WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 709: Instinct Tears Through the Mind

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"You still have a chance. Come under me. I will give you what you desire."

The voice of the man called Alchemist Dmuel rang in everyone's ears as if driven straight into them, though where exactly he was speaking from was unclear. At some point he had cast a spell, and a faint sweet smell drifted through the air, though only Enkrid caught it.

"Give it up, Tempe. As Dmuel said, what can two swordsmen and one girl possibly do?"

Heskal raised his left hand as he spoke. Behind him, another horde of Demon Creatures came writhing forward.

He raised his right hand, and the horde swelled further.

They had split their forces by type.

Enkrid's gaze swept left and right.

Strange enough that Demon Creatures had arrayed themselves like an army, but they were organized by unit type as well. The ones summoned by Heskal's left hand were Scalers mounted on lizard Magic Beasts.

The lizard Magic Beasts carrying the Scalers flicked their tongues. Sheets of rain slid across their brows and ran in rivulets along the ridges of their snouts. The flesh above their eyes jutted upward, carving a long groove down the center of each face, and the water traced that groove in a visible stream.

The storm made it hard to distinguish colors, but the lizards' scales were not pure black, whatever they looked like now.

Their number was at least three hundred.

The Scalers sat atop the Magic Beasts without reins, yet nothing about the way they rode suggested they would fall or crack their skulls if the lizards bolted into a run.

Scalers' heads were not that fragile, and if they did not trust themselves to fight from the saddle, why would they be riding at all.

Heskal had betrayed the Zaun family, not his own mind. He had not turned into an idiot.

A lot.

The horde was closing in on two thousand.

Several more dark masses still churned along the gently sloping downhill road. The Demon Creatures would keep coming. No knight's intuition was needed to see that.

To Enkrid's right, crouching low, were another three hundred or more Scalers and Owlbears. Not a small number.

They were well hidden.

That would be Heskal's doing. It would be.

He was a man skilled at manipulating information.

The ones ascending from below were forming up as they came, moving in formation.

If the trainer who had drilled those Demon Creatures was human or some other intelligent race, Enkrid decided he would ask about the training methods before killing them.

Impressive, whatever else you thought of it.

That idle thought drifted through him as he studied the black masses visible between the sheets of wind and rain, and he noticed that the creatures gathering on the right had something on their backs that looked distinctly like the membranous wings of a bat.

They'll fly. Of course they'll fly.

Wings were not decorative. Factoring that in, the ones on the right did look unusually lean.

To fly, a body needed to be light, so these were probably Demon Creatures built with hollow bones or something close to it.

Enkrid kept cataloguing the horde, checking where his allies stood, measuring the distance to the enemy, weighing the forces against each other.

He poured everything needed to fight into his head and let it all mix together.

"The flow of a battlefield is organic. Train soldiers into an elite force and you still cannot predict every variable that surfaces in actual combat. There are people who fight with all of that calculated out, of course. Big Eyes and his kind. But even Krais cannot predict every last thing that happens on a battlefield."

Ruagarne had said that while teaching him to think tactically.

She had continued.

"When it comes to battles I'm part of, though, I can do something close to that."

And then, with complete conviction:

"That's how I can kill opponents stronger than me."

Did a fight have to be won on pure skill alone? Did that matter in a fight meant to be won?

"Not at all," Enkrid muttered to himself. Calculations kept running through his head without pause.

Ruagarne had a talent that was rare across the entire continent. Enkrid accepted that fully. The more he trained under her, the more certain he became.

"I am Frog. A challenger who decided to surpass her limits."

Her words, those of Frog Ruagarne, burned through his mind.

Her fights began with tactics. And the foundation of tactics was deceiving the opponent.

What Heskal had done followed the same logic. He had concealed his strength. The existence of someone called Dmuel had been within the family head's predicted range, but everything else was not.

The Demon Creature horde transformed into an army especially had been completely beyond expectation.

Which meant what was coming was a many-against-many battle.

In that case, what the Zaun family needed most right now was a single current to direct a scattered crowd.

"Feel the flow. Enki, you can do it. You've commanded a battlefield through instinct before, haven't you?"

Right. He had held back the army of Azpen with an invisible wall. What had moved Enkrid then was instinct. This was no different.

Crack.

An enraged god bellowed through thunder.

Bang.

A gesture toward the ground, and lightning scorched and shattered the earth. The storm surged again.

In Enkrid's eyes, the raindrops split apart one by one.

Two streams of thought ran side by side, one reading the situation, the other calculating. A variation of the Wave-Blocking Sword.

On top of that, the instinct honed past the five senses through training with Jaxon, long since carved into his body, fired. It raked through his head and delivered answers.

What had to be done. What current had to be created.

How do we win this?

The enemy had struck the Zaun family's veterans to prevent them from forming ranks. The most critical thing here, then, was formation, a shape that would not collapse.

Huff.

Enkrid pulled a deep breath and packed it into his abdomen. Then he released it. Pressure forced up from the belly drove air through his vocal cords, shaping it into sound and meaning. He threw Will into the shout as well.

"Family head! Hold that position! Stone wall!"

Short and heavy. Would they understand? They would.

If not, they would ask.

The family head did not look back. All Enkrid could see was the back of his head, but he answered through action.

Thud.

He drove his sword into the ground and drew a line.

"Rain's falling, the moat fills itself."

An unlikely moment for a joke.

He was the wall, so the line he drew with his sword was the moat. No Demon Creature gathered here would be allowed to cross it.

The family head spoke with his back, and..."We are!"

"Zaun!"

"Walking the path of the sword!"

"Seekers!"

Riley's lead call was answered by another voice, Kata called out, and the nineteen-year-old girl of the Zaun family, packed full of talent, closed out the chant.

Whatever you throw at us, we will not be moved.

That was what the family head's wall meant. He had shown more than what Enkrid asked for.

Still, it was not enough on its own. The family head alone could not hold back the wave of Demon Creatures. He had set the central axis.

Enkrid cupped his right hand near his mouth and hurled his voice out.

"Alexandra, ten steps to the right of the family head! Lynox, how well can you fight?"

"You're asking me how well I can fight? Cut out that arrogance. I was holding a sword before you were born."

"Long experience isn't the same as skill."

A joke in the middle of all this. Why throw a joke while veins were standing out on his neck? Same reason as the family head's unlikely quip just now. The shoulders of those who had locked up at the sight of the arrayed horde loosened.

He was lifting his side's momentum.

Naturally it was calculated.

Next, read the enemy's current.

Channel it. Lock the flow of the battlefield inside his own intent.

Instinct pricked and buzzed at his skull. It felt like lightning splitting fine and raking through his brain.

"Anahehra, let loose!"

At Enkrid's shout, the shackles on the red-blooded Magic Beast snapped open.

"Ha ha ha ha ha!"

Normally Anahehra held back the Giant's instinct. If she did not, she would have already killed several of the people around her.

But there was no need to suppress instinct on a battlefield packed with enemies.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A Giant kicked off the wet earth. Mud flew up on both sides where she ran. It fanned outward and had barely begun to fall back to the ground when Anahehra reached the front of the Demon Creature horde.

The lizard cavalry formation.

From above, it looked like one lunatic Giant charging alone into enemy ranks.

"Intercept!"

Someone on the other side called out, one of those who had sided with Heskal.

At the call, a dozen or more arrows came flying. Not arcing shots, either; they fired straight at close range from within the Demon Creature ranks.

Thwip. Thunk. Clang.

A few glanced off and bounced from the skin's surface. One struck her head but hit the iron helmet and clattered away.

Only one found its mark, in the forearm, and even that was wrenched free by her violent movement and hit the ground.

It had barely caught in the skin to begin with.

A Giant's hide is thick and hard. Average arrows do not embed. That was what it came down to.

Those who had spent their lives enclosed within the Zaun family would have forgotten that.

Enkrid knew the hunters' village was on the enemy side. Would there not be a marksman among them?

There would be.

But was there any guarantee those arrows would work on a Giant?

Several of those archers hesitated now, hands that had been drawing bowstrings going still. A ripple of disruption passed through the enemy horde.

Then Anahehra met the Scalers on their lizards.

A lizard wrenched its mouth wide open and pressed forward with teeth grown like saw blades, while the Scaler riding above gripped a short black spear in a reverse hold and stabbed.

Enkrid could not see it from where he stood, but Anahehra twisted the corners of her mouth into a wide grin and swung her sword.

She was a Giant, and she was drunk on instinct, yet she did not forget she carried the Zaun sword.

So what came from her hand was the Zaun swordsmanship.

Shunk.

Her planted left foot drove into the earth up to the ankle, and the force from that rising push fed into the sword coming straight down.

A Heavy Sword Style half-moon slash, loaded with Will.

Crash.

The harmony of a Giant's strength and Will split the lizard and the Scaler riding it straight down the middle.

Splatter.

Black blood poured out and soaked her helmet. The rain hammering down washed it away almost at once.

"Kill them aaall!"

The Giant threw her head back toward the sky and screamed.

Had he anticipated all of this?

No. Enkrid had only followed instinct.

"Kato, go after her and guard Anahehra's back!"

Even as he said it, his head kept swinging left and right.

At some point a command had gone out, and the enemy Demon Creature horde was already charging straight at the family head.

If I were Heskal, I'd use the Demon Creatures to grind down their strength.

It was not a tactic easy to execute with a human army.

With a Demon Creature army, there's no reason not to use it.

Demon Creatures knew no fear. Spending them to drain the enemy was pure profit.

Had he known this in advance?

Not at all. He had raised the wall on instinct. The reason he had raised it was simply to sharply reduce the death toll here.

Scalers on lizards, some with black scales shot through with red, Owlbears fitted with steel-feathered shafts, and above them things that flew through the sky.

That kind of Demon Creature came in formation.

The family head, Alexandra, and Lynox held the line in front of them.

Only three? No, three was a great deal.

A knight is a calamity. Alone, they cut down a thousand.

These three could do the same.

Anahehra tore through and Kato covered her back. Those two he left alone. Both had clear specialties ill-suited to fighting in a concentrated group.

Anahehra needed to rampage without distinguishing friend from foe, unleashing even her instinct to perform above her natural ceiling.

Kato hid weapons all over his body and fought best surrounded.

Being encircled by enemies was what suited him. He had spent years moving between villages, sparring against many opponents at once, and built his skill that way.

That was how he had developed into his current form.

Some people were built for real combat over sparring, and Kato was exactly that type.

Enkrid had sent those two out first with exactly that in mind.

Charging the enemy before their assault broke the enemy's ranks.

That held true whether you faced a Demon Creature or the grandfather of every Demon Creature.

The ones at the front had no choice but to be swallowed into a brawl.

Enkrid's intent worked. Heskal pulled the units not yet caught in the chaos, reformed them, and circled around.

Truly clever.

Heskal was clever. He felt that again, freshly.

But Heskal fought with his head, and Enkrid relied on instinct.

So there was nothing to be rattled by. His intent had been read? That could happen easily enough. Heskal showed his next move, and this side responded. That was all there was to it.

The other side's aim was clear.

Force our side to fight individually while their side fought in formation.

The Zaun family had lost those with deep combat experience.

In their place stood someone who had fought through countless battles at Border Guard, who had clawed up from the bottom, a soldier-turned-commander, and one who had learned the tactical sword from a Frog named Ruagarne.

That was who had stepped into the gap.

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