WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 672: He Brought Another Woman, They Say

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"Are you out of your mind?"

Ann was in the middle of treating Magroon when she looked up from the sparring match and went pale. Past frowning, the color drained clean from her face.

She could hardly blame herself. From where she stood, the whole thing looked like a parade of insanity.

Ann could not read the flow of a fight or follow its turns. But she could read results.

Enkrid's sword had bitten halfway into the blond man's shoulder and stopped there. Another inch and no amount of divine power or medicine would have saved that collarbone.

"I stopped it. Freckles."

Audin said it with the back of his hand pressed against the flat of Enkrid's blade. He wore no armor, nothing to block with, but the golden sand flowing from his skin kept the edge from splitting it open.

Even so, blood ran. That alone said plenty about how little hesitation had been in Enkrid's swing.

"Oh. Nearly killed him."

Enkrid's tone was perfectly flat.

"Losing an arm wouldn't kill me."

The man on the receiving end was just as calm.

These absolute lunatics.

Ann was a healer. She had not become one because she wanted to watch people die. She had become one because she wanted them to live. She had chosen this path because she could not stand watching people waste away from pointless illness.

So what was all this talk about not dying?

Sever an arm and you bleed. Not a trickle, either. It would pour out like a waterfall.

Sudden blood loss drops body temperature.

That was what Ann knew.

Go deeper into it and the first sign was restlessness, then the skin went pale and the body started to cool.

Pulse speeds up. Breathing gets shallow.

As the temperature kept falling, the pulse grew irregular and weak. The skin would start mottling blue. After that came confusion and fading focus.

Knights hold up better than most.

But becoming a knight did not make you immortal.

Just as someone drunk on omnipotence could be felled by the crash of depletion that followed, someone who trusted blindly in a body brimming with vitality could very easily die.

Ann had spent years under her teacher, doing her own research and stealing glances at his journals whenever she got the chance. She had learned a great deal that way.

The conclusion she had reached was clear. Unless someone was Frog, a severed arm would not grow back. That was the end of it, yet a stray thought surfaced anyway.

Wait. Could it?

What about someone with archbishop-level divine power, of which the Church had precious few?

Maybe?

Not that pouring raw divine power into a wound like that would make it heal cleanly on its own. There was more to it.

Over the past several days the Ragged Holy Man had been teaching Seiki, and he had tossed a few pieces of advice Ann's way as well.

She had been grinding away at research because of it, trying to develop a potion that could carry divine power within it.

And in the process she had come to understand something.

Using divine power is a skill in itself.

Stitching torn flesh shut with a heated needle took technique. Divine power was no different.

But how many people could wield that power with any real finesse, and even among those who could, how many years would it take to learn a technique like that?

You would need to treat countless injured people before the skill became second nature, before you developed a feel for exactly how much divine power was enough.

"What would you do if you grew a third leg? What if you suddenly had a tail?"

That was how the Holy Man had described it.

And yet there was a prayer for learning to handle that tail, that third hand or foot. More precisely, a prayer that made the learning possible. Teaching and being taught.

Someone who had already learned and mastered it could add their own experience and pass it on to someone ready to receive it.

That still required someone who could wield divine power, and someone with enough experience doing so.

By chance, we have both.

There was the Ragged Holy Man for technique, and Seiki, whose divine power was strong enough to call her a Holy Maiden ten times over.

And I'm here too.

Ann herself could judge which wounds would not respond to divine healing, and in those cases she could administer regeneration-boosting medicines or perform surgery while monitoring recovery.

She had been sewing up corpses since she was a child. Her needlework put most seamstresses to shame.

"Long as nobody died."

Rem said it from somewhere behind her.

"Still. This is too much."

Ann said it once she had finished turning it over in her head. Her hands kept moving as she spoke.

She shook white powder over the wound to stop the bleeding first, then looked the injury over carefully. Stitch it? Or use the medicine? She had a new preparation ready. She had recently made a salve by collecting water from the Elf Spring and morning dew.

Put him to sleep first, then treat it? No, she would stitch it now and apply the salve while he was awake.

He was a knight, they said. It would heal.

"I think I was behind by half a move that time. It won't go that way next time."

Odinkar said it. He had just taken a wound that might have killed him if things had gone slightly sideways, yet his mouth was still working fine. Enkrid took stock of the man.

Recklessness. The kind that did not look before it leapt.

The reason someone like that had survived this long was obvious. A talent that earned the word genius would have turned his recklessness into bold audacity.

"Sure. Next time you'll just die."

Enkrid said it plainly, as a statement of fact.

"You were playing mind games from the start to get inside my head, weren't you? Sharper than I expected. A crafty side to you. You kept calculating during the fight too."

Enkrid wiped a trickle of blood from his nose with the back of his hand. Odinkar was right. He had used the same approach he had used against Grida, seeing every situation as a series of probabilities, calculating everything.

Strictly speaking, that was something he had picked up from Jaxon, and he felt the need to sharpen it further. A little more polish and it might become one of his swordsmanship techniques in its own right.

"And yet you can still hit hard and reckless when you need to. Interesting. You're rough."

"Rough?"

"Fun."

Odinkar grinned as he finished. The white powder held back the surge of blood.

Only then did Odinkar glance down at his own wound.

"A skilled healer."

You could tell from the way the hands moved.

"Would you mind staying quiet while I work? He needs to stay still."

"I'm a knight. A wound like this, I'll be fine in a day."

"Frog wouldn't heal a wound this deep overnight either."

Ann kept her eyes on the injury as she said it, gauging where exactly she needed to start stitching.

Enkrid turned to Odinkar.

"Welcome to the Border Guard."

"A little fast for greetings, isn't it?"

"That was the real greeting."

Enkrid gave Penna a small shake, the same sword that had just carved into Odinkar's shoulder. Sunlight caught the blade and sent a flick of blood scattering. Odinkar's blood.

Just as Ruagarne had said, Enkrid's intention to learn the Zaun system from these three was completely genuine.

But could he learn it just by asking outright? He was not sure. If not, he could always steal it by watching.

For now, though.

Technique.

The edge he had just gained over Odinkar had been partly luck. If that luck had shifted even slightly, it would have been him losing.

That fact left him quietly pleased. Everything else could wait.

Either way, the three from the Zaun family agreed to stay, and the next day Enkrid had to take it easy.

"You're not fighting again until I'm finished treating you. Otherwise you might as well die and become my research specimen."

Ann made that argument with no trace of a smile, and it worked.

Enkrid's own condition was not normal either. Knights had unusual vitality, but he had pushed the calculation method so hard his head was throbbing. That too was gone cleanly after about two days.

In that time he watched Audin spar with Grida, then Rem spar with Grida.

Of the three from the Zaun family, Grida alone had no attachment to winning or losing.

"Isn't wrapping yourself in divine power a bit of a dirty move? Jaxon?"

"My lady, if you don't know my name, perhaps don't use one at all."

Even after hearing Audin correct her, Grida stayed unruffled. Audin was the hardest opponent for Grida to deal with.

By the standard Enkrid had worked out for himself, Audin knew how to draw a large circle. On top of that, he was a Holy Knight.

Divine power was a force built for defense.

The golden sand that covered his whole body was a gift from his god, and that gift had become armor that ordinary attacks could not pierce.

"This is cheating! Rem!"

"That's my name."

Grida called out whatever name came to mind. Rem, watching from the side, replied simply. The only name she never called out was Enkrid's.

Audin won the spar. By a landslide? Not quite. It was more that they had worked through it together and Grida acknowledged defeat.

The spar with Rem was rougher. At a glance, Rem looked full of openings. Showing gaps and then using those very gaps against an opponent was one of his specialties.

Grida was a swordswoman who knew how to pry into whatever opening her opponent showed. She did exactly that. And lost.

Rem moved only his wrist and let the axe follow. The same trick he had used to frustrate Ragna. The axe with no recoil carved a zigzag through the air and blocked every one of Grida's attacks.

Clang, clang!

The moment their weapons met, Grida glimpsed her own death.

Sorcery.

If divine power was the Holy Knight's armor, Sorcery was the barbarian's blade.

That blade was roughly wrapped in cloth, the kind that would cut even the hand holding it if things went wrong, and yet its wielder handled it with frightening ease.

"You hit well."

Grida laughed even in defeat. Aside from the fact that she could not remember faces, she was the most sociable of the three and the most unflappable.

"Ruagarne, was it? A Frog who studies. We actually have one in our family too. I heard that Frog's ancestor helped create a few of the Zaun sword techniques."

She warmed to people easily, and while she was getting to know everyone, Ropord and Fell bit down on pieces of wood and pushed their training harder than before.

Magroon, after that, said little. He simply observed everyone and scribbled notes. The Zaun family had no ordinary knights.

Within the family, knights were divided into three broad types. The first was the Pioneer.

Those who used their talent as a compass and forged ahead into unknown territory. Odinkar was one of these.

The second was the Researcher, also called the Digger.

These were the ones captivated by swordsmanship itself. They built techniques, then built the theories to dismantle those techniques. They sometimes lost themselves in things that seemed useless, but they were also the ones who had built what the Zaun family was now.

Magroon belonged here.

The last type was called the Observer, or sometimes the Guardian.

Grida Zaun was one of these. Rather than caring about the outcome of any one fight, they watched everything and carried the duty of passing the family on to the next generation.

For any established system to endure, it needed a structure to support it.

That was how the Zaun family worked.

"Is it all right to tell me all of this?"

Enkrid asked. Grida smiled at him. The seasonal rains had been threatening to arrive, and now they did, the sky cracking open as if something had punched a hole through it. Rain hammered down.

The roar of it was constant, and through it Grida's voice came through clearly.

"Anyone who visits the Zaun estate can find this out. And you want to know more than this, don't you?"

They were standing under a wide eave. Through the mist rising from the downpour, Grida's brown eyes showed open curiosity. Enkrid nodded.

"I don't have anything to offer in return."

He said it alongside the nod. That was simply the truth.

If she wanted something between a man and a woman, he would have to deal with the Golden Witch first.

"You brought another woman here?"

Sinar had shown up early the next morning after the spars, shouting that from a distance. The misunderstanding was cleared up, but she had addressed Grida directly.

"The line is already long. Your turn is far off."

"Fine, sure. You're the Black Flower, aren't you?"

Grida answered that way and made her own position clear in the process.

She saw an elf's blond hair and thought of the Black Flower. Enkrid found that genuinely baffling.

She had a talent for observing people but could not remember faces. Did information even reach her properly that way?

He wondered, then let it go. She could figure it out herself.

It was not his place to get involved.

Spring weather was fickle. Two days of rain, two days of sun, the sunlight doing the work of drying out the ground that the rain had soaked. Flowers bloomed and fruit began to form on the trees. The seasonal rains had passed.

And Ragna had still not returned, even after two full weeks.

In that time, Enkrid spent his days with the three from the Zaun family, learning and practicing.

Every stretch of time had its own weight, but this one was genuinely worth something.

Day by day, hour by hour, time moved forward in long strides.

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