WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 667: Fenna Is Enough

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There was no higher praise one could give Aetri. Even so, the iron-pounding madman simply rose without a trace of a smile.

"True iron."

The farewell was just as plain.

"Understood."

Enkrid gave a plain nod in return. With that short exchange behind him, he stepped out of the smithy and quickened his pace. There was nothing particularly urgent. He just wanted to get back and swing the meteorite iron sword as soon as possible.

Technically it was a hardest-iron-true-silver-meteorite-iron sword, but that name was far too long.

'I need a name as good as Odd-Eye's.'

Something that intuitive, something that stuck in the ear just right.

'Three-Iron Sword?'

If the sword had possessed a self, it would have leapt from its scabbard and declared its independence on the spot. Of course, swords had no self, so nothing of the sort happened.

'Not bad, though.'

Enkrid quietly admired his own idea.

Meteorite iron was the core of the thing, but calling it simply the meteorite iron sword felt off somehow.

Meteorite iron apparently varied in quality from piece to piece, and the batch Aetri had worked with this time had a blade that broke easily when sharpened to an edge, yet when packed and shaped into a pillar, the hardness rose dramatically and the weight distributed itself evenly throughout. That was its nature.

It was no accident that the one called Elle of the Black Serpent had chosen to make it into armor. The material was far better suited to armor, and Aetri had been skilled enough to make it the central axis of a sword instead.

The leftover material was set aside for research, since Aetri had wanted it.

After trading words about this and that, Enkrid emerged from the smithy with various thoughts turning in his head. It was the hour when one or two people had begun to appear at the marketplace, and a modest crowd was already gathering, not so dense that there was no room to move.

Ever since Krais had divided the city into districts, it had been rare for crowds to press tight enough to make walking difficult, and the morning was still early besides.

Enkrid was cutting straight through the marketplace. Left foot, right foot. Then, just before his left foot came down again, his hand settled over his sword grip. He pivoted on his left ankle, let his right foot ease naturally a half-step back, and stopped.

In that brief motion he took in everything around him.

To the upper right, a furled canvas awning and a half-built structure with its wooden skeleton still exposed, and below it the nails and hammer a carpenter had left behind. To the left, a child who had woken too early sat on the front step of a house with a vacant stare. Sunlight falling from a clear sky cast deep shadows where it met buildings and awnings, and people drifted through the gaps between them.

And there was one person who was not hiding in those shadows, yet not exactly showing themselves either. A blade-wielder.

Just past the crossroads at the center of the marketplace. A woman wearing a breastplate of riveted iron plates and leather armor from the waist down over the thighs. The outfit carried an air of excessive confidence. Her lips moved.

"That's you, isn't it?"

A question that was not really a question. She already knew the answer when she asked it. So instead of waiting for one, she moved. Her foot kicked off the ground and she crossed the intersection.

Ching.

She drew her sword and darted through the people standing in the road, weaving among them. Seen from above, she would have traced a smooth curving line.

She moved through the crowd like a quick-witted snake, and then the snake's fangs became a blade and came flying at Enkrid's forehead.

Ping.

Naturally, the blade did not reach its mark. Enkrid stepped sideways and drew Penna upward in a rising cut.

The new sword was not yet settled in his hand. He was not about to gamble on drawing an unfamiliar blade against an opponent like this.

Swish.

Penna found no mark either. He had read the precise moment of contact and drawn along a line with no room to evade, but she read that too and pulled back. She had already repositioned beneath a canvas awning, its poles set and its top rolled up, shade pooling around her.

Deep shadow covered half of the blade-wielder's body.

The softly curved corners of her mouth told him exactly what kind of mood she was in.

'She's smiling.'

She looked like she was enjoying herself. Then she moved again. Her speed was nothing short of his own.

Blades passed and evasions followed.

Neither of them could end it easily, and neither was trying to. Reading each other's next move was no simple matter, not at this speed, not with this kind of insight on both sides.

She could match him move for move, so they just kept reading each other right back.

Whip, flick, snap, swish.

The two of them swung their swords through the crowd as though they had agreed to do exactly that.

Not one person got hurt.

Penna skimmed above the head of a boy staring blankly ahead. The controlled motion and measured force left only a small breath of wind over his hair.

The boy sensed something that had already passed him, ducked his head, then absently rubbed his own hair, but by then both of them were long gone.

Her blade passed above the shoulder of an old woman walking at a slow shuffle. It did not even graze her, so the old woman simply paused and tilted her head.

"Hm?"

Not everyone missed what was happening. But it was hard to name precisely what they were seeing.

A baker working an early morning loaf blinked. Did something just go past?

It was genuinely difficult to follow. They never stopped moving, so whatever it was kept flashing into view and vanishing again.

It looked almost as though the two of them had agreed to circle through the crowd playing a game of tag.

The problem, if there was one, was that the players in this game of tag were holding swords. And since the two of them were swinging those swords without pause, it was impossible to take it all in at once, which left people wondering what on earth was going on.

"Is that a fight?"

That was the kind of thing being muttered.

Enkrid judged that fighting in the middle of the marketplace put him at a disadvantage.

If she decided to go after the bystanders, he would have to defend and fight at the same time. She used the people around her as a shield with practiced ease. He had the edge in raw strength, but this was a battlefield where that strength was hard to use.

'Terrible tactical position.'

He had deliberately drawn the demon One-Killer's attention first to stop it from looking anywhere else, specifically to avoid situations like this.

The blade-wielder who had just appeared understood tactics better than One-Killer had, at least.

Individual fights had tactics too.

Not just had them, but had plenty of them. Any effort to account for the environment and claim even a small advantage fell within the domain of tactics.

'She's better at it than I am.'

A few exchanges was enough to know that much for certain. She understood how to use the environment and she had claimed the favorable ground.

Every person around her was her shield.

For Enkrid, every person nearby was weight he had to protect.

That did not mean he thought of them as a burden, exactly. If that had been his mindset, he would never have sworn to protect everything at his back in the first place.

'Calculate.'

High-speed thought, split thinking, Wave-Blocking Sword, that last one was not simply a guard technique. It was a sword that trained the mind.

Since returning to the Border Guard and spending time among the company, he had not come back empty-handed. There had been things to learn, even now.

Slower, in a way that Rem found irritatingly peculiar as a talent, Enkrid still walked. Slow as it was, he walked. And he had gained things from that.

Expanding the range of the Wave-Blocking Sword. For this, he had borrowed some of what made Jaxon's specialty his own.

"It's about expanding the domain of your senses and making that space yours."

Following what Jaxon had said, Enkrid did something similar. What the eyes took in, what the ears caught, what the nose pulled in as scent, the taste across the tongue, the feel of things against skin.

All of it fed into a sixth sense that predicted what was coming. Every scrap of information from the surroundings went into his head in an instant, and he calculated, and calculated again.

'The awl pierces the circle.'

He attached the thinking built through Wave-Blocking Sword training to a secondary gain he had found along the way.

In other words, he was looking at the future through calculation.

'High-speed thought lets you see further ahead than your opponent.'

His eyes burned. A nosebleed ran down and grazed his upper lip.

Doing this required several conditions to be met first.

It had to be a familiar place he passed through often. Without that, too many variables entered the calculation and his head would simply burst.

And he had to know his own limits.

'Push it too far and it's blackout.'

A human brain overheated could blow. He had already found that out firsthand.

Both conditions were being met perfectly right now.

The Border Guard marketplace was not a place he visited constantly, but it was a familiar route. And managing his limits was something he had done countless times across every iteration of today.

What mattered was control. When it came to control over Will, Enkrid was the finest madman there was.

His toe struck the ground with a sharp tap. Deliberate. It drew eyes toward him. Calculation was a game of probabilities.

He drew several lines ahead of time. Not the line of dodging and gaining slight ground, but a future where the two of them collided. He was pushing her toward a place she could not escape.

Enkrid brought the future he had seen in his head into the present.

He felt the crowd's attention land on him and stepped sideways. The pace was incomparably slower than a moment before.

After moving at high speed and then shifting his rhythm, she read it as an opening and sent her blade in. From behind and to the left. Enkrid turned his hips smoothly and pulled the sword back along the shortest possible arc.

'Here, the new sword.'

With his left hand he drew the sword he had just received halfway, using it as a shield. If she pulled her blade back, he would push forward and thrust immediately after.

She knew that. Which meant pulling back or switching to something else was not an option for her.

Clang.

It was a deliberate sound. The blades met and rang out, and only then did someone call out.

"Fight!"

Krais, back when the anxiety had been at its worst, had made the Border Guard residents run evacuation drills.

It was to make sure no one died to a stray blade by just standing there.

At the time, some of the citizens had cursed him for making them do something so pointless, but the moment they heard that sound, they dove into their homes and ducked inside their shops without hesitation.

"City watch!"

Someone else shouted that.

"We don't have much time left, do we?"

The blade-wielder realized what had happened and said it aloud. Still, she did not seem particularly sorry to see her crowd of shields disperse. She did not grab anyone to use as a human shield either.

The opponent was a knight. Or at the very least, someone of comparable ability.

Rather than respond, Enkrid pushed the half-drawn sword back into its scabbard.

Click.

Smooth going out, smooth going in. The word masterwork was not wasted on it. The scabbard felt like part of the sword itself. Whoever made this had cared about the finish on the scabbard too.

If there came a moment when he truly doubted his chances and real danger pressed in, he would draw the new sword whether his hand was used to it or not.

'Penna is enough.'

He did not think he was going to lose, so he left it where it was.

The strange thing was that her face felt faintly familiar. He could not place where from.

No matter how well he retained faces, when he considered all the todays he had lived through, it was simply impossible to remember everyone he had ever passed by briefly.

"Excellent tactical thinking. You read the unfavorable ground and eliminated the disadvantage, that's what you did, yes?"

The woman blade-wielder spoke again, and Enkrid gave a nod. The fact that she was not going after the retreating crowd made her worth acknowledging.

"And you're confident you can catch me too? The half-drawn sword, did you just receive that one? Your other sword is a recent change as well? You're using it because it compensates for some length disadvantage, and the single-edged blade means it's specialized for cutting, right?"

Each question already contained the answer. She was not asking for confirmation. The woman let her sword hang loose at her side. The blade had an unusually white sheen to it.

A single exchange earlier had already told him that sword was no ordinary weapon.

"I wonder what everyone else is doing right now."

Then, without any lead-in, she said it.

"Did I come here alone?"

Maybe it was habit. Nearly everything she said came out as a question.

"No. I wouldn't have."

Even the statements she made that were not questions had that same probing quality. But the meaning buried in the words was clear enough.

"What are you?"

This time Enkrid was the one asking.

If she had not come alone, that meant others had struck as well.

Which meant this was not aimed at him personally. It sounded more like the Border Guard itself was the target.

Figuring out who she was felt difficult with so little to go on. He could ask more, though. He would need to knock her around first and then ask.

"Who am I?"

She asked it as she moved again. Without the crowd to work with she seemed almost relieved, her footwork was faster now than when he had first seen her.

She left afterimages behind as the blade became a line and cut through the air toward him.

Enkrid did not stop calculating. He pushed his brain harder, overheating it further to see ahead of her.

He calculated the probabilities and found the most rational line. This might have been the only way to make every sword stroke the right one.

His overheated mind chased after the answer. Between the arcing trajectories of her blade, he read what was in her head and chose his response. A well-trained body was a fine instrument to back up high-speed thought.

Clang.

Blades met and separated again. The impact numbed Enkrid's grip. She was strong.

"You're ridiculously strong, you know that?"

She seemed genuinely surprised, and her voice stretched long because she was already stepping forward and lunging again as she spoke.

He calculated probabilities between the blades. His nosebleed ran freely, and he tasted exhilaration.

Honestly, it had been so enjoyable from the start that he felt his brain slowly melting away.

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