WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 693: Excellent
= = =
The next day.
Enkrid had slept in deliberately, and he took his time working through a slow, careful warmup. Almost no fatigue remained in his body.
The bruises Ragna had left would be gone too. He knew without needing a mirror.
A trained knight's body recovers far beyond what an ordinary person can manage.
"Legend."
That word always came first whenever anyone spoke of the Zaun family. A name not found in any traveling bard's song, one only those who had crossed a certain threshold ever heard in passing. If legend fit anyone perfectly, it was the Zaun.
"And the family head above all of them."
A tingling rush shot from the tips of his toes to the crown of his head, and every hair on his body stood on end.
"How much fun is this going to be."
The anticipation sat high in his chest.
"It's a good day," Enkrid said, looking up at the sky.
Ann stepped out beside him, rubbing her eyes, and looked up too.
"A good day?"
The sky was packed with dark stormclouds. By what measure was this a good day?
"Yeah. Very."
Ragna spoke from just behind Ann.
"Don't mind him. He gets like that sometimes."
Ann had never seen him like this before. That said, she was not especially surprised. She simply thought: so that's why they call him a lunatic.
She had come to find the source of the illness, not to enjoy a leisurely visit to Ragna's family home.
Before long, a page wearing a sword at his hip arrived with a summons from the family head.
The sun had only just begun to rise, making it a remarkably early hour, but Enkrid had been ready well before the summons came. That was how he ended up where he was now.
The family head and his spouse received Enkrid at the center of the broad training grounds.
Any need for pleasantries about how he had slept? No.
The moment Enkrid stepped forward from roughly ten paces away, he knew who would take the first turn in the bout.
The family head.
The one who represented the Zaun family. Ragna's father.
He had never felt Pressure like this before. It did not simply crush the body from all sides and stop there. The Pressure took on a shape. A single great sword stood before him.
An illusion, and yet not one. Whatever gave it that quality was the fact that real substance breathed and lived ahead of him.
It feels like it actually exists.
That was what you had to call presence.
The shape the Pressure had drawn, something that should have had no physical form, was a sharp greatsword, a blade so large it made the human body look absurd. The edge was three times the size of the family head's own frame.
That said, it was not saturated with killing intent.
Why? The question came and the answer followed close behind. Instinct, sharpened by experience and a trained eye.
That Pressure isn't aimed at me.
It was simply his way of announcing he was ready to fight.
The minimum condition for facing the family head was probably standing upright under the Pressure he put out. That much felt close to certainty. And it turned out to be exactly right.
Ragna watched his father's materialized pressure from a distance, something he had not seen in a long time.
It's grown.
Separate from any sword work, his father crushed opponents before a single blow was traded. It was his signature.
Standing before it, Enkrid looked like a reed swaying in the wind, a branch on the verge of snapping. The gap in presence was that plain.
In front of a materialized presence, most people felt themselves shrink endlessly. Put another way, the opponent swelled inside them before the fight even began, and that bloated image quickly buried them from within. A fight you have already lost in your heart, that was what this meant.
The certainty that a blow from that great sword would flatten him pressed against his mind at a dizzying level. That was the power of the Pressure.
While Ragna watched, Enkrid's bearing shifted sharply.
Ragna was standing behind Enkrid and could not see his face, but he did not need to.
He's smiling.
That kind of person. And it was true.
Enkrid felt a tremor of joy and exhilaration run through him, and the corners of his mouth curled on their own.
The presence itself was different. He had never felt anything like this. That was exactly why it was enjoyable.
The person who surfaced in his mind was Anu, the Mercenary King of the East. Anu was probably at a similar level to this.
When he came to Border Guard, he was just playing along.
The Enkrid of that time had not managed to draw out the Mercenary King's real self.
Then what about now?
His lips pulled back and his canines showed. Alexandra's right eyebrow twitched at the grin laid bare.
He's smiling?
Her expression seemed to ask exactly that. Of course, it did not reach Enkrid's eyes. He was looking only at the family head.
* * *
Teresa was deep in training when a thought floated up and she opened her mouth.
"Brother Audin, Sister Sinar."
Both of them turned at the same time. Sinar recalled the daggers she had been floating around herself with vital energy, and Audin was pulling off a steel gauntlet cracked during training.
"When you fight Commander Enkrid, what gives you the most trouble?"
It was not a question she had spent much time on. She just said what came to mind. A good topic for a short rest.
Audin and Sinar answered at once.
"His stubbornness."
"Refusal."
Different words, but the same answer. Stubbornness was Sinar's, Refusal was Audin's. Audin added to his.
"When it comes to learning, he takes in everything. But once a fight starts, no kind of pressure does anything to him. I've heard it called the Will of Refusal. That might be his very foundation, the strength to push through no matter what anyone throws at him."
Sinar followed.
"There's a point where anyone ought to stop, and he doesn't. That stubbornness has no pattern to it."
Without Enkrid around, Sinar's jokes came less often. If he had been standing there right then, she probably would have tacked on something like this:
"Stubbornness, pigheadedness, and thick-skulled density sturdy enough to hold out against an elf of my caliber."
Different words, but at the core the same thing.
"I think so too. So it's my turn to show the disposition I learned from the Commander."
Teresa nodded, then rose from her spot with a limp. One of her legs was broken. That was not a signal to quit.
Enkrid had stirred something in all of them, and because of that everyone except Ragna had stayed behind at Border Guard.
They wanted to work through what he had sparked.
"Come on, then."
Teresa called out. She was trying to push past her limit, and she was in the middle of doing exactly that.
* * *
He's smiling?
Alexandra knew the presence her husband put out.
Just by watching how someone held up against that Pressure and that presence, she could gauge the shape of their character.
The worst were those who had already decided they could not possibly win before they even started.
Those people could never become Pioneers.
No, never mind Pioneers. Getting as far as knight-rank was hard enough for them.
The Zaun family sorted knights into three types.
Pioneer, Researcher, and Observer.
Among them, the Pioneer was also called a Seeker. The Researcher was sometimes called a Craftsman. The Observer was also called a Guardian.
This was also part of how the Zaun family trained the sword, one piece of their established framework.
Anyway.
Going in assuming you would lose, and the best you could do was become a Researcher.
Second-worst were those who refused to face their own weakness.
Stubbornness without self-awareness.
They knew they would lose and still would not admit it. People who lacked the ability to look at themselves clearly.
Some of them had enough raw talent to become Pioneers anyway, but in all the people Alexandra had seen, not one of that type had been a truly outstanding Pioneer.
They could not become Researchers either.
Those who analyzed techniques, found how to break them, and went back to study them again had to be capable of turning the eye on themselves.
Third were those who accepted their own weakness.
That was the common thread among people who moved to the next stage. They acknowledged their weakness and looked for what they could do right now.
Her husband disliked that type, but Alexandra considered it an excellent disposition all the same.
Even expecting to lose, they did not just fight and leave it at that. They tried anything they could think of.
People who fought tooth and nail to raise their odds.
More than enough to be a Researcher and a good Observer.
The last type was the one her husband loved most.
They enjoyed the pressure itself.
Beyond enjoying swordsmanship, they welcomed even the crushing weight of pressure. Enjoying it meant becoming drunk on the fight. The mark of a Pioneer. Someone who charged ahead.
And even among that type, she had never seen anyone quite like this one.
A full grin.
Just looking at it, you could tell how happy he was.
The man called Enkrid came at her husband with the face of someone who might die of sheer delight.
He stepped through the presence and planted his foot forward. Even if a meteorite fell and a mountain came down in front of him, he would still be there with one sword in hand.
Character shown with the whole body.
Her husband, Tempest, drew his sword. Alexandra did not look away.
It was not a fight to the death, and yet the presence from both of them ran high. Like fighting in real combat but pulled back exactly one step from the edge.
Bang!
Her husband's greatsword dropped straight down. A slash called the mountain-crushing strike, the one that pressed down like a peak falling.
It was that heavy. It looked slow from the outside, but Will, the shapeless force, would already be moving the instant before that sword swung, seizing the opponent's whole body in place.
Just as she expected, Enkrid felt his feet and his whole body seized by that force, and he Refused it outright.
Fun.
Odinkar was impressive too, which made him interesting, but not to the level of the family head.
At rest, a great mountain. In motion, a storm. That presence stoked the Will circling through his body.
Enkrid gripped the Three-Iron and extended it. Taking a heavy sword head-on?
That was how it looked. But the Three-Iron, leading with its edge of hardest iron, twisted in a subtle way and the force loaded into the family head's sword bled off to the side.
Bang!
Even so, the shockwave from the collision rolled outward. Ragna stepped in front of Ann, and Alexandra simply watched with her arms folded.
"What was that?"
Ann could not make out what was happening at all.
"We should move back," Ragna said, shielding her. Standing still, a stray chunk of rock might split her forehead open.
Swish.
The instant their swords touched, Enkrid released the Three-Iron and drove forward into close range. One of the crazier things to do. A move the opponent could not have predicted.
It was part of Vallen's mercenary sword style, and the result of a calculation run through Flash.
From the very first exchange, it was all-out aggression.
Enkrid made a tight fist and swung it at the family head's face.
A hit to the jaw could make anyone, knight or otherwise, lose balance and go blank for a moment. The family head tucked his chin and took the fist on his forehead instead.
Bang!
The second impact came at the same instant. The family head, fist still wrapped around his sword's grip, raked his knuckles across Enkrid's face.
Enkrid bent his knees sharply to duck under the punch and crossed his arms in front of his chest to block.
The Wave-Blocking Sword stops every attack. A judgment reached through high-speed thought.
Thud!
The family head's knee came up and drove into the center of both arms. Enkrid deliberately went light in his body and flew backward, almost floating.
As he went, his left hand shot out and caught the Three-Iron again. The blade tip pulled free from the ground naturally, and the Three-Iron lifted its head into its owner's grip as if it had been waiting.
Watching that, the family head used the momentum from pulling his knee back to thrust with the greatsword.
Skilled.
Both in fighting and in sparring.
Enkrid felt his right hand going numb from the knee strike a moment ago.
That had been aimed at the grain of the muscle.
Take the punch on the forehead, then use the knee to strip the right hand of its freedom for a moment.
Beyond any particular sword technique, a born fighter.
Enkrid used both hands interchangeably, so swinging with his left cost him nothing in power.
In fact, he turned the briefly numb right hand into a supporting brace and showed the trick of switching left and right hand positions.
A skill that had settled into his body by now, natural as breathing. The Vallen's mercenary sword style hand-switch.
He kept the left hand high, used the right to support the base of the grip, and tried to break the incoming thrust's line.
Aetri.
The sword he had forged. It would not break that easily.
The family head did not slow the thrust.
Clang!
The tip of the Three-Iron drew a curve through the air and the edge struck the middle of the thrusting blade. The point the family head's sword was aimed at shifted. Enkrid had forced it off course.
Will surged. The joy and drive swelling inside him boiled over like a live volcano.
"Ha!"
Enkrid let out a shout, drove force into his right foot, and twisted at the waist as his left foot swung out. He kicked the family head's sword.
Bang!
Use the sword to shift the point of impact, then use the left foot to kick the flat of the blade and kill the attack.
The family head released the sword and threw a tight, winding punch.
Amber eyes, usually expressionless, now trailed light like a comet's tail as he closed the gap and came in tight against Enkrid's face.
Did I quietly assume that a Heavy and Fierce Sword meant slow fists?
He had.
The family head's sword had indeed not been fast. But his feet were another matter. Those feet were very fast.
The calculations of Wave-Blocking Sword and Flash layered over each other and produced an answer. A conclusion born from high-speed thought.
Can't dodge this.
Enkrid ground his back teeth together, kept his expression exactly where it was, looked at the family head, released the Three-Iron, raised the fingers of his left hand straight, and stabbed at the man's eyes.
Every motion came out naturally. No hesitation.
If he could not dodge, he would meet an attack with an attack. That was the Wave-Blocking Sword's answer.
The family head closed his eyes and drove his fist into Enkrid's stomach.
Bang!
Along with the sound of air bursting, Enkrid felt a weightlessness he had not felt in a very long time.
He was airborne, sailing backward. At the end of the float came a hollow thud as his back met the ground.
He righted himself immediately, cat-like, but taking the hit was taking the hit.
If the family head had followed up by charging in with the greatsword, Enkrid would have taken a fatal blow. But the family head stopped, blood running from the corner of his eye.
No damage to the eyeball. The fingers aimed at the eye had only managed to tear a small strip of skin at the edge of the eyelid.
The landing shock had run through his back and left a stinging, catching sensation in his chest, yet Enkrid already had the horn-blade dagger drawn and ready.
Seated on the ground, but ready at any moment to throw the dagger and come back up swinging.
"Remarkable."
The family head said it. The bout was over.
Someone let out a long, slow breath, and the family head spoke again.
"Desperation in the moment always arrives one step too late."
He added a few words more.
"Only the effort made before that moment can answer the desperation of the present. That is why: remarkable."
He was not someone who spoke much during or after a bout to begin with.
Enkrid did not realize it, but the people who had quietly drifted over to watch all understood just how pleased the family head was right now.
Normally, he might say a single word after a bout, if that. Now he had opened with remarkable.
So they could not help but be surprised.
"A rare guest indeed," said a middle-aged man with thick golden hair.
"He doesn't look particularly talented," added a man with light chestnut hair, six swords strapped across his back, his waist, and the outside of both thighs.
Everyone was staring when Enkrid spoke.
"One more round?"
That was exactly the kind of thing his character would say. Only his expression was different from before. The smile was still there, but something else lived inside it.
Like he was saying it with everything he had. The scent of that emotion spread like spilled perfume.
Dense enough that even an ordinary person with no grasp of Will could feel it.
With that scent spreading past any hope of containing it, everyone there understood the emotion Enkrid was showing.
It was desperation.
= = =
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