WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 680: A Night of Enlightenment and Killing Intent

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"Just because my shop took some damage, does that mean I sit around waiting for someone to buy me bread? I can't send my daughter off to marry with empty hands. Or are you going to take her yourself?"

It had happened when he opened the Gate of the Sixth Sense. The cobbler had not rested his hands even after losing his workshop.

It stuck in his memory because it had left an impression.

It was not exactly a grand spectacle, but the craftsman had shown his work, and Enkrid had watched.

He picked up the tanned leather, beat it, stitched it, applied adhesive. The work of shaping the form, setting it on the last, fixing it firm, all of it flowed like water.

What had he thought, watching that?

'How long must someone do this to get that smooth?'

He had definitely thought that, and then figured that if he swung his sword without pause, he too would reach that kind of fluency someday.

As always, those had been days of nonstop deliberation over how to improve.

Next came the memory of Aetri swinging his hammer.

'Was there ever any hesitation in those hands?'

Not once. Whether grinding a blade on the whetstone or hammering heated iron, Aetri's hands simply never stopped moving.

If you had walked a road hundreds and thousands of times already, you could find it with your eyes shut.

That was how Aetri worked metal.

And Frog, who had been beside him? Had Frog's hands been clumsy, she who had said she would drive nails through her slippery palms if that was what it took to make her jewelry?

No. Not at all, not even a trace of it.

Rising before dawn, picking up tools suited to her hands, melting silver, affixing gold, working all manner of metals, she was busy pulling out whatever lived inside her head.

There was no room for clumsiness in something repeated every single day without exception.

Even when mistakes piled up and failure followed failure, her hands moved naturally on to the next thing.

He had not seen everything, but skilled movement told its own story. She must have been doing the same thing for a very long time.

Snap!

One day Jaxon had crept up without a sound and flicked his finger. The noise made Enkrid whip his head around.

"How did you just turn your head? Did you think about it first? Did you register the sound, locate the direction, and then turn? Or did you just react?"

Jaxon had said he could not explain it any more plainly than that, but at the time Enkrid still could not understand it.

He had grasped it faintly in his head, seeing that using Will was the same kind of thing, but that was not quite right either. More accurate to say he had never felt it in his body.

The giant merchant spread word of his wares' value to everyone around him as naturally as breathing.

The woman grilling jerky adjusted the heat and the seasoning without a moment's pause or thought.

Had there been any hesitation in any of that?

'None.'

He had watched her grill jerky in front of the Ragged Holy Man and felt something close to awe.

An unbroken string of movements that locked into place without a single slip.

Had the Ragged Holy Man ever made pained sounds when using divine power?

'Not once. It was perfectly natural.'

He had said the same about what he taught Seiki. Let divine power flow loose and natural, throw it around, play with it.

That was what Seiki had told him.

"I knew how to handle divine power from when I was very young. Knowing I could actually pull it out and use it came a little later. The captain's brothers are the same as me."

Audin had said it too.

"You just do it. The doing is what stops. Not the ability."

Ragna used to say it half-asleep.

'Just as I drilled the cutting motion into my body by swinging a sword more than ten thousand times, Will works the same way. Reflexive. I've already been doing it like that.'

So what Aetri did, he should be able to do. What the woman grilling jerky did, he should be able to do too.

While they worked metal and grilled jerky, he had been swinging his sword and moving Will. Thanks to the well that never ran dry, he had been able to spend time more densely than almost anyone.

He had used it and used it again without end. He had done that while looping through the same days, over and over.

But he had thought it was impossible. Why? Will was willpower, and so he had assumed it required conscious intent before any action. That was what he believed.

"Why can't you do it? Sounds like a mental block. You crazy captain. Will only moves when you invoke willpower? Will and willpower are the same thing? Do you actually believe that?"

Will was derived from willpower, wasn't it? Or wasn't it? It was.

But Rem had said Will and willpower were not the same.

He had not understood that at the time either. Now he did.

There had been no grand turning point. The image of those hands grilling jerky simply surfaced in his mind, and with that, Enkrid found he could now move Will and use his sword naturally.

It had started as a question of how to use sword techniques other than his specialty, and that answer came too.

'Make them all specialties.'

Drawing a sword naturally meant you did not need separate designated specialties.

He did not know if everyone did it this way, but he would. That was enough.

'No, Audin draws a great circle, but when he needs to, he becomes a sharp awl.'

An awl pierces a circle. But it breaks more easily.

'Variability.'

That was the condition beyond becoming a senior knight.

Circle and awl, you had to know how to pull out whichever one was needed.

Thinking about it fresh, he now had a clearer sense of just what kind of monsters he had gathered into his unit.

'Every time I caught up to them, they had already grown into variability and left me behind again.'

He was the one who had driven their changes, though he could not know that now and had no desire to.

What filled him was simple satisfaction. Being among those people was enough.

Having people like that right beside him, how lucky was that.

He had heard Marcus talk once about a former battalion commander who had collected troublemakers into one squad.

An opportunist who only cared about his own safety, apparently.

'I actually want to meet that man.'

He was even starting to feel grateful.

'Ha.'

Mid-thought, something new surfaced in his mind and expanded outward.

It was not just about swordsmanship.

Was Will something only knights possessed? The idea stretched and stirred in a corner of his mind.

'Ordinary people use Will naturally too.'

Of course using Will was not easy, and even when someone used it, it did not show on the outside, but they used it.

Not doubt. Certainty.

He had seen it with his own eyes. Had he not noticed it in them just now?

The woman grilling jerky and Aetri hammering iron both used Will unconsciously.

Which meant: if someone reached the level where others called them a craftsman, a master of their trade, they were using Will.

'Or, if the origin is the same, should you call it magical power instead of Will?'

Or maybe it needed its own term entirely.

One thing was certain. Technique alone was not everything.

The dwarf who had once come to visit Aetri had possessed greater metallurgical skill than Aetri at the time, but there had been no sense of dignity coming from that dwarf.

Thinking of dignity, his thoughts branched toward Crang as well.

Crang was a sharp awl and a brilliant star. Someone who stood out wherever he went. His dignity would not be hidden even if he wore rags.

'The value Crang carries is something inside him.'

What was it that sat at the core of that?

He thought he might understand why Crang's words seized people. The dignity, the bearing, and the momentum that radiated from him, all of it was likely the working of Will.

'Many people use Will unconsciously, in small amounts.'

The privilege of those who had given everything to their work, who had invested effort and time without holding back.

Or those simply born with it.

Mid-reflection, part of his senses woke and sent him a signal.

Enkrid felt the wind. Then caught a smell. The smell came first. His nose twitched and sorted, separating out several scents.

The sweat of companions who had been pushing hard on the march. The chemical smell of Ann's medicines. The faint trace of blood that drifted off Ragna. Grida's perfume. The iron scent of everyone's weapons. All familiar.

And through all of that, one distinctly different smell bored into his nose. A thin, rank animal odor.

After the smell came sound.

Wind stirred the dense undergrowth around them. A dry rustling, and woven into it, a separate sound.

Last was touch. Fine hairs stood up, and a sharp alertness lifted its head. In one instant Enkrid began to feel and search everything around him.

Five senses that should not mix, like water and oil, blended into a sixth, widening the reach of his perception.

And then he felt it. Something cold prickled the back of his skull.

Enkrid turned his head to the side and adjusted the position of the Three-Iron Sword in his hand. The tip of the blade in his right hand lifted upward. That small motion made Ragna and the three from the Zaun family react.

Ignoring their reaction, Enkrid turned and looked up to the left from where he stood.

What shape would killing intent take, if you could see it with your eyes?

His sharpened sixth sense and the realization he had just reached, the way of moving Will naturally, blended into one and gave it form.

It looked like a short, pointed needle flying from far away and pressing down onto a target with a click.

His heightened senses turned the page to a moment not yet arrived.

On that page, he saw black soot driving into Ann's head.

He could not identify what it was. What was certain was only the killing intent.

The Three-Iron Sword drew a smooth arc. Enkrid stepped his left foot out to the side, distributing his weight across both feet, and cut cleanly from below upward in a straight line.

Every part of that happened the instant he felt the killing intent, so from the side it looked no different from lifting the sword tip and swinging in one continuous motion.

Thud!

The sound of flesh tearing and bursting.

Then a shriek, the kind only a beast makes at the moment of death.

Enkrid saw blood cascading down above Ann's head. The color was black as soot.

"Ragna."

Ragna reacted to the name called mid-swing. He was up in an instant, greatsword drawn, sweeping it diagonally through the air.

He straightened his knees and swung at the same moment, but by the time the blade was moving, the full weight of the strike was already loaded into it.

It looked like a swing at nothing, but Ragna's instinct had decided something was there.

A wet tearing sound.

Then a shriek, high and ugly, the cry of flesh coming apart.

Enkrid confirmed what he had cut. A bat Magic Beast. Its fangs were several times longer than anything a normal bat would carry, stretched out into needles.

It had been split in two, spilling blood and organs. Already dead.

He also took in what Ragna had cut.

An Owlbear. The creatures were originally owl-like in shape, which earned them the name night hunters.

They were the kind that, when they truly tried to hide themselves, were nearly impossible to detect.

'But not sensing them until they got this close, that feels like a different problem.'

Similar to Jaxon coming at him on purpose? Even granting that bats and Owlbears were good at masking their presence, this was too much.

Through his senses, Enkrid caught something beyond the killing intent of the Demon Creature and the Magic Beast.

It was thanks to cutting down the Walking Fire and training with Esther.

He could smell a spell. Not that he needed to compare, but if Esther gave off the smell of dry firewood under a night sky, what he was catching now was an overwhelmingly sweet smell, like crushed fruit being wrung out. Putting it that way made it sound strange even to Enkrid, since it was a powerful sweetness caught at a near-imperceptible level.

Dense, but impossible to catch for anyone who was not already paying attention. Enkrid was barely catching it himself.

He also felt the wrongness of it.

Both the bat Magic Beast and the Owlbear had targeted the same thing.

'Why?'

His gaze shifted to the freckled woman who had been startled, who had felt fear, but had not screamed. She had a strong spine.

'Why are they going for Ann?'

Did Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts have that kind of awareness? Or was it coincidence?

"Magroon."

Before Enkrid had even finished saying the name, Grida spoke and turned her head toward the surrounding dark.

"Audin, watch the perimeter. What in blazes is this Demon Creature?"

The group had been gathered around the crackling campfire.

"What is happening all of a sudden," Magroon said, moving closer while scanning the area.

Reacting like this over a mere Demon Creature might seem absurd, but the surprise of a moment ago had put everyone on edge.

Being a knight did not make you immune to poison, and it did not stop blood from flowing when you were stabbed.

On top of that, Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were, by nature, beings with abilities that surpassed ordinary humans.

Could an average person split a log barehanded?

An Owlbear could shatter a tree with arm strength alone, no recoil, from a standing position. Their claws were that hard, their forearms carried that kind of power.

That was why any knight worth the title reacted with excess caution rather than none at all. These three were the same. So was Enkrid.

His sixth sense was still standing on end like a row of sharp thorns. The smell was still there, clinging just at the edge of his nose, that dense sweetness threatening to slip out of reach.

Even a slight lapse in focus and he would forget there was a smell at all.

Like pressing a dried flower petal against your nose to catch whatever faint scent it still held. Move it even slightly away and the smell was gone.

"Can the Demon Creatures around here use magic?"

Enkrid asked while keeping his senses sharp.

"What are you talking about? This isn't even our territory yet. Not the Empire's either."

It was not Border Guard's territory either. Northeast of the former Count Molsen domain, before even reaching the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range. Unowned land, and this was where the attack had come from.

'I don't feel any killing intent.'

But the smell was still there.

'Where?'

How do you find an enemy you cannot see?

Enkrid's gaze swept the environment around him.

Using the environment was the basic of tactics. He reached out and pulled one of the burning sticks from the campfire. Still less than half burned, good enough to use as a handle. The flame caught and leaped. The wind swept through, scattering sparks into the dark.

The firelight swayed and his shadow rolled and rippled like a wave.

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