A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 684

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 684: The Amber Dress

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"Hm?"

Ragna already knew what that sound meant. He raised his head and looked forward. Fog surged up from underfoot in an instant. Nothing was visible anymore. A thick blanket of mist swallowed the entire field of view.

He had faced this sorcery once before on a past battlefield. The Fog of Annihilation.

"Stay sharp."

Enkrid pulled Ann to his right side as he spoke. Ragna took position on Ann's right.

He had wondered when it would come, and now here it was. An ambush. What would they throw at him this time?

Some Demon Creature he hadn't anticipated? A spell?

The fog thickened so completely that Ann, standing right beside him, disappeared from sight. Sound still reached him, though.

No banners were visible. Either the method of sorcery differed from Azpen Duchy's, or they were being concealed somehow.

"Front."

Grida's voice. Whatever sense she had used, she had detected the enemy before Enkrid did.

Touch sharpened to a pitch he rarely felt, every fine hair on his skin standing rigid, reading the tremors in the air.

Thud thud thud.

Vibration struck his skin instead of sound. There was no actual noise, no thump or boom.

Rather than drawing Penna and swinging, Enkrid only redirected, angling his blade four times to block the incoming trajectories.

Clang, clang-clang, clang.

Four projectiles bounced away on four separate deflections. Darts.

If there had been no attack at all he might have had trouble finding them, but throwing something made it easy enough to pinpoint a position. The Fog of Annihilation hid presence, not movement.

A doubt surfaced immediately, though.

'All that effort concealing themselves, and the attack is just a few darts?'

That couldn't be the end of it. Enkrid stayed alert, trusting his gut, while Ragna read that his captain was covering Ann and raised his greatsword.

"Going."

"Yeah."

Two short words and their roles were settled. Ragna stepped forward and lifted the greatsword overhead.

He bent his knees as his foot struck the ground, then straightened. A simple motion, but what followed was anything but. His body tore through the fog like a blade.

A low, rolling pressure radiated outward through the air.

Then,

Boom!

The sound of air being ripped apart. The force of the swing was such that the fog itself reeled back from Ragna in a wide circle.

Pushing back a sorcery with a sword swing. Anyone ordinary would have recoiled in horror. That was what made him a knight.

The head severed by that swing sailed into the air.

A shrieking, wet screech.

A head with a snout jutting sharply forward. The gap in the fog lasted only a moment, long enough to catch the shape but not the details.

"Scalers."

Someone recognized it from that alone.

Grida spoke from three steps to Ann's right. The word named a type of Demon Creature found in the Cursed Ground.

At the same moment, a faint sweetish smell drifted through the air. That smell. A spell was being readied as well. Something lethal, most likely.

Enkrid expected it, and he was right. A light source appeared above them without warning.

A whoosh of flame.

Not a light source, exactly. A fireball. It dropped straight down.

Enkrid watched it fall, aimed again at Ann. At the same time, he predicted what would happen if he cut it.

"A sorcerer likes to prepare multiple spells and cast them in sequence. Like layering cold over a patch of ground with successive spells until everything freezes solid."

That was how Esther had killed the Cult sorcerer when they fought the Walking Fire. Enkrid had learned it from her. His thoughts accelerated.

The fireball's descent slowed, and slowed, and seemed almost to stop. Inside that gap of accelerated thought, he kept working through it.

'If I were the mage, I wouldn't use a plain falling fireball.'

The enemy had already watched him cut down bat Magic Beasts. Was this fireball more threatening than those?

No. Slower than a Magic Beast, and with no life of its own, no judgment, it would simply come straight down.

'They want me to cut it.'

His thinking was already running fast when he reacted. Penna stayed sheathed. He reached for Three-Iron instead.

A ring, a flash.

Resheathing one sword and drawing the other happened in something close to a blur. Why wouldn't it? Training with two swords had built its own kind of skill. In the specific arts of the weighted sword and the draw-cut, Enkrid was the most obsessive of obsessives.

He adjusted Three-Iron's angle. Shifted his grip and closed both hands around the hilt. The meteorite iron length of the blade, neither hardest iron nor true silver, faced the descending fireball.

He swung flat-face first from low to high and knocked the fireball straight back up.

Boom!

The fireball shot skyward, climbed, then burst apart into dozens of pieces at the top of its arc. Streaks of flame scattered in every direction, slicing the fog open around them for an instant, producing a sight you did not often get to see.

For a moment the scattered fire cut through even the Fog of Annihilation and lit up the surroundings.

"When dealing with spells, you have to step outside common sense."

Esther had been right about that. Who could have predicted the fireball would shatter into dozens of pieces on impact?

But a spell could do that.

A force that changed the world. Same source as Will, people said, yet nothing on the continent felt stranger or further from it than this.

Had the mage lost focus for a moment, watching the fireball scatter across the sky?

No follow-up spell came. The flaming streaks fell and that was the end of it.

Instead of another spell, a smell hit next, the kind that made you want to pinch your nose shut. A smell of rot.

The fog the fireball had briefly parted had already closed back in. It couldn't hide the Sorcery Medium indefinitely, though. That was Enkrid's read.

And it came true almost immediately.

A wet, muffled pop from one side. The fog began to lift.

Enkrid saw bipedal Demon Creatures with scales like a snake's skin collapse onto the ground.

They stood a full head taller than an ordinary person. Around Ragna, a few quadrupedal lizard Magic Beasts big enough to chew through two people lay scattered as well.

Naturally, the directionally-impaired bastard with the greatsword had already split their skulls and torsos open.

Grida had been right.

Scalers. Demon Creatures shaped like lizards, covered head to tail in scales.

Enkrid watched and understood. The sorcery had broken when a Scaler died.

'So a living creature can serve as a Sorcery Medium?'

Then at least one of the enemies ahead could conceal their presence, whether mage or sorcerer.

Looking around now, Scalers packed the area. The fog had been spread purely to mask their approach.

"They have a habit of hiding their presence and striking from behind."

Magroon said it again. Grida drew her sword and swept a look around. Even a rough count put the lizard heads well over a hundred.

The smell of rot still drove into his nose the whole time. Foul enough to crowd out even the sweet smell of the mage.

"What is that smell?"

"Weren't Scalers supposed to be odorless?"

Grida and Magroon spoke one after the other.

"Those are Plague Brides," Ann said.

The fog had lifted enough to give her a clear view. As she said, a few unusual creatures moved among the Scalers.

"Even grazing you causes disease. Be careful."

One of them was already drawing near Ragna. Bare feet mottled with rot, gray as ash. It wore something like a dress torn to rags, hair spiking in every direction, and where eyes should have been there were only hollow sockets. Green fluid dripped from between its nostrils. A nightmare of a shape.

The kind of thing you would never want to meet at night.

Or maybe it was simply more nauseating in daylight.

Kreeaaaa.

The Bride let out something between a shriek and a wail and ran at Ragna.

The shredded dress it wore billowed behind it.

Calling it a dress felt like an insult to dresses, but Ann had named it correctly. A Plague Bride. Most likely a summoned creature.

Either way, Ragna rejected the Bride's approach without a trace of concern.

He slipped left, caved in a Scaler's skull with his pommel, then brought the greatsword down vertically and declined the Bride's proposal in a single stroke.

A dry crumbling sound, like old paper tearing apart. The Plague Bride was cut cleanly at the chest, top and bottom separating. But the two halves joined back together on the ground and the thing rose again.

"Ordinary attacks won't, no, just take this!"

Ann shouted, lifted her left foot for balance, and hurled something hard with her right hand.

Ragna held his greatsword in his left hand and shot his right arm out, snatching it from the air. A glass bottle, sealed at the end with a cork stopper.

"If it gets urgent, smash it and coat your blade!"

Ann called out as she recovered her stance. Enkrid had been watching the whole exchange and couldn't help asking.

"What was that throw? Is that part of alchemy?"

"Of course not. I just learned it playing with other kids when I was small."

Children raised in the slums learn life's harshness early. Catching birds in flight to eat was one of their survival methods, and they staked their lives on it. Accidentally hitting a carrier crow or pigeon meant execution, so it was genuinely life-or-death throwing practice.

"Here."

Ann passed a medicine vial to Enkrid as well. Amber liquid swirled inside, catching the light.

"I'm a healer, but I'm also an alchemist. An Evil Spirit like that is no threat to me."

Divine power was the natural opposite of all Evil Spirits, but it could not kill them as simply as alchemy could.

A continental proverb. Passed down by a brilliant alchemist from an earlier generation, and not wrong.

Enkrid poured the amber liquid over Three-Iron.

The liquid ran down and settled on the blade. The moment it met the air it hardened like sugar syrup, leaving the flat and edge of the sword glowing with a soft amber light.

"I'm good."

Grida spoke to Ann first, then pulled out a small leather pouch, bit the cord loose, and dusted the powder inside over her blade. Pearlescent, faintly luminescent grains.

Magroon accepted the amber liquid from Ann.

By then Ragna had the coated greatsword in hand and declined the Bride's proposal a second time.

This time horizontally, splitting the body cleanly between upper and lower halves.

A small, flat sound. The two halves of the Plague Bride were purified. An Evil Spirit was, in essence, a shapeless Demon Creature made manifest from negative energy, born of malice and hatred.

For such a being, purification meant exactly what the word implied: losing the form it held. It amounted to death.

The Plague Bride crumbled to dust with a dry hiss and was gone.

Scaaaaaah.

While Ragna had been dismantling one Bride, the pack of Scalers let out a chorus of snake-like cries, almost as if cheering each other on. The sound filled the air with vibration and made it nearly impossible to sense anything through touch.

"They're masking each other's presence with the noise."

Grida said it. She had been close enough to the Cursed Ground to have tangled with Scalers before, which was why she could say so.

It also meant she knew exactly how much of a headache they were.

The Cursed Ground had its reputation as a graveyard for knights for a reason. It was full of things that could threaten a knight's life. That didn't mean this specific pack of Scalers was a serious threat, but tiresome was exactly the word for them.

They had a habit of targeting backs without pause, and they were capable of thinking.

"Hah!"

Grida let out a sharp breath, spun, and cut through the throats of three Scalers closing in from behind.

One swing, but the arc bent and shifted in a zigzag path, and all three Demon Creatures dropped without a twitch.

"Not a chance."

Grida said as she reset her grip. Enkrid quietly swept his eyes over the battlefield.

'Assume the sorcerer isn't here.'

Was the mage waiting for an opening, or had they pulled back rather than risk even minor danger?

Whatever perfume the Plague Brides wore, it had smothered even the sweet smell of the mage.

'Should I assume they noticed I was tracking by scent?'

No. That was a stretch. Too much assumption.

'No matter how capable a mage is, there's no way they can know my specific method of perceiving things.'

Not even with magic. The time spent alongside Esther had taught him the actual limits of what spells could do.

There was no spell for reading another person's thoughts.

That was a certainty. A truth that didn't change.

'Assume the mage is still here.'

Even so, cutting through the Demon Creatures in front of him wasn't difficult.

Tap, swing, smack.

A Scaler was closing in from within three steps. He brought the sword around. Three-Iron drew a smooth arc and split a Scaler's snout in two.

A tongue, forked like a snake's, lolled out and dangled. The slit vertical pupils lost their light.

Enkrid felt the blade reach the skull, and in the same moment knew the creature was playing dead.

"Clever things," Grida said immediately.

Enkrid reversed the swing and drove the blade straight down.

The Scaler playing dead had no time to react. The moment light flickered back into its eyes, Three-Iron paid a brief visit to the inside of its skull.

When he pulled the blade clear, black blood and something else trailed off the tip.

"That's frightening," Ann said.

Fair enough. Every Scaler in the pack, plus the eight Plague Brides still standing, had turned their gaze toward Ann.

"Don't worry. Lady Three-Iron in her amber dress will keep you safe."

Enkrid chose his words to give her something to hold onto.

"...The sword was a woman?"

"Wearing an amber dress today, so yes, a woman."

"I suppose the gender changes depending on the occasion."

"That's the advantage of a genderless sword."

He said it while holding amber-glowing Three-Iron aloft. Demon Creature blood dripped steadily from the tip.

"You crazy bastard."

Ann's lips barely moved.