WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 674: Three Irons

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"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Grida asked, tilting her head to one side. Ragna's mouth opened on reflex.

"What about my eyes?"

Come to think of it, this little sibling of his had always been like this, even as a kid. The eyes, though, that was new.

"I said, why are you looking at me like that."

A faint fighting spirit colored Grida's words. There was quite a gap in their ages, but they had picked up the sword at the same time.

Had Ragna first picked up a sword because he refused to keep getting hit by her?

There had been days like that. A childhood memory from the time after he had learned to walk, when the world was just starting to make sense.

Not that Grida's memories gave Ragna any reason to share them, of course.

"None of your business."

Ragna answered without blinking once. Inside a month of first holding a sword, he had stopped needing to be hit. That was the kind of sibling he was.

Still, annoying was annoying. The eyes and the mouth, both.

Grida's right hand dropped and came back up in the same motion. She loosened her fingers, then clenched them, and somehow a sword grip had found its way into her palm.

Ting.

The blade left its home and rushed toward its destination. It threw off an unusually white light, catching the sun and scattering it across Ragna's line of sight.

A bold arc, the kind that would draw blood if he failed to dodge. It surged upward, then dropped straight down, then veered like a swallow and drove in toward his forearm.

Clang!

Ragna twisted his left foot and drew his greatsword halfway, raising it to block Grida's blade. Then he pulled it the rest of the way free and slashed upward.

They had grown up clashing blades since childhood. This was how they said hello. Grida was quietly surprised by the exchange, light as it was.

Two things surprised her, in fact.

The first.

'He dodged?'

Young Ragna had not known how to dodge.

"Dodge? Why? I can just meet it head-on."

That had always been his way. Back then, the family had called him a potential pioneer talent unlike any they had seen, but the flaw was plain.

'Too stubborn.'

Headstrong to a fault.

Sometimes you had to know when to go around, but Ragna had always looked straight ahead.

To truly master a sword, you had to learn to move and reach and cut the way water flows.

That was the teaching handed down from the family's ancestors.

But Ragna had just kept doing the same things, because anything else felt like too much trouble.

That was exactly how Ragna had looked when Enkrid first met him. The younger sibling Grida knew had been that way, and yet now he was deflecting the blade.

Close to the opposite of the Heavy and Fierce Sword, it was the Soft and Flowing Sword. The flowing blade.

A movement she had never expected to see from him.

And there was one more thing to be surprised by.

Grida quickly gripped her sword with both hands.

She needed both to hold against Ragna's pressing blade.

Skreeee, grrrrnd.

One hand alone was not enough to think about blocking.

'How strong has he gotten?'

The senseless little brute.

From the outside, Ragna's upward sweep looked almost casual, yet Grida, on the receiving end, felt cold sweat running down her back.

Thunk!

She broke contact with the blade and jumped back.

Whoosh.

Ragna's greatsword passed through where she had been and rose into the air, stopping there. Blade pointed at the sky, one hand holding the greatsword, her younger sibling looked at her.

A moment ago his eyes had held something like Rem's savage stare, but now they were different again.

'I keep getting surprised.'

A third thing. There was actual eagerness in Ragna's eyes.

He was the sibling who had left the family because walking the prescribed path bored him. Back then his eyes had been like a rotting Ghoul's.

Someone who had called everything dull and tedious and not the least bit fun.

Someone who had treated swinging a sword as labor.

And yet, deep in that sibling's eyes, she glimpsed the same flame she had seen in that madman Enkrid. Grida had the eyes to notice things, and she noticed it now.

'What in the world happened to you?'

She asked it silently and adjusted her grip. Instead of asking with words, she would finish asking with her sword.

* * *

Enkrid swung his sword alone in the training yard, sinking into his thoughts.

If he devoted every day entirely to swordsmanship, would a path open up? If he filled his head with nothing but sword technique, would that be enough?

No.

His thoughts needed to roam free. Thinking only about swordsmanship actually trapped him. Letting things rise and drift away one by one had sometimes revealed a new path, so that was what he did.

Doing that, the first thing that naturally surfaced was the member of their group who had gone missing.

Ragna had been gone a whole month, but nobody was worried. He would come back on his own.

'The same way Grida memorizes the faces of people she sees often, Ragna more or less knows the roads around the camp.'

More precisely, it was less that he knew the roads and more that he had the surrounding terrain memorized wholesale.

Either way, if it came to it, he would climb a tree or leap across rooftops to get back.

When he was down low he could not find his way, but from up high he managed just fine.

He might have gone outside the city, but probably not.

The way Jaxon occasionally went out on his own errands, Ragna sometimes wandered down to the market and spent time however he liked.

Everyone figured he had gone to the market, eaten his fill, found a warm spot to rest his back, drifted off to sleep, and was now spending his time there in comfortable laziness.

Which was not a wrong guess.

Enkrid had figured roughly the same.

So he shelved any concern for Ragna.

Then the past month drifted through his mind.

The same training and drills as always, and threaded through them, the three from the Zaun family.

'Zaun.'

He had listened, watched, and learned from what they carried. In that process, Enkrid had felt a spark.

Well, even before that, the very existence of the knighthood he had dreamed of and longed for had always been a spark, and his enthusiasm had always been on the boil, so it was nothing new.

Krais in particular would have snorted if he knew.

"Even Juri, who sells marmalade at the market, knows the captain was always like this."

Something like that.

Anyway, whether it was Jaxon or Rem, there was nobody around Enkrid who would settle into complacency. That pleased him greatly.

And the three from the Zaun family had been like a pat of butter on a well-baked white roll. Thanks to them, his satisfaction had risen above its usual level.

"Awareness, calculation, preparation."

In the middle of his thoughts, Enkrid turned over something Jaxon had said. It had surfaced without warning. The words drifted and circled through his mind, then settled into place, calm and ordered.

"You confirm the opponent and read the environment."

That was awareness.

"Then you map out the possible Attack Lines."

That belonged to the realm of calculation.

"Then you anticipate the fallout from your own actions."

That was the stage called preparation.

Jaxon had laid out the foundation of assassination, the core that still held now.

"What I learned first is inside all that, and what I use now doesn't go outside the scope of what I just told you."

So what had he taken from Jaxon's words?

The basics. Doing what he already did, but doing it better, that was what he judged himself to need.

Awareness, calculation, preparation. Things he had been putting himself through harshly of late. But there was a clear drawback.

'If I strain my head with calculation, the duration shortens.'

That was not the direction the Wave-Blocking Sword wanted to go. But was the Wave-Blocking Sword the only answer? That was not it either.

'Finish the calculation in an instant.'

In his mind he had his sparring with Rem, his bouts with Audin, and the training where he and Jaxon had chased each other's senses in loops, disrupting and reading.

All day he swung his sword and trained. Always scheming, turning things over, reviewing every exchange.

Things that once could only be understood by dying, once a mountain of experience had piled stone by stone, had at some point become the lamp that lit the way.

Now was one of those times.

Things that surfaced through inspiration. Enkrid compressed them all.

'Rem focuses on the instant.'

Jaxon moves with everything around him in mind. Audin deceives his opponent to secure his own distance.

Everything overlapped and drew his inner vision together.

Blocking a flying arrow. Perceiving the projectile Rem had hurled with his Sling.

All of it had been a world of a single instant. Inside stretched time, he had to catch that instant and react.

'An attack only means something when it lands.'

Flash. A flash of light.

Not simply fast, but if he could hold calculation inside that speed, it would truly deserve to be called a flash.

The meaning: light that bursts in one instant.

The form of execution: lethal speed born from calculation.

The method of training:

'In any spontaneous moment, drive the sword out through tactical thought.'

And in any moment, never forget speed.

A difficult path by anyone's measure, but Enkrid had found it, and a joy unlike any other shook his whole body.

"Why is he suddenly doing that?"

Magroon, who had been studying swordsmanship in the corner of the yard, looked at Enkrid and asked.

Drooling, shaking all over. Anyone watching could see he was drunk on some kind of rapture.

To anyone who did not know him, he just looked insane.

He had swung his sword once, thought for a while, trained alone, and now this. It did not look remotely normal.

Even the Zaun family had its share of unusual people, but nobody quite on that level.

As far as Magroon could see, this was a human being operating in an incomprehensible domain.

"Just leave him. He's excited, that's all."

Rem had seen this before and was unmoved.

"Does this happen often in the west?"

"Often? The west is where people live too, you idiot."

Rem got inexplicably annoyed and left.

'So that one over there isn't a person?'

The question only deepened in Magroon's head.

By then, Enkrid had come down from his rapture and returned to himself.

The direction was set, so only training remained. Then the last principle Jaxon had mentioned came back to him.

A kind of teaching, that in any moment you must not grow careless or arrogant.

"Preparation is not the end. The last step is retreat. If no opening appears, why would you charge in? If no opening appears, you pull back briefly. Though here too, you need to know how far to pull back, where to stop, and what damage you're willing to accept."

Don't get so caught up in attacking that you forget to look behind you.

Jaxon had meant it as advice not to throw your life away carelessly, but that was something the listener could take and apply as they saw fit.

'If you get so absorbed in technique that you stop looking back, that's a problem.'

That was what he had learned from the very first day he kept replaying.

He had grown so absorbed in thrusting that he had not thought past the thrust itself. Had he not reviewed it back then and sworn never to repeat it?

He was in the middle of separately training the sword art he had named Flash when Ragna walked into the training yard with Grida.

A return after a month away, and yet.

"Why were you shaking just now and drooling? Is something wrong with your body?"

Magroon did not even turn his head, just said it toward Enkrid. Rem was off to one side muttering to himself while he ground the blade of his axe on a whetstone. Audin glanced over briefly, then devoted himself entirely to helping Fell and Ropord with their training.

Audin's voice filled the brief silence that had opened up.

"Did you not say that whoever cries out first loses? I will do my humble best to help you both. The Lord will look after you. Brothers."

Ropord and Fell, each with a wooden stick clenched between their teeth, went pale. Understandably. They knew from experience what was coming.

Whoosh.

Audin swung the smooth iron club he had made specially, about as thick as a grown man's forearm.

Thwack!

That sound came from Ropord's thigh, covered by nothing but thin trousers.

"He held it in," Teresa said. She was watching as the judge, her expression and eyes carrying nothing but the gravest seriousness.

"Good," Audin said with satisfaction, and raised the club toward the next one.

Fell watched and thought it over for a moment. Should he concede defeat? No, he could not do that.

While he was still deciding, Audin swung the club.

Thwack!

Both of them took one hit each, fair and equal.

Ruagarne, some distance away, was swinging her whip and sword and dripping oil when she stopped and said, "You're back."

That was all.

Ragna came inside without making much of it.

Odinkar had been absorbed in solo training off to one side and looked up when he saw Ragna, raising his sword.

"Hey."

A greeting.

"Odinkar."

Ragna saw him, lifted a hand slightly, and that was the full extent of it. Odinkar seemed to have blended into this place completely in the time they had been apart. The ease with which he welcomed Ragna back said as much.

On par with Assimilation, the elven technique.

Then Sinar walked in behind Ragna and called out to Enkrid.

"It's your fiancee. I'd like us to name our child today."

Right. Just an ordinary afternoon, as it should be.

"You people are genuinely strange."

That was Grida's verdict on everything she had witnessed. Ragna, as naturally as anything, made his way to the dining hall and the bath and back, then headed over to Enkrid.

"Good timing. I needed you."

Enkrid welcomed him.

He had just devised the Flash sword art. The urge to test it was rising fast.

Shing.

Ragna lifted his greatsword. Even after Aetri's work on it, the edge had chipped.

It had happened trading blows with Penna and then with Grida. Enkrid drew the Three-Iron Sword.

Shhhhring.

The sound of the blade clearing its sheath was uncommonly clear. They sparred. It was just another part of the day.

"The child's name?"

"I've already chosen one."

Grida had been listening with genuine interest to what Sinar had said to Enkrid, wondering if there really was a child.

Then Enkrid only raised his sword and spoke, so Grida simply concluded that yes, this person was indeed a lunatic.

"Three-Iron."

After thinking it over, Enkrid had decided to name his sword Three-Iron.

"Thank goodness Odd-Eye didn't go berserk. Really."

Rem said it looking at Enkrid, and Enkrid nodded.

"Right? Good name, isn't it? Odd-Eye went wild at first too, just from being so happy."

"What a convenient pair of ears you've got. Wonder why you bother carrying them around."

That was the highest compliment Rem had to offer.

One day, two days, three days. Time kept passing. Even after Ragna's return, the days held no particular change.

The same as always, days that anyone watching might have called tedious, slipped by in a rush.

Then came a clear spring morning, no rain, no clouds. It was also the start of the second month. Grida put a proposal to Enkrid.

"Let's have a proper fight."

For two months, Grida had focused on basic training rather than sparring. Watching that, Enkrid had thought what she was doing looked similar to what Aetri did.

'Like heating iron in a fire.'

Grida had been heating herself that way.

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