WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 711: A Black-and-White World

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Under normal circumstances, the Zaun fighters would have been scattered one by one, picked apart in isolation. Instead, they had formed something close to a proper formation.

It had started with the family head, Alexandra, and Lynox positioned at the front, serving as an invisible wall. Three people holding the line.

Because the lizard riders had to go around those three, they could not build momentum for a real charge, and every move they made lay exposed.

On top of that, Enkrid had sent Anahehra forward before a portion of the riders could even begin their assault, using her attack to break the enemy formation and drag the fight into a melee.

And yet Heskal showed no sign of alarm.

'It would have been better to send Ragna instead of Anahehra.'

That would have left them thoroughly baffled. But it would be a waste.

If the family head was a wall, Ragna was a catapult. He needed to fly in and deliver the blow. No one was expecting a catapult, so there was no reason not to use it. More than anything, there had been no time to get word to Ragna. He had to trust that Ragna would figure it out himself.

Enkrid's gaze shifted to one side. He had not heard anything in particular. His senses had spread wide and thin, catching a faint anomaly, no louder than someone waving a hand behind his back from ten steps away. Even so, in conditions like these, he felt certain he could detect even a breath of air from that distance.

In the middle of the storm, his senses cut through everything with perfect clarity.

He turned his eyes in the direction intuition pointed and caught the target in his field of vision.

Among the lizard riders charging toward Riley, several were extending their arms.

He saw a Demon Creature covered in sharp-snouted scales, black tinged with red.

'Variant Demon Creature.'

The kind that could earn a name if it lived long enough.

Hidden inside the pack was a company of Demon Creatures with supernatural abilities that made ordinary Scalers look like harmless children.

At the same moment, Anahehra reacted to their attack and shouted.

"Someone's holding me!"

Nothing was physically grabbing her arms or legs. Enkrid parsed the meaning packed into those few words.

'Telekinesis.'

He drove his sword into the ground, spread his awareness wider, and opened his senses further. Several Demon Creatures moving in ways that didn't fit the flow caught in his perception. He took in the incoming information with heightened sensitivity, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling.

The data fed into his mind and rearranged itself, sorting into exactly what he needed.

Like black dots on a white canvas, clear and sharp, he detected every creature within range that carried a supernatural ability.

His hands did not rest while he opened his senses to hunt them.

He drew two horn-blade daggers from the sheath strapped to his chest and split them between both hands.

Jaxon had once called them the most loathed weapon on the continent.

"It doesn't muffle the sound. It makes it louder. Absolutely terrible."

They were weapons that had nothing to do with Jaxon's technique or sense of aesthetics.

The stray thought was brief, and his hands kept moving. He locked the enemy creatures he had felt through all five senses into his eyes as well. The Scaler reaching out with its arm, along with everything else, seemed to slow down.

A knight's mind ran several times faster than an ordinary person's. It felt like slipping through a crack in time and watching from inside.

That was probably why stray thoughts kept sneaking in at moments like this.

'Focus Point.'

When time seemed to slow, it pressed against the body like sinking into mud, but Will surged through him from head to toe and drove force into his limbs.

Inside that mud, he could still move however he chose.

What did he need to do right now? Throw and hit.

He concentrated. He blended Jaxon's technique with what he had seen and learned from Riley. He drew both arms back behind him at the same time, compressed the force until it was exactly enough to land, then swung both arms with Will loaded into them. Both arms crossed in front of his chest like a whip crack, and the horn-blade daggers tore through the air and flew.

Bang! Bang! Bwoooo!

The daggers split the air with a short blare of horn sound and punched clean through the skulls of two Scalers that had been reaching skyward.

The twin cracks rang clearly through the driving storm.

The daggers had not lodged inside. They had passed straight through. Which meant two holes wider than a fist had opened in those heads.

A hole like that was something not even a Troll would walk away from, let alone a Scaler.

The creatures that had stretched their arms out to use telekinesis crumpled and splashed face-first into the mud.

Enkrid pulled his sword free from the ground and said, "Leave the variant Demon Creatures alone."

It seemed he could no longer just watch from the sides.

If there were more than one or two with supernatural abilities, there was no choice.

He would have to throw himself into this lively battlefield in person.

And those variant Demon Creatures with supernatural abilities were only the first of what the enemy had prepared.

CRACK-BOOM!

Lightning split the sky, and from above came a feeling of dread. He looked up. Beneath the dark wall of storm clouds, the rain began to coil and mass into a vast shape.

It looked as though a great serpent had appeared overhead. Not a dragon. A serpent with a long, winding body hanging in the air above them, taking the side of the Demon Creatures.

The way dread clubbed the back of his head told him at once it was sorcery.

"I was wondering when they'd show this."

Enkrid muttered.

The effect was immediate. The moment the serpent appeared overhead, the Demon Creatures grew fiercer.

SSSSAAAAA!

The shrieks the Scalers poured out rang more sharply in his ears, and his instincts sounded the alarm.

"Hold the line."

He said it as he passed Riley.

"You think I need to be told that!"

Enkrid swept past and swung his sword in a smooth arc. Three-Iron drew a curving line from low to high and raked across the throat of a lizard that had been crawling up from the ground in total silence.

Slice, crunch!

It looked exactly like snapping a bladed whip around a throat and tearing it free.

The edge circled the Demon Creature's neck once and cut it away.

The thing had a remarkable talent for concealing its presence, but the sound of rainwater hitting the ground had changed, and a shape had registered in the falling curtain of rain, and that was enough to kill it.

'Heskal.'

Enkrid thought he understood now what the man was after.

If someone like Krais or Abnaier could see this battlefield from the outside, they would say it plainly.

"He's betting everything on a single decisive strike."

And before that strike, he intended to drain every bit of strength from their side.

Physically and every other way.

He would run Demon Creatures at them to wear down everyone who had reached the level of a knight, and if necessary, send the remaining force at the Zaun people to kill their family. That was how he planned to break their spirit.

A knight was an asymmetric force. If you could kill them, throwing a thousand Demon Creatures at them was a trade you were happy to make.

'He's exceptional.'

Heskal was outstanding as a tactician.

Enkrid had no choice but to go along with Heskal's plan to some extent.

He had tried to fight while holding back his strength, but he could not look away from this. He had only managed to stop the deaths of Riley and the others, to keep that from shaking everyone's will. If this line broke, the road to the Zaun settlement opened up. Then the rear could not be protected either.

Enkrid threw his gaze toward the distance, guided by the sharp intuition his finely honed senses fed him, and called out quickly.

"Duck your heads!"

Is this really fair?

That thought flickered through his mind for a moment.

The serpent shape summoned by sorcery was boosting the Demon Creatures, raising their strength and other physical capabilities beyond their normal peak.

Mixed into that were the variant Demon Creatures. Demon Creatures with supernatural abilities, no less.

And now, from behind them all, a Demon Creature that dwarfed every other creature on the field raised its head. One you would rarely see even in the Cursed Ground.

SHAAAAA.

The hundreds of snakes covering its head were that creature's signature. That signature now spread over the entire battlefield. A creature that cast the petrification curse on anything that met its gaze. Medusa.

Its body looked to be five times the size of a Scaler. Larger even than a Giant.

The petrification curse Medusa cast would not work unconditionally. Someone with Will could withstand it to a degree. The problem was the simple fact that you had to withstand it at all.

That much Will was now mortgaged against everything else you needed it for.

They had to endure a curse that mixed stone dust into their blood while holding back a Demon Creature horde that included monsters with supernatural abilities.

A clean fight: their side had the edge. Mix in the supernatural ability Demon Creatures: roughly even. Sorcery serpent overhead: losing. Medusa appears on top of that: defeat is certain.

And even here, Heskal had used his head.

'He used Medusa as a tactical tool.'

He had not sent it charging. He had positioned it to exert coercive force over the entire battlefield.

Watching from here, Enkrid thought he could see where the sorcery's power was drawing from.

Medusa was a tactical instrument, a Sorcery Medium, and a symbol all at once.

The enemy's strength clearly outweighed theirs. And alongside that, a sorcerer and a legendary alchemist.

If that ghost called Dmuel became a god the way he wanted, they would probably call him Dmuel of Pestilence, or something along those lines.

Enkrid decided that spending Will to resist the curse was worse than not looking at all. Even if Will flowed endlessly through him, any portion spent in a given moment was Will he could not use elsewhere.

He also knew the Zaun swordsmen were capable of fighting blind. They had been doing blindfolded sparring since age ten. He knew their sword training included exactly that kind of sensory drilling.

"Duck your heads and fight! Just don't look!"

Enkrid shouted again. He himself kept his chin raised as he did it.

He was making one last sweep to confirm whether there was still something he needed to see with his own eyes.

Medusa placed its curse on the act of seeing.

And from somewhere above, he heard the beat of wings.

Heskal had been holding the winged ones back, saving them, and was only releasing them now. Paired with the Medusa.

'He aimed for the combined effect of a tactical suppressor alongside an airborne unit.'

Or possibly, those winged creatures needed the sorcery to blanket the battlefield before they could fly through a storm this heavy.

Enkrid ignored the Medusa's curse and kept his eyes forward. He trusted the Will flowing through him without pause, and he trusted his Will of Refusal.

And it held. The curse left no mark on his body.

For an ordinary person, the skin would have been stiffening by now, stone creeping outward across the whole body.

"I suppose those would have to be called aerial troops."

He pushed wet hair back from his face. The thought settling in his mind was simple: this was very dangerous.

If their side could not pull out something they had been holding in reserve and turn this around, they were going to lose for certain.

Intuition told him so. The math said the same.

Well then. That was what he would do.

Ruagarne's tactical swordplay was not completed by watching from the rear. Intuition drew from the unconscious, pooled everything together, and produced an answer.

That included his own fighting strength.

Enkrid traced the path in his mind using instinct and intuition.

A head burning with focus showed him the road he had to walk. This was tied to something he had come to understand recently.

Enkrid lowered his head.

'Lynox drives waves with restrained Will.'

He applied what he had learned from watching Lynox's swordsmanship. Enkrid was no genius, but when it came to handling Will, you could fairly call it a talent.

In practice, moving Will was less about innate talent and more about the fact that his overflowing Will made unlimited repetition possible.

That was why he had found it easier to learn advanced techniques than the Zaun family's basic training.

'Restraint.'

He stopped looking at the Medusa. He hid his Will. At the same time, he matched his own frequency to the world around him.

That was Assimilation.

Absurdly, it was only here, now, that he had grasped the Assimilation that Jamal of Azpen had once shown him.

If Rem were watching this right now..."No, what the hell, I genuinely don't get it, why can you only do this now?"

That was probably what he would say, furious.

He could almost hear that voice demanding to know why he hadn't managed it when he was told about it long ago.

Enkrid dissolved into the battlefield.

He breathed out in a long, thin, even stream and let his tongue brush past his lips to taste the air and the falling rain.

A faintly sweet trace passed through his tongue and turned into information. Distance, direction, position. Imprecise. Only presence.

He thought he could close his eyes entirely. So he did.

Instead of his eyes, he opened his ears. Hearing stepped in where sight had been.

There was no need for echolocation. The sound of the rain would do that for him.

The rushing sound of rainwater fell away.

And Enkrid's world turned black and white. Only then could he see everything.

The position of every enemy, where they stood, what they were doing.

He ran, following the path Ruagarne's tactical swordplay had traced inside his mind.

Not one person from the Zaun line, Riley included, caught his movement. Neither did the enemy.

Moving in Assimilation, he raised the restrained Will only when he arrived directly in front of a target.

The first was another Scaler that had just raised its hand to use telekinesis.

Enkrid drew Penna and drove it upward from beneath the creature's jaw.

Thud!

The blade punched through the skull and offered a glimpse of black blood, brain matter, and skull fragments to the open air.

Faster than he had thrust it in, he pulled Penna free, shook off the blood, slid it back into its sheath, and took eighteen steps sideways. He moved like a man walking, but the speed was that of a sprint.

Eighteen steps sideways, and there was an Owlbear that specialized in hiding its presence, just about to scatter a volley of poison-tipped feathers.

Rattle-rattle-rattle. Feathers that could punch through the driving storm rose up like a furious beast baring its teeth.

Every feather on its body was a poison dart. Left alone, someone would almost certainly take a hit. The Owlbear did not get the chance.

Three-Iron's true silver edge cut through the Owlbear's quills and its neck, which were as hard as steel.

Black blood fountained from the clean cross-section of the severed neck, but the rain pouring from above mixed into the spray and diluted it.

In Enkrid's black-and-white world perceived through hearing, it only looked like two liquids of different textures blending together.

He kept moving. In Assimilation, he detected enemies through hearing and vibration, and used restrained Will only in the moments it was needed.

Thuck!

The next Scaler had an unusually tough body, but Penna found the eye socket and drove straight through, splitting the head apart.

It did not die immediately, but there was no need to use his hands again.

On to the next.

The supernatural abilities came in roughly three types.

Those that used telekinesis. Those with exceptionally hardened bodies. And those that specialized in concealing their presence.

Enkrid killed the third kind first, the ones that hid.

The black and white world felt like a training ground that existed only for him.

It was like being the only one free to move on a spider's web.

Aker's Web, assigning order to all things, sending the sword out. He blended the Correct Sword Form he had learned and practiced with Ruagarne's tactical swordplay. From that point on, this was no longer something difficult.

It was simply what he could do.

And with only what he could do, Enkrid did not let a single one of the people bearing the Zaun name anywhere near him die.

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