WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 690: Somewhere Between Familiar and Strange

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"Upper right arm. Left abdomen."

Enkrid read the intent of the woman he assumed was Ragna's mother. The sword in her right hand cut downward while the one in her left thrust forward. Both blades moved in the same rhythm. Fast, but predictable.

So then.

Easy.

Easy to block, easy to dodge. Ragna chose to dodge rather than draw his sword.

He barely seemed to shift his feet, yet his body slid sideways. A knight's reaction speed brushed past the limits of ordinary human sense.

A regular person would be stunned by Frog's raw strength, startled by Beastfolk agility, and horrified by a Giant's crushing power.

But once you became a knight, there was no longer any reason to be surprised. No need for it, either.

At that level, you could draw on similar strength and move with similar speed. That was simply how it worked.

Ragna was proof of that right now.

As he shifted, his mother's blades pivoted at a sharp angle and followed him.

Still easy. One blade thrusts, the other cuts. It felt almost monotonous.

No. Not quite easy.

Whether it was because Enkrid was watching from the outside and could see more clearly, or whether his eye had simply grown that sharp over time, he caught a glimpse of the intent buried inside her swordwork.

Both blades moved at a fixed angle, and that forced her opponent into a narrow set of options.

The sword in her right hand drove down from above to threaten the collarbone, while the left cut diagonally outward, raking across the abdomen and arm in one sweeping arc.

Step sideways to dodge and you walked straight into the blade.

Nimble, quick twin swords. In pure speed, she would hold her own against anyone.

That speed was precisely what denied her opponent room for anything else.

And not a single wasted motion.

Ragna had two choices in that position: draw and block, or fall back and create distance.

If that were me, I'd grab both her wrists.

Ragna had the physical advantage, so using that edge made sense.

By Ruagarne's school of tactical thinking, that was the correct answer.

Grab the wrists, then drive your forehead into the bridge of her nose.

Why that choice?

Retreating makes her next move hard to predict. A pure block just lets her keep the pressure up.

That was the reasoning. And at the same time, Enkrid understood what Ragna's mother was actually doing.

Forced movement.

If Aker's Web was a sword art that tangled the opponent's actions and narrowed their options, what she was doing was different. She set the path from the very beginning and herded her opponent down it.

Similar to the Correct Sword, but subtly different in method.

Ragna blended three options at once, Enkrid's approach included.

If you can, make more than one choice at the same time.

If someone could pull that off. Ragna could.

He drew the Shortsword he had brought along and blocked one blade, while his left hand shot out to snatch her right wrist, and his right knee came up as his foot drove toward her chin.

Ting.

The moment her blade met the Shortsword Ragna extended, it snapped straight back to where it had started. She had already pulled her body sharply backward, so Ragna's kick and grab caught nothing but air.

Her blond hair, braided behind her, swung left and right. The violent movement sent everything from her clothes to her hair rippling.

"Hmm. You've changed a bit, haven't you, son?"

After darting forward and back at that speed, her apron fluttered and then settled back over her abdomen and thighs. For just a moment, the scabbard strapped to the outside of her thigh came into view.

She keeps a sword on her even when cooking.

The blades in her hands looked nothing like kitchen knives, no matter how you looked at them.

A little longer than a Shortsword, the blade thicker, yet somehow also thin for something that thick.

Custom work. Somewhere between a Gladius and a Shortsword.

No. Inscribed Weapons.

He corrected himself.

She cooked with Inscribed Weapons on her person.

"We haven't seen each other in a long time. Some change is only natural."

Ragna showed an assertiveness that had not been there before. His posture said she was welcome to come at him again.

It was not something he had shown before he left home. Ragna's mother felt something stir inside her.

"Right. I always knew you'd come back someday."

"I didn't come back. I came to take Ilchul."

"Ilchul? Did you promise to give it to him?"

She glanced back toward her husband standing behind her.

"No."

Ragna's father shook his head.

"You've grown some fire, son. Good to see."

She turned back and said it with a smile.

This family has a remarkably positive outlook.

Enkrid thought that, then replayed what had just happened. It had been a brief exchange, but there was plenty worth chewing on.

He had learned something, too.

Not every sword art in the world could be sorted into lethal, sustained, or all-purpose.

Put another way, instinct and calculation alone could not account for everything.

Ragna's mother had just shown him that.

Transition.

She had crossed back and forth across the line between calculation and instinct. Not all-purpose, not a balanced center. More like a seesaw tilting one way, then correcting back.

And backed by extreme speed.

Enkrid had named his own sword art Flash, but what Flash actually was in substance was optimized thinking. Reducing the number of dependent variables to the minimum in that single decisive instant.

It brought Grida's swordwork to mind. More precisely, her method for breaking through calculation, though in a real fight it was essentially useless.

To use it in actual combat, you would need something close to what Enkrid had done against the One-Killer: assume a perfect defense and minimize your movements. But Grida's movements had been far too large for that.

So it was not meant for real fights.

In that sparring session with Grida, he had been the one running rational combat logic over and over, and Grida had been playing the role of disrupting that logic from the outside.

So he had decided not to give her an opening to disrupt it at all.

Leave only a limited set of choices. Pick the best one among them.

That was Flash.

Defining it that way did not make it slow, but in terms of pure blade speed, what Ragna's mother had just shown him was more stunning.

High-speed thought switching driven by a fast sword?

There was almost certainly more hidden underneath than what he had seen. That prospect genuinely excited him.

Which was probably why he kept reaching for Samcheol's grip without thinking, then letting go again.

"A combative guest."

Ragna's mother noticed and said so. Enkrid was just opening his mouth when Grida cut in.

"Don't. That."

A warning.

"I followed Ragna here," Enkrid said.

He wanted to go at her right now, but he heard Grida's warning.

Magroon stepped in and added, "This is Enkrid from the Border Guard. The Madman Knights. You may have heard the name from news that came through the broker's village."

Ragna's mother blinked a few times and answered. "Oh, him? The heartbreaker?"

Enkrid's composure nearly cracked. He held firm.

Why has that nickname reached all the way out here?

He wondered briefly, then let it go and answered in a flat, ordinary tone.

"Who passed along the news, if I might ask?"

Track down the culprit first and the source would become clear.

Nine times out of ten it was Sinar. A hundred times out of a hundred, it was Sinar.

By now Enkrid knew exactly how far she had spread those rumors.

She had been circulating the story that the Knight Commander of the Border Guard's Madman Knights was best known for breaking hearts.

At this rate, kids passing on the road would start using the nickname, and eventually some traveling bard would write a song about it.

At worst, even a sorcerer holed up deep in the forest somewhere, cutting themselves off from the world to pursue their studies, might already know his nickname.

No. That's going too far.

This was no time to lose his head.

He met the clear gaze watching him and continued, "The rumors are a bit much."

"Where there's smoke there's fire, and looking at your face I can't say it's a lie, either. Still, if you believed every rumor out there, you'd think the family head is some eight-armed monster, so if it's false, it's false. I'm Alexandra Zaun. Welcome to Zaun."

At a glance she could pass for an ordinary person, but her exceptional nature had already been confirmed moments ago.

"If anyone has eight arms, it would be you rather than me."

The family head said it from the side, and his wife let out a small laugh. Despite being middle-aged, she had few wrinkles and looked remarkably young.

Becoming a knight tended to slow aging.

Which means she reached knight-level at an early age.

That was unusual. The family head was unreadable, and his wife looked ordinary, but she was just as hard to read underneath.

"If you're skilled enough, hiding your own intent is only natural."

Jaxon had said that once.

He understood the meaning behind the words, too.

Superior observation touched the edge of insight, and superior insight could veer close to something like reading minds. So those with keen insight learned, in turn, to conceal their own.

Whether through calculation, instinct, or raw sense, that kind of unreadable composure was something you picked up reflexively.

Otherwise a fight between Ropord and Fell wouldn't even work.

If one side knew the opponent's intent and the other didn't, the outcome tipped too easily.

There were attacks you couldn't block even when you saw them coming, of course.

But that was how things were.

"We happened to be preparing a meal for a guest, so the timing is a bit awkward. I wasn't expecting this, but there's plenty to go around. Come eat with us. Go wash up first."

Zaun was a small keep, and there were a few people to help around the house. Several maids and attendants stood further back.

Every one of them had nerves of steel, apparently. Watching a sword fight break out in the entryway had not changed their expressions at all.

"I'll show you the way," Grida said.

Alexandra, as the family head's wife had introduced herself, gave a nod. "Good. The layout hasn't changed."

The swords had been put away somewhere during the conversation. The motion was so natural that Enkrid missed it again.

She had sheathed them mid-conversation. Was seasoned even the right word for it?

Not every small movement could be called extraordinary. But still.

She's definitely something unusual.

The family head looked between Enkrid, Ragna, and Ann in turn. "I'll see you all in a bit. Today's meal should be lively. It's been a while since we've had this many people."

The tone carried no trace of anticipation. Lively was the last word that came to mind.

"This way."

Grida nodded to the family head and Alexandra in a brief show of courtesy, then led the group forward.

"I have somewhere to stop by," Magroon said, and peeled off partway through.

Only after they had put considerable distance between themselves and the family head and his wife did Ann speak.

"I was going to mention that we came to treat the illness, but his face is rather intimidating. Ragna's father, I mean."

"Is it?"

"You two don't look anything alike, either."

Enkrid added that, and Ragna nodded.

"They're my adoptive parents. Resemblance would be strange."

"Oh?"

That was news to him.

Enkrid turned his head, and Grida glanced back over her shoulder. "I'm an adopted daughter too. Didn't you know? Then again, that guy was never the type to go into that kind of detail."

Ragna said nothing and simply looked around. It had been a long time since he had come home. Fragments of memory lodged in some corner of his mind were waking up, and nostalgia had started to settle in.

"This corridor used to lead to my room. Is it still there?"

It was called a keep, but the structure was closer to a large manor house. A row of columns marked the boundary between inside and outside.

The scale was not especially large. Ragna raised a finger and pointed down a corridor branching to the right.

That was the way inside. The left led to a small garden, still outdoors.

"There's nothing down there except the family head's bedroom. That hasn't changed since two generations back."

Grida's words made Ragna tilt his head. "I got a bit confused."

"Just a bit?"

Grida sounded incredulous, but this was hardly surprising. No matter how much of your childhood you spent somewhere, coming back after a long absence was different. For Ragna, getting turned around was the natural outcome.

"Bathhouse is here. No attendants to help you wash. The Zaun way is to take care of yourself. No duty, no service. Oh, they'll bring you clothes, though."

Swinging a sword didn't make bread fall from the sky. This place had its own way of keeping itself running.

Keep the minimum number of staff and handle the rest with your own hands. That seemed to be the principle.

"Nice to finally wash properly for once," Ann said.

"You're washing with me."

Grida took Ann through to a separate bathhouse divided by a wall. Enkrid stepped into his and found a large wooden tub filled with drawn water, a hearth set to one side for heating it if needed.

Water was already heating. Steam curled up from above the hearth, and a large bathing tub sat waiting.

Ragna's sense of direction might be unreliable, but his memory was fine. Something from an old recollection seemed to surface, and he picked up a wooden bucket and began mixing hot and cold water together.

He was not just filling his own tub. He filled Enkrid's too. Watching that, something registered that hadn't quite sunk in before: this was Ragna's home.

Half familiar, half strange. The bath being drawn had something of both.

"What's Ilchul?"

Enkrid asked while watching him. His body had gone sour from so many days without a proper wash.

Which was probably why they had been asked to clean up before sitting down to eat.

Ragna lowered the bucket into the tub with a splash. His answer came mixed in with the sound of the water.

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