WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 655: How Do You Feel?

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"Didn't you say you were going to see the elves?"

Jaxon asked. He dropped to informal speech the way he always did when something surprised him. Even from the rooftop, his voice cut through clean and sharp. There was that much force behind it. Like a cold flame, if you had to put a name to it.

Cool yet charged with heat. A challenging tone. His eyes burned while his voice stayed perfectly level.

"Went there, found a demon."

Whatever Jaxon said, Enkrid took it in stride. A little puzzled, maybe.

"And?"

Jaxon asked again.

"...Cut it down hard and killed it."

Under normal circumstances he wouldn't have put it that way. He could give a more detailed account now that he'd worked things out in his head, no need to talk like those madmen anymore. He'd put a framework around it, after all.

But that was the kind of thing you said in a calm moment, not when the people in front of you were sharpening their edges like blades.

So the same words he'd thrown at Ermen slipped out like old habit.

Not that these people would say anything about it.

"Can't argue with that."

Ragna agreed and stood. He took a few steps forward with his sword in hand and drew it.

Chiring.

A ringing so clear it stung. Ragna tossed the scabbard from his left hand to the side, gripped the hilt with both hands, and spoke.

"Step aside, you deflated pup. It's my turn."

He must have come across a fine sword somewhere while Enkrid was away. The blade held a soft gleam, close to the color of the sky.

It was forged from Valerian Steel and Nuairian Wrought Iron, with true silver mixed in.

A thick blade, a long blade. Those had always been Ragna's signature, same as the old hardest iron.

Ragna was called a genius, a talent heaven itself had blessed, and now even his eyes had flames in them. He wasn't trying to hide it.

Enkrid studied him quietly. Ragna spoke.

"If you can't block it, you'll die."

Train with a sword long enough and you might lose an arm or a leg. That was how Ragna had been taught.

He said it seriously, but the corner of his mouth crept up. Anticipation, pleasure, excitement, all of it leaking through, and that was why.

One look at Ragna's face and posture was enough for Enkrid to read him.

Part of it was instinct, part of it was that he'd always been good at reading that kind of feeling. And lately, spending time among elves who treated emotional restraint as baseline had sharpened his sense for what lay beneath another person's surface.

Either way, this was Ragna speaking, voice full of expectation.

"You going to go easy on me too?"

Enkrid asked, straight-faced. Ragna answered with his sword.

There was no wind-up, no prep. One moment he was standing still, and the next the blade had snapped out like a thing severed and thrown.

Chang!

Enkrid raised Penna vertically and deflected with the flat, then sprang sideways like he'd been launched.

Thoom!

Air tore apart. Ragna's second strike, already primed, passed straight through where Enkrid had been.

From the opening thrust to the follow-up cleave, not a single attack was light. But from the outside it looked like Enkrid was drifting out of the way without much effort.

He was predicting and reacting. When a gap opened mid-sequence he recalculated in an instant, and when recalculation wasn't enough he stopped it with force. When an attack broke past his read, technique and muscle covered the rest. There were a few moments that looked like desperate scrambling, but taken as a whole, everything seemed to be moving exactly the way Enkrid intended.

He was adjusting his tactics in real time.

If you could track every variable and stay completely focused on the moment a fight was actually happening, you could do something like that.

But does that even make sense?

Raise your eyes and you can't see your feet. What Enkrid was doing was seeing both at once.

He was making what looked like chance and luck feel inevitable. Like he was watching the fight from far above it.

Normally that was something that simply didn't happen, but it was happening right in front of them, so there was nothing left to say.

Rem knew how it would end before the two of them really got going.

Before Enkrid came back, he'd fought Ragna ten times and drawn all ten. Win or loss was hard to call. And if he himself had been pushed this far, Ragna would face the same.

The Wave-Blocking Sword had no hard counter. Whatever you threw at it, it held. Ragna wouldn't break it either, and when that became clear, it would turn into a war of endurance.

Ousque.

When that moment came, his bottomless Will would be there to greet the directionally-impaired bastard.

When Rem fought Enkrid it felt like being dragged into a swamp. His instincts were sharp that way, no question.

When Enkrid thought strategically, he imagined grabbing an opponent by the ankle and pulling them slowly down into the water until it closed over their head.

Once it reached the top, the battlefield would be entirely his. That was the intent.

If Rem saw it, Ragna felt it.

I'm going to lose.

His genius compressed the process and landed on the outcome. Keep fighting like this and he'd lose. The moment that thought settled, he changed his stance.

He'd shown this to Rem a few times. It was the start of something nearly impossible to counter.

Every muscle in his body pulled tight, and he poured every drop of Will he had into a single downward slash.

The motion itself was a simple Heavy Sword Style cleave, but from the other side it looked like anything but.

A sword like thunder, like a bolt thrown by a god.

You might call it Ragna taking what he'd watched Enkrid do, pouring everything into a single strike, and reforging it in his own way.

Ragna himself would just say he was swinging hard.

He spread his stance and raised both arms overhead. All of it happened in an incredibly short span. The prep was almost nothing. That was what made it so hard to block. Vision narrowed in the middle of a fight; that was just how it went.

In a fight where a single cut could cost you your life, even the most seasoned warrior would, at some point, be thinking only one step ahead.

That was why Future Sight, the knight's technique, was called the eye that saw one step forward.

No matter how sharp a knight's perception, there were moments you couldn't predict. And even if you predicted it, you'd be too late. Try to run and Ragna would chase and swing. His feet were far quicker than they looked.

Even compared to someone who'd grown up tearing across the wide western plains, that held true.

Retreating alone wasn't enough to escape this sword. Rem had broken it by stepping in close right before the swing landed, closing the gap to cut the force in half. Completely, horrifyingly dangerous to attempt in a spar.

They'd both nearly died. After that they'd stopped training together. Another round and one of them would be gone; they both knew it.

Now that same sword was falling toward Enkrid.

The moment when everyone watching would have said there was no opening.

"Oh."

Audin murmured. The instant Ragna gathered his momentum and set his stance, Enkrid stepped well back.

Whether Ragna set his stance first or Enkrid stepped back first was impossible to say. It happened at the same moment.

Of course, even with that distance, Ragna could have chased him and swung.

That cleave had Aoara's linking-sword technique folded into it.

But the loss of force over that distance was real. Enkrid had put exactly that much ground between them.

Tactical movement.

Reading the shape of a fight before it takes that shape. It brought to mind the sword style called Aker's Web, but this was a step beyond.

Aker's Web cornered an opponent and pinned them down. What Enkrid was showing now was stopping everything, no matter what came.

Is it that his thinking runs faster?

No. He had two trains of thought running at once. If Rem had spotted it, Jaxon would have too, and so would Ragna and Audin.

All of their eyes were bright.

Ragna swung at the end, and Enkrid swept his short blade horizontally to meet it.

Two pieces of iron loaded with Will crashed into each other and split the air open.

Thoom!

Like someone had squeezed the air and blown it apart. Thunder from the sky met a volcano erupting from below.

A line the color of the sky and a line the pale blue of moonlight met and parted.

Throwing everything into a straight collision would have cost them both, so they skimmed past each other at an angle.

They were sparring, and each gave a step.

Enkrid and Ragna's bodies crossed, one moving left and one moving right, and the distance between them opened.

That ended it. Ragna had burned through nearly all his Will. He needed time to recover. Enkrid didn't.

"Want to keep going?"

Enkrid held Penna up in front of his face and asked.

Ragna looked into Enkrid's blue eyes for a moment, then lowered his sword and walked over to stand beside Rem.

The sight of Rem and Ragna standing shoulder to shoulder was almost funny. Anyone who knew how badly things had soured between them while Enkrid was away would have found it baffling.

"The two shrunken brothers, step up."

Audin said it and moved forward. His eyes were burning the same as the others. He came forward with joy and excitement and anticipation written across his face. Had he always been like this? Or had he changed because of Enkrid?

Either way, it didn't matter much at this point.

Every one of them had a competitive fire burning inside them. They looked like madmen itching to pick a fight no matter what.

Golden light poured off Audin's whole body. It drifted like sand across his skin and flowed downward, touched the tops of his feet, then climbed back up along his calves. That golden sand clinging to him from head to toe was the mark of the divine power Audin carried.

"This is my full strength right now."

He moved as he said it. Light exploded from his clenched fist.

Brightness rushed together into a single point and shot toward Enkrid's face.

The motion was a punch, pivoting on the left foot, twisting through the hip, but with Audin's divine power and the solid body he'd spent years building layered behind it, what came out was a spear made of light.

Bang!

Enkrid blocked it. The spear of light didn't stop there. It scattered and poured in like starlight falling from every direction. Fist and foot, and sometimes fingers reaching to grab, aimed at different parts of his body. Enkrid blocked and blocked again, kept moving his feet.

Their fight looked like Audin pouring everything forward. One of them was trying to close the distance, and the other wasn't letting him.

When Audin finally forced his way in, Enkrid dropped Penna, grabbed Audin's arm and wrenched it, and drove his knee into Audin's jaw.

Thwack!

Audin caught it with his palm, but he couldn't stop Enkrid stepping back and scooping Penna back up. Every motion flowed into the next without a break.

From dropping the sword to picking it back up, all of it looked deliberate. Fighting always had chance and luck threaded through it, and yet he made every bit of it feel inevitable. When his read was wrong, he acted as though the wrong read had been inside his range of prediction all along.

He split his thinking, accelerated one half of it, and calculated everything at once. That was how he fought.

I can't beat him.

Rem read the future one more time. Audin would find the same answer.

Audin's divine power was the firmest thing any of them had going for them here, but its limit was clear.

Watching from the side, Rem's axe gave a faint tremor. The Inherited Weapon, which had a will of its own, sent something across to him.

I know. But he's not trying to kill anyone, so there's no reason to step in. This is, well, play.

The axe was saying it could kill everything here. Rem just didn't want that. The axe had misread him.

Wanting badly to win and wanting to kill were two different things.

If he unleashed the Sorcery the axe held, there might be an answer in that. But he didn't want it. Even having lost, Rem didn't feel bad. If anything, it felt clean and good. Audin seemed to feel the same.

"I lost."

Of the three of them, Audin was the only one who said it out loud. Then he asked, sweat running down in sheets.

"How do you feel?"

Now that he looked, Enkrid had pushed through just as hard. His whole body was soaked through too.

Same with Ragna and Rem.

There was a great deal packed into Audin's question.

All of them thought back to Enkrid as he had been when he first came to them as squad leader.

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