WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 703: He Used Both

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Alexandra had a habit of tormenting her sparring partners during practice bouts.

Odinkar, once he got absorbed in a fight, lost the ability to tell training from a real battle. Grida had face blindness.

Lynox carried a similar flaw.

He lacked the judgment to decide which side he should stand on. The best way to put it was that he got so restless he couldn't stay put unless he did exactly what he felt like.

A story from his younger days wandering the continent as a mercenary said everything about that bad habit of his.

"Why are you standing over there?"

Yesterday's ally asked the question, and Lynox answered without a trace of shame.

"Oh, I decided to switch sides starting today."

"What the hell? Even mercenaries sold for Krona have a code of conduct, don't they?"

"No idea."

Lynox attempted assassination by shutting his ears and watching the people around him die of frustration. It failed, naturally.

He had been an ally yesterday and an enemy today, and he had changed his allegiance over a few cups of alcohol.

The deeper reason, one only Lynox knew, was that there was someone on the enemy side he actually liked.

After crossing blades with them once, he had found a person he simply couldn't bring himself to kill.

So he switched sides.

Two nobles had been fighting over land at the time. The whole affair ended with the noble on the opposite side recklessly hiring a famous mercenary company out of sheer rage.

You could say anger had slapped reason clean across the face.

The other noble, not willing to be outmatched, hired a company of similar size, and what had started as a skirmish between barely a dozen people ballooned into a full-scale battle.

It ended in complete ruin. Both nobles fell.

One couldn't scrape together enough Krona to pay his mercenaries. The other had his own peasants rise up in revolt.

That revolt wouldn't have been a problem if Lynox and the mercenary companies had stepped in to suppress it, but with the fighting nearly over, nobody saw the point, so they all pulled out.

It wasn't for nothing that Lynox had earned the nickname Destroyer.

He was known for breaking techniques, yes, but he also had a knack for turning any situation into a complete catastrophe, which was the other reason the name stuck.

There was a time he picked up the less flattering label of the mercenary who could always become your enemy.

Either way, this was why Lynox never made his own decisions. It was also why he was not a Pioneer.

He didn't forge his own path. He watched others and followed theirs.

He knew that acting on his impulses made everything fall apart, so it was fair to say he could never be the family head.

His question just now had reflected exactly how he had always lived and who he was.

Once he laid out the situation, the judgment was the family head's to make. That was how Lynox's mind worked. And the word out of the family head's mouth was: fight.

At that moment, a fierce voice rang out from the divided crowd.

"My father did that?"

Roooom. The pouring rain swallowed part of the words, but not enough to make them inaudible.

The reason the Zaun family had split into two factions was simple. Or perhaps complicated was the better word.

One side were friends of people Heskal had wronged.

The other side were those who refused to believe Heskal was capable of it.

Heskal had worked on them so carefully over the years that even after hearing what he had done, they couldn't accept it.

Both groups were on the verge of tearing into each other when something began to coil and gather in the sky above, moving in shapes too deliberate to be natural, assembling itself into something that resembled a human face.

What now?

Enkrid couldn't help tilting his head back, curiosity pulling his gaze upward. Rain lashed his eyes and made him squint sideways at the sky, and the enormous face-shaped thing floating above spoke.

"You who carry the curse. I will take you into my arms. Come out of that place now and find the light. Those who do shall live and receive what they desire."

A spell.

And a threat.

An overwhelming presence radiated from it. How could there not be? A head larger than a parade ground had suddenly appeared overhead and was speaking.

The Will packed into those words was formidable enough that his skin prickled.

Sssh.

Layered beneath it was a crude trick. While everyone's eyes were on the face in the sky, a dark shadow rose up suddenly from behind the family head.

All four of them reacted. Enkrid stepped sideways. The family head twisted at the waist and swung an elbow. Lynox extended his hand into a Hand Blade and thrust.

And Alexandra's sword cleared its scabbard and returned to it faster than any of them.

Rain dulled sound, masked smell, blunted every sense. One Scaler had used that cover to attempt an assassination.

It was the kind with red scales scattered across the black, mixed in at intervals.

Not a Named, but it looked like an unusual specimen, something that had gone through what you might call evolution, or metamorphosis.

Thud.

Alexandra's blade punched a hole through its neck, and the family head's elbow came down on its skull.

The Scaler flew like a kite with a snapped string and hit the ground.

Thump, crack.

It rolled a few times, then twitched and started pushing itself upright. This one had some fight in it.

Still getting up after that?

Its grip on life was something else.

Lynox finished it. He pulled back the hand he had thrust into the air and crossed to the Scaler in a single quick step.

"What are you supposed to be?"

He said it while drawing a thin-bladed sword and cutting clean through the already-punctured neck. A wet sound, and the severed head rolled through the rain.

The sword returned to its scabbard at frightening speed.

"Tch."

As he sheathed it, Lynox shook his hand out, and anyone who had sparred enough could see he wasn't at his best right now.

The area where Heskal had hit him had gone dark. Poison. It was affecting him.

"That bastard told me the symptoms would get a lot worse over the next two days. And I got nicked by a poisoned blade on top of that. The son of a bitch actually put poison on his own Inscribed Weapon."

An Inscribed Weapon carried a knight's Will. Coating one in poison? If he had gone to those lengths specifically to win rather than using poison from the start, it would have damaged the Will inside it.

And he had done it anyway.

It made you curious about what was going on inside Heskal's head. Enkrid felt the same.

Though figuring it out probably wasn't that difficult.

Everything up to this point had been stacking itself inside his mind. His thinking drew on that foundation and sorted through what he had seen and heard.

Schmidt came from the Empire and had no agenda of his own.

But Heskal had used him, made it look as though he was pushing the Zaun family to get into bed with the Empire.

You could see it in Schmidt's face right now.

He looked like someone who had gone out for a pleasant walk to smell the flowers and stepped in horse dung instead.

Something he hadn't anticipated had made him furious.

He used Schmidt's name to stir up confusion.

A simple structure, but you wouldn't see it coming unless you knew. Looking back on it now it was obvious, but when Enkrid first arrived, even he had wondered whether the Empire was pulling strings.

Heskal manages the people moving between the three villages and moves around himself.

That would have made it easy to hear when Odinkar and Magroon were on their way back. He would have also picked up, almost as an afterthought, that Enkrid, Ann, and Ragna had joined them.

Why target Ann?

That wasn't Heskal's doing. He only assisted it.

Opening the path and steering the direction was Heskal's work, but what happened wasn't what he wanted.

Enkrid had seen his swordsmanship. The precision in his technique pointed to someone whose real strength lay in exactly this kind of scheming.

So whoever had wanted that was the Mage or the Sorcerer.

He has a Sorcerer and a Mage working under him. Or alongside him.

Not leaving chance to chance.

Heskal had done that. Coming this far made it clear. Without realizing it, Enkrid had been used by him too.

He made the family head suspect me.

Ragna, returning after years away, had immediately asked for Ilchul. The family head and his wife knew what they were dealing with, so handing over Ilchul, or anything else, wasn't something they could do right now.

Suspicion would have followed naturally. Could Enkrid of Border Guard be the power behind someone targeting the Zaun family? That wasn't an unreasonable thing to wonder.

From the outside, Border Guard had appeared out of nowhere. To someone who didn't know better, it would have looked like Naurillia was revealing hidden strength the same way Azpen had concealed knight forces.

So that's Naurillia, keeping a blade up its sleeve.

Your thoughts could arrive there on their own.

Zaun had power, enough that an Imperial talent recruiter named Schmidt came in person to make his case.

Zaun had probably refused everyone who ever came calling for their strength. Sometimes with force, sometimes with compromise.

Those refusals, repeated over and over, had trained them to stay alert to the intentions of any armed group with hidden motives.

Heskal had used that. He had quietly made them suspicious of each other.

He showed Grida the Demon Creature traces on purpose.

What had Heskal been doing behind the scenes all this time? Buying time. In other words, the same thing that had been done to them on the way to Zaun was being done inside Zaun too.

That stings.

They had been played, properly.

Would it have gone differently if Krais or Abnaier had been here?

No way to know.

All right. Heskal's aim was clear: buy time. His purpose was still unknown. That part couldn't be guessed at.

What about the family head?

According to Ann, the family head had put off even treatment, refusing a diagnosis was probably the right way to see it. The words at the time had been "not now."

Only Ann had heard them, and Ann had only told Enkrid and Ragna. That made sense.

Ragna had heard it directly while keeping watch over her, but even if he hadn't, those two were the only ones around to talk to.

Ann had gone around saying she was here to treat an illness, not a curse, and poked at everything she could.

Nobody had said anything, but there had been a faint discomfort in all of them.

A stranger arriving unannounced and asking how much coughing there had been.

That would have looked like dismissing Milestia as a healer.

Clever.

The family head's "not now" had been meant for Enkrid and Ragna.

Through Ann. Using his own illness to say it.

Was it a way of telling them it wasn't time to take Ilchul yet?

Or was it asking them to wait, whatever their reason for coming?

He had been slow to see it, but every time those words crossed his mind he had turned them over, so the family head's intentions had landed, at least partly.

That was one of the conclusions the reasoning produced.

The family head was waiting for this too.

On the way to Zaun, Odinkar had said it was frustrating to keep running into a veiled enemy.

The family head was the same. He wanted the enemy to show themselves.

Left alone, he knew the rot would fester and burst eventually, so he had wanted to see it exposed as quickly as possible.

Oh.

The family head had used Enkrid too. He had seen the name Enkrid of Border Guard carried, and Ragna's skill alongside it.

He had probably arranged things so Ann could move through the family without difficulty.

Nothing visible, but it would have been done.

He had Alexandra teach me too.

Why? It was a signal: these ones are on our side.

If they turned out to be enemies, nothing could be done about that, but if Enkrid had arrived at this moment by chance ,

He didn't leave chance to chance either.

A rolling stone that had suddenly wedged itself in, and he had pulled it as close to his own side as he could.

Enough to tip things even slightly in his favor.

The family head had done all of that to make the enemy named Heskal step into the light.

And Heskal had bought time, waiting to seize the moment he wanted.

The family head had been locked in a silent battle of wits against an invisible enemy for years.

"The nerve of these people."

Enkrid muttered it under his breath.

Meanwhile, the face floating in the air had the gall to keep speaking, brazen even after sneaking the Scaler in.

"Does it change anything that two sword-swingers and one young girl have been added to the mix? Tempest Zaun?"

What the family head did next made Enkrid laugh before he could stop himself.

The family head raised a clenched fist toward the sky, then extended the finger at the center of his hand, the longest one. Yes. He put up his middle finger.

Cultures varied across the continent, but everyone standing there understood it to mean exactly the same thing.

Roughly: shut up and get out.

Or perhaps: would you care to go pleasure yourself.

It was a gesture that sat rather oddly with his grave expression.

The family head hadn't been hiding his emotions. Enkrid understood that now.

"Grida can't recognize faces. Alexandra breaks out in hives if she doesn't torment someone during a sparring match."

"It's not that bad."

Alexandra cut in from beside him, but others tended to see these things more clearly than the person involved.

This was what it meant to have an objective third-party perspective.

"Just as Magroon couldn't hold back sharp words, you don't know how to show what you're feeling."

The family head looked at Enkrid and gave a nod. The emotion he had shown toward Ragna earlier was real.

The worry was real. So was the joy.

Crack.

Lightning struck on a scale nothing before had matched. Dozens of white forks split the sky and tore through the face that had been hovering there from wherever it had come.

The lightning ripped it apart, and the sky went back to what it had been: black stormclouds, nothing more.

Ragna stepped out from inside and asked.

"There was a halfwit going after Ann, so I cut him down. What's happening?"

Enkrid gave the short answer.

"A fight."

Ragna nodded. The anticipation was there, not obvious, but plain enough if you looked.

If it had been anything else, he would have heard it with one ear and let it go out the other.

Hard to say exactly why, but he had looked cooped up, like something was pent up in him. The kind of pent-up feeling that might turn into anger, though he had been holding it down well enough.

Conclusion: that one was also the type who couldn't stand to go without a fight.

Well, Enkrid could guess at the reason for the frustration, but he kept that to himself.

I'm not like that.

He thought it and felt a fresh surge of excitement at the idea of proving wrong what the face in the sky had said.

Just two sword-swingers.

How far did that word "just" actually extend? Worth finding out.

There was a mountain of things to handle before that, of course, and the most immediate was stopping the two groups in front of him who were half a breath away from ripping into each other.

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