

The traces of Necromancy the Apostle had summoned dissolved one by one the moment their caster died.

A few Evil Spirits tried to take advantage of being summoned and run loose, but Ruagarne's whip and Zero's sword didn't let that stand.

"Well. My approach was wrong."

Then the severed head, despite having no body, spoke. The Reincarnation Apostle had a strange ability. He tried to hold a conversation with only his head remaining.

"...Are you some kind of immortal?"

Would cutting the head into eight pieces still not kill him?

Enkrid asked and raised his sword again. The head spoke up without delay.

"No, I'll be dead soon enough. Maybe I can hold on until morning at best. The red moonlight is feeding my magical power, that's the only reason I'm still here."

Was it a lie? It didn't sound like one.

"No point in splitting my head anyway, is there? If you felt like sparing me out of pity, you'd need to bring five men and five women who've never known anyone, pour their blood over my body, and reattach my head. But I don't suppose you'd do that."

"If I were going to do that, I probably wouldn't have cut your head off."

"Honestly, it wouldn't work even then. That doesn't change what the blood does. Unless you could get Dragonkin blood, maybe, but even then."

Was this really the moment for jokes?

"Should I crush it with my whip?" Ruagarne offered helpfully.

"I can split it if you like. Are you worried about a curse?" Fell stepped up.

"I can do it if that's the concern." Zero joined in.

"Every last one of you, dying to finish off one old head. Give me a moment. Damn, it's exhausting just gathering up what's left of my magical power to talk."

"Is there something you want to say?"

"Regrets and a proposal. The regret is personal, so set that aside. The proposal still stands. You should switch sides."

"My whip, then." Ruagarne moved to swing it.

The Apostle had been holding on by sheer force of will. He didn't have many words left.

He could have spent his last strength on a curse, but he had already tried that and already knew the result. It didn't work. It wouldn't work. Leaving a few words behind was the best he could do.

"You can't win this fight. No reason to stand with the losing side."

No body left, just a head working its mouth, and yet the words carried weight. Not quite Crang's level, but this one knew how to give a speech.

The Apostle had been a schemer who left his mark on an age. He had stood with the Cursed Ground, followed the teachings of the Cursed Ground Holy Sect, and become the Reincarnation Apostle, but right or wrong, counting up everything he had done across the years, you couldn't say there was nothing heroic about him.

Believing in the wrong cause didn't diminish a person's capability.

In the same way, character and skill didn't move in lockstep, and walking the right path didn't guarantee a bright future.

Enkrid watched the head in silence. The Apostle, nothing but a head now, kept talking.

"You'll be stopped by our blades in the end."

Maybe. Enkrid could tell the other man was being as honest as he could, without pretense.

But the fight Enkrid had started was never premised on winning to begin with. It was a path he had walked on hands and knees, with precious little talent to show for it.

He wanted a mother who wished to protect her child to live in a city free of Demon Creatures.

He wanted a world where a fruit seller who split even a rotten-cornered apple and shared it could keep on smiling.

He wanted an old woman who had spent her life as a tavern girl, lamenting every day of it, to find peace even in old age.

He wanted a simple-hearted mercenary who told a child she was a genius and planted a dream in her to have nights without nightmares.

Yes. That was the world he wanted.

So he took up the sword.

So he sang the song.

The song of the Knight of War's End hadn't even started yet.

"Doesn't matter."

The Apostle had hurled his words like a curse, and Enkrid shook them off with words of his own. It wasn't difficult. He hadn't even consciously aimed to do it.

That was just how it came out.

"...You'd fight a losing battle?"

He didn't say it depends on how you look at it, or that you can't know until you fight. What came from somewhere deeper was quicker.

"I'll fight until I win."

"...I see."

Behind him, Fell reached something like understanding again, and the Apostle looked at this madman for a moment before leaving his final words.

"It's a shame I won't see the world of the Cursed Ground."

The Apostle was a true believer of the Second Coming Sect down to his bones. But he was dead now, so it was a meaningless wish. After that, the head spoke no more.

The red moonlight faded to one side. Black night with no moonlight. The hour before dawn. In the western tongue, urkiora, dark dawn.

That dark dawn giving way to sunrise was only natural.

A pale blue light wrapped the surroundings first, and a little while later, dawn broke. Light settled over the world. The sun shone across everything as though nothing had happened at all.

"Nice sunlight," Ruagarne said.

While the group cleared and sorted through the bodies, a few elves who had sensed something ominous from ahead came closer. They were ones with a remarkable gift for handling vital energy.

"What happened? An attack?"

One of them looked around in every direction and asked. This was the elf who had volunteered as a guide, having traveled the continent before.

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