WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 687: The Swordsmanship of Calculation

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Night comes fast in the mountains. The early dusk bled away quickly, and the moon and stars took the sun's place across the dark ceiling of sky.

They could not sprint at full speed, but they were running hard enough.

When flat ground appeared, their pace doubled. With momentum behind each step, the moon and stars overhead stretched into long pale lines.

Skreeee!

A wild boar Magic Beast they passed mid-run spotted the group and started after them, then gave up.

If the thing had been a little more stubborn, it would have earned the rare experience of seeing its own entrails spread across the ground, but it was lucky.

Grida's hand rose to the grip of their sword, then pulled away. In that brief moment they had judged that killing a Magic Beast here and scattering the smell of blood would only draw more strays.

Running across flat ground was practically a rest.

True to their word, Magroon led the group along a somewhat rougher path.

The ground was broken with jutting rocks and thick tree roots tangled like natural snares, spread dense enough to catch a foot.

Any one of those might have tripped someone, but these were all knights.

Not one of them was slowed by conditions like these.

The only member of the group who genuinely could not keep this pace was Ann. She had swallowed two small pills, slumped against Ragna's back, and was sleeping like the dead, so there was nothing to worry about with her.

Thwack! Slash! Crack!

Magroon at the front swung a sword and cut away a few branches. The severed pieces fell away behind them.

They wove around roots and picked their footing, and a boulder waist-high reared up to block the path, but every one of them cleared it without laying a hand on it.

Slopes that would have drawn a long sigh just looking at them from the bottom were passed without a second thought.

Enkrid ran and let himself sink into his thoughts. Holding two lines of thinking at once was practically a specialty by now, so dodging obstacles while running was nothing.

His eyes had long since adjusted to the dark and could read the surroundings by moonlight and starlight alone. As long as he was not running all-out, shifting his footing an instant before something caught his foot was not especially difficult.

So this stretch of running was, as far as Enkrid was concerned, exactly the right time to think leisurely about swordsmanship.

Like reaching out a hand when something flies at you. Like a jerky-stall owner in front of a brazier turning skewers back and forth without thinking.

If he could use Will in that natural a form, the blow would carry force even when reacting to a sudden ambush.

He had grasped the idea before, but without putting it through his body again and again, it would never settle into him.

Enkrid knew himself well. He knew that thinking something through once and turning it over in his mind did not mean it would take root easily, and that it needed to be repeated many times over.

So surprise attacks like the ones on this road were something he could almost welcome.

He drifted into thought for a moment. Something caught at his sixth sense.

Something is coming.

The instant he registered it, Ragna, running with Ann on his back, swung his forward foot to the side and changed direction.

Thud. The ground where his foot came down caved in and left a hole.

Putting that kind of sudden force into a step would not ruin his boots. The soles were lined with iron plate and the outer leather was troll hide, making them exceptionally tough.

The scene came into Enkrid's view in slow detail: Krais's custom-order boots churning earth upward, and between them, a long dark shape sliding in.

"Ambush!"

Ragna evading came first. Grida's shout came after. Enkrid, running close behind Ragna, drew Penna and swung in the same instant Grida called out.

Slash!

The masterwork elven blade cut the dark shape flying toward them on a diagonal.

An arm.

He knew what the shape was as he cut it. His dark-adjusted eyes read it in the moonlight.

A forearm covered in black scales.

The sensation through his hand told him more.

Hard.

If it had been an ordinary blade instead of Penna, it still would have cut, but not this cleanly.

Hard, densely scaled in black. That was what sight and touch gave him.

He had cut the arm, but there was no scream. Instead, black blood sprayed into the air, angling deliberately toward Enkrid's face. The severed arm's stump was being shaken to fling blood at him.

High-speed thought parsed the intent.

Using a severed arm as an attack.

That was not a tactic any ordinary Demon Creature would show. When an arm was cut off, reacting to the pain was instinct.

"Black scale!"

Grida shouted again, but Enkrid had already moved, stepping cleanly away from the spraying blood. Where Ragna had gone right, Enkrid went left.

He kicked off with the Frog Step he had learned from Ruagarne and swung Penna horizontally this time.

An attack blazes for one instant.

Will flowed through every motion as a matter of course, with nothing wasted, so it all looked like choreography. A Flash like moonlight punched through the air and drew a line, and everything that fell on that line was cut.

The dark of the night. And the Scaler hiding behind that dark curtain.

Thwack.

The Demon Creature, its body cut halfway through, toppled sideways and spilled black blood and entrails.

Enkrid held the follow-through of his swing. The rest of the group came to a brief stop.

"Would you look at these bastards."

Grida said it while staring ahead.

No scent, no sound you could easily read. But in the darkness, beast-like slit pupils announced their presence. Dozens of pairs of black eyes. Eyes that held a strange light only along the vertical line of each pupil drifted through the dark.

Ssssssssss.

From the brush, from beneath thick roots, the creatures' sounds spread outward. Another wave of Scalers.

Enkrid took stock of the path they had come from and the pack blocking the way ahead.

No magic, no sorcery. Just a Scaler pack.

Fewer in number than the last group, too.

"Watch out for the ones with black scales. Some of them have special abilities."

Grida said.

In place of magic and sorcery, then.

As Grida had said, there were Demon Creatures with unusual abilities among them.

The one he had just cut.

Its body had been harder.

Was that all? Probably not.

Did they veer off a predicted route and rush these things out?

Then how did they know this group's position? Easy enough. They observed.

How did they observe?

How do you track an enemy's movements on a battlefield?

You send scouts.

Could the enemy be doing something similar?

Sending scouts openly would get them spotted, so perhaps they were using something this side could not detect or predict.

Several pieces fit together and pointed toward something close to an answer. His mind was reflexively working through cause and effect, reading the situation, building toward a conclusion.

The bat Demon Creature on the first day.

Bats track movement by sound.

If all they needed was to observe, that would work. And if there were sharp-eyed creatures in this terrain who knew it well, watching trees snap and sway from a distance would be enough.

Thinking it through, predicting exact routes might fail, but meeting them in real time as they moved would not be hard.

That was probably why Scalers had been sent to this spot.

Stalling us is the goal.

As proof, this time they were not targeting Ann alone. The malice aimed at her still existed, but stopping the whole group's advance was the more pressing purpose.

So getting dragged into a prolonged fight here was not a good outcome.

Strategically speaking.

"Go ahead."

That was his call. Grida asked at that.

"And you?"

"I'll catch up. Leave me a trail."

Asking whether he would be all right alone was a luxury. Yes, there were special-ability individuals among the black-scaled Scalers here.

But this side has one who could just as easily be called a special-ability knight.

Grida thought it privately and gave Magroon a nod. Magroon set a heading, and Ragna left without looking back.

His attitude was plain. No reason to worry, nothing to reconsider.

Would the Scaler pack split and follow? They did not. When Enkrid stopped, the creatures held their ground.

Had whoever was behind this anticipated that split too? Hard to say.

The enemy on the other side of the Veil was difficult to infer. Too little information.

So he would just do what needed doing right now.

Enkrid spoke to the pack blocking his path, feeling something close to good cheer.

"Play with me."

If these had been creatures that understood speech, would they have felt a chill?

The Demon Creatures might have felt something similar, though that was unknowable.

Ching, chiring!

He sheathed Penna and drew the Three-Iron.

The true silver blade and the hardest iron blade jostled each other, each wanting to go first.

"Easy, easy."

When Enkrid settled them, the Scalers apparently read an opening, because two had already closed the distance and were charging in from either side. He swung the swords at them in turn.

Right side, he swept the true silver upward toward the sky. Left side, he brought the hardest iron down in a heavy cut.

Whoosh.

The two Scalers caught in those arcs split lengthwise and scattered blood, as though wings had appeared along the swing.

Moonlight spilling through the black blood caught the soft curve that had come to Enkrid's lips.

"Keep going."

It felt like something was almost within reach, and that made it all the more tantalizing.

He spoke and raised his sword tip overhead. Two of the black-scaled Scalers stretched their hands toward him.

Telekinesis. At that motion, Enkrid felt invisible ropes winding around him.

Stronger than a Manticore?

Or about the same.

Right about that.

Useless. The difference in force was obvious; he could simply ignore it and move.

Tzzt.

That sound did not actually happen, but Enkrid tore through the telekinetic net with his body and ran.

He did not charge toward the ones who had used telekinesis on him.

He simply moved through the nearest Demon Creatures, cutting each one cleanly, one stroke at a time. Calm. No wasted motion.

He stepped the left foot forward, Heavy Sword Style downward cut, then stepped the right foot, the rear foot, far forward and thrust.

Thud. Thunk.

Then he felt three killing intents from behind, shifted to defense, and swung the sword backward. Those three cuts snapped and severed the wooden spears the Scalers had been carrying.

Sometimes the blade moved too fast to follow with the eye. Other moments, it looked as if he were stopping, moving so slowly it seemed deliberate.

Moving only as much as needed in each moment was why it looked that way.

Defense flows like a wave. Attack blazes for one instant.

But did attack and defense need to be separate? Was there any reason not to treat them as one?

At the level called high-ranking knight, swordsmanship was used without division, naturally. So he could simply do that now.

The thought and the movement came together.

Ahead, one creature was gripping his sword with telekinesis. To the side, another had brought a long wooden spear and was thrusting with it.

The spear tip was dark and discolored. Something had been applied to it. Given everything so far, poison seemed the natural guess.

A natural association.

Not technique and training.

Enkrid reshaped a concept he had turned over once before.

He had classified swordsmanship into killing strike, sustain, all-purpose, and then technique and training. He revised that last category.

Instinct and calculation. Not technique and training.

That framing fit better. And it was a structure where, even if you leaned heavily into one, you would naturally develop the other.

If Fell had no ability to calculate at all, Ropord would take him apart easily. And if Ropord fell dramatically short of Fell in instinct, no amount of calculation would matter before one clean strike settled things.

While he kept turning this over, his two styles of swordsmanship stopped running in parallel and naturally merged into a single motion.

Applying what he had newly learned with each repetition, every swing was better than the last, and each one improved far beyond the one before.

What I am doing right now is calculation.

In an instant, he weighed possibilities, checked probabilities, and swung. All of it was as natural as breathing.

I was arrogant.

The level of a high-ranking knight meant using Will naturally, he had been told.

On the surface it looks that way. But dig into it, and it is still repetition the whole way down.

You use Will naturally, you refine your swordsmanship, you let that settle naturally into your body. Repetition. The whole thing is repetition.

Even right now, the gaps in himself were visible.

The sword art of calculation.

That he could do, here and now. But the sword art of instinct?

The Madman Knights had told Enkrid to conceal his special abilities. Enkrid had chosen instead to develop new ones.

Anyone watching might call that madness. Rem included.

He thought all of this while swinging his sword, and nothing suffered for it.

A knight is a calamity. Alone, a knight cuts down a thousand. Against Demon Creatures, Enkrid made part of that continental saying real.

Not a single scratch on him when it was done, of course.

He did not even pause to look back over what he had accomplished. The moment he judged things were settled, mid-swing, he turned and started moving toward where the others had gone. That was the full extent of what this dead pack of Demon Creatures had accomplished.

They had bought a small amount of time and given Enkrid live combat practice. Nothing more.

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