WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 676: Sinar the Interpreter

= = =

The Zaun could be called people who were twisted, then twisted again.

They had strength but chose not to use it, and they would do anything to refine their swordsmanship.

Among the things Grida had said, one stuck with him.

"If you trace back far enough, to the generation before the generation before, you find our beginning. From what I know, someone who lacked something started the sword to fill that void."

There was no need to ask what the lack came from. Whatever it was, it always came back to the sword.

Take a man carrying a broken heart after being rejected by a woman. How does he overcome the pain? A Zaun would say: swing the sword.

A child who has lost both parents is no different. How do you resolve grief and sorrow? Swing the sword.

There was a child who had always lost his way from an early age. He yearned for the right, true path. His talent pushed him forward, and the one path he never lost was the path of the sword.

His desire to find the right way was made real through the blade.

The child who could not remember faces grew up and gained the talent to remember techniques instead.

Grida had something close to perfect memory, but only where swordsmanship was concerned.

So.

"Oh, Roni? What brings you here?"

Calling Krais by the wrong name, even after all this time, was not some special failure. If you understood her, if you knew the Zaun family, it was only natural.

"Why do you keep getting my name wrong? Are you picking a fight?"

Whenever Krais grumbled, Grida would smile and answer.

"Sorry. I have never crossed blades with you."

If they had, she would have remembered through swordsmanship. Without that, Grida simply did not retain faces.

Did it make sense to fill a deficit with the sword like this? To outside eyes it was absurd, but they could do it. There was one final piece that made it possible.

Talent.

People born with talent gathering together, twisting themselves into strange shapes, and training the sword. That was the Zaun family.

Among those watching the match, everyone who knew how to read a fight understood what Grida had done.

Enkrid, who had faced it directly, understood too.

A tailored counter.

It was not so different from what Sinar had done. Sinar had brought a method to break the Wave-Blocking Sword; Grida had brought something to overturn his calculations.

A counter built to destroy exactly one technique.

"I will show you the results of two months."

Those had been Magroon's words before they started, and this was the result.

Irregular. A string of meaningless movements to unravel the calculations. He should have stomped the ground and charged forward, but the motion never connected.

Turning backward and thrusting the sword through his own armpit, slapping his own thigh for no reason, shaking his head left and right, some of it meant something and some of it meant nothing.

Because the movements did not correspond to each other, the calculations had no choice but to come undone.

Pretty interesting, though.

This was not about winning. It was purely about breaking a technique, twisting the calculations, then turning even that twisting into swordsmanship.

Genuinely fascinating people, weren't they?

Then would they have thought about the Wave-Blocking Sword too? The Wave-Blocking Sword also existed in the realm of thought.

What would happen if he kept applying Load this way?

Even so, it would not work against the Wave-Blocking Sword.

They would simply become two parallel lines advancing without ever crossing.

The Wave-Blocking Sword was a blade devoted entirely to defense, and in terms of endurance it was unmatched. Even if you called it a sword that trained the mind, its meaning lay in defense.

Both Magroon and Grida knew that.

So the answer was clear: if the Wave-Blocking Sword appeared, there was no point pressing in.

They broke techniques and found joy in the swordsmanship itself. That was how they were. Odinkar, watching from the side, twitched his shoulders as though something had stirred in him.

Enkrid adjusted his sword position. Grida knew how to strike at weaknesses. That was her specialty.

"Coming again."

Enkrid said it while looking at Grida. He raised his sword above his head. Both arms lifted, and his chest, flanks, and armpits were wide open.

Grida spotted several openings on Enkrid at once. The desire rose, and her body moved on its own. All she had to do was lower the tip and lunge in. But even knowing that, she could not do it easily.

Why?

Because of the sword Enkrid had raised above his head.

If she went in, she would get hit.

Grida pulled back the sword she had been about to thrust. An instant's judgment. Her white blade caught the sunlight, gleaming white as it went perpendicular to the ground.

Enkrid changed the form of his calculation. Not sustained, but instantaneous.

If defense was about blocking the wave, then attack was a single flash. He had decided that was what the sword meant.

Zzzt.

He pushed with both feet planted on the ground. Dry earth kicked up dust from beneath his boots. If the left foot stepped forward, the right following was only natural. He claimed the space and took the distance he wanted.

"Don't block it!"

Odinkar shouted just before the strike landed. Something like unease had moved his mouth. Magroon was busy watching with wide eyes.

Rem, Audin, Ragna, and Jaxon all moved at the same moment. Still, they were too late.

Zzzzzt.

Enkrid scraped his right foot along the ground and stepped diagonally forward, then rotated his sword and gripped the flat with his right index finger, a thumb grip. He swung. In that single instant, he had calculated every movement Grida might make to defend and swung through all of them.

Grida's white blade, held vertical, rang hard as the Three-Iron Sword struck through it.

Clang!

A thunderclap of sound. Grida let out a choked grunt. Enkrid had swung a horizontal cut from above. The advantage of that cut was that even if blocked, it flowed from the high guard into the ox guard and straight into a thrust.

He did exactly that.

The sword swung in a full arc overhead, and as it seemed to knock Grida's white blade to the left, he pressed his edge against hers, the cross guard sealing her sword's movement, and slid down into a thrust.

The force bent Grida's knees halfway. In everyone's eyes a vision flickered, a great hole opening through her skull. But nothing of the sort happened. Enkrid had stopped the sword well before that.

"...I kind of need to pee."

Grida said it, and Enkrid turned to the member standing behind him, casting a long shadow.

"If I had meant to kill, it would have been a diagonal cut followed by an upward slash, not a horizontal cut from above."

"We knew that. That's why we didn't move."

Rem added that last part unnecessarily. Odinkar had already risen and drawn his blade before anyone noticed.

The situation was clear. Enkrid had won and Grida had lost. Grida let out a long breath, released the tension, and dropped down to sit on the ground. There was a laugh in her voice.

"Hey, you're supposed to fight with insight all the way through."

"We never agreed to that."

"Fair enough."

Grida nodded. Enkrid smiled and sheathed his sword.

"It looked interesting, but that's not really suited for sparring, is it?"

Ragna said from the side.

"Is that really coming from you?"

While Rem delivered that jab, Ropord had barely managed to keep Enkrid's fighting method in his eyes, and could not hear anything around him. Inspiration had come down and settled in his head.

If the calculations are being read, what do you do?

Enkrid had just shown him the answer.

You change the form of the calculation.

What if you had multiple calculations, each with a different form?

Calculations are not all the same method. He had realized that by watching Enkrid.

It had not been intentional, though perhaps all the lessons along the way had in fact been preparation for this moment, so it was not entirely wrong to say some intention had been there.

He just had not known one spar would be enough to bring him here.

Ropord realized several things and began moving a Hand Blade through the air on his own. Fell saw it, started to say something, then closed his mouth.

Interrupting now was not fair.

And interfering with someone whose talent was below your own, at that?

Fell, a Shepherds of the Wilderness member, did not have that low a sense of pride.

He kept it to himself and said nothing.

In the meantime Enkrid had turned his eyes elsewhere.

"Tch. I lost."

It was Magroon. Not because of what he said. Over two months Magroon had not been without his sharp words, though he had softened somewhat.

There were times he treated Enkrid like a friend of a decade or more.

"Magroon."

Enkrid called his name. Magroon smiled and opened his mouth to say something, then his brows knit and his face pinched and he coughed, spitting up blood. The front of his shirt stained red.

Odinkar sheathed his sword with a soft ring and moved to Magroon's side. Grida retrieved her sword and stepped back.

"Of all times for the curse to act up."

Enkrid's gaze went to Esther, then to Rem, then returned to where it had been.

Esther was away for about two days, searching for some star or other, and Rem only twitched an eyebrow.

"Blech!"

Magroon coughed a few more times, then retched up a clot of blood, rolled his eyes back, and collapsed. Odinkar reached out and caught him.

"What curse?"

Enkrid asked while looking at Magroon. Grida scratched near her lips with a finger and answered. There was no urgency in her voice.

She could not have spoken that way if this had been her first time seeing someone vomit blood.

"It's a curse that hits a few people when their luck runs out. Some who cough up blood like this survive, and some don't. Usually the airway narrows afterward, and sometimes that's what kills them."

Her tone was flat. Ragna clearly already knew about it.

"It is as she says."

It seemed there was nothing more to add.

Odinkar cradled Magroon in his arms and calmly checked his condition.

"Jaxon."

"Yes."

"Bring Ann. Audin."

"Yes, let me take a look. Brother."

Audin knew curses had no grip on Enkrid. And he himself was not afraid of a curse either.

He let golden light settle on his hand and pressed it to Magroon's chest.

"Mm."

Magroon groaned.

"If this is a curse, it appears to be a variety that falls outside my ability, Brother."

Was divine power the natural counter to curses? Not necessarily. Divine power could heal wounds caused by a curse, but curses as a concept were closer to something that originated from Sorcery. That was why Enkrid had looked toward Rem, but Rem had not especially stepped forward.

"No rank smell."

Rem said it, then asked his axe.

"You see it the same way?"

For someone who had been called crazy for talking to the Three-Iron Sword, he held a surprisingly fluent conversation with his own weapon. Grida could not hold back a word.

"Doesn't your axe ever say it wants to sing?"

"Hey, my axe genuinely expresses its will."

She understood that, but from the outside it looked the same either way.

Grida just thought it and kept her mouth shut. It was not the time to bring that up.

Enkrid had wondered whether Magroon's condition had been that poor over the past two months, but not exactly. This was a sudden onset. He waited a moment, and then Jaxon returned with Ann.

"If someone's arm had been cut off, we'd need to call Seiki too, wouldn't we?"

Ann said as she approached.

"Nothing like that. It's an old curse."

Grida tossed it out casually, and Ann went quiet and came closer.

Ann sat down in front of Magroon, flipped one of his eyelids back, and checked his condition.

"Open his mouth."

Odinkar opened it for her.

Enkrid had learned from getting hurt in past sparring matches. This Ann was a genuinely outstanding healer.

Honestly, she was someone Enkrid had never seen the equal of, even at the main family house. He had thought she might look at the tongue, but instead Ann examined the inside of Magroon's mouth carefully.

Then she took a rounded iron spoon from inside her coat and scraped the inside of Magroon's cheek once, then produced a sheet of paper and wrapped what she had collected.

"A curse, you said?"

Ann asked.

"Yeah."

Grida nodded.

"It's not a curse."

Ann stood up, letting out a slow breath. Then she worked her lips silently for a moment, turned, and walked away.

As she walked there was something slightly unsteady about it, not physically unsteady, but the look of someone absorbing a mental shock.

"Hold on."

Ragna stepped alongside her and took hold of her arm.

"What?"

"You looked like you were having trouble walking."

"...Yes, a little. I've been staying up the past few nights doing some research."

The two of them stepped away, and Grida said:

"He'll be fine after some rest. The family head held on with this curse for over ten years. The family head is still going strong, right?"

"The episodes are coming faster than before, but yeah, still fighting like something inhuman."

Odinkar answered. Enkrid found himself curious about this family head they kept mentioning. But he said nothing. He just thought: would he ever have reason to meet this person?

Magroon woke up the following day.

"I'm fine now."

He said it casually and stood up without difficulty.

That afternoon Ann came to find Enkrid, with Ragna standing beside her.

Seeing the two of them side by side, they looked like a well-matched pair.

"I need to step away for a bit."

Ann spoke first.

"Where?"

"The Zaun family, you said? There. Ragna says he'll guide me, so I can go with him."

Enkrid asked back almost on reflex.

"Was your dream all along to be a wanderer, not a healer?"

"Sorry?"

Ann looked up with wide eyes. Ragna spoke from beside her.

"I actually have some business at the home house as well, so I thought I would go along."

He said it like he was popping next door for a visit, but naturally there was no sending just the two of them. Unless Ann had exceptional talent as a guide.

Which she almost certainly did not. Ann did not like traveling. From what he had heard before, she had nearly died several times on her way to Border Guard, and he had even heard her say she had used up all her luck on that journey.

"We are about due to head back ourselves."

Grida said from the side.

"Yes, you should."

Ann agreed as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, then glanced over at Grida, Odinkar, and especially Magroon, and added:

"I'm honestly surprised you all held on this long. You people, I mean."

So she said. Enkrid had no idea what she meant. But in that moment he knew what he was going to say.

"I should go along. I cannot look away from a crisis facing your family. It is Ragna's home."

Enkrid said it in one breath. Ragna had given him a great deal. There was no reason not to go when Ragna was heading out to protect the place where he was born.

Jaxon, Rem, and Audin were all away.

Only Sinar was nearby, and she heard it and interpreted what was actually going through Enkrid's mind.

"What he is saying is that he is dying to meet your family head and wants to come along."

Grida nodded at that. A madwoman saying something fitting for a madwoman, nothing more.

And though Ann had said it was surprising they had all held on, Grida was not especially worried.

If that curse had been going to kill them, they would all have been dead long ago.

Even so.

"You know what this is?"

Grida could not help asking. Many had died from this curse. No one carried some grand goal of fighting it, but if it could be gotten rid of, they did want it gone.

"I do. Though I think seeing it in person will give me a clearer picture."

Enkrid added his weight to her words.

"I trust Ann's judgment."

"What that means is that he absolutely must come along because he truly wants to see the family head."

Sinar, right at his side, interpreted Enkrid's words one more time.

= = =

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried