WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 714: As Planned

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The gleam of eyes, iron-plated hands, muscles resettled into armor, minute shifts in posture, the rain, the wind, and even the killing intent drifting through the humid air between them.

Alexandra took in every piece of information she needed and filed it away.

Reading the surrounding situation and turning it to advantage was something her friend Enkrid did well, a specialty he showed off often enough.

'You're not the only one who can do that.'

Even with the rain and wind battering her, she kept her focus locked on the enemy. She shut out everything around her, narrowed her range of perception, and left only the two of them: herself and her opponent. Done right, she could even ignore the Medusa's petrification curse.

Of course, the curse would still reach her to some degree from outside that narrowed range.

But she could not cut off the Medusa's head and come back in time, so ignoring it was the only answer.

So that was what she did. She ignored it and sharpened her concentration. She forgot the rain. She forgot the wind. She stepped into a world where only the two of them remained.

In the friend who had come back from death, she could still see traces of the person who had been alive. Beneath the helmet trailing black vapor, a long braid hung down the back.

Andante had worn her hair long and flowing.

It was Alexandra who had told her it would be a shame to cut it, when Andante had said she didn't need it. Alexandra taught her how to braid it, and from that day on Andante wore a braid down her back for the rest of her life.

'She kept growing it out for so long after that.'

Later, Andante had shown her a trick where she hid blades inside the braid and used them in a fight, but that had only ever been a bit of play.

Sssss.

The vapor gathered and thickened, then seeped back inside the helmet.

It looked almost like a readying motion, the kind you make right before a fight. Alexandra, too, pressed a little more weight into her toes than she had a moment ago.

Alexandra and Andante had never been the type to spar at length. The two of them had always preferred single-exchange bouts.

The sparring was half a step away from staking their lives, and Andante in life had loved every second of it.

"When I feel like I'm touching death, the world doesn't look quite so red," she used to say.

She had said it smiling, blood streaming freely from a hole punched through her thigh.

A red world. Andante had said the world sometimes looked that way to her, washed in red. It was something others would find unsettling to hear, and it had come at the end of a stretch of time that was truly wretched for her, a stretch that left behind an urge she could not suppress.

An urge she could only put to rest by killing someone.

That killing intent had sharpened into a single blade and come for Alexandra now. The Pressure took the shape of a jagged red edge and closed in until it was right before her face.

Alexandra did not take a single step back.

Two acrobats on a tightrope, rope strung between two poles.

'One stroke. That's all we need, Andante.'

What do you get when you take a knight-born disaster and add death on top of it?

The answer was standing right in front of her. Andante would react faster and more freely than she ever had in life. Alexandra did not need to cross blades to know it.

Beyond that, Andante held several other advantages.

For one, there was no breath to read. The dead do not breathe, that went without saying.

On top of that, without needing to warm up the muscles or go through any preparatory motion, she could draw on full strength in an instant.

Combat instinct with nothing left over was one of the powers a Death Knight carried.

The one mercy, if there was one, was that the absolute ceiling of her Will had not changed. The Will of a knight does not grow easily under the best of circumstances, and after death it cannot grow at all. Only the Will held in life remains available.

There was also regeneration to contend with. Cut off an arm or a leg, and it would come back almost immediately.

That meant the viable targets were fixed.

The neck or the head would have to come off. Andante would know that too.

'Her instincts will drive her to bring out whichever sword gives her the best chance of winning.'

From the outside, the two of them simply stood there, perfectly still. Neither had drawn a sword. Both stood with arms loose at their sides, posture unresolved.

Someone who did not know better might have thought they were about to shake hands. A Death Knight, though, was not likely to be that sociable.

Crack!

A white bolt of lightning split the air between them. Even then, neither moved.

The standoff stretched, long or short depending on your measure of it, and Alexandra was the one who moved first.

She bent her knees, drove off the ground, and pushed forward. Before her body had even started to move, her hand was already gripping the sword.

Blitzkling. Lightning Blade. That was why she had been given the name.

The sword she swung was fast enough to be compared to lightning itself.

It was a speed she had never once shown during any spar with Enkrid.

Lynox was there too, and would she, of all people, have no secret techniques she held back in sparring? Of course she did.

She compressed the Will swirling inside her body, gathered it to a point, and detonated it. The explosive force let her blow past her limits, just for that single instant.

Bang.

The blast erupted, and the blade tore through the air, crossed the boundary of time, and arrived.

Clang.

Andante, now a Death Knight, responded to Alexandra's speed, not by blocking, but by thrusting right back at her.

If Alexandra had held her course, her gut would have taken a hole while she put a scratch on the helmet, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, she accelerated once more.

Bang,

The sound rang in her ears. Not a real sound. It was a hallucination, born from gathering what Will she had left and detonating it a second time.

Alexandra's body bent sideways mid-charge. The blade carved a zigzag path and struck through the Death Knight's helmet.

Crack.

The helmet split, and black vapor shot out from within. Alexandra's world turned red. Something hot poured freely from her nose. Both legs began to shake.

Through that reddened vision, she looked back and saw the rotted skull inside the cracked helmet.

Whooooosh.

Where she had passed, a horizontal whirlwind took shape, as though her passage had carved a long tunnel through the rain and wind.

Only when the single exchange was over did the trace of her movement through the air appear.

"Go."

A sword carrying Will, an Inscribed Weapon at that, had split the skull. A Death Knight was not invincible. Sever the head, and it dies.

Andante's last word was "go."

Her real last words would have been something Heskal heard, but that was a different matter.

"Cough!"

Alexandra closed her bloodied eyes and let the rain wash them clean. She dropped to one knee and drove the point of her sword into the ground. Then she spoke.

"Andante. If that was enough, then go on."

Andante had said once that she wanted to see a faster sword than she had ever known. She had just been shown one.

Two detonations. Detonating Will at all was already half madness, and she had done it twice, the second more violent than the first.

Her lower abdomen burned, and she could not tell if something had torn inside. Her head pounded.

Pain rang through her entire body so sharply she wondered if she might actually die from it. Her insides felt wrung out and knotted, and she could not push herself upright, but that was fine.

She had honed this technique in her younger years and lost the ability to bear children because of it. Then and now, she had no regrets.

She had not carried a child in her body, but she had children she had carried in her heart, and in the end, had she not helped protect the family with the very technique she had forged herself into?

'Still, this is a bit much.'

Within the Zaun household, Alexandra's illness had never been severe. A mild cough was all it had ever amounted to. But with her body in this state, the sickness raised its head. A chill swept over her without warning.

In one sense it was just a single sword stroke, but that stroke had killed a Death Knight.

She had done her part. The problem was that the battle was not over.

'And my body won't move.'

There were Demon Creatures flapping toward her. The Medusa's eyes were still trained on her as well.

The petrification curse she had been able to ignore until now had become a pressure she could no longer afford to dismiss.

Alexandra bowed her head to avoid the Demon Creature's gaze.

The serpent hair above still writhed. The Medusa surveyed the battlefield, and Demon Creatures were beating their wings and circling in on her.

'Not good.'

On top of everything else, one of the lizard-type Magic Beasts, apparently gifted with a brain even smaller than its fellow monsters, charged at her with something that could only be called courage. Alexandra looked as if she was barely holding herself upright against her sword.

With its rider gone, the lizard Magic Beast opened its jaws to bite off her head.

Alexandra pulled her sword free, swung it, and drove it back into the ground. The motion was fast enough that an ordinary person would not have been able to follow it.

Thwack.

The only evidence of what she had done was the Magic Beast in front of her: sprawled across the ground, jaw still open, the top of its skull gone.

'This is really not good.'

She barely had the strength to speak, and the Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures around her kept multiplying. The reason was not hard to guess.

'Tempe.'

He was pinned down. Even with Lynox at his side.

'That Heskal, fox is exactly the right word for him.'

This plan had come from his head. Turning Andante into a Death Knight and sending her here, all of it.

Well, she had no way of knowing which side he had expected to win when she and Andante fought.

If she died in this state, the balance would tip just a little toward defeat for Zaun.

Her senses were dulling, and she began to feel the weight of her soaked clothes. None of that was a good sign.

'Will somebody deal with those snake heads already.'

The petrification curse and the serpent hair were making everything so much worse.

A Scaler using telekinesis caught hold of her sword. An invisible grip closed around the blade.

Then she sensed a presence behind her. Her muddled mind and numbed senses had not caught it until whoever it was had already stepped into place at her back.

'Falling apart.'

She shook off the telekinesis and swung her sword backward. She had enough strength left for exactly one swing.

If this was the end, she would swing it and then call out her husband's name.

If she was about to die, he would figure something out. He always did.

Or she could die here and become a vengeful ghost, dedicated to blocking his remarriage.

Without fail.

'So save me. Tempe.'

She gauged the distance to the figure approaching from behind, and when she had it, she wrenched her sword free of the telekinetic grip and swung.

Scrape, whip, clang.

Her attack was stopped. The other person stood their sword vertical and simply halted her blade. Then they closed the distance in one long stride, fast enough that she had no time to call out her husband's name.

* * *

Enkrid was in the middle of counting the arrows floating in the air around him when he understood that most of the Demon Creatures with superior supernatural abilities had been gathered here.

There were probably still quite a few telekinesis-users left among them, but those he could treat as run-of-the-mill.

He did not need his intuition to tell him what the evidence in front of him made plain.

At least five of them were standing with arrows hovering in the air-a dozen each, without so much as lifting a hand.

Fifty arrows floated in the air, all aimed at him.

When those started flying, things would get very complicated.

The arrowheads were also jet black.

Enkrid would have bet Rem's left hand they were poisoned.

"I am Fanito, the right hand of Lord Heskal."

The owner of the net spoke. Enkrid turned his head and looked at him. The iron-plate armor giving off a faint sheen looked like a treasure in its own right.

Something Krais would covet on sight.

Fanito seemed confident he had Enkrid cornered. That was the attitude he was carrying.

Watching it, a thought came to Enkrid out of nowhere.

'Does getting caught in a net mean it's over?'

No. It did not. A single idea surfaced in an instant, inspiration, you might call it.

'Combine the Sword of Chance with tactical swordsmanship.'

Build from the foundation of tactical swordsmanship, calculate using Flash, and pull even chance and luck into deliberate intent.

All of it in service of seizing the most favorable position.

That was what tactics existed for.

His mind, running hot and spinning at full speed, produced an answer. Enkrid opened his mouth and let the words out, smooth as a well-made instrument.

"According to plan."

Not entirely true, he had in fact been caught. But if every coincidence was pulled inside intention, then even the current situation could be called part of the plan.

"You… anticipated this?"

Fanito asked, genuinely startled.

"Of course."

Enkrid was completely composed. Compared to Ragna, who could point west and call it north without blinking, this much was nothing.

"Impressive. Enkrid of the Border Guard."

He had never faced Fanito in a spar before. Some of those who followed Heskal were said to be busy with outside work and difficult to meet, and Fanito had been among them.

Fanito was genuinely surprised, and Enkrid let his mind wander for a moment.

Since he had decided to bring every coincidence under deliberate intention, making it actually look that way would fall under the domain of tactical swordsmanship.

Tactics were about deceiving your opponent. Ruagarne's tactical sword, at its core, was the Illusionary Sword.

A small chain of ideas rang out one after another inside his head.

The Vallen Style Mercenary Sword had never truly been about how to handle a sword. That was because it was the Illusionary Sword. Which meant that at its base, tactics rested on deception. If he kept training and drilling into tactical swordsmanship from here, the path forward might come into view.

How to describe it, the training method for a sword that deceives, or the sword technique itself?

He could not sort it all out right now. It was a thought he could only catch and hold in memory for the moment.

Right now, what was in front of him needed to be dealt with first.

"You gathered the strongest individuals among the Demon Creatures with supernatural abilities here to kill one of Zaun's knight-level fighters, then push straight into the Zaun interior. That was the plan."

He could say it because he had read their intent. Once the other side had shown their hand this far, reading the purpose behind those cards was simple enough.

"That is correct. You anticipated that as well."

Fanito did not seem to be especially sharp, because he kept showing his surprise openly. From one angle, he had been well and truly fooled. From another, Enkrid's acting had reached its peak.

Enkrid spoke again, following the path the Illusionary Sword showed him.

"Yes. All of it, according to plan."

If Krais had been watching, he might have called him the greatest liar on the continent.

If Ruagarne had been watching, she would have been clapping those slick hands of hers without stopping.

"None of you are getting past me."

That part was sincere. Plan or no plan, the moment Enkrid had faced them, he knew what he had to do. And by now, that Ragna bastard would know what he had to do too.

"Even knowing that, stopping us will not be easy."

Fanito bit down on his back teeth as he said it. That someone had seen through his master's strategy filled him with envy.

The envy converted quickly into anger, and the anger settled into killing intent, a clean and certain desire to kill the man standing before him.

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