A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 697

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 697: A Hollow Thunderclap

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"Medusa and Scalers."

Owlbears too, and probably bat-type Magic Beasts as well. He had seen them on the way here.

Demon Creatures gathering in one place to target Zaun?

"Or is it something else?"

The shadow of deliberate outside interference lay thick over everything. Whoever it was remained unseen, yet the weight of their presence was almost suffocating.

Demon Creatures did not congregate like this on their own unless someone had intended it.

The presence of an enemy hidden behind that veil pressed down on him all the more heavily. Like a black cloud overhead, the veil concealing the enemy was dark and dense and far beyond reach for now.

"Would things have been easier if I had brought Rem?"

The thought crossed his mind again. Rem had a way of blocking the path with sorcery at the worst moments.

From what Enkrid had seen on several occasions, that man had a tendency to reach straight for his axe the moment anyone used clumsy sorcery in front of him.

Once, out of curiosity, Enkrid had asked why he flew into a fit every time he saw sorcery used poorly.

"A fit? When did I ever do that? You'd call it justified anger."

"I asked why you do it."

"Because they're all terrible at it."

That was all Rem offered, a spectacularly useless way to explain anything.

Enkrid had mulled it over on his own afterward and eventually worked it out, then confirmed it with Rem directly.

"Does it bother you when someone who barely learned the basics tries to show off in front of you?"

"Yeah, that's it."

What made this slightly uncomfortable was that Enkrid actually understood Rem's point.

"Has that madman barbarian's way of thinking rubbed off on me?"

He had wondered about that too.

If you were a skilled cook with your own hard-won philosophy, and someone shoved a charred lump of meat in your face and declared, "This is what cooking is," what would you do? Anyone short of saintlike patience would want to crack that person over the head, especially someone who took their craft seriously.

"It's a matter of pride."

Put into words, Rem's reaction was the same as shouting: "That's not how sorcery works!"

"What are you doing?"

A voice cut through his thoughts.

Enkrid was lying on his back at one edge of the training grounds, eyes closed. The ground was damp, but with his cloak spread beneath him it was soft enough to be comfortable.

It would have been nicer if the sun had dried out the grass, but that was not the kind of weather they were having.

He cracked one eye open at the call and found Grida.

Grida had returned from three days away just the night before, sought Enkrid out, spoken with him, then gone to her room to wash and sleep.

Sleep had not come easily. She kept expecting the family head to throw open her door at any moment and ask: "What did you do for three days? What did you find out? Daughter."

Not that the tone would be warm. Her father, the family head, showed as little emotion as an elf. There were times he seemed to have no feelings at all.

What if he had changed from the person she used to know? That fear gnawed at her.

And it was not just the family head. She half-expected anyone to come and confront her.

Honestly, part of her had wanted that. She wanted to know exactly what sort of person had done this to her family.

In truth she had spent the three days deliberately leaving traces as she moved around, half-hoping the other side would respond.

Nothing happened.

No questions. No confrontation.

Those thoughts were still circling when she woke that morning and spotted Enkrid stretched out in the grass as though sunbathing. Except there was no sun, so it could not be called sunbathing, shade-bathing, maybe. Or she just felt like cursing at something.

Grida asked her question and immediately stepped to one side. Someone was approaching from behind, and the sidestep was pure reflex.

"Is today a rest day?"

The person who walked up from behind spoke. Grida gave a slight nod. Alexandra acknowledged it with her eyes alone.

"Yes," Enkrid said from where he lay.

He was doing what years of hard-won experience had taught him: rest mattered as much as training.

Zaun understood this too.

By their custom, at least one day in every ten was a rest day, meaning three full days of rest each month, without exception.

Generations past had already known that swinging a sword every single day without pause was not the whole answer.

"It's a system passed down and refined over generations."

There was no shortage of things to learn just from watching.

Daily sword work tempered the body and cleared the mind of scattered thoughts. A rest day was for sitting with those long hours of training, thinking deeply, working through problems, the day when all those scattered thoughts were gathered and brought to bear at once.

Zaun called it a very old tradition.

Enkrid understood why rest mattered, so he observed the same rest day they did.

That meant no sparring today.

He had still kept up his fundamentals, spending the early morning reviewing what Audin had taught him and putting in time with his sword.

By afternoon he had settled into lying here, letting the thoughts drifting through his head sort themselves out.

He no longer chased the sword out of anxious desperation the way he once had. That was why he could do this.

By ordinary standards, it still looked like a day of training. But anyone at the level of the Border Guard Standing Army would call this half a rest day at most. Anyone from the Madman Knights would call it a genuine day off without question.

From Enkrid's own perspective, he figured he had been about as lazy as Ragna.

"That cloud is really black."

He pointed toward a dark mass far in the distance.

"We call them dark rolling clouds. This one's a bad one," Alexandra said, following the line of his finger with her gaze.

Black clouds swallowed the sky. Thick. Dark. It was less like clouds blocking the sun than a second black earth forming overhead.

That vast dark mass had become its own world, and it was moving toward them slowly.

"When the rain starts falling from that, we'll get a storm that causes real trouble."

Alexandra looked worried. Enkrid pushed himself up and studied her, then the shapes of the houses behind her.

"Is the stone construction here because of storms like this?"

The buildings were proof of how long this place had been home, evidence that Zaun had put down roots here for no short time.

"Why?"

A small question formed.

Zaun had strength. Why not simply live somewhere else?

Heskal, for instance, moved between three villages in the surrounding area to handle whatever the family needed, but he had mentioned the terrain was too rough to increase the number of merchant groups traveling to the brokers' village.

This place was close to the back of beyond, with rare herbs and fruit growing nearby, but those could be gathered by hired hands sent out separately.

The brokers' village was, put simply, a settlement of smiths and traders.

"Even so, I like it here."

Heskal had said that while still always worrying about Zaun's future.

And Lynox? He called himself a man who understood romance.

"No food? Then you live with no food. Need something? You find it when you need it."

He and Heskal sat at opposite ends. Heskal believed Zaun could grow into something stronger. Lynox saw no reason to bother.

Lynox had also spent his youth completely consumed by the sword, living like a man possessed. Now, apparently, he was obsessed with raising the next generation.

Despite that, his eye for talent was famously unreliable, and he told anyone he managed to grab hold of that they were "the greatest talent he had ever seen",at least five times a year.

Once every two months he was calling someone a genius and holding them up like a trophy.

"Reminds me of the mercenary from my home village."

Enkrid himself had been fooled by that kind of talk into picking up a sword.

Though it was not entirely a lie, either. Most of those who endured and survived within Zaun could genuinely be called geniuses.

The family kept at least five knights.

"The Madman Knights are an unexpected force?"

Zaun had something close to that level too.

Anyway, a few unsuspecting young ones still fell for Lynox's flattery, but by now most people had heard enough of his fuss to let it pass with a shrug.

Yes, he understood romance.

"He just has no interest in reality."

His dream was to travel the continent with a single sword.

"But you already have six swords, not one," Enkrid had pointed out, and Lynox had laughed and said, "Then I'll leave five behind."

What did Heskal and Lynox have in common?

"A life spent protecting Zaun."

Different methods. Same goal.

The reason Lynox stayed was that he was waiting for a genius who could surpass him. He planned to pass everything he knew to that person before leaving, and he could not leave before that happened. He still believed there was work left for him to do here.

And he was right. Lynox was genuinely skilled and genuinely a fine teacher.

He fought with six swords, each one a different style. As a sparring partner, he was the most interesting opponent Enkrid had faced.

His sword had moved beyond the framework of the Five Sword Styles. It struck and pulled back freely.

Within the broader system Enkrid had built in his mind:

"A swordsmanship that pushes sensation to its extreme."

Instinct and restraint, two words that would describe it.

Reach out a hand and that becomes the path. Step forward and that becomes the footwork.

He had developed more than a hundred sword techniques and broken more than a hundred of them.

He created something every day and dismantled something every day.

The name that had stuck to him was "the Destroyer with Six Hands."

"Direct nickname."

By Grida's classification, Lynox fell under the Digger type, someone who researched sword techniques endlessly.

"Classification and ability are different things."

Another lesson from all this.

Listening to the stories alone, it had seemed like the Pioneer temperament was the most fitting for producing the greatest swordfighters. But that was not quite right.

"Whatever each of them wants, wherever they are, if they push themselves without stopping, the level they reach is high."

Heskal was similar. He fell in the same category as Grida: a Guardian, someone who protected the family's people and assets and carried the family's honor forward to the next generation.

And Guardian or not, his swordwork alone was not a step below Lynox.

His style was the calm, precise Correct Sword.

No gaps. His fighting seemed to aim for a battle where neither side won nor lost, but.

"He fights by hiding his fangs. That's why he's like that. A sly one."

That was Lynox's assessment.

They had been friends and rivals, apparently.

Now they each worked in their own place and occasionally shared a bottle of wine, which confirmed the friendship well enough.

These were impressions Enkrid had gathered from crossing swords with them and talking.

And the family head?

"Solid."

Patient, and the kind of person who would step into a dragon's mouth for what he wanted. That might not be exactly right, but it was the feeling he had gotten so far.

What about Alexandra?

She tried to embrace and take in anyone who came to her. The difference was that her method was a sword, not knitting gloves for them.

"Andante has been away on outside business for a month now. Family head's orders, apparently."

There was no shortage of things he did not understand. Enkrid dealt with situations simply and directly. If he did not know something, he asked.

"Alex, why haven't you asked Grida what she was doing while she was away for those few days?"

Dry lightning split the sky.

The black stormclouds had turned midday dark as night, but for a moment the world lit up white. The flash looked over the group gathered there, then departed.

What the hell is this guy saying? Grida thought, though what showed on her face was only the mildest look of bewilderment at the sudden remark.

She had just barely kept her composure.

"That's an interesting question," Alexandra said, smiling, unbothered.

"Is it?"

Enkrid replied with equal calm. His expression did not shift.

"We respect our children's freedom. They're grown. There's no need to pull each one aside and demand an account of themselves."

It fit the family's nature, when things were ordinary. When nothing had happened. That was when it would be right.

A few of the younger Zaun swordsmen drifted over during the conversation, drawn by the sound of voices. Most were on the younger end of things.

Rest day or not, at that age the body itched for movement.

"I came up with a new technique," one of them said, edging closer. Enkrid answered evenly.

"Isn't a rest day supposed to be for resting?"

"No matter how many times you tell them, they never quite listen."