A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 677

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 677: What Will Be Left Behind?

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"You've changed a lot. You have."

Ragna turned his head at Grida's words. His sister had been watching him train alone under the moonlight.

She did not ask why he had chosen to sit on the bare floor instead of a chair. Too much trouble, probably.

"Me?"

"Yes."

He asked and she confirmed it. Ragna nodded vaguely. Sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin.

"Seeing you like this would surprise everyone."

Ragna only nodded again. His manner said it plainly: whether anyone else was surprised was no concern of his.

He bobbed his head carelessly, as if the whole thing was beneath his notice.

"Well, in the end you're going back home after all."

Grida said.

"I'm not going back."

"Then what?"

"Just stopping by."

"Why?"

"To pick something up."

Is he serious? Grida stared at him for a long moment, then patted the dust from her backside and stood. She had been sitting on dry earth, and rising kicked up a small cloud of dirt.

"All right. You'll handle your own affairs."

She was simply amazed at how much Ragna had changed. After Grida left, he kept swinging his sword.

He had decided to return to the family, but to bring back what he needed, he would have to push further than he had now.

And besides.

'There's no time.'

So he poured whatever time he had into training.

Swing the sword and the path appears. It had always been that way, since he was small.

How far he could reach, where relentless training would eventually take him, all of it was visible. It simply appeared without any effort on his part.

No desperate clawing, no thrashing about. The path had already been open.

But did walking that path actually mean anything?

Memories from the past surged in like a tide and pooled inside his head.

"Become a knight."

His father had said that.

"Why should I?"

Ragna had asked. His father looked at him the way a man looks at a creature he has never seen in his life, then spoke.

"Do you need a reason?"

The Zaun family were people captivated by the sword itself. Ragna could not feel that. Swinging a sword brought him no pleasure whatsoever.

"You don't enjoy this? Why not?"

Everyone around him asked, but his answer was always the same.

"Why do you?"

"Wanting to beat someone, or pushing past your own limits, that gets you excited, right? It's just fun."

Some people said things like that. Ragna could not agree.

Beating someone? Even if he could not do it today, he would in a month. The outcome was already plain to see. That was a fact that would not change.

"What are you talking about? You think you're some kind of prophet?"

He proved it to those who scoffed. And even that process was utterly tedious. The difference in raw talent divided everything. Ragna knew that.

They had gathered only the gifted, and still he stood apart.

So it was dull. A hollow life. He would swing his sword until he died. He could even sense how that death might come.

'Do I just walk this fixed path, sword in hand, until I die right here?'

A new sword art? A new road? He saw nothing. Only what had already been decided.

The talent heaven bestowed should have been a blessing. For Ragna, it became a curse.

God had given him the gift, then walked off with every last trace of desire alongside it.

That was how he left home, and how he ended up meeting Enkrid.

"Why do you push yourself that far?"

He had asked that question once.

"Right now I swing my sword just to survive. But that's not how I want to live."

That was the period when Ragna had judged Enkrid to be fundamentally broken, his Basics too poor to be worth anything.

Even then, Enkrid's Will did not waver. A straight, unbending road. That was what his Will was.

As though slicing through the still water of his thoughts, the present Ragna swung his sword.

Ping.

The blade swept horizontally, level with the ground, leaving only a small whisper of displaced air before vanishing back into its arc.

Moonlight chased the path the greatsword carved. He kept swinging without rest, the moonlight following the blade while the blade teased the moonlight and ran.

Dozens of silver lines appeared and dissolved in the air, again and again.

Words Enkrid had spoken had soaked into Ragna's mind and stayed, rising to the surface whenever they chose.

"I want to live the way I think is right. I want to raise my sword for the poor and the sick, raise it for honor, raise it for the people I love."

By all rights, the downpour of talent should have dissolved him. The pursuer called limits should have seized him by the scruff of the neck and forced him to his knees. That was the future Ragna had seen for Enkrid.

And Enkrid shook off every future Ragna had ever seen for him. Carrying all of it, everything that clung like a curse, he walked forward with dumb, stubborn steadiness, and in the end threw off the pursuer called limits without ever putting on the clothes called despair and defeat.

Watching someone advance like that right beside him, Ragna felt a shudder run through him.

Does walking the fixed path matter? Have you actually tried walking it? Enkrid asked that through his actions, his life, his Will. Ragna had no answer. So he had to walk it himself.

He had to find out whether his own path was right, the same way the man before him had shown. At that moment, he began to enjoy the sword.

You could call it one strange experience after another.

The pooled memories pulled him onward.

"You went to Juri's house?"

Ann, healer and alchemist, asked.

"Yeah."

Nothing to hide, so he answered plainly. At that, Ann paused to choose her words, then suddenly met his eyes and asked.

"Are you interested in Juri? Or is it maybe that you have a thing for younger girls?"

"What do you take me for?"

That was a little irritating.

At Ragna's reaction, Ann tossed her neatly braided hair back over her shoulder and said, "Then never mind. So why did you go?"

"To look."

"At what?"

"Do you think a person always has to want something?"

Ragna turned the question back on her. Ann thought it over for a moment, then answered.

"I don't know."

She was already busy enough managing her own path. What anyone else did or did not do was hardly her concern. Ann's interest did not extend that far.

"Right. That's all there is to it."

"What does that even mean?"

"Tell me about yourself."

Ragna had changed. Compared to when Grida Zaun had known him, he had changed. Compared to when Enkrid first met him, he had changed too.

"...What do you want to know?"

"You were startled when you saw Magroon."

So he can read people even if he can't find his way, Ann muttered to herself. She spoke again, still holding his gaze directly.

"That's not a curse, it's a disease. More precisely, it spreads through something like an invisible powder. And that disease killed more than a hundred people in the city where I grew up."

Ann had lost her parents, her relatives, her friends, all of them. That she survived was luck. No, to be exact, it was the talent she possessed.

She had already been learning the foundations of alchemy from Raban when she was small.

That was what kept her alive. But she understood it now. Raban had been her enemy. No, her teacher was the true enemy. Someone had cultivated the alchemist Raban. That was the one who made this disease.

Ann knew it.

"What spread where I lived was still being studied at the time. So it vanished without a trace, without even a rumor. It ended with talk of plague spreading and dozens of people who hadn't even caught the disease being burned alive."

People born already carrying the illness were supposed to die then.

Those were the ones Ann had seen. People born with disabilities from the start, people like her own parents. Watching her limping father and her mute mother burn to death, Ann recognized that two choices lay in front of her.

Dream of revenge, or walk a completely different road.

Ann chose the different road. The targets of her revenge were too vast and diffuse for revenge to mean anything.

Frightened peasants had crept out at night and set fire to the straw tents. It was not just one person. Part of the slum had watched and looked away. Some had encouraged it.

Ignoring it, encouraging it, doing it, knowing and letting it happen.

Who was to blame? The world? The nobility? The comfortable commoners who only watched? The guards patrolling the district?

Some of those guards had drawn water and helped fight the flames regardless of whether they might catch the disease themselves.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

One of those guards had said that. He had even wept.

Ann did not know his face, but she did not think he had anything to beg forgiveness for.

In that moment, Ann found her path. The one she would walk for the rest of her life.

'I will not be beaten by any disease.'

She steeled herself and built a tower of Will inside her heart. She resolved to wipe out the fear that disease inflicted on people as well.

Lately, the migration of the elf city had brought her a great deal of rare materials. It was a chance to push forward on research she had only ever been able to plan in her head.

So she did. When she told Ragna she had been up for several nights running, it was no exaggeration.

Was there a medicine that could cure every illness in the world? Ann asked herself that. It was a question with no easy answer, but she already knew it.

'No such thing exists.'

No, it does.

It doesn't, but it does. The medicine does not exist. But a person who knows how to cure any disease might exist. Become a healer.

'That's what I want.'

Her goal was clear and so was where she needed to go. There was no room to look anywhere else. That was why Ann could not spare much thought for others.

"I have to go to where that disease spread. I think it started with some mushroom or flower, something like that. I need to find it and confirm. That's the only way I can make a cure."

"Does everyone die if they catch it?"

"Sooner or later, yes. I believe so."

Ann answered without hesitation, then continued.

"When exactly depends on luck. You said Magroon was vomiting blood and that the family head had caught the disease too? Some people will seem fine while others will be groaning and unable to exert any strength. That's because the disease works differently in every person. It's not a curse."

Ragna nodded and said, "Every now and then I stop by that Juri's house to look around, and the kids welcome me."

A sudden remark. He said whatever came to mind. Ann received even that without missing a beat.

"And?"

"And so I go."

Juri's house was also the name for the place where the children were cared for. Ann had asked earlier why he went there, and he had only now gotten around to answering.

"Took you long enough."

Ann murmured it and felt a small wave of relief. There was nothing to worry about after all. She had been briefly startled, wondering if he had gotten together with Juri, the marmalade seller.

As long as it wasn't that.

Ann murmured something to that effect and left.

Ragna moved through his thoughts, shifting his feet, thrusting and cutting.

Starting from the horizontal cut from above, he wound into the blade, bent and sliced, then cut on a diagonal before knocking aside an imaginary sword with a sideward strike. Then he flicked his sword down as if tapping the crown of an opponent driven back by the force.

Every sequence ended the same way: a counter.

The imaginary opponent changed stance. Dragging one foot, they brought their sword down. Ragna read the arc of that descending blade. The imaginary enemy had attempted a horizontal cut from above out of an ox-guard.

Ragna assumed his own sword would get bound to the opponent's, then pulled his blade back, closed the distance, and drove his fist into the space where a face would be.

Whoom.

Naturally, his fist cut through empty air. He was swinging sword and fist at an opponent who did not exist.

"That looks like a counter to my Flash."

A voice reached him. Someone who had been leaking presence for a while now, also the person Ragna called his captain.

"It would be different if we actually tried it."

Ragna let his sword hang and answered.

"There's always the option of settling it before the Bind even happens."

Enkrid had drawn close without Ragna noticing. He showed no trace of sweat, which meant he had already washed up after his own late-night training.

A spring night breeze moved through, cool and laced with the faint scent of flowers.

"The Holy Man mentioned that someone in the city is already doing the thing he wanted to do. Said it was Juri's house."

Enkrid continued.

The woman named Juri, who sold marmalade, had taken in war orphans, children who had lost their parents, children their parents had abandoned, and was raising them all. What had started with just a few children had grown in number, and more people had come to help.

As a result, she was always short on Krona. Someone had been giving her regular donations.

"Yes."

"You gave all the gold coins you squeezed out of Krais to her?"

"Raising children takes a fair amount of Krona."

"Raising people always does."

That was what Ragna had done.

"Why?"

Enkrid asked it with plain curiosity, looking at the silent Ragna.

"Those children didn't necessarily have anything they wanted to become, or something they wanted to do. I thought they should still be allowed to live like everyone else."

Did a person have to have a dream? Did they have to carry longing in order to live?

Ragna was saying that some people did not. Like his own childhood.

"You're stating the obvious."

Enkrid took those words in quietly.

There were people in the world who only wanted peace in their final years, and people who hoped that a day like today would simply continue into tomorrow.

On the other hand, there were people who hoped that by tomorrow, a day like today would not repeat itself.

"I just wanted to help. That's all."

Ragna added.

"There's a saying in the west, when a person changes, it means their time to die has come."

"Are you cursing me?"

"No. Just saying."

"Once I find one thing, I'll be back."

The meaning behind Ragna's sudden words was clear. He was not going back. His home was here now.

"Wasn't even worried. See you tomorrow."

Enkrid said it and turned to leave.

Ragna nodded without much thought.

The moment he was alone, Ragna sheathed his sword and raised a hand to cover his mouth as a small cough tore loose.