WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 708: Seemingly Impossible

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Swordsmanship began with movement designed for efficient force transfer.

The width of the stance needed to generate power, how to grip a sword, how to channel force from the ankle up through the waist, shoulder, and wrist.

Studying the posture through which force traveled, then honing the act of swinging a sword from that posture. That was swordsmanship.

The family head swung his blade as though demonstrating its very foundations.

He stepped forward with his left foot and swept the sword from right to left.

It was nothing more than a swing grounded in the Basics, yet everything around him shifted with him at the center. Sound died. The driving wind and raindrops were swallowed into the arc the blade traced and vanished.

Enkrid watched the family head's sword and heard a ringing in his ears.

A high, piercing tone.

A cut that swallowed everything, storm or thunderbolt alike.

Focus Point activated on its own. Everything around him slowed, and the family head's motion and the Demon Creatures charging in separated into distinct frames. His insight pulled the immediate future into view unbidden.

The family head's sword drew a single arc. The line sweeping from upper right down to lower left was thick and fierce, like dragging a brush heavy with old ink across empty air.

The two Demon Creatures would be trapped inside that arc and split apart. And as they died, the claws they threw out would catch the family head across the shoulder and side.

The intent behind the two creatures coming in high and low was plain.

Bang.

An explosion followed the end of the ringing.

Enkrid let out something close to a low hum and nodded.

The future his insight had shown him twisted. Not that there was any reason to be surprised.

It had gone beyond what he expected, but this was the family head of Zaun. Surely this much was the least he could do.

The family head's sword was faster than the Demon Creatures rushing in. Both were split and flung through the air. With a pair of heavy thuds, the two creatures sprawled across the churned ground as slabs of meat leaking black blood.

The family head pulled the swing back, let the blade hang loose at his side, and spoke.

"Come out, Heskal. I will hear your crimes."

Rain fell in long curtains.

Between the downpour lay the path pilgrims walked to honor the god of swords, a road revered by those who worshipped the blade.

Below that path, a formation of Demon Creatures came into view.

Every one of them stood in line, holding formation.

The family head could see it too.

No one watching this could think today's fight would be easy.

The man standing against them on the other side knew the full depth of Zaun's strength. He would have come prepared to win.

And yet a single swing of the family head's sword reversed the entire atmosphere. Strategy? Ambush? What does any of that matter? Does knowing a trick give you a shield that can survive my blade?

That was what the family head's sword seemed to say.

"Ask away."

Across the distance, Heskal answered from where he stood among the Demon Creature ranks. The family head's Pressure and the weight of his presence left no mark on him.

Heskal's existence registered in everyone's eyes. By standing squarely before the family head and making himself seen, he declared that everything unfolding here was his doing.

Their gazes met through the thinning rain.

The falling drops seemed to grow a little colder. Thunder cracked across the black clouds, splitting the sky between them as if to divide the two men.

Neither Heskal nor the family head broke the silence that followed.

"Heskal."

Someone limped forward out of the standoff. Their pupils trembled without stop, though perhaps not as violently as the storm raging inside them.

"Ah, Riley. I thought the family head would keep you locked away. Though I suppose the family head is sharp. Bringing you here even while suspecting you, that would be to throw me off balance."

Rain fell without malice or warmth. No feeling at all. Heskal's tone and bearing were the same.

No malice. And no warmth left either.

"Did you use me?"

Riley bit down on their back teeth hard enough that blood ran from the corner of their mouth, though the rain would thin it away to nothing in moments.

Only someone standing right beside Riley could have seen that. Enkrid happened to be there, so he did.

He had not meant to stand beside Riley in particular. It was chance.

This spot suited him well.

Riley was at the center of the Zaun group. The position gave him a clear view of the surroundings and let him stay on top of the situation.

"Was it an illusion spell? Did someone have leverage over you? Some kind of poison that needed an antidote?"

Riley muttered the words in denial, but none of them held together. For someone else, it might have meant their life was being held as collateral.

But not a person like Heskal. He would sooner die than turn against Zaun.

That was what Heskal's name had meant inside Zaun for decades.

There was no hesitation in Heskal's eyes. Standing straight, shoulders back, facing forward, what came off him was a sense of rightness and composure.

"Of course not," Heskal said, in the same gentle, warm tone he always used.

"Then why!"

Riley's cry burst through the rain. Calm on the outside, screaming within.

Heskal did not click his tongue. He did not blame Riley. He simply turned to the family head, unmoved.

"Family head. Did you think this much would shake me?"

"Had to try everything."

The family head did not deny what he had done. He acknowledged that bringing Riley here was partly to rattle Heskal.

"Give this up, even now. It is over," Heskal said.

Enkrid was watching the Demon Creature mass, not moving an inch through any of this.

He was gauging the density of the gathering and counting numbers.

Just over a thousand, maybe?

If you were going to do a scout's job, you had to know how to read an enemy's strength.

Enkrid could manage that much.

What surprised him was that the creatures were not moving at all.

Training? Some kind of mental control?

Either way, it did not change the fact that this was a dangerous enemy.

Creatures that lined up without any sign of excitement looked like soldiers.

A unit put through repeated training was called elite. The individual strength of each soldier was part of that, yes, but from a commander's perspective, the reason they were called elite was that they acted as trained and moved when told.

In most battles, inexperienced and under-trained soldiers did not know what to do. Some broke formation and ran. Some hid. Some charged blindly.

Any unit that could hold formation and fight without doing any of that deserved to be called elite.

They should be treated at the level of the Border Guard Standing Army.

The gathered Demon Creatures looked as if they had gone through drill training. The right call was to treat them as a serious threat.

"Why. What the hell. Why."

Riley's heart had broken. That said something about how large Heskal loomed in Riley's world.

Riley's body swayed with the muttering. When the heart collapses, the body follows.

Was this what it meant to cut someone without drawing a blade? Seen this way, Heskal was a fine swordsman in his own right.

He had not pulled his sword, and he had already cut one person's soul clean through.

Enkrid read the momentum coming off the people around him.

Ruagarne had said something once.

"Is there anything more useless than a commander who fights without knowing what state their own soldiers are in?"

Knowing the enemy's situation was good. But knowing nothing of your own side first made it worthless.

That was Ruagarne's way of thinking through a fight.

Enkrid had absorbed that way of thinking from her, again and again.

He applied it now.

Someone burning with anger.

Someone sick with grief. Someone steady and flat.

Everyone put out something different. The most unusual among them was probably Anahehra of the Giant race.

She was excited. Her breathing came hard through her nose. She was ready to launch herself forward at any moment.

Watching her fidget her fingers around her sword grip, left as she was, she looked ready to throw herself in without a second thought, every drop of what made the Giant race Red-Blooded Beasts pouring out freely.

In a real fight, she was reliably more than junior knight level.

Enkrid placed Anahehra outside the usual categories in his mind and drew lines between the others.

The grieving ones would fight well enough. The panicked ones, sent straight into battle, would only add to the body count.

Those who could fight right now, those who needed time, those better off holding the rear.

And among the enemy, there was a Sorcerer.

Setting aside the Mage, Sorcery was too good a tool for finding gaps in the mind.

Curses burrowed into the hearts of those whose spirit was weak, Rem had said that. Personal experience backed it up.

His thinking was clear. His judgment held steady. Enkrid drew the picture of this battlefield alone in his head.

"Ah, Enkrid of the Border Guard. I had hoped you would go, yet you stayed. Quite the mystery, what you think you can still gain here."

Heskal called out to him through it all. Shouting from a distance without coming closer looked like cowardice, but honestly, it was less cowardice than smart positioning.

If the family head and his wife decided to go for Heskal together, he would die. He had given them no such opening.

"You promised to tell me your dream," Enkrid called back. "I couldn't leave when I still want to know."

Even through the rain, neither voice had any trouble reaching the other.

"Were you always this curious?"

"Never slept well as a kid when there was something I didn't understand."

Not a lie. When it came to swordsmanship, that was genuinely true. Everything else he had tended to ignore.

"Truly an interesting one."

For the first time, Heskal let something resembling emotion show. What flickered across him was curiosity.

"Behind me stands a man who intends to become a god. The alchemist Dmuel, a name most anyone on the continent would know."

A name passed down like legend, carved into the history of the continent.

If Ann had been here, she would have demanded to know how that made any sense.

Dmuel was Raban's teacher, the unhinged alchemist who had developed the plague seed and dreamed of mass slaughter. Someone who should have died long before he finally did, a ghost from a past that should have stayed buried.

Heskal laid out his dream without feeling in his voice.

"As he shaped divine nature, I will do the same."

He was earnest. The content was absurd.

Though was absurd not entirely to be expected?

Something that looked impossible on the surface, a wish hard to reach, something longed for with all of one's heart, we agreed to call that a dream.

Still.

He had probably not said everything.

Shaping divine nature could be a step along the way, a tool. So what did he mean to gain by becoming a god?

If it was fear of death, he would have spoken of becoming undying. If it was a dead son he wanted back, he would have talked of resurrection. But Heskal added nothing beyond that.

He had simply thrown out the fact that the dream he had promised to share was the theft of divine nature, and left it there. That was as far as Heskal had wanted to say.

The brief exchange had bought time, and in that window, several of the people Enkrid had quietly hoped to see react did exactly that.

"Crazy bastard."

Riley Zaun settled where they stood with those words.

Riley was Zaun's blade.

The trembling that had lived in those eyes lessened. The waves were still there, but a person standing on deck could keep their footing even so.

Riley Zaun did exactly that.

Not bad.

Enkrid took that change as a good sign. A few of the others had finished readying themselves for a fight without a word. Not all of them, though.

Beyond Riley Zaun, many in this group had received something close to grace from Heskal.

No small number were still being tossed by those waves.

Those people still could not be used as front-line strength right now.

The family head, his wife, Lynox, himself, Ragna.

Five knights.

Beyond that, two who could reasonably be called somewhere between knight and junior knight.

Anahehra of the Giants, and the man who had stood at the head of the opposing group, the one who had stood against Riley Zaun.

He had once earned Lynox's recognition, but seeing those with real talent had worn at him and sent him drifting for a time.

Not to the level of leaving home for over a decade.

That did not make his wandering light by comparison.

Everyone had their own private hell, and everyone walked the road they chose.

His wandering had amounted to spending a few months living in the retirees' village.

Or rather, he had stopped through the hunters' village and the brokers' village as well, or so it was said.

Either way, he had come back at the end of that and found his footing again. A swordsman returned.

He was close to Anahehra's level, better in an actual fight, which was the point.

Anahehra was a Giant, so that came naturally to her.

The man who had stood against Riley and done his wandering, Kato Zaun, used every technique imaginable.

He knew a bit of Eil Karaz style Martial Arts, as had been seen before, and he armored himself across his body with bladeless knives and such.

That was where the nickname came from: Blade-Armored Kato.

Five knights, and two more besides. The total number of people who could fight from the Zaun side was around seventy.

More than that had stayed behind, so this was the full extent of Zaun's strength here.

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