A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 698

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 698: Not Leaving Coincidence as Coincidence

= = =

While Enkrid spent several days training and sparring, and while Grida disappeared and came back, Ann had not been idle.

"I want to look around a bit."

She said it offhandedly, but she did not stop at words. She walked around, learned the paths, and met people.

"Cough, cough. What?"

"When did the coughing start?"

"Don't know. Sometime last summer, maybe?"

Onset: roughly six months ago.

Primary symptom: coughing up blood.

There was only a little blood in it, but from what the patient said, it appeared only intermittently, when the body was at its worst.

Three people showed similar symptoms.

"My strength gives out sometimes, but other than that I'm not really sick anywhere. Hey, Ragna's back. Want to spar?"

One of them said this and immediately squared off with Ragna. Ann could not gauge the gap in their skill just from watching.

But she could infer it from what was said afterward.

"You've gotten incredible."

The man with the wavy brown hair said it, and Ragna returned his sword to its sheath. A clean ring as the greatsword slid back into the scabbard on his back.

"Train hard every single day. That's all there is to it."

"...And apparently you've also come back as one seriously unhinged bastard."

Zaun gathered people with talent. More precisely, anyone who lacked talent, self-discipline, and the drive to improve could not stay.

Those who failed to adapt went to the hunters' village.

When they grew old and their strength faded, they moved on to the retirees' village.

The retirees' village in turn held those without enough talent.

Facilities like the forge were concentrated in the brokers' village, where people got by through trade with the Empire and the merchant companies that came through.

That was the structure of the Zaun family.

In other words, it was a place where only the proven gathered, people who devoted each day entirely to swinging a sword.

Telling people like that to just train harder sounded almost the same as saying:

"You've got no talent. Quit."

The man bristled, but the gap in skill was plain to see.

Ann watched him closely, then asked Ragna about it too.

"How was it?"

"Not a terrible level, but at that rate I couldn't say what he'll leave behind."

"No, not that. His condition. Whether anything felt off, whether his strength dipped somewhere it shouldn't. That kind of thing."

"Nothing. He was probably at his peak."

A spar was not a life-or-death fight, but it was still a conversation held through swords. Someone at Ragna's level could get a rough read on an opponent's condition just from crossing blades.

"Intermittent onset," Ann murmured.

To Ragna's eye, this girl was in the middle of doing something, and he was helping her do it.

'This too is one of the things I'll leave behind.'

Enkrid protected people. Ragna had seen that many times. At first it only left him with questions.

'Why?'

A sword swung not for oneself but for others. What was the point of that?

He understood part of the answer in his head, but it had not reached his heart yet. Walking the path of the sword was simple. Because it was simple, he had never experienced losing someone. That was how it had always been.

Ordinarily, a child born with neither status nor anything to their name picks up a piece of iron. First something like iron-fitted farm tools. Then, once they realize they are stronger than those around them, they pick up a spear or a sword.

Regardless of nobility or anything else, it was the fastest road to rising in station on the continent.

Fight well enough and you could make it.

Fight at the level of a Squire and most merchant companies would compete to take you in at a premium. You could hold your head high in mercenary circles too.

Fight at the level of a junior knight?

You could receive a share in a merchant company and live out your days with a full belly.

Running a mercenary guild or building a mercenary company and then being folded into a noble house short on military strength was also within reach.

If luck was on your side, being adopted into a noble family was entirely possible.

Though there was the drawback that you had to be younger than your new father.

You could hardly become a son older than his own father, after all.

Apparently such things had happened on the continent in the past, but not if appearances mattered.

In other words, even reaching junior knight changed your station completely.

Become a full knight, and you stepped into a different world entirely.

Even well-born nobles could not raise their heads before a knight.

That was the kind of world it was. If your hands were full of violence, you could achieve almost anything.

The violence in Ragna's hands had rarely ever been stopped. So he did not know the pain of loss. He had never let go of something he wanted to protect.

"Why do you work so hard at it?"

The moment a small question surfaced, Ragna asked it. Time was precious. Human time was finite. Ragna felt that in his bones.

Ann was silently going over intermittent onset and symptoms in her head, scribbling notes with a pencil made from ground charcoal, when she looked up and met his eyes.

Red eyes shone through golden hair. They looked like the eyes of someone hungry for knowledge. Was not all curiosity, at its root, a hunger for knowledge?

So she ought to answer honestly.

"I hate this sort of thing."

"This sort of thing?"

"It's not conclusive yet, but someone is running an 'experiment' here. Whoever it is will be a right bastard, and I really, truly, deeply, absolutely hate that alchemy is being used for something like this."

There was force behind Ann's words. If Enkrid had been there, he would have said Will had settled into her.

Will took root in people who were sincere about their work and gave everything to every moment, and Ann was one of those people.

She had always been sincere.

She was now, and so were the words about to leave her mouth.

"And this is Ragna's home."

Was that supposed to be a reason?

Ragna asked with his eyes.

Ann very much wanted to call him a dense bastard and kick him in the shin, but she spoke calmly instead.

He had always been this way. She had not started this without knowing that.

When you put into words why one person likes another, it always comes out sounding clumsy and strange.

The heart had simply moved.

A face close to one's ideal could set that movement in motion, but it could not be the anchor that made someone stay.

Yet right now, Ann's heart was anchored.

"Because I want to protect your father and mother, your friends, your brothers, your sisters."

It was a slightly clearer target than the vague way Enkrid had said he would guard the backs of those around him.

"Because they might become the grandparents of the child I have someday."

Ann said it with a kind of abandon. The threats to her life on the way here were part of what had pried her mouth open.

If you never knew when you might die, you could not afford to waste the present moment.

This was not literally about dying. She was not thrashing in the face of actual death.

Just.

'Today.'

She would live the way Enkrid lived.

Ann had sharp eyes and a keen mind. She had learned a great deal.

How to live in the moment, you might call it.

That mindset was part of what had moved her to speak.

And it was not the only reason she wished for it.

Walking the line between alchemy and healing, she sometimes thought back to the day people like family had died. The same thought came every time. Or rather, the same wish.

'I want a child.'

Someday she would pass her healing arts on to that child.

Having a child and becoming a mother, she would spend time laughing, crying, raging, trembling with feeling.

And while doing that...'I'll spread Remedium Omnia across the world.'

A longing and a dream.

A person's dreams were never just one. Ann wanted to be a mother. She wanted to plant healing arts in a new form across the continent. And.

'I want to be Ragna's wife.'

She had dreamed that dream.

Ann's eyes sparkled as she spoke. Light that seeped through her freckles reached the eyes of someone who had once been lost, carrying something real.

Ragna was a man and no fool, and he remembered everything Ann had shown him up until now.

A girl covered in freckles who had stayed at his side, talking about her dreams.

Ragna agreed with those dreams now, so he answered.

"If I make it back alive, let's talk about it then."

Ann's brow furrowed. Was that a yes? A no?

Ambiguous. Ragna for his part thought it was the best answer he could give.

"Are you planning to die here?"

Ann asked, sharp again.

"No. But a swordsman never knows when they'll die."

"If you're going to refuse, you'll need a better reason than that."

Having said that much, Ann tucked one of her dreams away in a drawer in her heart for now.

'For now, just treating the illness.'

This was not where her focus needed to be.

Ragna kept following her around after that, and Ann spent several days poking around and turned up a few things.

'It's been modified. The disease.'

It was not the disease she knew. The ways it manifested had multiplied.

'Why?'

Simply put, whoever had done this was no longer relying only on rats or other animals.

'The number of seeds has increased.'

Seeds, meaning the origins of the disease. Some had been harvested from rats, some from Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts, and some had been made using rotted corpses.

Using plants or venomous animals was a given.

From there, the materials were mixed and the method of spreading decided. Those infected developed a fever and died with their entire body wracked by muscle pain.

Ann had spent a long time researching and dissecting this disease. She knew that until now it had relied on what she called heat seeds and pain seeds.

'The cough should only be a secondary symptom.'

Now it was sometimes how the disease began.

'And there's the weakness too.'

That was why symptoms had appeared outside what she knew. It was evidence that someone had continued to research and refine the disease even now.

'Who?'

Her teacher Raban, the one who had raised her, was dead. Raban's own teacher was not alive at any reasonable age. Then who?

"The continent is wide and full of geniuses," Ann said, and gave a short scornful laugh.

She had not known until she saw it herself, but now she was certain.

A pitch-black storm cloud blocked the light above her. Ragna simply stood at her side in silence.

Symptoms she did not recognize.

'But I can cure it.'

The generous support she had received at Border Guard had pushed her research forward considerably.

'I just need to develop a treatment for each form of the disease.'

She did not have one yet. But given time, she could treat it. There were still things she needed to understand, of course, but Ann was certain she could do it.

Her eyes held a sharper light than they had during the confession.

It was the look of someone whose Will showed itself naturally from the certainty of believing in oneself.

* * *

When too many things get tangled together, it can all start to look like someone's plan.

In reality, looking inside it, sometimes it really was just coincidences piling on top of each other.

And sometimes someone had taken those coincidences and used them.

'From a tactical standpoint, that's entirely possible, isn't it?'

Not letting chance stay chance was probably a privilege reserved for those with exceptional minds.

The previous night, the Boatman had appeared in a dream again and said something about protecting Ann or not protecting her.

Enkrid asked him:

"Why should I?"

"Goodwill."

Looking at the Boatman say that, Enkrid found him thoroughly sinister. That was the feeling. His expression never changed, so the face gave nothing away.

He woke from the dream and moved his body, and amid those wandering thoughts, a question surfaced:

'Is the person working from inside Zaun the same as the one gathering Demon Creatures outside and spreading the disease?'

What if they were not?

What if one side had found the other and was using them?

"Thinking about something else while standing in front of me. Is that contempt, or provocation?"

Heskal, standing before Enkrid, asked.

Not letting chance stay chance. He had not intended for Heskal to react like this, but..."Let's call it both."

Enkrid took it as an opportunity to provoke.

Heskal was a composed, measured man. His swordsmanship was the same.

According to Lynox, he was hiding fangs, but Enkrid had yet to see them.

"Oh, nice."

Anahehra said it from where she watched, the most beautiful woman in Zaun by the standards of the Giant race. Naturally, she was the only Giant in the family.

She grinned and showed her fangs.

"Don't get reckless and die. I'm next in line."

She was saying she had already queued up to be his next sparring partner.

Enkrid set the thought about not letting chance stay chance to one side and focused.

Heskal was not an easy opponent. That was true even without seeing his fangs.

Enkrid spoke toward Heskal.

"If you can't show me fangs, even molars would do."

Heskal smiled at that. Light brown hair swayed in the wind.

The sky was still dim, but today the sun had found a gap in that black curtain and pushed through, spilling quiet light.

Heskal spoke with that muted midday light at his back.

"Showing molars is harder than showing fangs."

He thrust his sword straight out. An honest stab.

But taking it as only a stab was how you got caught. Enkrid had learned that from several exchanges.

Fighting calculation against calculation meant pressing shields together and shoving. He had won that way before, but he could not call it satisfying.

"I lose."

Because all that had happened was Heskal conceding defeat first.

'Ousque.'

And from the very first look, Heskal had also identified the nature of the inexhaustible Will.

'What is instinct?'

Letting the sword move on intuition.

'Then how do you train instinct?'

Both Breaker and Flash had taken the approach of training through thought.

Instinct and intuition in swordsmanship also needed their own training method.

Turning things over in his head as he tried to build a framework, the realizations he had already reached began to help.

'Empty the mind.'

Not calculation. Repeat reactions to the movements the opponent shows.

Put another way, the movements carved into the body came out on their own.

'React.'

He had already experienced it once, thanks to Alexandra's help. He knew well how precious that one experience was.

Walking a path you have never known is different from walking a path you have stumbled down even once by chance.

'Not letting chance stay chance.'

The thought he had set aside earlier surfaced without warning. Was that natural? He did not know. For now, he simply was not going against the flow.

Enkrid turned it over in his mind and showed a swordsmanship he called the reacting sword.

Breaker was defense. Flash was offense.

What he was doing now, if forced to categorize it, was counterattack.

Clang. Flick.

Three-Iron knocked the incoming thrust aside and moved forward, tracing a small arc. The trajectory was like a skipping stone skimming sideways across water. Block and attack at once.

An unexpected blow, outside the reach of calculation?

For an ordinary knight it might be. Not for Heskal.

He would not be caught by a sword slower than Alexandra's.

Heskal's left-hand gauntlet spread open like a wing and became a small shield.

Clang.

He deflected the sword cleanly with the shield mounted on his left arm. If you could hide weapons on your body, you could hide a shield too.

"Whoa!"

Anahehra burst out in admiration. Both the attack and the block had been impressive.

"Incredible, isn't it?"

She asked, unable to take her eyes off the exchange. The family head, who had drawn close without anyone noticing, answered.

"Yes."

In the family head's eyes, it was a rare sight. When was the last time Heskal had sparred this passionately?